Category — Webyantra

BarCampDelhi3 happened last Saturday and was a smashing success. The event was being organised after a whole year, so lots of people were waiting for it in anticipation. The venue was the Impetus Tech office in Noida (big thanks to them for volunteering to host the event). Here are the key highlights:

The Participants: I’ve heard of dwindling audiences at BarCamps in other cities but Delhi kept its date by more than doubling participation. We got close to 175 campers (against 235 signups, a 75% attendance rate); At BarcampDelhi2 we had about 75-80 people. Many of the participants were first timers, having read/heard about it on blogs, newspapers & magazines, national TV etc. This demonstrates that the flurry of Barcamps in Indian cities (over the last 18 months) has built up a critical mass and taken the concept beyond the early adopter crowd. The audience was a mix of developers, startup entrepreneurs, designers, bloggers, media folks etc. I was surprised to find amidst them a group of tech professionals who were working with the government (in its various depts, agencies). And the youngest camper was this cute 6 month old baby girl (photo below) who slept through most of the sessions and occasionally had to be cajoled not to cry, disturbed as she was by the surrounding chaos.

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The Speakers: Check out the wiki for the sessions. The noteworthy ones included a very well analysed presentation by Prashant Singh about the state of user generated content in India, a live demo from the Vinsol team on deploying a ROR app on EC2 & a talk by Vineet Tyagi (Impetus) on Agile Development & practises. The Amazon Web Services evangelism team (currently visiting India from Silicon Valley) had an extended session about how AWS was a game changer in the global internet infrastructure sweepstakes, with its battery of services that include S3, EC2, AMT etc, besides lesser know projects such as ‘Grep the Web’. Interestingly enough, this was followed up by a presentation from The Sun Startup program which also is aimed at the startup infrastructure mgmt space, but from a diametrically opposite angle (the talk incidentally was given by a SUN affiliate and not SUN’s evangelist, who had signed up for the event but did not turn up).

The Mood: The mood was effervescent and infectious. Sessions took place amidst the usual self-organising chaos; some first time attendees (rather speakers) were found complaining about the sub optimal presentation set up in one of the rooms- I guess it’ll take them a while to understand the BarCamp culture and how you need to find your own audience rather than depend on the organisers to deliver to them a room choc-a-bloc with an eagerly awaiting, rapt audience.

The Real BarCamp: Once the pseudo one got over, the group headed to Ruby Tuesday at Noida’s Sector 18 for the “Real” Barcamp…pictures on flickr.

iNeed: During the opening introductory session, we realised that many people were there looking for something- possibly employees, cofounders, facilities, incubators etc. To help them get the word out, we quickly converted the whiteboard into a bulletin board dubbed “iNeed” (think apple). By the end of the day, the whiteboard resembled a graphiti wall with people scribbling all over it (check out the slide no 2 in the deck). Some quick improvisation that proved useful.

Check out the long list of blog posts detailing the event.

It’s two years since I’ve been a web entrepreneur. During this period, I have graduated from being an occasional internet user to somebody, whose basic livelihood depends on the internet. As such, I take the liberty of counting myself amongst the more ‘advanced’ (whatever that means) 40 million Indian internet users.

The majority of the web content that I see everyday in the Indian internet space fails to inspire me. Most of the contemporary Indian web products, internet services, web applications etc seem amateurish, are poorly designed, lack real innovation or are copied unimaginatively from successful western product concepts. As an Indian, this hurts me somewhere deep in my heart.

Much as I never miss an opportunity to crib about this, on this occasion, I have decided to do something regarding this. Webyantra is a first step in that direction and is my way of trying to make a difference in a small way.

Webyantra is a blog, which is dedicated to profiling innovative Indian web products and internet services. It’s a platform for Indian web startups, ecommerce websites and internet based businesses to showcase their products & services to Indian internet users. To see what Webyantra looks like, go here.
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