Indians bag 2 bronze at Young Guns International Advertising Awards

Indians won two Bronze and two finalist nominations at 2004 Young Guns International Advertising Awards.
http://www.ygaward.com/
Awards List

In the 'maverick media' category, Ambience Publicis has bagged a bronze for its work on Snehi, a Delhi-based organisation that works for the rights of abused children.
In the 'Outdoors: community service and charity' category RMG David's Nests won a bronze for an innovative hoarding done for WWF-India.
Ambience Publicis has also bagged two finalist nominations for its work on Western Union Money Transfer in the print single and print campaign categories.

http://www.agencyfaqs.com/news/stories/2004/11/30/10367.html

Indians on top at Commonwealth Vision Awards 2004

India's Neeraj Bhasin and Rupalli Mehraa won the first and second prize respectively in the 2004 Commonwealth Vision Awards, awarded in a ceremony held on friday 26th Nov,2004 at the Royal Commonwealth Society in London.

http://in.rediff.com/news/2004/nov/29awards.htm

Ittiam Systems awarded the world's most preferred supplier of DSP

Bangalore based Ittiam Systems emerges as the world's most preferred supplier of DSP based intellectual property in world-wide DSP Professionals Survey for 2004 conducted by Forward Concepts.
http://www.ittiam.com/pages/news/pres-rel-20041124.htm

Its an amazing feat for Ittiam made it to the top in just 4 years after its inception. Ittiam was founded in 2001 in Bangalore, India.

Blogging with wblogger

This is a nice tool, a stand alone editor to edit/post without ever explicitly logging in to the blog web site. This is a test blog using this tool. Nice and easy now to post a blog. Updating a blog is also very simple and quick.
http://www.wblogger.com

Top 100 Indian American firms generated $2.3bn for 2003

The ninth edition of the study entitled "2004 VII Hundred" conducted jointly by the New York weekly News India-Times and Ventures International Inc says, top 100 companies owned or run by Indian Americans, generated $2.3 billion in revenues during 2003 and provided jobs to 18,491 workers. Productivity is at $124,000 per employee.

Details of Top 5
http://sify.com/news_info/news/nri/fullstory.php?id=13350582

Only 21 listings were from the software sector, followed by 19 for professional services and 17 for manufacturing.

The eligibility criteria for participating in the study:

1. privately held

2. controlled by (CEO,President) must be Asian Indian origin

3. Minimum sales of $1 million

Ninety-two firms had made it to the 2003 list, as per the 8th edition of the survey, collectively generating $2.2 billion in revenues, providing jobs to 18,337 employees. Productivity is at $120,000 per employee.

Comparing 8th and 9th editions, the difference is only $0.1 billion in revenue.

$2.3Billion looks good for India, though it is almost nothing compared to other Asian counter parts in particular. Long way to go.

Top 6 Innovative Indian companies 2004

Six "Made In India" Innovative Software companies have been shortlisted by NASSCOM for 2004 "IT Innovation in India". These companies will present their road maps in the next NASSCOM meet in Mumbai in feb, 2005.

These six made in to the finals, from a spirited 96 counterparts.
Beehive Solutions Ltd,
Compulink Systems Ltd,
Liqwid Krysal India Pvt Ltd,
PACE Soft Silicon,
Srishti Software Pvt Ltd and
very well known among certification aspirants Whizlabs Software Pvt Ltd

NASSCOM aspires to showcase the expertize and help them to become world leaders in the area of specialization.
http://www.nasscom.org/innovation/

Comparing IITs with MIT – mere hype

This show CBS's '60 Minutes' was broadcasted a long time back, but I came to read this comment recently, and I was shocked to see the emotional interpretation media and Indians who believed it to be true.

"Well, my son, he probably wanted to do computer science at IIT. To do that, you have to be in the top 200 and he couldn't do that, so he went to Cornell instead....I do know cases where students who couldn't get into computer science at IIT, they have gotten scholarships at MIT, at Princeton, at Caltech." -N R Narayanamurthy Founder, Infosys in an interview to CBS's '60 Minutes' on India's IIT Jan 17, 2003.

