The occasional light expression

Justauthority is an interesting Indian site which allows users to search through judgments of the Indian Supreme Court. So if you’re one of those curious cats who is interested in the details of the Rajiv Gandhi assassination, or government cases against Reliance and other companies, or landmark cases, this free online resource might be useful for you.

IDYeah is a niche Pune based design and IT company which created this site.

I am busy with planning out Dcamp 2.0, the second edition of the Dcamp unconference series. After last year’s rather fun experience of organizing Dcamp 1.0 at the Yahoo campus in Bangalore, I’m looking forward to seeing newer topics and perspectives this year. This year, the folks at Aditi Technologies have been nice enough to provide ample event space in their Bangalore campus.

I am hoping to invite creatives from other fields to Dcamp as well – including from art, photography and film. If you know of any good folks I can send a Dcamp presentation invite to, please email me at pande dot amit at gmail dot com

Via Doubtsourcing, an irreverent and in-your-face take on global and distributed product development, outsourcing, offshoring and the like - by Sandeep Sood with artwork by Aron Botham.

Sandeep also runs Badmash.tv, an animation company out of Berkeley and Bombay. One of their pieces has Amitabh Bachhan as an anti-Obama candidate for the 2008 US presidential election. Fun!

The Economic times reported the results of an interesting CEO survey.
CEOs believe that Mumbai and Bangalore are India’s cities of the future while Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore (in that order) are India’s most investor friendly cities at the moment.

Patna and Guwahati were perceived to be the most investor - unfriendly cities.

The rankings relatively make sense to me - Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore are arguably the  Indian cities most geared and oriented towards global business and global competition. They still retain a strong vernacular flavor but their human resource base has become fairly international and the quality of corporate goods and services continues to improve (despite the absolutely shoddy infrastructure, especially in Bangalore).

However, I also believe that atleast for Bangalore the rising costs, increasing crime, political instability, slipshod infrastructure and absurd and nonsensical rules (like the curfew at 11:30 pm and the ban on dance floors) have made it quite unattractive for the creative class that Richard Florida keeps talking about. If all the interesting people that made Bangalore what it is leave it or become uninteresting, dull and mediocre then I would imagine that Bangalore will quickly lose the branding it has projected to the international business community.

Plus, it would be a darned boring place to live, notwithstanding the mostly congenial weather!
Or maybe its just that I’m recovering from my Mumbai weekend hangover - but more on that in another post.

It is around 730 am in the morning and I am headed towards Bangalore International Airport to catch a flight to Nagpur. The experience thus far has been reasonable enough - the Airlift shared cab was waiting for me on time on Old Madras Road, my Tata Indicom wireless connection (despite some serious troubles in activating it) seems to be giving enough signal strength to blog live and Outer Ring road seems a lot less maddening at this time of the day.

Where is the Bangalore ecosystem headed - its a question I ask myself everyday. On the one hand (now don’t start off with Roosevelt’s assertion about wanting to meet only one handed economists) it has the trappings of a network hub with the necessary knowledge infrastructure, talented and creative people, a pace of life which is still slower than Mumbai and Delhi by a healthy factor (some might argue that geographically the main Bangalore region is not more than a few Mumbai or Delhi suburbs), and a fairly aggressive consumer spending base not just through IT professionals but also otherwise. On the other hand having experienced the absolutely anarchic traffic situation, the 11:30 pm curfews, the mundaneness of the MG Road area, the soulless and relentless construction and the blase attitude of may of this city’s residents, I tend to also wonder if Bangalore is a blip, a brief burst on the horizon which fades away into the sunset with a one liner in history textbooks.
Anyways, I need some coffee soon in my system …

Microsoft announced the launch of multi-touch technology with Windows 7 by 2010.

Its good to see that touch is generally becoming a more common form of interaction. Its time we got rid of the clunky keyboards and error-prone and mechanized voice recognition technology through some intuitive, instantaneous, responsive and almost-fluid Touch Interfaces.

Darwin would definitely approve…

via Popular Science, a vintage 1878 piece by Charles Peirce on ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’.

The article ends thus…“How to give birth to those vital and procreative ideas which multiply into a thousand forms and diffuse themselves everywhere, advancing civilization and making the dignity of man, is an art not yet reduced to rules, but of the secret of which the history of science affords some hints”.

I’m looking forward to Pangea Day - a striking and timely concept in a fragmented and scattered world.
Starting at 18:00 GMT on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire Pangea Day program will be broadcast in 7 languages  to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.

The 24 short films to be featured have been selected from an international competition that generated more than 2,500 submissions from over one hundred countries. The films were chosen based on their ability to inspire, transform, and allow one see the world through another person’s eyes.

Pangea Day was conceptualized by Jehane Noujaim after she won the annual TED prize.

I have been doing a bit of reading on the current state of renewable energy or clean tech as the buzzword goes. One of the interesting areas of research within clean tech is the generation of electricity through an understanding of one of nature’s most potent phenomena - Photosynthesis.

There is of course the traditional area of photovoltaics which deals with the science and engineering of artificial devices such as solar cells. However, solar cells can still utilize only about 10-15% of the light energy as compared to the 98% utilization that nature has perfected over billions of years.
What about generating electricity directly from nature - say from a tree? I had this surreal hour long conversation with my good friend Babloo on this subject and then decided to do a bit of digging  on the state of this particular question - is it possible to generate industrial grade electricity directly from within nature instead of through solar cell like devices?

Turns out it is! MagCap Engineering in Massachusetts recently revealed that they have developed circuitry that converts the natural energy from say, a tree, into useable DC power capable of sustaining a continuous current to charge and maintain a battery at full charge.

Some researchers are trying out different tricks including the oldest one - mimicking nature by creating artificial leaf-like systems from bio materials instead of silicon. Others such as Barry Bruce of the University of Tennessee are of the opinion that you can grow electricity within a natural setting - what he calls akin to growing a power plant in a green field.
I also stumbled upon the New Energy India group, a non-profit organization dedicated to the field of renewable energy in India - I hope to get in touch with them and find out more about interesting developments in this field in Bangalore, and India.

Via Outlook Business - a somewhat critical view of whether the Barcamp unconference phenomenon in India needs to revisit its entrepreneurial roots to avoid imploding upon itself.

A related article notes notes that events such as proto.in and headstart.in seem to be making more headway because they are more self-selective in nature:

My experience in organizing Dcamp Bangalore last year was that it is indeed difficult to get the balance between top down structuring (which you need a bit of to get the event off the ground) and bottom up collaboration (which is sort of the whole point).

That being said, I remain a firm believer that unconferences (even if somewhat directed) have the potential to start radical conversations, are a very democratic form of dialogue and are evolutionary and emergent in nature - which makes them much more interesting than top down events. Unless of course its something as interesting as the World Debating Championships : - )