I am writing this blog on the behalf of 22 people, rather I should say 22 visionary individuals. All of them previously unknown to each other, each from a different background, each having a variety of reasons, motivations and inspirations to do things. Each of them had distinct perceptions, disparate ideas and above all, diverse visions. Nevertheless they still had something in common.

It has been a beautiful journey for them, a journey of ten months. They had started from scratch, with no clue of where they we were heading, each of them having completely distinct perception of the world and different things to achieve in the period of the 10 months that were to come.

In spite of such an incoherent and hazy beginning, they had worked together for a common goal. A common vision to achieve. One single reason has motivated them all. All those diverse visions have faded away to engender me. This could only be described as phenomenal.

I am what those 22 visionary individuals defined me to be. I am Techfest 2009-10.

Nexus Europe, an urban acrobatics team shall amaze with their brilliant feat. Already a name to reckon with, they have fascinated the masses with their repertoire on the sets of Max Payne, The Pacifier and American Pie-Beta House.
Nexus stands for Next Urban Style. They are a one-of-a-kind performance team based in London, England, with extensions in other countries. Nexus provides performers that excel at different disciplines such as Urban Acrobatics, Freerunning, Parkour, Capoeira, Breakdance, Beatboxing, Power Risers, Trampoline, Football Freestyle, BMX, Martial Arts, Pyrotechnics, Hip Hop, Street, Jazz, Contemporary, Tap and Irish Dance, Ballet.
The fusion of these different arts is unique and enables the team to perform a high energy show leaving audiences in awe. Our ultimate goal is to inspire and promote the diversity of movement and to unite many disciplines of performance in an effort to incubate new breeds of performers and continue to evolve the face and the future of the Urban Arts.
This is one performance that is sure to elicit a deep gasp from the onlookers. As Nexus Europe’s motto holds, Life is Movement!

Remember the life sized, magnificent, holographic characters from Star Wars? Umpteen sci-fi flicks have drawn inspiration for what you shall witness in person here under Technoholix, the most happening aspect of Techfest.
Some extremely mesmerising entities shall be conjured up by the technocratic Activ8- 3D, a world leader in 3D holographic projections system. Life sized cars, virtual humans, robust robots and much more intriguing stuff are in the offing. You shall be able to behold them flowing in mid- air and would agree in unison that it had been a scintillating experience.
Activ8-3D will also be showcasing their award winning motion capture system holograms. This hologram system displays 3D hologram characters in real time. The holographic characters entertain and interact with your audience, live at your event or show. A real actor (who is off set) wears a motion capture suit which brings the virtual character to life. The 3D hologram virtual character is fully mobile and has all the features one associates with animated characters in the movies, except this one converses with you. Almost akin to humans manipulating their Avatar among the Na’avi, you would think!

After a heavy dose of competitions, exhibitions, workshops, lectures and night shows, Techfest 2010 brings to you its one-of-its-kind and the most crowd-pulling segment – On-the-Spot-Zone or O-zone. No pre-registrations, No pre-requisites, just be around and you could make a mark! This year’s O-zone is an all-round segment with events based on science, technology, art, simple common sense and ofcourse, sometimes, just luck!!

The biggest event in O-zone is SciTech – Asia’s Largest Science and Technology Quiz. To be hosted by the ESPN quiz host – Gautam Bhimani, SciTech is the place all you quizzers wanna be! The evergreen “Junkyard Wars” poses a bigger, and better challenge this year, so if you TRUST the RUST, just join in and you could win handsome prizes! Awaken the “Da Vinci” in you to create a novel design for commonplace articles in “Product Designing”, and brush up your knowledge and skills in Astronomy to win the “Astronight” quiz.

Ozone is, however, incomplete without its popular events – The O-zone Hub will host talks on themes like cloud computing, workshops on science and robotics and on-the-spot competitions for anyone who is present @ the hub; the Puzzle Hut promises the wizards more fodder for their brains while the Coding Arena is all set for a fierce mind-battle.

