insideout

BarCamp Mumbai 4

Bar Camp Mumbai 4 happened on 4th and 5th OCT at SJM-SOM IIT. It was a two day event, full of fun and learining and while crowd was higher on the first day, I feel that the sessions were better on the day 2.

This time BarCamp was more oriented towards enterprenurship and startups. A lot of sessions covered different aspects of starting up a company.

Rajiv Dhingra of WATblog inspired the gathering with his own story of success while giving tips on how to break out of the regular herd. Anand Lunia from seedfund.in gave valueable insights on how to acquire Seed funding, what works, what doesnt. Bakshish Dutta from Sun offered help with their special plans for setting up the infrastructure for startups. Aditi gupta from CIIE gave tips on brand buiding for startups and some gyan on the incubation process. There were a few startups like  entrip.com, youcharades.com, housie app by socialwebfactory and m4mum.com who presented a demo of their products and shared their experiences. You can read about all the sessions on the official barcamp site barcampmumbai.org.

There were some impromptu presentations too. The one I liked the most was by Appu and Vipul on Social Photo sharing. They highlighted why photo sharing is important and how so many people all across the globe are getting benifitted by such photo sharing communities. The presentation they had put up was amazing. Both of them are photography fanatics themselves and have their photo streams on Flickr. Appu’s stream and Vipul’s stream.

Another session which interested me was on wireless security presented by Sheetal Joseph. She gave a little run down on how security on wireless networks is compromised and what measures one can take to ensure maximum security. A copy of the presentation is available at OWASP.

I met a lot of people and shared a lot of ideas. The gathering was a mixed crowed, students, enterprenurs, techies, bloggers, geeks, management people, etc. and everyone had something to share. It was a wonderful experience.. I hope I would present something in the next barcamp.

The regulars say that this time the turn out was pretty low and I realised that most people this time were the first timers like me. I cant speak about others but I’m sure I would be a regular from now on.

Check out barcampmumbai 4 pics at preshit’s photostream.

Google Chrome launched

Google Chrome is a web browser by Google. It generated a lot of hype when a comic book representation of its features was leaked yesterday. Google held a press conference to announce the launch of Chrome and it was officially launched today.

So whats new?  Well, quite a lot. Google has brought the best of all the existing browsers under one hood and in turn have come up with a browser who is kick ass in terms of speed and has a pretty low memory usage as compared to the other browsers including the new IE8. Chrome is based on an earlier version of WebKit framework (which is also used in Safari) for rendering the pages. A new process is invoked for each tab and all the tabs work independent to each other resulting in more efficient memory usage and fast processing. Javascript processing has been significantly, contributing to the added speed.

Innovative UI is another plus for the browser, the common bar for address/search/history, tabs on top, no title bar, no status bar, bigger screen space makes it look slick. The download manager looks neat too, however it doesnt seem to support broken downloads yet. The speed dial as default page is a great tool too.

It also sports the “incognito” mode which is similar to private browsing mode in Safari. With this mode on, no info from your browsing session is saved on the machine. The Crash control feature prevent the application from crashing, in case one of the apps in a tab goes bad. Its just the tab which closes, not the whole application.  There is also a javascript debugger, Javascript console and Tab Manager to help the developers.

With all the good points there are bound to be negatives too, and yes there are. Its only been a few hours since the browser has been launched and a few security concerns have popped up. There has been some criticism about it being available only for Windows platform, ignoring Mac and Linux users. The browser is called an open source browser but there are speculations about its openness too. It posses a good threat to IE even in this beta stage, but may not be a full replacement for the firefox users yet. Most FF users are in a habit of using the different plugins it supports, Chrome still has a long way to go before it get similar ones.

All said and done, for me the browser seems to be pretty cool and have worked with almost all the sites I have visited on it. So if you are planning to download it click here and check out the easter eggs by typing “about:stats” and “about:internets” in the address bar.