Why a Java meetup in Bangalore?

In Silicon valley, pick a day of the week and a topic and you’ll find an event for the evening along with 20-odd like-minded folks to hangout with.

This is missing in India (esp. Bangalore). There is a lot of top level chatter about startups, entrepreneurship, innovation. There is a huge momentum around events related to entrepreneurship. Just last 2 weeks saw 2 of them. But, the events around fundamentals of building a business are hard to find. To the surprise, there are events around social media marketing but few are talking about ‘building a sales pipeline’ or ‘ABCs of channel marketing’ or even deeper into core technical areas like ‘Building a distributed memcache’! Is it given that we know it all?

Java Meetup

Beyond entrepreneurship, Bangalore sees maybe a handful of events which covers other areas of sales, marketing, technology, intellectual property, cloud computing and such. Even if there is once such event, it is meant to price out a general crowd.

When I moved to Bangalore around 18 months ago — I could not find a place to hang out with fellow geeks but then met a lot of them at a startup event! This was nagging in the back of mind for a long time. Barcamp happens maybe once every 9-12 months. Slowly, things have started coming together.

I was happy to see that PHP Meetup found a place at Microsoft and they have been meeting regularly. Repeated the same thing with Java Meetup earlier this weekend with a similar footing at Google where they have agreed to host the monthly melee.

The whole idea is to get people bumping into each other and hopefully something new comes out of it. Maybe a new startup, a next job, or a solution for a problem or simple plain learning.

Need more of such events, happening at a regular frequency. If you have ideas, drop a line, I can at least get you connected.

And yeah, most of the silicon valley events come with a free pizza, soda and beer at times. Feed them well.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 22nd, 2010 at 9:13 am and is filed under meetup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.