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We just released The Dark Reprise. Thats almost after 2 months of our previous release (The Nemicron Flourish was released on Feb 5th). We have been a lot quite lately, yes. But that is only because we have been working real hard.

So whats happening? A lot. We are working on 5 tracks, including two vocal ones. The one's we can name right away are Recourse, Darkness, Tere Bina (vocal), and Andhera (vocal, based on Darkness). Another, is a loung-ish, techno track, which is still unnamed.

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We have now released the resources from the Team Development Concepts with Zend Studio for Eclipse Webinar hosted by Peter MacIntyre on Monday, March 7th, 2011.

The webinar introduced the Zend Studio 8 for Eclipse environment to the participants and walked them through the key Zend concepts & features including Views, Perspectives and Workspaces. In the webinar, Peter went on to explain how Zend Studio 8 supports team collaboration including Code Revision and development processes. Through the Webinar, we show how Zend Studio for Eclipse and PHP is the preferred option for building enterprise applications.

The video of the whole session can be seen below:

(Team Development Concepts with Zend Studio for Eclipse from OSSCube on Vimeo)

The slide deck from the webinar can be read below:

We look forward to your comments and feedback on the webinar.

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On February 27th, Gervase Markham, a developer of Bugzilla and lead for the project Domesday, joined the Mozilla community in Delhi for a general meetup. The venue for the meetup was Coffee Home, Connaught Place, Delhi. Around 20 participants turned up for the meetup.

Gervase was on a tour to South Asia, having spent time with the Mozilla communities in Bangladesh and in India. Gervase started contributing to the Mozilla project back in 2000 and in 2006 he won a Google/O'Reilly Open Source Awards as the "Best Community Activist". The agenda of the meetup was for Gerv to interact with the Mozilla community in Delhi and discuss ideas, initiatives and challenges.

One central theme for the discussion that kept recurring was the imminent launch of Firefox 4 and the community activities around the launch. Gerv was all praise for members of the community making active contributions to FOSS projects and was also very happy about the Google Summer of Code participants amongst those present.

Pictures from the meetup can be seen on Flickr

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OSScamp Solan was organized during the annual tech-fest of Chitkara University - Algorythm. Students from Chandigarh, Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh attended the camp.

The camp started off with my usual talk "What is Open Source" - an idea to broaden the concept of Open Source, which would ensure everyone is on the same page to begin with. Discussions took a great leap forward from the introduction, when the idea - how does a common man benefit from open source, turned up. It was an interesting discussion, where students were trying ot get over the theoretical freedoms of FOSS to its practical implementations. Apart from this, the discussion also helped in clearing out the confusion many students face - that open source is like some social work, when we discussed "How can you earn with Open Source Softwares".   I went forth to discussing how services and product companies work with open source softwares and the general demand for highly skilled people. Went on to discuss how experience with working on open source softwares and distributed development teams can help students build up their career growth spirals. From the looks of the participant, this sure was an eye-opener. Further on, programs like Google Summer of Code aroused a lot of interest. I wonder how many students take it forward.   After all this serious discussion, we plugged in our guitars to lmms and explored DAWs and music synthesis with FOSS softwares. We ended the day with discussions on Licensing and the role it plays in computing.   Day 2 was a series of how tos with FOSS projects, where participants showcased projects and discussed them. We also started actively working on a physical music library manager project being written in python by some of the participants of the camp. It looks like an interesting project in the offering too. Lets hope it turns out solid within its roadmap.   (with inputs from Mayank Saini)   Pictures from the camp can be found at Flickr (this link will take you there), while my presentation is embedded below. Foss: Why should it matter to Students View more presentations from OSSCube LLC A Global Open Source Enterprise for Open Source Solutions Hide from blog:  No

Economic Times covered our President, Lavanya Rastogi, today with his views and expectations from the Budget 2011. Excerpts from the story:

Mr. Lavanya Rastogi, President, OSSCube Solutions Ltd. on expectations for the IT and ITeS sector from Union Budget 2011.

OSSCube Solutions is a global Open Source Software focused company, providing an integrated value chain of services encompassing outsourced software development, product customization and implementation, consulting and training services, on open source products and technologies, delivered through its principal locations spread across North America, UK & India.

OSSCube has served 50+ industry leader clients such as Intel, Google, Yahoo, Trend Micro, LinkedIn, and Bigadda.com in four continents. Some of the solutions developed by them include Enterprise Products, Web 2.0 applications, Social Networking sites, Ecommerce applications and Widgets, Games and Mobile applications. Following is a small quote on budget expectations of the SME segment in the IT and ITES sector.

