Tuesday Post | Getting acquainted with Web 2.0
Tuesday Post | Getting acquainted with Web 2.0
BarCamp IIT Kharagpur
4 November
Kharagpur
The BarCamp at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, my alma mater, was based on the theme of Entrepreneurial Opportunities in the Web 2.0 sphere.
So, when I was invited to lead a session, I was keen to find out how well informed students were about actual business opportunities out there.
About 120 people attended the day-long event on Sunday, which was organized by a student group within IIT that works on encouraging entrepreneurship. Most of the attendees were IITians on campus.
We kicked off the session trying to define the term Web 2.0. The students came up with various aspects of this nebulous term—user-generated content, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, used to develop interactive Web applications), innovations and democratization of Web 1.0 successes and social networking elements, to name a few.
I illustrated some of these concepts using my own experience with my Web conferencing start-up DimDim. We also had among us Shaibal Roy, who was chief architect at Research in Motion, the makers of BlackBerry devices.
His new start-up ARW plans to marry push technology and P2P (peer to peer) network to create a new generation of mobile consumer products. He described the strategic implications of Open Social—the programming standard being promoted by Google and others.
As the discussion continued, I was impressed by how much the students knew about new Internet companies. I hope they will translate their awareness into companies in the future.
D.D. Ganguly is co-founder and CEO of Web conferencing start-up DimDim Inc.
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