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I just read the results of the survey on the impact IITians have had, and it’s fascinating how much education can change. The survey was sponsored by PAN IIT. I am traveling to PAN IIT this month, and the program seems very impressive. They have not one or two star speakers, but a full galaxy. In fact, my company Capillary is doing all the application development for their SMS based services. Some highlights:
1. Every IITian has contributed Rs. 50 against every rupee spent on him
2. IITians have a budgetary responsibility of $885b
3. 54% of the top 500 companies in India have at least one IITian on their board
4. 25% of IITians in R&D
5. 10% of IITians doing social work
6. One in 10 IITian is an entrepreneur
So much for Nehru’s vision!!!!
[See the full results of the survey here]
I found this game on youtube where you have to drive a car to safety by clicking on annotations they present at seemingly random places during the video’s playback. While a little lame to call it a game, it sure is a way to make youtube interactive and a little more engaging, and perhaps something YouTube team itself might like to experiment with [via pluggd.in]
This has been made by Hexolabs, an IIT Kanpur startup.
A very happy and prosperous Diwali to all my readers.
For some reason, those who have lived through IIT Kharagpur at least on one Diwali night, can never forget the splendour of Diwali at the small little town in the Eastern fringes of the country. One whole month the students toil hard and the result is huge chatais (wire mesh) alight with diyas (earthen lamps) which depict scenes very often from mythology. And the rangoli (floor painting with powdered colours) they make will probably win any art competition. If you don’t know about them yet, check out my earlier posts (on my old blog) here and here. You can guess how important illumination is for KGPians from the fact that it is one of the most inspired pieces I have ever written. Some more stuff about illumination is here on Maddy’s blog (was pleasantly surprised to find myself in some pics!).
If you are a KGPian, Diwali comes back and haunts you every year with that heady feeling, the 15 minutes of fame and glory when the diyas light up, all your blood and sweat up in 15 minutes of smoke but that 15 minutes of smoke is worth remembering for a lifetime. It’s a feeling you can’t forget for all your life. It’s a feeling that reminds you of the fraternity that you are forever a part of, of those four beautiful years that you would always miss.
And yes, of course, the kgp tempo shout:
KGP KA TEMPO HIGH HAI!
update: hope you had a safe diwali. firecrackers aren’t very safe. discovred yday :(
I have written about Minekey in the past. It’s a startup that I had been involved in back in college. Today, was a great day for Minekey because it launched a new revamped site, with a much cooler widget and loads of customizability options which is what users have been looking for. The new site looks absolutely super-cool. Kudos to the team who’ve been working hard day and night.
The new updated offering is being showcased at the Always on Stanford Summit 2007, as one of the top 50 participants at the Stanford University campus. It is truly a momentous occasion for all of us — employees, alumni and well-wishers of Minekey. Minekey had also presented at Proto.in at IIT Madras last weekend.
Meanwhile, Minekey has been TechCrunched. This should drive a lot of traffic to the site, and create a lot of traction. I just hope that the servers can scale to the hits it is going to get in the next few days.
A word about Minekey again. Minekey aims to make the life of blog-readers simple by providing them recommendations based on both the content of the current page as well as the reader’s past reading habits. So, if the reader is generally interested in cricket news and visits a web-page about the stock market, it will show links from both cricket as well as stock market. It takes personalization to a whole new level because current services only provide recommendations based on the current context. The blog publisher can indicate a list of sources from which Minekey should aggregate content so show recommendations on their website. Hence, if you have multiple blogs you can aggregate content across all of them.
If you haven’t yet, try it out!
[Sadly, WordPress.com does not allow blogs to add custom widgets and so I can't be the user of the Minekey widget :(]
UPDATE:
Some more coverage: pluGGd.in, StartupSquad, TekJuice, Bona Bhatia, Gulker, Rajiv Doshi, Delip Andra, 9:01AM, Venture Beat, VC Circle, alarm:clock, BlogSchmog, WebWare, ContentSutra, Pavithra, reyes-chow, American Venture Magazine,
And it’s also made it to today’s del.icio.us popular. (Link may not work later. If someone knows how to find the permalink of a particular day’s popular on del.icio.us, please let me know!)
Additional Tags: Minekey
A review of the play on July 21 posted on my Spaces blog.
I have also submitted it to DesiCritics, will post the link here once those guys accept it. And here it is.
[Link]
It really feels good to read nice things about your alma-mater. It fills you up with pride, the place almost revisits you — the labs, the classrooms, the hostels, roads and intersections — all those small little things that were a part of your life, things you took for granted, until you left the place. Oh, I am getting nostalgic again :)
Anyway, the good news is that IIT Kharagpur has been adjudged the best government engineering college in India, by the Outlook-CNN-IBN survey. I don’t lend much credence to such rankings because I personally feel that all the ones in the top-5 are almost neck-to-neck, and establishing a pecking order can not be an objective process. This is clearly illustrated because in the same year, it is ranked 5th by the India-Today ranking.
