Management blog updated :D

http://itsallaboutmanagement.atblogs.org/

Whether you're building Facebook apps, Meebo apps, iPhone web apps,
mashups, widgets, data services, web APIs or are new to zembly, we want
to hear from you. Simply tell us about your experience with zembly and
you could win a $200 gift certificate!

First Prize: $200 - The top 5 winners will receive a $200 American Express Gift Certificate.

Second Prize T-Shirt - The next top 100 blog entries will receive a zembly t-shirt.

Deadline for submission is May 16.

Details at http://zembly.com/ui/competition/blog-contest?intcmp=2736

Linux Journal has announced that OpenOffice.org has won their 2009
Readers' Choice Award for "Favorite Office Program."
Over 6000 readers voted in this year's competition and openoffice won its category by more than a landside. The Editors  noted, " Open Office .org, bolstered no doubt by its recent 3.0 release , retains its crown as your favorite office program with the same share of your vote as last year, 85% . Congratulations OpenOffice.Org, Well deserved.

The Eye and dental camp was organised by Nightingales Medical Trust for
senior citizens at SeetaKempanahalli village, about 25 kms from
Bangalore. Organising eye camp in rural areas usually involves inherent
setbacks around logistics. But not for volunteers from Sun - where
there is a will, there definitely is a way. The trust did an excellent
ground work for the camp. They publicised the camp in 12 villages  with
Public address system, Pamphlets/ handbills and posters. The trust also
had arranged for vans to pick up elders from different villages to the
camp. More than 200 senior citizens benefitted from the camp and about
25 of them have been scheduled to undergo a cataract operation. There
was also a dental checkup to detect the presence of oral cancer. After
screening, the doctors educated them on the ill effects of tobacco.
Employees also served them good food and that completed the camp. Many
of the volunteers expressed that it was not just a 'eye opening'
experience, but also a 'heart opening' experience.

Even though the employees had to get time out of their busy schedules,
had to travel a long way to get to some of these locations and had to
endure the hot summer sun, they realised that their hardships paled
into insignificance in front of what these underprivileged faced on a
daily basis.

I was very happy to be one of the core volunteer for this event. It was wonderful event

Project Kenai is the onramp for Sun's "developer cloud" efforts, which allows you to host your open source projects and code - as well as find and collaborate with developers of like mind and passion.
Anyone can join by going to http://kenai.com. And if parties are ready to start hosting a project, they simply need to send an invitation request with a description of their project to: kenai-admin-AT-sun-DOT-com. Sun Developer Network members can use their SDN credentials to sign in.

We currently offer an integrated suite of productivity services to host open source projects/code or connect with peers of like mind; features include: 1.Source Code Management (Subversion, Mercurial, and Git).

2.Issue Tracking (Jira and Bugzilla)

3.Wiki

4.Forums

5.Mailing Lists

6.Download facility for documents

7.Evolving integration with NetBeans Here's some useful resources to learn more or stay connected:

8.Nuts & Bolts of Kenai.com http://kenai.com/projects/help/pages/KenaiOverview

9.Screencasts: o "Welcome to Project Kenai:"
https://slx.sun.com/1179272514 o "Edit your Project Kenai Profile:"
https://slx.sun.com/1179272664 o "Manage your Kenai Project:"
https://slx.sun.com/1179273752

* Blog: http://blogs.sun.com/projectkenai

* Twitter: http://twitter.com/projectkenai 

Netbeans 6.7 Beta is now Available

http://www.netbeans.org/community/releases/67/

Check out the Home Page, the Release Notes or go and just Download it!