This may be true, that his son and many other Indians could not get in to IITs but got in to American universities and even got scholarships there. Considering the population of India and the intake of IITs, there will always be such a fierce competition. There is a large queue for Maruthi cars in India, but you get a Mercedes Benz almost immediately if you have money. This does not make Maruthi car better than Benz. The context it was told and the media hype created later on intended to say that IITs are much better than MIT and likes, which I believe is totally foolish and emotional.

Consider these parameters and compare IITs with American Universities in general and MIT in particular.

MIT has 59 noble prize winners. How many does IIT(s) have?
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/special/nobels.html
Do you think, all these Nobel prizes speak for, stand for and prove some thing about MIT?

The Indian Institute of Technology ranked 41st in the world in the league table of the world's best universities produced by The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES). American institutions occupied seven of the top ten places, with MIT at 3rd place.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,591-1343946,00.html

Kind of research activities going on at MIT, Compare with IITs, both in number of labs and products/concepts came out of their labs.

How many algorithms, concepts, frameworks created by IITs that you have ever heard of, which are in active application at any point of time?

Number of patents filed?

Dissemination of Research and knowledge gained.

Do you have any thing like MIT OCW initiative at IITs at any scale? Visit http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html and see how the whole world is taking advantage of MIT knowledge.

Compare how many papers got published from IITs at major international forums?

How many text books published by the faculty at IITs? It is quite funny that even IIT students study only books/material published by American universities.
How many American universities prescribe books published by IIT?

How many products/concepts do you use which are invented or produced by companies founded by IIT faculty/students?

How many startups you are aware of are from IIT faculty/students/alumni? List it down. I do not accept if they have gone to any American university for their higher education.

Honors, Top positions held at major companies.
This is where I heard lot of hype that American companies can not survive without IIT students and Indians. Quite funny. Americans innovate, create companies, create businesses, but can not survive?

You may come up with a good number of people on your list, but again, count only those who have not gone for higher studies to MIT and likes?

Take the list of top executives and CEOs of major Indian companies, and count how many of them have studied in American Universities?

Visit pages of http://www.kamalsinha.com/, an IIT alumni; you will be shocked to see the real picture, in particular at Microsoft.

If IITs are so much better than its overseas counter parts, why every IIT graduate is going for masters in American universities?

IITs MAY be the best in India when compared to the other Indian counter parts, but they are far from MIT likes. You may come up with some star performers who are from IITs, but wait a moment; most of them have done a course in MIT likes before they start shining.

Visit these links, it may make sense to some of you and see the real picture, through your own eyes, not through media or businessmen with vested interests.

My favourite MIT Links:
http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html
http://mitworld.mit.edu/
http://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/mit_orgs.php

Arindam Banerji
Can India produce billion-dollar innovations?
http://www.rediff.com/money/2004/aug/10ariban.htm

How India can produce big-bang innovations
http://www.rediff.com/money/2004/aug/11ariban.htm

Inovation: Where India succeeded and failed
http://www.rediff.com/money/2004/aug/12ariban.htm

G V DasarathiAre Indians really dumb?
http://in.rediff.com/money/2004/aug/10das.htm

Bangalore: Silicon Valley or Coolie Valley?
http://in.rediff.com/money/2004/mar/03guest1.htm

Visit pages of http://www.kamalsinha.com/, an IIT alumni; you will be shocked to see the real picture.

