Business Line
Bangalore, Dec 10: ‘It never rains, but it pours’ was not just a comment about the unseasonal weather in the nation’s technology capital last week. Replace the word ‘it’ with capital letters - IT - and you could be speaking just as surely, about the year-end log jam of Information Technology-fuelled events, facing many of Bangalore’s best and brightest with a ‘dharma sankat’, a dilemma about where to go and what to miss.
The quandary first faced geekdom in the previous week which ended on December 1 - when the annual developer conferences of chip maker Texas Instruments and enterprise solutions leader SAP clashed head on for two days, even as another chip giant, AMD, emerged as a rival attraction when its Chief Executive, Dr Hector Ruiz, came to open yet another R&D centre in the city, its third in India.
But last week forced even more agonizing decision making on professional decision makers in town: with three compelling, and sometimes clashing techno-melas.
National Instruments - creators of the popular prototyping tool, Labview - had one unchallenged day for themselves, and they used it to good measure to unveil the latest, version 8.5, of this hardy tool.
Labview has been embraced by the engineering education community in India because of the way it made the PC or laptop the heart of almost any ad hoc measurement system you can think off and enabled the use of hundreds of sensors from third parties to create a complete lab instrumentation system.
Last week delegates also heard of efforts to squeeze key functionality into a single digital signal processing (DSP) chip.
The tough decisions were forced on many engineers when the annual conference of Free and Open Source Software (foss.in ) opened on the same day as the first edition of Bangalore Nano, the State’s attempt to focus on its strengths in nanotechnology.
Open source meet
There was a palpable, visual difference between the two events though: Foss was all about youth and freedom, which apparently also meant freedom from the shackles of a tie and a dark lounge suit. This was jeans-kurta-pyjama territory, recalling the late Union Minister Pramod Mahajan’s memorable phrase about the divide in the technology industry being between the ‘ties and the tie-nots’ rather than between the haves and the have nots.
Foss attracted the ‘usual suspects’ of the Open Source movement as well as corporates like Yahoo, Google, Geodesic, Redhat and IBM.
Sun used the event to announce $1-million corpus to fuel open source programming research asking why one could be expected to sustain oneself, if one was expected to create intellectual property and share it for free.
Nano meet
The Bangalore Nano event was more focused on industry - and the core opportunity for many was the session titled ‘Research Industry Collaboration Hub (RICH)’ where 18 Indian nanotechnology players showcased their research before an audience of potential investors.
The poster session was a disappointment, rarely rising above the standard of a college competition.
But there was a $1-trillion opportunity out there by 2015 - and this was one small step towards carving out a desi chunk of that pie.