Its festival time.

Pongal celebrations started with little ones in my neighboring house doing a kolam depicting the Mattu (Cow) Pongal. This kolam was drawn by Miss.Prianka my neighbour who is studying VI standard

The firing up of the traditional stove to start the festive event.

With fire going up we were waiting for the milk to boil out and push off to the brim of the utensil.

Yep, the festive treat captured on my mobile camera.

Happy Pongal wishes.

The event – Proto.in

Where – Asiana Hotel (Phone – 044-67411000)
Dates: January 18th, 19th 2008
Location – Old Mahabalipuram Road, Chennai

What is this?
Its a premier event in which startup companies and the alike showcase their products, technologies and companies to a selected gathering of investors, VCs, et la…
This event is happening twice every year and so far happening in Chennai. Of course this event is bound to sail across cities other than Chennai in the future.

Here is the agenda of the event.

If possible trying to live blog the event with photos from the venue.Related articles.

by Dr Rao, Adviser-Ministry of Science & Technology, Government of India

by Vijay organizer of the event

by Kausikram Krishnasayee

by Siddhi
Update (14 Jan): Direction to the venue using Yahoo Maps is here (Thank you Siddhi)
Update (17 Jan) : Agenda updated with the latest one.

To Tata Inc,

You have just introduced the world’s cheapest car.
Yes its India’s pride. You have made a revolution in the car industry.
Your dream product is really a special gift to the middle class Indians.
In spite of increasing input costs you have stood by your promise of 1 Lakh Rupees.
I salute you.

BUT

The already congested roads in the Indian metros will surely witness an explosive growth of car population.
Your competitors are bound to follow your business logic..,
Are you doing good to our country’s poor roads?
Should the morality of daily office goers be injured with increased journey time?

Why the car makers are making the traffic poorer ?

This same country had well planned cities called Harappa and Mohenjodaro that too 4000 years ago which had even a well planned drainage.
But today our country is heading for a more heart burn to the road users.
Why not the country make the roads richer ?

It was an excitement for me to know that one of the photos I took on my 2MP Mobile Phone Camera has got featured on the Yahoo Developer Network.
A mention on my pipescamp review at the Y! site tells that its a “Play-by-play” of the event.
coOL!!
Seems that many of the Yahooligans had feast on reading my pipescamp review
The organizers have really put in great efforts in churning this world’s first ever unconference on Yahoopipes into a success.

Thank you Mr.Matt McAlister of Yahoo Developer Network & everyone for making pipescamp a brilliant one.

Hey I am trying to browse into the google website for the past few hours but in vain. The sites igoogle, blogger or any other google sites are down it seems. Of course blackle.com is opening.

Neither,  I could post my articles today through blogger.com nor read my friend’s posts thru google reader !

Srini’s Weblog

Welcome to this new blog.

So far I am writing at www.coolsrini.blogspot.com :  for quite some time, since the news are going that wordpress is the nice one to have a try, just started this blog on the wordpress website.

Happy blogging days ahead

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

The day for me started at 3.30 a.m. getting from the bed and catching the bus from Cuddalore to Chennai at 4.30 am. The event is at 10.00 a.m. in Koyambedu, the journey is usually of 5 Hrs from my town Cuddalore and as per my plan I could reach for the event at 10.00 a.m. on 23rd Dec’07

Photo taken while my bus is making its way thru the misty day on the ECR, the artistic road in South India.

A nice early morning shot of the ECR (East Coast Road)

I suppose it to be a theme park making a good feast for my mobile camera.

