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

On December 20th we were invited to present at the Developer Garage in Pune. This conference was organized by a couple of OpenSocial enthusiasts. It was hosted by Thoughtworks in their Pune office and sponsored by Sun Microsystems. The event was attended by more than 130 developers.




























It was a very packed schedule and we were able to cover a lot, starting from the OpenSocial basics to advanced sessions on topics such as Latency in OpenSocial apps and Apache Shindig Architecture.

Aparna from Sun Microsystems' evangelism group demoed Zembly, a platform for creating and hosting OpenSocial apps. Agriya Technologies gave a presentation on the integration of OpenSocial with their social networking products.

There was also a parallel workshop to develop an Orkut app, "India I Care", for an NGO at the event. Developers were able to complete the basic scenarios and are now fine-tuning the app before it goes live.

Some photographs from the event can be found here.

Aparna, Aman Jain, and Amit Kumar also blogged about the event.

Overall it was very heartening to see so much interest and momentum around OpenSocial. Pune has a vibrant developer community, which has been organizing many events around open-source technologies.

Rajdeep Dua
Google Developer Relations
India

We ( Google India Developer Relations team) landed late night in Pune on the 25th for the IndicThreads conference. This conference was held at Sun-n-Sand Hotel, one of the landmarks of Pune's bund garden road.
























This was a 3 day conference on Java and Web Technologies where we were given a 5 hour slot to cover OpenSocial and GWT.























Developers from local companies ranging from TechMahindra, TCS, Infosys and several other startups in Pune attended the event.

In the OpenSocial session we ( Rajdeep, Anash and Vijaya ) covered OpenSocial Introduction followed by API deep dive. This was followed up with discussion on Shindig Architecture.
DJ Patil, Chief Scientist of LinkedIn gave a talk on LinkedIn's platform strategy as well as adoption of OpenSocial platform. There was a lot of interest from the developer community on the app submission process.

Anirudh from the Developer Relations Team at Google covered advanced features of GWT as well as what is new in GWT 1.5.

Slides from the OpenSocial and GWT talks are embedded below:






It was an excellent experience participating in IndicThreads and talking about technologies which are changing the Social and Web world. We hope to return very soon to engage with developers in Pune.

Rajdeep Dua
Google Developer Relations, India

We hosted India's first developer event in India on Oct 18th in Bangalore, Google Developer Days are a chance to learn about Google developer products from the engineers who built them. This event received an overwhelming response from the developer community with an attendance of about 250 - 300 developers. It was amazing to see how enthusiastic developers in Bangalore are about Google's Developer Offerings !

The event started off with a key note from Prasad Ram who heads Google Labs in Bangalore. His keynote address gave an inspiring journey we have made in the field of computing, from era of main frames to desktop taking over in many areas, and finally cloud computing making a come back. This was followed by elaborating on Google's offerings on the client side platform for cloud computing as well our foray into Mobile market with launch of Android as an open source project.



Extracts from the online article by Anand Parthasarathy from Hindu.

"Create your applications using our ‘Open’ software tools. Then run it on Google infrastructure. We will take care of all the technical and administrative problems. We will run your applications till they attract 5 million page views a month. Then you know it works - and you can monetize it in any way you like”.



Developers were really excited and engrossed throughout the day in tech talks as well as code labs covering areas like Google Maps APIs, OpenSocial, Google App Engine, Google Web Toolkit and Indic Translation APIs. Session details can be found here.

Last but not the least, feedback from the developers were very positive and heartening.

"It was an interesting day. Google speakers were pretty awesome and I think that I found amazing was that they were very keen on getting feedback on their tools and api from the audience. I also found every googler using chrome and deploying all their sample code on app engine. A true eat your own dog food environment. (Prateek Dayal)"

"In its first edition of GDD India it was a very good start. My suggestion would be to plan a 2 day event for GDD 2009 with tech talks on the first day and hands on sessions on the second day. (Anurag)"

Don't forget to check out the photos as well as videos and presentations from GDD India 2008. Thank You Developers in India for making this event successful and see you at Google Developer Days in 2009.

Rajdeep Dua, Developer Relations, India