Sun just launched the OpenSolaris Apps of Steel Challenge. This is a
great opportunity to learn about developing and porting packages. Then
use your talents and participate for a chance to win a Toshiba
OpenSolaris laptop! The winning packages will also be showcased at the
OpenSolaris Install Lounge at CommunityOne West, in San Francisco on
June 1-3rd, 2009. part from the prizes and recognition, contributing OpenSolaris
packages benefits the entire OpenSolaris community by building out the
package eco-system.   Need help getting started? Check the OpenSolaris
Software Porter's Community.Packages must be submitted by 12:00 pm midnight PDT on May 8, 2009. Packages will be judged on the following criteria:

Complexity of the Port, * Use of unique OpenSolaris features, such as ZFS, DTrace, SMF, and FMA, * Number of dependent packages ported , *Usefulness to the end user

For all the details, please see the Official OpenSolaris Apps of Steel Challenge Rules and Restrictions

As part of world wide volunteer week, We had organised an event at
Shishu Mandir ( http://www.Shishumandir.com ) on 19th April .
Indeed 19th April 2009 was a super Sunday!!! Day was filled with loads
of fun,emotion and happiness.

All the sun volunteers assembled at Shishu Mandir,Bangalore at 9:00 Am.
To start up with , We interacted with director of Shishu Mandir.
There were around 80 + students (which includes orphans and
underprivileged students) attended our event.

We carried tonnes of gifts, prizes, chocolates, biscuits for kids. We
conducted 3 competitions for kids.

a. Musical chair Competition.
b. Painting Competition.
c. Singing Competition.

All the kids were really happy and participated in all the competitions. We had arranged lunch for all the  kids and for the volunteer.  We had
desserts( Ice cream and Fruit)  as well.

We donated 1200 Rupees for medicines and donated 4000 rupees of text
books to shishu mandir.

Please have a sneak peek at the pics :: 
http://picasaweb.google.com/Shishumandir1/Touploadshishu#

Special thanks to Ganesh hiregoudar, Vidya Sakar, Radhakrishna,
Tirthankar, vijaya,shamantaka,Rashmi, Vittal, Nischal,Dhanraj for their
help and to make this event very successful.

OSUM CLUB Inauguration at BNMIT, Bangalore was held on 30th March. The program was scheduled at 2:30 Pm . BNMIT management had invited Employees from Sun, Microsoft, Vmware for the Advance technological Club inauguration. 

 I went to BNMIT at 2: 00 pm. I received a warm welcome from Computer science HOD. Later I interacted with Rajanna,chairman ,BNMIT, Principal and other departments HOD.

 I gave a talk on Importance of opensource , OSUM and Student Academic initiative. There were  around 200+ students  attended  this event.

Open Source Mela at IEC,Bangalore was held on 24th , 25th March. Open source mela was so much fun . There was loads of events which includes a.Talks by engineers on different sun technologies, b) Panel Discussion, c)Blogging Contest, d)Business Plan Competition,e)Dtrace Contest,d) Fun Events,e)Open Quiz Contest, Lucky Dip.
 To start with , I attended KNR keynote session followed by couple of tech talks.
 Now coming the interesting part, I participated in Business Plan competition.

When ever I think of Business plan competition, I feel very nostalgic, It reminds my good old MBA days :D

I and ganesh participated as one team . We submitted our business plan on " ECSTASY - Software Insurance Product" .

Here is the executive summary of our Business plan ::

“If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door ”

Business Plan on ECSTASY – Software Insurance Product.

Executive Summary

There is a evolutionary change in the technology that has revolutionized the entire insurance sector.
Insurance industry is a data-rich industry, and thus, there is a need to use the data for trend analysis and personalization.

With increased competition among insurers, service has become a key issue. Moreover, customers are getting increasingly sophisticated and tech-savvy. People today don’t want to accept the current value propositions, they want personalized interactions and they look for more and more features and add ones and better service.

