When I got the invite to speak at CII Connect Coimbatore, I was not sure whether I wanted to spend a whole day to make a trip and talk for 20 minutes. Finally my curiosity got better of me and I decided to go and I am glad I did.
Coimbatore is a rising star in the IT industry. I was amazed to know that they did 700+ crores (about $160 million) IT and ITES (IT enabled services). They have a new TiE chapter and have been doing this program for several years.
Besides great key notes, I thoroughly enjoyed the panel on embedded systems. There were three talks – from Bosch, Texas Instruments and Philips. Shri Krishna of Bosch, gave a talk on Internet of Things which is one the highlights of the event. I was pretty impressed by the Philips and Texas Instruments talks as well.
I think the talk that stole all the hearts was the one given by Kumar Vembu of GoFrugal. Down to earth, utterly unassuming, Kumar talked about the importance of culture in an organization and how Agile helped them focus more on getting things done. His session probably had the most questions of all the ones I attended.
I got an invite to come and spend more time with both the TiE chapter (which recently started) and do some geeky things (KovaiGeeks?). Will be happy to infuse some product enthusiasm there and start a few tech and entrepreneur communities.