Headstart Conference, Bangalore

Headstart and the Bangalore chapter of ACM organized a conference showcasing cutting-edge technologies and products from start-ups in India. This conference had two tracks: one focused on presentation of research papers, and the other on start-ups.

The conference took place on the 9th and 10th of January, 2009 at the NIMHANS Convention Center in Bangalore. Google was invited to present on OpenSocial in the "Search and Social platforms" track.

















Prasad Ram, Google Bangalore Engineering Director, was one of the keynote speakers at the event, which was attended by roughly 400 participants. The agenda included panel discussions on various topics like SAAS architecture and Cloud computing. Tutorials were also held on mobility and virtualization. Finally, there were demo stalls for start-ups to showcase their products.

The audience for the OpenSocial track comprised of about 60 developers/entrepreneurs. Presenting alongside us were Yahoo! Research on the BOSS APIs, as well as Jai Ganesh from Infosys, who presented on social network analysis and its implications on knowledge discovery.
Google presented on the OpenSocial philosophy, OpenSocial APIs, Apache Shindig architecture and Social-site as a usage example.

It was very promising to see such interest in Opensocial amongst the start-ups. The chapter has also shown enthusiasm in holding day long sessions and workshops to provide developers with more insight into the OpenSocial APIs and Shindig.

Here are a few pictures from the conference.

Rajdeep Dua and Vijaya Machavolu, Google Developer Relations, India