Budget expectation - I wish that this budget would consider the special challenges of SME segment of the sunrise sector of IT and ITES. Consecutive budgets have been kind towards the IT sector in general, its an urgent need for the Government to take note of the specific needs of the SME players which so far have received a trickle. World over innovation and disruptive/transformational business models have often come from startups like Google, Facebook, etc and a nurturing ecosystem has facilitated their transformation into mega corporations. Its about time that India caught up.

My wish list from the Government at this stage is for simple things, on the policy side, dropping the suspense and extension of the STPI scheme by at least three years to allow the SME’s leverage the growth emanating from global recovery, reduction of rate of MAT, a formal push to the banks to expand credit under the SME Credit Guarantee scheme which is currently tough to get by most entrepreneurs.

On the incentive side, it would be good to see some bold visionary steps like tax credits for not only R&D but also skill development spend, encouragement to local governance arms specially in backward regions like north east etc. to engage SMEs in eGov and capability building initiatives to help spur growth and maturity in the local IT services sector and recognizing IT/ITES as a distinct Industry exempt from archaic provisions of Shops and establishments act and other state industrial acts more oriented to manufacturing industries.

(The author is Mr. Lavanya Rastogi, President, OSSCube Solutions Ltd.. Views are personal)

You can check the whole story on the Economic Times website here.

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OSSCube is hosting a free webinar today at 1PM GMT on "Introducing Zend Studio for Eclipse".

Zend Studio 8 is a professional-grade PHP application development environment. It has been designed to maximize developer productivity from the ground up by speeding up development, code maintenance, and team collaboration.

The webinar will:

• Introduce the Zend Studio 8 for Eclipse environment
• Explain the key Zend concepts & features
• Explain how Zend Studio 8 supports team collaboration
• Show how ZSE and PHP is the preferred option when it comes to building enterprise applications.

You can register for the webinar at https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/160370446.

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We are participating at the PHP UK 2011 Conference today.

In its 4th year, PHP UK is the largest PHP conference in the UK and the region. For this edition we are participating as a silver sponsor of the conference. We have also set up a booth in the exhibitor area, do catch us there. You will find Rakesh and Rafiq, at the booth, to assist you.

With our entry into the the UK, OSSCube has been setting itself as the PHP company. We became the world's first Zend Centre of Excellence, housing best of breed PHP expertise and development practices. We are also the Zend Certified Training partners in the UK. We would love to catch up with you at our booth and discuss how PHP can help solve your business problems.

We are also offering our booth visitors lucrative discounts on our training programs for Zend. Dont forget your discount coupon, when you do visit us.

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We are participating at the PHP UK 2011 Conference today.

In its 4th year, PHP UK is the largest PHP conference in the UK and the region. For this edition we are participating as a silver sponsor of the conference. We have also set up a booth in the exhibitor area, do catch us there. You will find Rakesh and Rafiq, at the booth, to assist you.

With our entry into the the UK, OSSCube has been setting itself as the PHP company. We became the world's first Zend Centre of Excellence, housing best of breed PHP expertise and development practices. We are also the Zend Certified Training partners in the UK. We would love to catch up with you at our booth and discuss how PHP can help solve your business problems.

We are also offering our booth visitors lucrative discounts on our training programs for Zend. Dont forget your discount coupon, when you do visit us.

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Chitkara University, Solan, is organising an OSScamp this weekend as part of their techfest. Students from across India will be there. I will be taking this opportunity to continue with my campaign to promote practical implementations of open source amongst students. A lot many sessions have been planned around PHP, Python and development, I will, on the other hand, talk about Why FOSS should matter to students, and 0AD - an open source real-time strategy game.

For details and registrations, check the OSScamp Solan page, and wish me best.

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The state of open source in India, especially the student community is very sorry. There are occassional sparks strewn around the place, but mostly students lack the initiative to be acquainted with FOSS. The students are not to be blamed alone, there are a number of factors influencing this. Yet.

During my participation at OSS Awareness Camp, Ludhiana I focussed on tackling this problem head on. With the session on why FOSS should matter to students, I wanted to highlight the practical benefits of open source and enable students in setting targets and achieving them.

The day began with Daljeet Singh Pathania and Dr. HS Rai introducing the day's objectives to the students and then me hogging up some serious time in a practical definition of What FOSS is. It was followed by a session on Wordpress, and then I did a reprise with my main session - "FOSS: Why should it matter to Students".

I began the session by asking the students why they think FOSS is relevant for them. They had the theoretical same answers - Cost Benefits, Ability to learn from Source Code, and so on, which rare student follow in life.

