Conquering BTP Dilemmas

With BTP topic submission deadlines approaching you by leaps and bounds, it becomes a bit difficult to think creatively. And thus, choosing a proper BTP.

BTP is about experimenting some creative idea that might have clicked you during the last three years of your college education. You had so many courses, but then each didn't fascinate you. So many lab courses, ... but only a few where working extra hours was fun !

Here are some tips based on my learning in past, regarding selecting a challenging BTP for yourself :

• Go after your INNER INSTINCT. Choose something that passionates you the most(Its no ordinary project, its YOUR project !!)
• Think CREATIVE, ... replicating any existing solution won't give you that level of inner satisfaction
• Be PRACTICAL, ... some of you might also be appearing for CAT/GRE, .. so you need to take a light-weight(in terms of effort required) BTP, ..
• Working in TEAM is always better(unless the team is not chosen appropriately)
• Do proper PLANNING, chalk out your work in stages
• In case you feel that, not enough resources are available in college to fulfill your BTP requirements, look out for them in other academic institutes like IITs or IIITs. Put a mail to some Professor over there including an abstract of your BTP. Chances are less, but you might be lucky enough to receive a response.(I had received from Vision Lab, IITK)
• Find out if any of your seniors is working on things relevant to your BTP, they might fetch you some industrial interaction
• Read a good amount of material regarding your BTP before finalizing it. Having a great idea is not good enough, you must also have a way to implement it !
• If you are still unable to think of anything good enough for BTP, you might go to library and browse the BTP reports of your seniors and if any interests you, you might contact the senior to help you think more in that direction.

Well, I really loved working on my BTP, .. despite maintaining my commitments with Microsoft, semester studies, as well as my CAT preparation. And that was solely because, it was MY project, MY abstract, and MY own implementation. Hope you will too enjoy similar experiences once you start-off working on your BTP , ...

All the best !

Is Google planning to launch a Job Search portal ?

Since past few years, jobs sites have been mushrooming like anything. And still, the market seems to comfortably afford some more key players. Several start-ups have leveraged this, and raised a good amount of capital from their VCs. For example, simplyhired.com(launched in early 2005), indeed.com(launched in late 2004) have made a substantial growth, inspite of existing giants monster.com and careerbuilder.com

With a large amount of job-related info being put online by these jobs sites, it is becoming harder for a user to quickly figure out jobs of her interest. And thus, job search seems to be a promising market opportunity. But when we were to search for a particular job opportunity, several vertical search engines seem to perform much better compared to the broad-based engines like Google or Yahoo.

Yahoo responded to this trend by having a separate vertical-search for jobs in its hotjobs portal. And Google, introduced(in November,2005) an on-line classified advertising system that allows employers, job boards, and other organizations to post job openings. But that service wasn't a big success and is still 'beta' , as of now.

Now, it seems that Google is experimenting the concept of a Job Search portal, to fetch some customers looking for online jobs advertising. As an exciting revelation of underground facts, I am providing the link here, for you all to play with : Google Job Search . (try searching for more info on this on Google !)

As of now, this seems to be in a pretty nascent stage, as it is just using an old instance of the index of Google and listing only URLs having certain keywords in them(typically 'jobs', 'career', etc.) It seems to be using some special instance of Google Custom Search.

One funny thing to note is that, it shows advertisements too. Now, that makes me wonder, who will pay for advertising on a website which is not officially out yet ? Yet another thing is that besides Job search, there is 'sm' written, .... now, I knew about 'TM', but what does 'sm' stand for ?? "Search Mark" , ... heheheh

Letter from a Pioneer

Hi folks,

Welcome to yet another year @ LNMIIT(am I not addressing freshers too, .. ? ... well, how come they knew about this blog .. ?). I hope the cut-off AIR must have gone up, some new great teachers have joined the institute (we really need them, specially in some departments), the new mess contractor offers better food, our campus canteen offers some more variety now, etc. etc.

So, how are you spending the first day of this semester? many of you might be sharing your exciting internship experiences, some rushing to banks to get their CAT forms well in time, while some couples might be enjoying a happy re-union after three months of exile !! (is library on the the same track ? ;) )

Well, lnmiit days were certainly awesome for me, and it was great to be involved into so many activities(except the ones in my last year). But as is said : "All good things, come to an end." Anyways, my challenging job life is helping me out in moving ahead. Working with a motivated team of bright folks, on latest technologies is really inspirational :-)

During your summer break, I got quite a few querries on mails/calls/sms/scraps from some of you. Unfortunately, I could not answer some of them well enough, beacuse I was in the state of settling up in Hyderabad. Anyways, you are welcome to ping me, whenever you think I can be of any help to you, .. but kindly be a bit patient while expecting the response.

Last but not the least, I have started this blog just to have some shared space for all the pioneers to be in touch with the latest happenings @ LNMIIT. In time to come, I will try to share interesting happenings in technical world here.

till then, ... keep rockin' .. cheeeeeeeers !