The insurance companies today must meet the need of the hour for more and more personalized approach for handling the customer. Today managing the customer intelligently is very critical for the insurer especially in the very competitive environment. Companies need to apply different set of rules and treatment strategies to different customer segments. However, to personalize interactions, insurers are required to capture customer information in an integrated system.With the explosion of Website and greater access to direct product or policy information, there is a need to developing better techniques to give customers a truly personalized experience. Personalization helps organizations to reach their customers with more impact and to generate new revenue through cross selling and up selling activities. To ensure that the customers are receiving personalized information, many organizations are incorporating knowledge database-repositories of content that typically include a search engine and lets the customers locate the all document and information related to their queries of request for services. Customers can hereby use the knowledge database to mange their products or the company information and invoices, claim records, and histories of the service inquiry. These products also may be able to learn from the customer’s previous knowledge database and to use their information when determining the relevance to the customers search request.

There is a probability of a spurt in employment opportunities. A number of web-sites are coming up on insurance, a few financial magazines exclusively devoted to insurance and also a few training institutes being set up hurriedly. Many of the universities and management institutes have already started or are contemplating new courses in insurance.

Life insurance has today become a mainstay of any market economy since it offers plenty of scope for garnering large sums of money for long periods of time. A well-regulated life insurance industry which moves with the times by offering its customers tailor-made products to satisfy their financial needs is, therefore, essential if we desire to progress towards a worryfree future.With the inclusion of open source technologies , We will be developing a software insurance product.

Me, Ganesh and Tirthankar at demo stall during opensource Mela.

We had an on-spot osum registration camp where we guided the students in joining OSUM. We also distributed prizes to the students in several competitions. Every group created in these two days and having 25 members at the end of the second day won the prizes. Hourly prizes for lucky students who registered at sun Tech Days.

We had around 1000 registrations on the two days of tech days. The most popular question asked at the stall was how to become a sun campus Ambassador and how to be a OSUM leader. It was very pleasing to see students taking interest in open source and their willingness to learn sun technologies and participate in the CA program.

There were several Sun technologies that were displayed and taught at Sun Tech Days 2009. New additions to the sun technology arsenal like zembly, JavaFx and Java Tv were Showcased. Also a lot of new improvement on existing technologies like Netbeans , Solaris were projected.

The sun Showcase, The Keynotes by James Gosling and Matt Thompson were
in the main auditorium and attended by several people . After the keynotes each day, the sessions were distributed into tracks like enterprise Computing, Client Technology, Tools and Best Practices,
Hands-on Labs, etc.The first day comprised of 7 tracks with an overall of 36 sessions.The second day comprised of 6 tracks with an overall of 31 sessions.

The tech days mainly showed the latest breath taking technologies of sun like Mysql, Virtualbox , JavaFx, Java TV.

Keynote : James Gosling on the first day, after the showcase we had a keynote by Jamesh Gosling, the father of Java. The Keynote was very exciting as it showed in a lot of new technologies based on Java. It also gave a glimpse of the Various products of sun like Glasssfish and finally ended with a projection of Java in the near future..

We had very successful year of FY08 and look forward to have more success stories in FY09.I would like to thank the support given by IEC engineers, management of IEC and Sun India University core team , with their support we couldn't have done this.Thanks to one and all.Please find the Campusworld Annual newsletter at http://in.sun.com/communities/univ/campusworld.html

Software Freedom week @ BVB Hubli

Emphasis was on making a favorable impact on all the people to whom the
event reached out, rather than just creating FOSS awareness. The events
were designed to sustain the FOSS spirit beyond the week and aid the
people who wish to embrace the open source revolution by providing
support in terms of training/installation & closed to open source
migration assistance. The event was a preface to the Year long
activities carried out by the Open Source Developer’s Community of
BVBCET. It all began with a grand Inaugural on 14th September 2008 in
Biotech seminar hall of B.V. Bhoomaraddi College of Engineering &
Technology, Hubli, India. I was the guest of honor. The function was
presided by Dr Ashok Shettar - Principal BVBCET, and was graced by Prof
B.L.Desai - Vice Principal, BVBCET, Dr. Satish Annigeri - Dean Academic
Affairs, BVBCET, Dr R.M. Banakar - Branch Counselor IEEE Student
Chapter, Mr. Shankar Setty - Faculty, Info. Sc. & Engg. Dep