ICICI Bank & Cyber Media launch SME CEO Knowledge Series in Agra

'If India wants to carry its fairytale economic story forward, Small

companies need to become Medium and Medium... Large. Knowledge is the vital

ingredient that will make it happen.' With this emphatic message from CMD

Pradeep Gupta, Cyber Media along with ICICI Bank kickstarted the first of a

series of events at ITC Mughal on Dec 15th, aimed at providing a common platform

to industry experts and SME owners to discuss challenges before the industry and

strategies to alleviate those. The land of Taj Mahal is also home to India's

biggest leather industry but sadly this is where the similarity ends. While our

beloved Taj has catapulted to be the biggest and the brightest wonder of the

world, the innumerable SME entrepreneurs of the leather industry are reeling

under threats from cheap Chinese imports, discriminatory taxation and a general

lack of skills. The entire event was divided in two parts. First was a mentoring

session, where experts from institutions such as IIM Kolkata, Deloitte and ICICI

Bank had a one-on-one discussion with SME owners on issues related to finance,

online marketing, taxation, HR and brand management. This was followed by a

panel discussion that focused on threats posed by cheap Chinese footwear.

Inaugurating the panel discussion, Dr Chanderpal, Secretary, Min of Micro & SMEs,

Govt of India said, 'We should combat external threats by strengthening the

various sections of our society, through proper training.' Vijay Chandok, Sr Gen

Mgr & Head SME, ICICI Bank revealed the Bank's plans to encourage SMEs to learn

from success stories of large enterprises and to understand key growth

parameters such as Marketing, HR, Finance and Taxation. The Series would

continue across 26 cities in India.

Foss.in: The Annual Open Source Jambooree

Tis year's edition of Foss.in, the meeting point of Open Source enthusiasts,

saw more action than usual, with companies encouraging development of

technologies to strengthen Open Source products, innovations and the overall

community. Sun Microsystems, the Platinum sponsor for Foss.in brought down to

Bangalore, its in-house Open Source experts, from various parts of the world,

led by Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer, of Sun's UK based Open Source

Group. The aim was to interact with coders, implementers, and enthusiasts of

Open Source from India, to strengthen its biggest Open Source offering, the

OpenSolaris operating system. The company will release review versions of

Solaris every six months, till the final release, to ensure that the community

gets a feel of the final version , and to identify newer bugs and fixing them.

What thrilled the Open Source community was an international announcement from

Sun-a $1 million kitty, to encourage innovation in the six streams of Sun's Open

Source activities- GlassFish, NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris and

Open SPARC. On the hardware front, IBM launched a series of Linux based servers

and cluster solutions to help small and medium sized companies to expand cost

effectively, and enhance productivity. Zimbra, a California based company for

Open Source servers and client software for messaging, has launched a

collaboration suite targeted at network administrators who face the challenge of

complex architectures that have to support mobile devices, documents, spam

filters and others. Its

proprietary offering, Zimlets helps you integrate and link the various

systems with its users' collaboration experience.

(Visit www.foss.in for more details.)

Web Innovation 2007: Nextgen Web Technology Revolution Conference

Web technology biggies from across the country came together in Bangalore for

the first ever 'Nextgen Web Technology Revolution conference'. The event, held

on 18th and 19th of December at The Grand Ashok, saw more than 800 'technology

practitioners'-both commercially inclined companies and individuals, in addition

to passionate followers and supporters of Web 2.0. They discussed the relevance

of Web 2.0 to the average Indian, before delving deep into the future

challenges.

While BV Naidu, Managing Director of SemIndia preferred to define Web 2.0 in

India as 'a booster shot for the networked economy', Naresh Gupta, Managing

Director of Adobe India defined the phenomenon as a 'natural progression' of the

World Wide Web. But the most logical explanation came probably from MSN India's

Country Manager, Jaspreet Bindra, who said that Web 2.0 converted the average

Web user from being just a static object to the very subject of the Internet.

The event, which was held in collaboration with Microsoft, IndiaTimes, Yahoo,

Sify, Netmagic, SAP, Adobe, Epsilon and Intel, saw sessions on topics like Web

advertising, Social implications of Web 2.0, and probable revenue models for the

future, which covered practically every aspect of the ongoing trend of 'social

Internet'. According to K K Natarajan of MindTree Consulting, 'Out of the four

Cs that defined Web 2.0-Content, Commerce, Community and Context-Community is

expected to be the driver for India in the social Internet arena. Being a

country that has multiple languages, cultures and attitudes, the future of Web

2.0 was seen in the form of local language content integration, with the content

ranging from local businesses to international news, all flowing out of the way

new-age Internet has begun to function-'the architecture of participation'.

While everybody was gung ho about the capabilities of Web 2.0 and what turn it

is likely to turn in the months to come, every single person had one common

brickbat-absence of world-class broadband speeds in India. Special mention was

made of sites like Bharat Matrimony and other business portals that have the

potential to increase user participation.

(Visit www.webinnovation.in for more details.)