Bio-wise and otherwise

Bangalore goes Scot'ish!

On May 18, Sun Technology Summit '07 saw over 800 developers and students gather at Taj West End, Bangalore. The enthu was palpable and the conference halls were brimming with delegates throughout the 5 hour long summit.

The keynote address was rendered by Scott McNealy. Scott captivated and enthralled the audience right from his opening statement. Alluding to Web x.y, Scott emphasized that we now live in the Participation Age where everybody is an editor, publisher, blogger, mash-up-er, and what not. The web today is clearly by the user and for the user. India itself, according to Scott, currently has 12 million bloggers. Citing the example of a bunch of youngsters who made over a billion dollars by creating the Youtube and later selling it to Google, Scott urged the developers and students to think innovatively, and out -of -the- box to create valuable solutions.

But innovation alone would not help bridge the digital divide. The spirit of sharing in the open source space will narrow the yawning digital divide and bring the power of the computer to each and every person on the planet. Scott further added that 90% of cellphones have Java programs running and that signifies the ubiquity of Java technology.

With the advent of Java FX, users can watch a movie on a phone. “No suing, no arresting, no billing. It's free!” was Scott's refrain to every Sun technology he took the name of. 'Click and wait' was the only mantra for availing all these freebies, he added. Needless to say, along with these words of assurance, Scott also urged developers to contribute code to the Open community. “Twenty five percent of the SDN is in India. Now 25% of code should be donated from India”.

To the rhetorical question on how free translates to money, Scott explained: Open drives volume and volume drives value.

India now has access to www.network.com, a Sun grid technology, where the first 200 CPU hours are free.

Not being new to Bangalore, Scott has already won the popularity vote for his charisma and wit. He seems to enjoy a celebrity status, as could be seen by the fact that several youngsters had gathered around him after his talk, to seek his autograph.

The rest of the day had talks on many interesting topics such as AJAX and Web 2.0, Java SE language features- today and tomorrow, Web Services and SOA applications using Java EE, Java EE and Glassfish. At the All Hands, which followed in the afternoon, Scott answered many questions posed by the IEC employees.

The message was quite clear to those of us who had been sitting all day in the talks: Kick butt and have fun.

Fun we did have aplenty- over chat sessions, ice cream and cookies and an occasional cup of Java.

Posted at 08:08AM May 18, 2007 by Manju in Sun  |  Comments[0]