It was an exhilirating experience working towards OSEF 2008 and Community 2008, and accomplishing the goals of promoting the Open Source vision.
Maruthi, Namita, Alolita, Nilayan, Uma and Saurabh had done an amazing amount of groundwork thinking through, involving the right set of people and executing it.
Poorna Shashank, Sumanth Krishna, O V L Kiran Kumar, Ramesh Rajamani and E. Sivakrishna of Synovel, were supportive of the event and volunteered for assistance. A big thanks to all. You guys rock !
The event started with Ms. Namita Iyer, President of the Society, talking about Open Source and how it helps boot strap product companies that can go on to build market leading products and nurture a community as well.
Ms. Alolita Sharma, Director of Open Source Initiative (OSI) and CEO, Technetra, started the session by asking the attendees a simple question - "what are three words that come to our mind, when we think of Open Source". The question really set a buzz among the members and make the people really interactive.
For the first time it has been possible in the IT industry that corporates can access "fairly" and "openly" world class software developed by world class developers.
Sharing between competitors provides them a level playing ground to compete in developing innovative applications over Open Source platform.
According to Alolita, "The competition is in innovation and providing services. It is a key enabler of change for prosperity".
The talk by Mr. D D Ganguly, founder and CEO of DimDim was awesome and as candid as ever.
He shared his startup experience and how he acquired seed capital and further funding from VCs. He talked about how to play the mating game with VCs in order for them to find your venture attractive enough to fund. VCs fund in millions, hence will never do seed funding. For seed funding, entrepreneurs should find someone who loves them and will fund them for being them. Last but not the least, he emphasized that the primary motive of entrepreneurs should be to create wealth for themselves and for their stake holders. The audience thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity for a heart-to-heart talk with a successful open source entrepreneur - who actually got big VCs to fund his venture.
Mr. D D Ganguly from DimDim, Mr. Suren Poruri from Polaris, Mr. Pramod and Mr. Sivakumar from AppLabs, folks from CA, Mr. Sivakrishna from Synovel, budding entrepreneurs from Genpact, NIC, Satyam and many startup companies actively participated in the session. Mr. Saurabh Bhatia, of SafewLabs shared his journey as an entrepreneur with the audience.
Mr. Sivakrishna, CEO of Synovel, presented an overview of Spicebird at the event. In his words, Collaboration is much beyond e-mail communication – it's a process where individuals work together to achieve a common goal. Apart from having e-mail, instant messaging and group calendaring, an ideal collaboration system should make 'working together' possible – like creating a proposal, launching a new product, developing software, managing group knowledge and publishing websites even while working from different continents. Spicebird - the collaboration suite developed by us, creates a platform to do precisely that. In addition, Spicebird makes customization easy and ensures that the software can be adapted to your business collaboration needs.
Ms. Kavita Vemuri of Innovation Lab, and Dr. Vikram Pudi of Open Source research at IIIT Hyderabad, were very supportive of the event from the word go. Kavita also teaches Product Management at IIIT to the students and is also involved with academia to industry transfer initiatives.
In the future, we look forward to interacting very closely with students and faculty at IIIT, Hyderabad on Open Source activities and also conduct course on Open Source software licensing and legal issues. At Twincling Society, we invested a lot of time in working through Open Source licensing, Copyright and Trademark issues. This is critical as we are focussed on infrastructure software products development and want to create the largest ecosystem in the world ! more on that later.
To keep the participants energised and vigorously participate in the discussions, lip smacking Samosas, Paneer Pakoda and delectable Kala Jam from Tiwari Sweets (one of Hyderabad's best sweet shops) was laid out for all the attendees to savor.
We wanted to make sure that the best people, the best speakers, the best food and the best arrangments are made for such a special and first of its kind event ! At all Twincling events, the focus is on the quality of interaction, discussion and genuine interest.
The best part is that Hyderabad has that kind of people with energy to engage in discussions.
If that sounds incredible, then you should remember that OSEF 2008 came to an end at 4:15pm and Community 2008 started at Applabs GEC at 5pm. The GEC is located atleast 10 km from IIIT and a lot of the attendees of OSEF turned up for this event as well.
Sreeram Kaviliga, AVP and Arun D. Rao, VP, my close friends at AppLabs, were the hosts for Community 2008 at 3XL Conference, AppLabs GEC. Arun, spoke on the occassion, sharing his vision about Open Source and how he sees close synergy between AppLabs goals and Twincling Society.
Sai Chintala, VP, and Rajesh Patil, Architect, made a presentation on Open Source initiatives at AppLabs, TEMA product and also shared their experiences.
Alolita who is a Director on the Board of Open Source Initiative, spoke on "How to build an Open Source Community".
The importance of nurturing an Open Source community with the right elements and Community leads cannot be over emphasised.
At Twincling, we have cultivated a "user" community with an excellent mix of professionals and students in the last 4 years. The experience that we have gained is immensely valuable and positions us uniquely.
Now, as we move to the GLOBAL orbit of developing world-class Open Source products (licensed under Apache License 2.0), we need to mentor and cultivate a "developer" community.
A "developer" community will create a better quality IT workforce in Hyderabad and provide Andhra Pradesh a competitive advantage.
How are we going to do that ? Well, i'll talk about that in the next blog.
Coming back after the event, we had a long day and all of us were physically tired and yet we had a 5-hour long Strategy meeting to chalk out the go-GLOBAL plan.
Special thanks to our dear friends Pratima and Ajay at Cybermedia who helped with the subscription form and May 2008 issues of the DARE magazine. It is an amazing magazine, 'DARE - Because entrepreneurs do'. Guys, we still have a few magazines available to give out to folks. So, if you are interested, please drop in a line to info@twincling.org and collect it at the next Saturday meet.
Thats not all :-) To further discussions on entrepreneurship, we have WiTi (What I Think Is) list. Consider joining it at, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/witi
See you all at, TWINCLING Open Source Summit 2008 on Saturday, December 13, 2008.
