Sunday, June 27, 2010

Bar Camp Chennai Roundup

- The sessions started little late. Robin from ReachAccountants.com kicked off with a session on the accounting and tax related things any entrepreneur need to know. It was informative as most of the participants were techies and this is one area which techies don't fully understant.

- Praveen from Krea gave a talk on the importance of Market Research for start-ups. His take away was "Find the market and develop the product/solution". A discussion ensued with a counter point that there are many examples of super success startups where the product/solution came before there actually was a market(Likes of Google, Twitter...etc).

- Kannadhasan from Eagle Software gave a talk on how biometric based id cards are used for Healthcare delivery (TN government's insurance scheme). It was interesting and very good to know that technology is touching people and is reducing pilferage. As a side topic, a strongly opinionated discussion on the ethical and privacy concerns of collecting bio-metric information of all the citizens and how the government could misuse it.

- The high light of the bar camp was the presentation by Ms.Sonal Misra Deputy Commissioner of Traffic Police Chennai. She demonstrated what she had done with geo tagging of accident prone zones at Erode. Eventually there was a very involved discussion on how technology can be used in
- providing automatic traffic alerts
- traffic law enforcement.
- Senthil Nayagam of RailsFactory.com gave a speech on the need for Hackerspace. Good idea. I would for sure subscribe to one such hackerspace.

We had to leave after this....In general the Barcamp was good. It could have been better. Though it is an unconference, the discussion could have been lil bit anchored, if not moderated. Some times the discussions took a tangential path.