The Indian Entrepreneur: Not CEO Material in the Valley! http://www.siliconindia.com/nextpage.asp?newsno=25878

Innovation Indian ishtyle!
India registered mere 354 patents in 2003 compared with Taiwan’s 5300 and Korea’s 3952.
http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=74517

National Innovation Foundation

Instead of living in Utopia, this foundation does what needs to be done at grass root levels, promotes innovation at every facet of life and finds value for it. The NIF was set up by the Government of India four years ago to help these unsung heroes find a platform to showcase their knowledge. Supported by the Honey Bee Networks, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, Shristi and various local NGOs, the foundation helps Indian innovation by identifying, documenting and protecting the intellectual property rights of the grass root level innovations. The NIF has selected 13,000 grassroots innovations based on traditional knowledge for commercialization.

http://www.nifindia.org/
http://www.nifindia.org/presentation/index.htm

Also Organizes various events like the Annual Business Competition "Disha" - http://disha.scai.org.in/ with support from IIMA to promote the cause.

Three Indians in Oracle Editor's choice awards 2004

Three Indians won Oracle Editor's choice Awards 2004.

Rajesh Kumar - Early Adopter of the Year 2004, Oracle Grid Control
Jyotika Patel - Portal Developer of the Year 2004
Venkat Tipparam - Java Developer of the Year 2004

Published in Oracle Magazine Nov/Dec 2004
http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/04-nov/o64awards.html

Global Indus Technovators Awards 2004

The 2004 Global Indus Technovators Awards have been announced.
http://technovators.mit.edu/winner04.php

The Global Indus Technovator Awards have been instituted to recognize and felicitate 20 distinguished innovators of Indus origin working at the cutting-edge of technology that may be harnessed for far-reaching applications.
http://technovators.mit.edu/index.php

9 Indians in MIT Top 100 Innovator's list

9 Indians achieved their spots in this year's list of "100 Top Innovators" (under the age of 35) chosen by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's "Technology Review" magazine.

The magazine is accessible only on subscription. Read info at various news web sites. Complete indians list is available at the first link:
http://news.indiainfo.com/2004/11/08/0811nri.html
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-916533,curpg-1.cms

India remains TOP, takes a hatrick with a 7% rise

India remains top, for the third year with an increase of 7% in student enrollment in US universities, while overall enrollment dips by 2.4%, as reported in
Open Doors 2004, the annual report published by the Institute of International Education(IIE).

Posted in a Press release at
http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/?p=50137

India on top at World Communication Awards 2004

Two of the best brands of India, Airtel and Reliance place India on top at the World Communication Awards 2004 by winning 2 of 12 honours. Airtel was voted as the Best Brand and Mukhesh Ambani of Reliance was voted as the Most Influential Person in Communications.

The awards were declared on 11th October,2004 in London.
http://wca.totaltele.com/index.stm

See all the nominees for "The most influential person in Communications"(the list includes CEOs of all top telecoms, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates), to get a feel of who Mukhesh Ambani has won against, and how much it mean to India to win such an honour.

http://wca.totaltele.com/poll/poll.aspx

Reliance Infocomm

http://www.relianceinfo.com/Infocomm/index.html

Airtel

http://www.airtelworld.com/

GoodnewsIndia

"Why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India embarrassed to recognise our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why?”

“There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed in the bad news and failures and disasters.”

“In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime. Why are we so NEGATIVE?”

- Excerpts from a speech by DR. A.P.J. ABDUL KALAM, President of India

I remember this email that was flying around for a long time with title, “A must read for Indians”, with excerpts from a speech made by president Abdul kalam. People read it, praised it, forwarded to all on their buddy lists. After a while, it is forgotten like any other forwarded article. I wish, at least some people would start looking at India little differently and start doing some thing different which might change this shameful image.

Honestly speaking this is true for all news papers, tv channels, plethora of web sites and other communication channels, except one web site, http://www.goodnewsindia.com/. This web site, with a mission to “.. persuade that there is more to India than the stream of depressing stories projects her to be”. Created by DV Sridharan in 1999 with 3 pages of good news about India, and now has over 650,000 unique visitors and over 1 million page views, spells only positive thoughts all through its web pages and show case the achievements and triumphs of the (mostly) un-sung heroes of India, thus setting examples to the fellow Indians to follow. The site is entirely maintained by him self.

