Adobe riathon – registrations open…

If you are a Flex/ Flash /  AIR developer in India and think you can be the one behind the coolest of all  RIAs, you cannot afford to miss this event! Put on your RIA development shoes, build the coolest app that you can imagine and send it to us on or before 26^th November 2008. If your application catches our attention, you will be invited to a very special event on the 29^th of November at Grand Ashok, Bangalore where the top applications will go on stage for a demo showdown! This is your chance to Flash your design skills, Flex your coding muscles and AIR your demos in front of an elite judge panel & the Adobe community.

The Grand winner / winning team will walk away with a groovy Apple IPhone.

The runners up will take home with them a Sony home theater system.

What’s more, there are loads of IPod Nano’s, shuffles and Adobe branded goodies to be won.

This event also brings to you  an exclusive preview on the new developments in the Adobe Flash Platform. Experience the Flash Catalyst (code name Thermo), Gumbo(code name for the upcoming version of Flex) ,FXG and Flash Player 10.

Register today at http://adoberiathon.eventbrite.com

For more information and contest rules & regulations, please visit http://adoberiathon.wordpress.com

The MSRIT Mojo – Flex Bootcamp [Day 2]

I was said that we are starting by 08:30 and I reached the gates of MSRIT, dot at 08:45 (damn Bangalore traffic). I reached the lab, thinking the few contestants await me there and that they too must have had the same experience with the traffic as me.

But lo! the hall was full and as Meghana told me, it had been since 08:15… wow. I saw several of them had tired faces and were concentrating hard to build one of the 4 applications that we had given them to build:

• An airline booking system
• A photo album viewer
• A video player/organizer
• A quiz

I quizzed some of them and found that they have been up all night going through Devent and the Flex in a Week videos. I admire their commitment and applaud their efforts.

Till 15:00, they were onto building the applications with a little bit of help from us. Special thanks to our community member Mr. Vipin from Impelsys Software, who accompanied us to help these budding programmers.

Jyoti (Head, R&D, AztechSoft) speaking in the closing ceremony

At 3 the mayhem started. We had the whole 200 split into 3 labs and we had to do an evaluation of over 100 applications and select about 20 of them for final evaluation. We had the Evangelism team, Ananth and Ms. Jyoti (Head, R&D , AztechSoft) doing the final evaluation.

Aditya & Nutan from CMRIT, Bangalore came out as winners. Congrats guys! We had a great closing ceremony, with a whole lt of interaction. Thanks to the whole MSRIT team including Kavya, Bhavana, Meghana, Priyanka, Prateek and others for making this a grand success…

Its done… It was fun but tiring

Winners – Aditya & Nuthan from CMRIT, Bangalore

CMRIT, the Champions

The volunteers – Thanks guys, you were awesome

At PizzaHut

We all headed out to dinner at PizzaHut before we called it a day…

I have a feeling that I am gonna see a lot more from MSRIT and that I will be visiting often 🙂

The MSRIT Mojo – Flex Bootcamp [Day 1]

I’ve always felt that as a student, one is much more adventurous, willing to try new things and not bound by any predispositions. The free-spirit. Hence I was very excited when we decided to run a Flex Bootcamp exclusively for students at MSRIT (M S Ramaiah Institute of Technology) on the 7th & 8th of November.

End of last month we visited the college and was worried if we could get the people that we wanted. But Meghana & Bhavana, 2 students from the final year said they would pull out all stops to the extent that it might be difficult to stem the flow. Though we didn’t believe them completely, we went ahead and opened the registrations.

Bhavana & Meghana

The response was amazing. I opened the event website with 400 seats being available, but in the weekend, got a panic call from Bhavana asking me to increase it to 600. The next day morn, that maxed out too… We were really curious to see how many turn up. Usually when any free event is done (tech or otherwise), people safely expect a 20-30% dropout rate. I was frankly expecting about 400 people to turn up.

Then the day arrived and mayhem!!! Not only did most of the 600 turn up, we had a lot of spot registrations and the total tally extended well up to 700. We had hire an extra hall and set up video-conferencing to accommodate all. Still some people went back disappointed.

The Crowd (in one room)

The session started with Ananth talking about Web2.0 & RIAs and Nisa demoing some applications like the FlexStore. During this time a  problem arose that was probably the only iota of disappointment in the whole event. The video-conferencing didn’t work. The audio was so poor that people started getting frustrated. That’s when me & Harish decided to cut it and run a parallel session in the other room. That session was the most enjoyable session that we have done together, except perhaps the time when we demoed our application during Kevin’s keynote in our internal summit.

Anant on Web2.0

Nisa demoing Flex Store

The rest of the day had Anirudh, Sujit & Anand talking in one room while I and Harish juggled the sessions in the other. My throat was hoarse by the end, but I was feeling better than I had felt in a long time. Infectious mojo I tell you 🙂

Anirudh’s session on ActionScript

Then, we had a preliminary test to shortlist 200 people for a contest to build a RIA the next day. Once the test was over, during the evaluation phase, Harish and Me entertained the crowd giving away goodies for Flex basics & Adobe trivia questions.

The Test

650 people  crammed into a 400 capacity hall

We then had a 2 hour lab for the selected 200 and thus ended day 1 🙂