UPDATE: The BarCampKerala date has been moved to May 15th in the same Location.

BarCampKerala, the must go to event for techies in Kerala is back with the 10th edition of the event. The event is scheduled to be conducted on the 8th of May, 2011 at the SCMS Business School in Kalamasherry, Cochin.

BarCampKerala?

BarCamp is an international network of user-generated conferences (or unconferences). They are open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants.

The BarCamps in Kerala is a tech event where sessions are mostly about the web and it caters the IT professionals, students, entrepreneurs and freelancers in Kerala. These events usually have about 100-150 participants who are the cream of the tech community in Kerala.

If you are a aspiring entrepreneur, a geeky student or a programmer looking to enhance your skills, you should probably mark your calender just about now!

How to attend BarCampKerala

1. Register for the barcamp
2. Done!

You can find the currently listed sessions and register for a session if you are interested, check out the venue and blog about the event if you have a blog and add a sidebar section (images here). This will help reaching out to more techies in Kerala and connect with them in a open, friendly and free-for-all platform.

BarCampKerala 10 on May 8th 2011 at Cochin
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

My dad is a huge fan of the stock market. He spends time studying the market, trading and watching the ticker on for hours. It was last week I heard about the youku Initial Public Offering(IPO) listing in the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) with a valuation of $5 Billion giving it a worth which is more than AOL!

I was stumped to be honest.

A video sharing site, which is popular in China alone and posting a loss of RMB 167 Million (25 Million USD) in 2010 gets a run away hit on the NYSE taking its listing up 167% on the first day.

While congratulating its founders on the success, I cannot help but wonder.

The popular belief is that China is paranoid about its citizens digging up information on Tiananmen Square massacre and stuff like that. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Foursquare, Vimeo, Blogger, Blogspot, Wikileaks, Hulu and recently Skype have joined the ever increasing list of websites blocked by “The Great Firewall of China”.

While the ban of a website like WikiLeaks is understandably paranoia, the others do not make any sense. But this article on The Telegraph makes a lot sense on the smart ass strategy of the Chinese Government.China wants to keep up world class websites to enable its home grown websites to grow and prosper.

YouTube was blocked to help Tudou and Youku.

Kicking out Google has benefitted Baidu and Alibaba.

Renren and Kaixin001 have been a runaway success thanks to the boot given to Facebook.

Sina Weibo, the Chinese micro-blogging website similar to Twitter is seeing a 50% jump in its member base every week!

And the recent ban of Skype in China aims to help its own Unicom which is more expensive than Skype.

China is becoming one of the most protectionist of all nations and helping its home grown companies get a stand and better valuation while technology companies with better capabilities and offerings are given the axe.

Without the competition of all those better companies, the larger population is left to use the best of the worst developed internally. Now I wish why India does not do this. . . .Life would have been much more easier for entrepreneurs

Photo by: topgold, Creative Commons

Thoughts: Is China Paranoid or Smart?
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

Everyone predicted the death of commuter bikes in India and expected every small family in the country to own a Nano to make their travel safer and more stylish.

Fast forward to 2010 -  Reports of Nano cars randomly exploding take everyone by surprise sparking debates about the actual safety of the vehicle.The car was found to have some fundamental flaws in its design and Tata Motors offered to fix the flaws for free and called for a recall. This was a major disaster for the small car and the sales have been hitting the floor for this little wonder which promised to change the way families in India commute.

The latest news is that Tata Motors has sold just 506 cars in the month of November down from the 3024 figure of October 2010. So, what went wrong?

Many things from the product recall which scares the wits out of any wannabe owner of a Tata Nano. I would not want to drive a car with an eye in the rear view to see if there is a fire brewing up.

Then, the costs. The car which was promised to cost less than Rs. 1,00,000 (2000 USD) is now at almost double the price and putting in in direct competition of some of the small cars in the market.  This takes it way out the league of the motorcycle prices with whom it is meant to compete with. Tata Motors blames the costs of raw materials for this price hike.

The banks have also withdrawn their support to the Indian Car dream as the car is meant for the “low income group” which means their chances of repaying the loan is a bigger risk than other car loans. This will perhaps be the biggest of the reasons why Nano is not taking off. Tata has huge hurdles to cross on this front if it wants to Nano sales to pick up.

Personally, I kind of like the car a lot. If I was not such a big motorcycle lover, maybe I would have gone for the Nano. It is small, cheap, different and has a roof! What do you think about the Tata Nano? Would you buy it if you had the money? Why and why not?

Looking forward to your thoughts.

Inspired from Team BHP

Tata Nano sells just 506 cars in November 2010
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

When I registered this domain of mine – TheAnand.com, I registered www.skumarandkumar.com which is my dads chartered accountancy firm. It has been with my server and my own registrar since day 1. My dads firm got an letter the other day from BombayBiz India Private Limited, some company based out of Andheri, India asking for money to renew the domain and hosting for the domains when it expires this December.

I got confused for a second. It seems to be some of invoice for the services rendered by them for the domain. My dads firm who handles this gave me call asking me for more information. I was perplexed again as I usually renew the domain every year myself and have never billed them for anything.

Upon sending this to my registrar, I got the reply that this might be spam. So, a heads up for you guys out there who get a mail in your letterbox that BombayBiz wants money for something they want to do in the form of a legitimate looking invoice, it is SPAM. You can safely toss that letter into your favourite papper shredder and continue with your life.