New additions to the Ozone segment are the popular “LAZERTAG” (do you still need an explanation?) and Sci-fi film Festival – to be hosted by film-maker, Mr Savvy, from Britain. So, what are you waiting for? Pack your bags, and join us from 22nd-24th January 2010 @ IIT Bombay!!

It all began with the urge to create something new, something more fascinating that the rest, something that will make you go “Wow!”, something that is truly “Unleashing the Future”! It took, obviously, more time than the rest of Techfest’s event line-up to be conceptualized, carved and finalised. So, here comes the new segment of Techfest 2010 – Scintillations! As the name suggests, this sparkling, dazzling segment of Techfest 2010 is sure to enthrall you as you witness futuristic marvels of technology and interact with them.

Installed in the heart of IIT Bombay, “Scintillations” boasts of the rarest and the best specimens of technology you have ever seen anywhere. May it be the 10 m model of the Eiffel Tower illuminated by using solar cells – delivering the message of saving energy, or the “Light Ripples” you can manipulate to create a blend of lights and sounds, or the “Light Stencil” giving you an experience of painting with lasers, or the amusing Mezatop interactive table, the gesture-controlled setup of Toyota IQ – the more you see, the longer you want to stay! The Discovery Dome and the the FlickrGetter present a 3D environment giving you an experience of your lifetime…

“Scintillations” come from the world over, and have been created by the best technologists and designers, all in the spirit of “unleashing the future”. Come, see and experience your imagination come true at this segment of Techfest 2010.

http://www.techfest.org/scintillations

All are “invited”!!

Does that word ring a bell? Yes, the Google Wave invites were the most sought after by the net-savvy, chat-tering youth after the launch of Google Wave, the immensely popular real-time communication platform by the one and only Google! Combining aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat and social networking this has truly added a new dimension to the way we communicate.

Now here is an “invite” to anyone and everyone to hear the Google Wave story straight from the man who created this wave – none other than the Google Wave co-founder, Mr. Lars Rasmussen! From a Ph.D. in theoretical computer science from the University of California at Berkeley to an entrepreneur who laid the foundation of the Google Maps way back in 2003, to the Project Leader who conceptualized the legendary Google Wave, the now-Senior Staff member of the Google Technical Team at Sydney, Australia is sure to enthrall you all with the tales of his inspirational journey, his passion of serving the world better and his ardent intelligence and creativity as an engineer.

Be there to interact with the originator of the Wave!
http://techfest.org/lectures/lars.php

It all began with a dream to bring together robotics-enthusiasts across the continents on one platform.

The word was spread all across, seeking collaboration to host the first leg of The World Challenge. Finally, Curtin University was chosen to host the Australian iNexus. Curtin Robotics Club and Curtin Business School students came forward to organize and execute the event.

The publicity began and students came forward to participate from six universities in Western, Southern and Eastern Australia. The teams worked tenaciously night and day and robotic ANTZ were engineered to find the sugar lumps on the Arena.

When the D-Day arrived, everybody was ready to perform. The organizers put up a fantastic show, engaging audience with excellent compering and interactive quizzes. Only three pairs of Bots were able to carry the lumps to their nests but still the excitement was unbelievable. The video was streamed live on web for all.

Thus ended the first international competition of Techfest this year, leaving a mark on a whole new continent.

Now, fingers are crossed for the next two iNexus competitions in Thailand and Srilanka.

Watch the video of iNexus Australia, http://scieng.curtin.edu.au/current/robotics.cfm

Tim Berners-Lee began work on his World Wide Web project in 1989. He never had a slight idea, then, that the project he is working on would evolve into what we call Web 2.0 today.

Today, the Web is not at all what it was in 1993 – when browsers did not have support for images – a website contained only the text. Thankfully, those days are gone. That was I would say Web 0.0.