To move on, I asked them what are their fundamentals rights as citizens of India. Only 1 fellow was able to give the right answer, out of 80 students. None, when asked about Human rights. I followed up with the question: When you dont care about your inherent rights as humans and citizens of this great country, why do you care about open source? To no answers as well.

I followed up with a review of what the freedoms with FOSS are and what they can do for someone. Also, shared inspiring stories of Linus Torvalds, Dries Buytaert, Matt Mullenweg and Mark Zuckerberg and ended up with the analogy that you can bring a horse to the well, but cannot make it drink water. Only the horse can drink water, if it wants to. Meanwhile, I also shared some Wordpress goodies with the students for answering my questions as well.

From that point onwards, I emphasised on how important it was for students to have an itch. The itch is the will to question the status quo and make efforts to change it. I also presented to them opportunities that they can utilize to fulfill the itch - how and what to contribute to FOSS projects, or starting their own works.

I ended my session around here, with a note on how FOSS can esnure you get the freedom, yet it is you who has to be free. And earn it. If you were at the session, I would like to hear your feedback and the road ahead

More pictures on Flickr

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I will be heading over to Ludhiana tomorrow to talk about FOSS: Why should it matter to Students. In the session, I hope to talk to the students of Guru Nanak Deo Engineering College about the various aspects of the freedom offered by Free Softwares, and how, in a way, its not enough. Having freedom is not enough, you should be free to use it too.

You can find the presentation embedded below. I hope the session does some good to the students. Please do share your feedback on the presentation as comments to this post.

Foss: Why should it matter to Students View more presentations from OSSCube LLC A Global Open Source Enterprise for Open Source Solutions. Hide from blog:  No

I will be participating at the Open Source Awareness Camp, Ludhiana being organised by LUG Ludhiana at Guru Nanak Deo College of Engineering, and will give a session on FOSS: Why should it matter to Students on the 12th of February.

In my session, I will look at what are the benefits of FOSS for students, and how contributing to FOSS is very relevant for students. To understand this, I will walk through the various ways of contribution, licensing concepts, Google Summer of Code program, the general open source ecosystem, and other related issues.

This promises to be an interesting session, I will soon share my presentation deck with some notes on what I intend to say at the camp. If you are around, do drop by. Check here for more details about the event.

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Symfony Live 2011 San Fransisco, the Symfony conference, kicks off today. The pre-conference Hacking Days are already over - a free for all, unconference, where people hacked on and talked about Symfony2.

From today, the main Symfony conference begins and will go on for the next two days. It promises to be a power-packed Symfony-centric conference, with focussed sessions on Apostrophe, Code Revision with Git, Symfony2 and Symfony, developing with Symfony2.

We look forward to the conference and hope that all the participants have fun! Though we will not be present at the conference, yet, we are glad we could at least sponsor the event.

We look forward to catching up with you at the next Symfony Live.

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Raleigh RTP (North Carolina), 26 January 2011 — OSSCube today announced its selection by Zend Technologies, the PHP Company, as the world’s first Zend Center of Excellence (CoE). As a Zend CoE, OSSCube is recognized as a center for PHP best practices and a Zend Solutions Partner positioned to deliver innovative and productive applications and services to mid- to large-sized enterprises across the U.S., the U.K. and India. OSSCube U.K. becomes a Zend Authorized Training Center, certified to provide full training and support for Zend Certification programs.

The Zend Center of Excellence program was launched in January 2011 by Zend Technologies as part of its ongoing PHP community thought leadership and knowledge sharing for effective use of PHP open source and commercial solutions for enterprise application development. Zend provides developers with an integrated solution ideal for Web and cloud computing environments that includes Zend Server Web application server, the Zend Studio IDE and Zend Framework, the leading PHP application framework.

“OSSCube is proud to be the first to establish a Zend Center of Excellence, an important step in our commitment to provide customers with best-of-breed practices, tools and solutions for successful application development and management on the Zend PHP platform. We are confident that our expanded partnership with Zend will enable us to deliver even higher value and ROI in our engagements,” said Lavanya Rastogi, President and Co-founder, OSSCube.

“We are impressed by the steadfast commitment of OSSCube to developing and promoting industry standard best practices for PHP open source and commercial solutions,” said Siddhartha Agarwal, VP, Americas & Emerging Markets Field Operations at Zend. Their strong team of Zend certified professionals consistently break new ground with Zend and PHP in large-scale and business-critical implementations around the world.”