I am outraged at their guts to try something as corny as this to make money off the hosting business. Get your ethics right BombayBiz hosting.

Fraud ALERT: BombayBiz India Spam Scam Hosting Services
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

BarCampKerala is special for me. I found the other founders of ayruz through barcamp 2 and almost 90% of our core team members were found during various barcamps from colleges.

BarCamp Kerala is an ad-hoc gathering rooted in the desire to share and learn in an open & friendly environment. It is an intense yet cool, event with discussions, demos, and strong interactions. The 9th edition of BarCamp Kerala (BCK9), will be held at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri Campus at Karunagapally on 14th November 2010.

BarCamps in Kerala are unconferences as barcamps are across the world. You get to interrupt the speakers, walk out of the hall if you find the session boring and everything else which is usually unethical in conferences. (But please keep your mobile phones in vibration which is general courtesy in any meeting! )

In BarcampKerala 9, the sessions page already looks promising with sessions in Internet Marketing, Silverlight and many other tech related topics. This list will increase as more and more people come to know about the event in the coming days.

If you are a techie in South India, this is perhaps your must visit tech event in Kerala where you can meet some of the top serial entrepreneurs, first time entrepreneurs, web programmers, designers, freelancers and students. Plus, yours truly me will be around to network with fellow minds and make new friends. So say hi! Register here

BarCampKerala – 9th Edition at Amrita Campus
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

Hearing the word ‘barcamp’ for the first time?

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants who are the main actors of the event

Venue

BarCamp Kerala 7 will be held at Kristu Jyoti College of Management and Technology, Chetipuzha, Changanassery, Kottayam. More details are available at the venue page

Registeration

You can register for the event in the BarCamp Kerala Site. Till now we have 47 attendees.

Sessions

As of yet we have 10 sessions. If you want to handle a sessions at BarCamp, you can add yourself in the sessions page.

BarCamp Kerala So Far…

If you are still uncertain about coming to BCK, checkout these reports about the previous ones…

• Barcamp Kerala 5
• BarCamp Kerala 5 @ Technopark on May 3rd
• Barcamp Kerala LiveBlog
• First ever BarCamp in Kerala on November 24th, 2007
• BarCamp Kerala 2007

This post was created by lazy me using BarCamp Kerala Post Generator

BarCamp Kerala 7 on 20th of December
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

The first flagship product of ayuz – WordZo is now alive and kicking! If you are the type of person who can find bugs, use a alpha application and help contribute to the future of WordZo, do signup for a invite key! This month we plan to send out about 100 invite keys to select users.

What exactly is WordZo? It was conceived by Kenney Jacob which aids in helping users to enhance their vocabulary. WordZo lets you find out meanings of words as you read it and it remembers the words you learnt and has a nifty way of making sure you learnt it well.

At ayruz, this is one of the first products we have done so far and we are looking forward to a public launch by January. If you would like to peep into the system, leave your comment here and I will hook you up with a beta invite key

Enhance your Vocabulary with WordZo
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

• My Startup Ideas I Never Launched CollinLaHay shows you his ideas which never took off. If some of his ideas interest you, venture out and take action on them!

• Perseverance Will Save Your Blog – A guest post on Problogger by Robby G explains how perseverance will help your blog in the long run.

• How To Develop A Strong Personal Brand Using Social Media – TheUniversityKid shows you how!
• Startups: Poor Record Keeping is Expensive – I found this article specially useful for my own startup! Must read if you think those hours you spend on book-keeping is not worth it.
• Why Do Certain Verticals Work So Well? And How to Take Those Ideas To the Next Big Niche. – Took me 2 reads to understand it well enough to take action on.

Saturday Shouts – Interesting reads
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

That is when I found the talent in this awesome designer – Ben Jacob. Of only 18, this barely legal designer has done magic with my concept of a dream home. Now, my homepage and this blog has a single integrated design with all the elements I had wanted.

Now, the only thing that lacks is blog posts. I should get back to more frequent blogging as soon as workload at my 10 member startup – ayruz web holdings starts to come down. In the meantime, if you think you have something interesting for my 3000+ RSS subscribers, send in your guest post and I will put them up.

If you are on a feed reader or on email, hop over to my home and do let me know your comments and let me know if there is something broken on your browser.

Presenting TheAnand 2009
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

Just put in something on word, save as html and upload it as index.html and your site is there for the world to see. For me, its nostalgic. Geocities was my first home online. I still have a broken site up there which I sometimes login to see my own roots. I have 3 really personal sites including one I made for my school crush(no way I am going to share that one!) which has a lot of java effects and animated gifs(90s’ style!). It was where I first learnt html with my trusted SoThinkHTML Editor and….its shutting down, so I am sad.

But when I come to think of it, its a bad move by Yahoo! to close one of their content monster. Tons of user generated content and high rankings by google are not easy. Selling contextual ads would have been really easy for them and maybe opening up Geocities to third party applications will bring back the interest on this property.

I still see a lot of geocities pages on the competitive niches I research and right on the top of Google, so it does not make sense to me. Maybe they were not enough for yahoo or does not fit into Carol Bartz’s new gameplan. Have you used Geocities? Do you have a moment to share? Do share your grief

Update: An interesting view by gawker.

Sad: Geocities is shutting down
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.