Welcome to the first all NIT (National Institute of technology) Alumni meet in Miami, Florida. Alumni and friends of all the 20 NITs of India are welcome.
Note: You must RSVP by visiting above link, you cannot RSVP here at out meetup event.
John Lonergan, Managing Member, MachLabs LLC (Medical Device Venture Capital and Development Firm)
Key points
How to find and refine your product. The “virtuous circle” between physician, engineer and manager. Your role as a technical developer, as a manager, and as a physician.
Who’s going to buy it? For how much? When in the product development/testing/approval cycle? Think about the purchaser from the start.
Who’s going to fund it? How much is needed? When do I raise the funds? Who are the best sources, and what are their motivations? VC’s may not have your best interests in mind.
How shall I staff it? How do I incentivize the developers/physicians/others?
How long will it take?
A few words on liquidity events.
Why should I attend?
Too few entrepreneurs make money commercializing their inventions in Silicon Valley. While we are all enamored by the stories of Google and Netflix, the reality is that VC’s make very few investments, and the entrepreneurs can end up with little to show for their efforts. Is there an alternative way to create value, sell to major companies, and profit from the experience?
From Optimization to Opportunity: Winning with the Cloud
Abstract: The value of cloud computing is shifting from the "best practice" of cost-efficiencies to the "next practice" of galvanizing growth. This interactive session, which combines both business and technology perspectives, explores how companies across industries have been leveraging the cloud to attain competitive agility, increase customer intimacy and create market-winning business models.
Making your Team Successful
Abstract: Work with over 600 NASA project and engineering teams shows a very strong correlation of “team social context” with ultimate success. The presentation describes quantitative results and efficient methodologies to enhance technical team performance and reduce risk. Astrophysicist Charlie Pellerin developed the methodology following the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope with a flawed mirror in 1990. He led the Hubble development team for the seven years preceding the launch.
Why to Attend: This presentation contains insights that, to the best of my knowledge, are unavailable elsewhere. If you lack this understanding, your team may fail for reasons that you were unaware of, and could have easily remedied. This is a unique journey into the “soft-side” led by a PhD Astrophysicist with expensive large-sale program/project experience.
Anywhere but India – Where American Companies are Outsourcing Now
Abstract: This is by no means an “India-bashing” presentation but instead is a report on the latest trends in global outsourcing, especially for custom software development. India is still the global leader, but in some ways the honeymoon is over. American companies are now looking nearshore (and elsewhere) for several reasons. Discover the criteria that American companies are using to decide where to outsource their software development, and how India can remain competitive.
Who Should Attend: Anyone responsible for software development in their IT department or software company and who is presently outsourcing or thinking about starting. You will learn about what works and what does not, and when outsourcing to India is the best choice. And when & why American companies may prefer to look elsewhere. Are you an outsourcing vendor from India? Attend and get insight on your competition!
Grid Computing at Yahoo!
The Yahoo! Grid Initiative is an effort to build a massive computing environment that supports and is augmented by an open-source software framework. The computing environment includes more than 30,000 nodes. The software framework is based on the Hadoop project from the Apache Software Foundation, an open-source implementation of the map/reduce programming model and a distributed file system that places the data close to the computations. When combined, the computing environment and software framework enable distributed, parallel processing of huge amounts of data. The Grid is used for a variety of research and development projects and for a growing number of production processes across Yahoo!, including key components of search, advertising, data pipelines and user-facing properties. The focus of this talk is on Apache Hadoop and Pig, which form the building blocks of the Yahoo! Grid infrastructure and how it can be applied for various problems in maths and science.
Hadoop is a framework for running applications on large clusters built of commodity hardware. The Hadoop framework transparently provides applications both reliability and data motion. Hadoop has subprojects such as HDFS, Common, Zookeeper, Avro, and related projects such as Hama, HBase, Hive Mahout and Pig. Apache Pig is a platform for analyzing large data sets. Pig's language, Pig Latin, lets you specify a sequence of data transformations such as merging data sets, filtering them, and applying functions to records or groups of records. Pig comes with many built-in functions that engineers and mathematicians can use to do special-purpose processing or write their own. At Yahoo! more than 70% of all Hadoop jobs are run with Pig.
Smart Buildings, the Smart Grid and Engaging People for Change
This talk will discuss new trends in smart buildings and smart grid technology, as well as how youth and social media are beginning to engage
Lessons for Long Life
Abstract: We are at the leading edge of a third wave of enterprise software and hardware, post client-server. This talk will focus on some lessons for you to have a long and prosperous life in this next generation of computing. Not only will you learn about seven key business models, but you’ll also be able to explain cloud computing to your Facebook friends.