For a student who is looking at just entering the IITs, the biggest advice I would give is that it is far more important to do well in the IIT you go to rather than worrying too much about which IIT is better. At the end of the day, you will have a gala time and pass out with a world-recognized degree which will provide a platform to build your career further.
However, what really got me to write this post was this video which made me really really nostalgic!
I wrote this for Desicritics. Read the article here.
The article was a response to a number of reports I read in the papers about ragging being a big social evil. While that is true, there are some beneficial fallouts as well, which I have tried to write about.
Also posted here (I plan to archive my writings here).
Minekey was a wonderous experience. It all started off about a year and a half back, when Delip came to IIT Kharagpur with a vision to solve the world’s information overload problem. The aim was simple — let content consumers get access to the information they are interested in.
If we look at the world today, most content producers and aggregators produce content for the general audience. That means that the news will be of all flavors, all topics and categories. However, it also means that if you wish to track news on a particular topic from a plethora of sources (and there is no dearth of them!), it is like finding a needle in a haystack, or a key in an information mine – which is incidentally where Minekey got its name from (if you couldn’t guess it already ;-).
As it goes, a handful of super charged students from IITKGP got together with Delip and Prof. Sudeshna Sarkar, and started working on this new project with a new model for incubation. The company was based in Santa Clara, and we were doing the R&D and the initial bootstrapping from Kharagpur.
Ideas flew — personalization, networking, recommendation, search, social connections, groups, communities, feedback, ranking, clustering, collaborative clustering, geo-personalization – you name it. Lots of ideas, debates, deliberations, re-iterations, progress spreadsheets, throwaway code, reusing old code, search, open source services, days and months later, we had a strategy in place. We created a news portal for the world at large (which was still an Alpha), we had strong customer leads, a model seemed to be emerging.
A lot of water has since flowed in the Ganges. There is a definite strategy, the company is well funded, there are people who have left plum jobs to work at Minekey, the business model has been refined and Minekey is staring at an immense opportunity. Kudos to the current team to take a prototype and build a real product.
Minekey has now launched recommendations for blogs! You get a sweet looking widget on your sidebar in a matter of minutes, and your friends would be able to get recommendations. Minekey monitors their clicks and as the users click from the widget, the personalization kicks in, to recommend more and more stories according to the users taste. (Sadly, WordPress doesn’t support JavaScript, otherwise you would have seen one right here. I need to work on a workaround).
This guy’s a genius!
The Times of India today carried a Special Report on how the IITs are facing a faculty crunch. Since the faculty salaries are linked to the pay commission, the IITs have to pay their faculty on par with Central Government employees everywhere else. What that means is that they can’t pay professors even if they have enough money.
The hostel facilities are deteriorating by the year (I can vouch for that). The additional reservations and the 54% increase in seats is not going to help that cause since the increase in seats has to happen within a year or so and it is humanly impossible to build so much of additional infrastructure. In fact, I remember a professor once asking a very innocent question:
“Will our drainage and sewerage system be able to handle all these new students?“
Most IITs have stepped up efforts to receive funds from alumni. There have been generous grants from individuals such as Kanwal Rekhi ($5m to IIT B), Vinod Gupta ($5m to IIT KGP), Nandan Nilekani (IIT B), Vinod Khosla, Arun Sarin, Arjun Malhotra and many others. However, the alumni foundations have not been able to put their acts together and create the kind of endowments that US Universities enjoy ($25B for Harvard). I am not sure if IITs can create such endowments primarily because they don’t have the 300 year histories that these US schools have. Creating an endowment which can sustain the annual budget of an IIT (which I am sure will be to the tune of hundreds of crores) with its interest amount, will require at least a billion dollars in endowment. It’s not an easy task.
There is another hope. As the Chinese proverb goes, Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Lately, IITs have started earning revenue by licensing technology and performing sponsored research (see end of this article). IIT Kharagpur’s Sponsored Research and Industrial Consultancy division has been a pioneer in this area having already handled tons of sponsored projects. I feel this might be the right way forward for IITs since this will provide a constant revenue stream. By sharing project benefits with professors, the IITs will be able to tackle the issue with the professor’s salaries as well. They could try to kill two birds with one stone!
Another area the IITs can develop is entrepreneurship. Nobody doubts that IIT produces some of the smartest undergraduates in the country. By providing sufficient mentoring and support, the IITs could channelize their energies toward commercial successes. Material benefits for all stake holders, students, professors and the IITs is only a natural consequence. Entrepreneurship Cells have started mushrooming in many IITs. One only hopes to see major successes shortly.
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