Although the usual journey time to reach Koyambedu is 5Hrs, I am bit lucky/unlucky to reach an hour earlier to the Koyambedu Bus Stand. Its 8.15a.m. and am confused on how to pass off the time till 10.00 a.m. Hmmm, ok pass the time at a eatery, had a breakfast at a small eatery named “Hotel Chennai” just opposite Koyambedu Police Station,
Had 3 pooris for breakfast.
Cost – Rs.10/- (Rupees Ten only)
Too cheap, could not believe, rather its tasty too.
Although I made my process of having the food purposefully slow I finished it at 8.40, Oh what to do, wondered on how to pass the time. Ok, have a slow walk to the venue.
The organisers of pipesCamp had used Google Maps to give the participants the location of the Hotel Shan Royale, so I failed to note down the address of the venue. As per the bubble placed on the map, the location is at the South Western side of the Fruit/Flower market of Koyambedu. I am an avid fan of maps and am so confident of the location which I confirmed the day before the event. Passed my time as well strolling through the busy road around the market. Remember a walk around the perimeter of the market complex (The largest market in Asia) will make you to clock around 4kilometers. While I walked for around 40 minutes and reached the South West side of the market hoping to see the hotel, I was welcomed by the filth and garbage which were the byproducts of the vegetable market. There is no sign of of the name – Hotel Shan Royale, pity me, should not have taken the maps with that much confidence.
Lesson – Should have cross checked before following the bubble placed by our friends on the Google maps
The bubble was placed in the map at a spot 4 kms away!!
Nobody in the area where I strolled into knows about this hotel, a bulb glowed in my head that an error has happened in the map. The only man wearing a T-shirt & pants walked past me…
Me: Sir, I wanna go to Hotel Shan Royale, where is it.
Him:Hotel Shan Royale? There is no such hotel here.
Me: ??
Him: Okay, u should be telling that hotel which is in Koyambedu Circle
Me: Where is it? Could I go by walk.
Him: No, Its more than 3Kms away and u have to catch an auto.
Then I reached the Koyambedu Round Tana thru a share auto and found the place. The time is now 9.50a.m.
Later came to know that a mistake has crept into the maps and it was corrected in the midnight prior to the event by Arun.

Here is the Hotel.
OH God, thank you, I had a good exercise for one hour and finally found the event venue at 10.00 a.m.
The event organisers were there and a short intro with the people there like Srivatsan, Bosky, Arun, ….
Me: Hi I am Srinivasan from Cuddalore
Him: Oh you are blogging at Cuddaloreonline?
(seems that he has already known me)
or
I should have got known since one my blog post got me an invitation from the district collector on the comments section of the blog post. A surprise and it should be first of its kinda in the blogging world.

The event started at about 11.00a.m.

A tee shirt bzz Microsoft .

Ganesh, Ramanujam and Arun Prabhudesai.
Arun is the sole sponsor of this wonderful camp and is churning out Hover.in from his staples named Orange Cube. The product which is expected in the month of February will be helping online publishers and bloggers to monetize their content thru display of customized content based on a keyword of phrase in an intuitive window. He asked me to register at his website but when i tried it is not going through. Hope that everything will be complete in another 2 months time. I plan to implement his product in my jokes blog.

Moyeen and Ganesh. Moyeen has a successful blog on bollywood movies and earning good number of clicks which come solely thru google search.

The event is set to start.

The key organizer Bosky giving out the intro talk. Heard that he was working in Microsoft for some 3 years and has now started his own company.

While the talk on how to and et al of the Yahoo Pipes is goingon, Mahen and Gapp are seen meddling some stuff on the internet. Thanks for the good Wi-Fi available at the venue.

Srivatsan giving out press talk to Divya, reporter at The Hindu.

Although the crowd is moderate all the participants were so much keen in churning out their mashups using the yahooPipes.

A pep talk by bloggers and developers. A good share of information took place at the event.

Balaji Sowmyanarayanan busy at developing a mashup.

Gapp busy with the laptop pc. Probably for getting the first prize in the hacking

Although the Wi-Fi is available, the shortage of lap top PCs have made these guys handicapped and they are found having a discussion of yahooPipes P:)

Moyeen and Siddhi found pichifying their brains for churning out a successful pipe.

MTC bus route mash up taking birth inside Siddhi’s head, P:(

Arun and Co busy with a mashup .

Vamsee piping thru day Dreams D:)

With the things going busy with guys developing different kinds of stuff then came a talk by RL.Narayana, Director, Equvia Webservices
Narayanan turned up the tables with saying Mashups are still to come up of age and he gives quotes supporting that mashups do not churn out money.
Time has to tell how far these hacks make the other way to profit.

A summary on mashups given out by RL.Narayana
The full presentation made by him can be pulled up from here on the slideshare

Succeeding this presentation is the developer’s delicacy — the mashups created at the pipescamp

Ego search mashup came up as the first demo in the hackday

Siddhi demonstrating his MTC bus mashup

Labsji modified Siddhi’s mashup and created an animated one using the yahoo maps, which made interesting to non-techie guys like me.

Arun giving out his mashup.

Arun: Hey, give me the lap top ya ArrG:(

Sagaro: Pongukeejeema

Arun giving out the talk at the closing of the event followed by distribution of T-Shirts to the hackers and a few more gifted people like me D:)

Oh I was not there in any of the photos taken at the pipesCamp

Mahen clicked me while we came out of the venue.

Related Posts: Siddhi’s blog , prabhu’s talk
My take
Plus – Good networking with my friends and some new people.
Minus – As I am not a developer I surely be not developing a single pipe.
On the whole a nice experience.

The Christmas Kolam drawn at my house today morning.
Merry Christmas !