Then with the support for images and JavaScript, Web 0.0 evolved into Web 1.0, and then with the birth of AJAX, this still nascent Web 1.0 took the form of the magical nexus that we call Web 2.0. With Web 2.0, you can play games (online) in one tab, edit a Word Document (online using Google Docs) in another tab, book the Air tickets for your trip to Techfest in the next tab, conference through video in the next tab and this goes on. Almost everything, and even more than what could once be done on the desktop, is now possible in the browser. This has become possible because, unlike Web 1.0 which comprised Web pages, Web 2.0 comprises not web pages but Web Applications (MS Word is a Desktop Application and Google Docs is a Web Application, for example).

Web Applications are more sophisticated than Desktop Applications because everyone can be connected through the intermediary World Wide Web. (Two people can simultaneously edit the same Google Doc while discussing it online through Google chat, for example).

Now, what do you do to edit a Word Document? Well, you click on the MS Word shortcut on your desktop. Open the document. Edit the document. Save the document. Close MS Word. Ah, that was simple! How nice it would be if you could do the same with Google Docs (without opening the browser)? You do everything in a Desktop environment yet it accesses the central Google database where all your data is stored.

How about a search bar on your desktop from where you can perform a Google search (without opening the browser)? The photos of your birth day are stored online on Facebook and you wish to increase their brightness. You fire up Photoshop, open the image in Photoshop (without downloading it from facebook), edit it, and when you are satisfied with the result, save the photograph and it gets saved automatically on Facebook (no need to upload the edited photo). Search your friend in a search bar on your desktop (again, without opening the browser) then type a message in the search bar and the message gets posted in your friend’s Orkut Scrapbook. Amazing, isn’t it? The underlying theme in all the above examples is – unifying the advantages of the Web Applications with those of Desktop Applications – the new species of these hybrid Applications shall be called AIR Applications. And, the best thing about the AIR Applications is that any Web Developer can develop an AIR application with the knowledge he already has. No new learning is required.

What should the era of all such magnificent AIR Applications be called? We, at Techfest, call it AIR-O-MANIA. Do join us in our efforts to catalyze this magical transition from Web 2.0 to AIR. Visit http://techfest.org/competitions/codex/airomania/ for more details.

–
Team Techfest

Does that remind you of hammers, screws, nails and bits and pieces of wood lying here and there? Wait till you attend the Techfest 2010 workshops then…

We at Techfest believe in giving an in-depth insight to students about new, upcoming stuff, stuff they wouldn’t usually come across in their courses, stuff that will excite them, stuff that will make them say “amazing!”. That’s why we start with brainstorming for new fields ourselves. This year too, we came up with a good number of ideas right from Cloud Computing to Adventure Sports to Forensic Sciences

Keeping in mind the dos and don’ts obtained from the feedback of our participants last year, we began shaping our ideas. A month full of contacting, analyzing, suggesting and improvising got us just the right kind of workshops we wanted – neither too robotics centric nor too costly and moreover, opening the minds of the attendees to a new realm of knowledge. After careful scrutiny, the finalized workshops have been put up on the website.

Do have a look! It has got something for everyone. Be it coding or AI, Decision sciences, Advanced Robotics, Aeromodelling and even a visit to an e-waste recycling industry. Some of the topics might seem common but the workshops will teach you a lot more than routine stuff. For instance, in QHOR, the participants will also learn about IC engines. And of course, you have every right to ask any doubt to the instructor, to make the knowledge process complete. Here is where our satisfaction lies.

Our robotics workshop is the first in itself in Asia. Yes, here the participants will get to learn about the Advanced Mars Rover that was sent for NASA’s space mission. The workshop on 3D animation will show you how your favorite Tom and Jerry or Toy Story 2 or Mickey Mouse were created, with satisfying content for both the novice and the veterans. Overall, our workshops have been based on quite diverse topics. We hope to make your time and money worthwhile as you attend our workshops. Do mail us (workshops[at]techfest[dot]org) in case of queries and suggestions.