Rival tech meets place Bangalore's geeks in a quandary
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 13 December 2007, 01:48 IST
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Bangalore: "It never rains but it pours," it was not just a comment about the unseasonal weather in the nation's technology capital last week. The word "it" could rightly be replaced by its capital letters IT. Such was the plethora of year-end IT based events in the city that really put many of the Bangalore's best and the brightest in a dilemma about where to go and what to miss. The quandary first faced geekdom in the previous week which ended on December 1 - when the annual developer conferences of chip maker Texas Instruments and enterprise solutions leader SAP clashed head on for two days, even as another chip giant, AMD, emerged as a rival when its Chief Executive, Dr Hector Ruiz, came to launch yet another R&D centre in the city, its third in India, reports Business Line. But three compelling, and sometimes clashing techno-'melas' in the last week forced even more agonizing decision making on professional decision makers in the city. National Instruments, creators of Labview, the popular prototyping tool, unveiled their latest version (version 8.5) of this hardy tool. Labview has been embraced by the engineering education community in India because of the way it made the PC or laptop to enable the use of hundreds of sensors from third parties to create a complete lab instrumentation system. Last week delegates also heard of efforts to squeeze key functionality into a single digital signal-processing (DSP) chip. The tough decisions were forced on many engineers when the annual conference of Free and Open Source Software (foss.in ) opened on the same day as the first edition of Bangalore Nano, the State's attempt to focus on its strengths in nanotechnology. Open source meet There was a palpable difference between the two events - Foss and Sun. Foss was all about youth and freedom, which apparently also meant freedom from the shackles of a tie and a dark lounge suit. Foss attracted the 'usual suspects' of the Open Source movement as well as corporates like Yahoo, Google, Geodesic, Redhat and IBM. Sun used the event to announce $1 million corpus to fuel open source programming research, asking why one could be expected to sustain oneself, if one was expected to create intellectual property and share it for free. Nano meet In the Bangalore Nano event, which was more focused on industry, the attraction was the session titled 'Research Industry Collaboration Hub (RICH)' where 18 Indian nanotechnology players showcased their research before an audience of potential investors. The poster session was a disappointment, rarely rising above the standard of a college competition. But there was a $1 trillion opportunity out there by 2015. And this was one small step towards carving out a 'desi' chunk of that pie.

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