"He is a one man army now; with only his Toyota Qualis, and an Apple computer to help him. He designs the site, meets the heroes of India, writes about them, takes pictures with his digital camera, writes two main stories and six supplementary stories a month, uploads them, publishes and replies to all the mail. Whenever a new story appears, all those who have subscribed to the site get a three line alert stating that a new story has been published.” Read the complete story of its beginnings featured on rediff.com titled “Now, for the good news” at
http://www.rediff.com/netguide/2003/may/23good.htm

This man’s brave efforts truly exemplify the famous quote, “Action speaks louder than words”. It can, hopefully, also inspire a billion people.

Exotic? Can’t believe it? Visit the web site and read the biggest achievements of the man himself and other fellow Indians.

If you buy stuff from Amazon, follow the Amazon link on this page http://www.goodnewsindia.com/Pages/support/theGNIStory/gniSupport.html , to help support it.

“For an affectionate but truthful look at India, visit http://goodnewsindia.com/”

SCJP Resources

There is a large number of resources both online and offline available for SCJP exam preparation. Not all of them are effective, particularly if you have limited time to spare, like me. The following are the short-listed resources I have used to pass the SCJP exam(31st october,2004). I got 56 answers right out of 61 questions and scored 91% . It took 3 weeks for me to learn the fundamentals of Java language and specifically prepare for the exam. If you have limited time, the following list of resources, which I consider very effective, may help you too.

Books

• “HeadFirst Java” by Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra - If you are new to Java, this is the best book, as it explains the concepts in a very humorously engaging way. And this book has a variety of presentation techniques to illustrate and emphasize the concepts.
• “Sun Certified Programmer & Developer for Java 2 Study Guide” by Bert Bates, Kathy Sierra - This book covers every thing required for the exam in the same style as in “HeadFirst Java” and the question set included is very close to the real exam both in content and format.

Mock Exams

• Mock exams included on the CD with the book “Sun Certified Programmer & Developer for Java 2 Study Guide”. Mostly the same questions as in the text book.
• Java Programmer Certification Mock Exam by Marcus Green (http://www.jchq.net/phezam/login.php).
  These questions are very close to the real exam both in content and format.
• Bill Brogden Collection (http://www.wbrogden.com/exams/index.html). 1. The Old hardest test collection 2. The new book test. These questions highlight a few very interesting concepts, which otherwise go unnoticed. Some of the questions in (a) are also be repeated in (b).

Other online resources

• Sun Java Online Tutorial in HTML Help- for reference whenever required. It will be very handy to have it in this format. http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/information/download.html
  
• JavaRanch SCJP FAQ Pages (http://www.javaranch.com/certfaq.jsp). This is the web page where I found most of the resources for the exam. I used the following from this page along with the mock exams (b and c) listed above: 1. Potential Trips/Traps in SCJP Exam by Ajith Kallambella. and 2. Ashraf Fouad's concentrated guide to SCJP- Good compilation from different certification resources. Careful, the wording is confusing at times and not all chapters are relevant for the exam.
• Xinox Software‘s JCreator IDE (http://www.jcreator.com/download.htm ) Free version available and is written entirely in C++, so very fast and better for testing samples. Can easily navigate through API and Java documentation from within this application.

My 2 cents

• Remember the nature of the few exceptions that you come across during the preparation, whether they are checked exceptions or not. If a checked exception appears in the question, check for code to handle it or declare it.
• If ‘Compilation fails’ is in the options list, then first go through the code to see for compilation errors. When you are taking final mock tests before the real exam, do not take tests by test objective (particularly tests on the CD include hint to the test objective). If you maneuver the mock exams, you will be in a better position to identify what is being tested in the question, though it looks to test something else.
• String and Wrapper classes are final classes and immutable.
• Thread class implements Runnable interface, so can be passed as a Runnable target to other threads.
• In Java, the remainder operator works with decimal numbers too unlike C++. The value of 15.07%3.01 will be 0.02, NOT ZERO.
• The Math.random () function never returns 1.0. (Always returns value less than 1.0)