About OSSCube Headquartered in North Carolina with offices in the U.K. and India, OSSCube is a leading global Open Source software development company with expertise in outsourced product development. We are dedicated to providing solutions to businesses by leveraging the power of open source software, solutions and technologies. OSSCube partners with leading technology providers such as Zend, EnterpriseDB, Acquia and SugarCRM, to provide the most innovative and effective solutions possible. With over a decade of experience and 200+ team members, OSSCube has an established track record of delivering solutions cost-effectively and on time. Learn more at http://php.osscube.com

About Zend Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP Company, is the leading provider of software and services for developing, deploying and managing business-critical PHP applications for Web, cloud and mobile computing environments. PHP runs 35 percent of the world’s Web sites and has quickly become the most popular language for building dynamic Web applications. The Zend family of products delivers a comprehensive solution supporting the entire application lifecycle, being deployed at more than 35,000 companies worldwide. Zend is headquartered in California with offices in France, Germany, Ireland, Israel and Italy. Learn more at http://www.zend.com.

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Hindu Business Line is a prominent newspaper in India. They covered the recent NASSCOM delegation that visited the Netherlands to discuss strategies and tactics for tech vendors from India to play a role in the dutch market. For the story, Hindu Business Line interviewed our President and Cofounder Mr. Lavanya Rastogi.

Excerpts:
[...] OSSCube Solutions – a technology company offering Open Source products and services – is mulling a debut in the Netherlands market but with a different game plan.

For OSSCube, a foray into the Netherlands will be strategic and tactical.

“Our goal will be to leverage the proposed presence to get a European character into our organisation, and then address the larger Continental Europe market,” said its Co-Founder and President, Mr Lavanya Rastogi.

OSSCube is headquartered in North Carolina but has its research and development centre and the global delivery centre in India, where it employs over 200 professionals.

“In the first phase, we are looking for clients in the Netherlands and also a local partner who could be an IT consulting firm advising companies on IT strategy. In addition, we are keen to co-create a development centre there,” said Mr Rastogi, who was recently in Amsterdam as part of a 10-member Nasscom delegation. [...]

Read the full story on their page: Small tech vendors find it lucrative to ‘go Dutch'

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OSSCube is looking for a Technical Content Specialist to work with the Online Marketing team at OSSCube to better engage developer communities and promote the OSSCube expertise brand across the globe. We offer our members competitive compensation in the industry, a jovial work environment and an equal opportunity to bring out their best. You will be exposed to industry standard best practices, and cutting edge technology. You and us, together, will set forth to solve real business problems and technological challenges everyday. Responsibilities Includes, but not limited to:

• Create engaging content for mass consumption and for specific technology niches.
• Plan and execute content delivery processes and social media integration across the technology spectrum and organization hierarchy.
• Plan and coordinate technical content across company divisions and business offerings.

Required Skills

• Good and Clear Communication skills
• Understanding of Social Media as a communication medium
• Understanding of Text, Image and Video content
• Open to travelling as and when needed

Required Experience

• A minimum of 2 years experience in generation and execution of content, preferably in a Media or a PR company.

Good to Have

• A background of Technical Content writing
• An active Social Media presence
• Past experience with similar processes
• Creative thinking
• Passion for Technology
• Passion for outperforming yourself
• Can handle stress
• Ability to take criticism positively

Preferred Background

• Either of, from a reputed institute:
  • MBA or equivalent in Advertising/Communication/Marketing, OR,
  • Bachelors in Mass Communication
• Experience in the field is a definite plus, but not a must have
• Preferred background is that from a Media or a PR company

Location This opening is for the Noida campus. Contact Send across your CV and links to your social media profiles, especially Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and Blog to careers at osscube dot com. Do mention "Technical Content Specialist" in the email's subject.

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The Drupal 7 Release Party is a worldwide event to celebrate the imminent release of Drupal 7. Jan 7, 2011 is not the exact release date. The idea is to have a two day event - a celebration of Drupal - technology and community.

The Drupal Users in Delhi are organising a release party on 8th and 9th to share some Drupal love, details:

Drupal 7 Release Party by Delhi Drupal Community
on Jan 8-9, 2011 - 10AM - 6PM
at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi

This is a community event and is open for all. Anyone can participate. Drupal Love is a good to have for the meet. There are no participation fees.

Contact
For details contact either: @kinshuksunil, @1sud, @abhisheknagar on Twitter
Use hashtag #d7rp and spread the word.

You can also reach out Kinshuk at +919910024895

More details and registrations at Drupal 7 Release Party, Delhi Page

Schedule
Day 1
10.00-10.30 : Welcome
10.30-13.00 : Hands On Introduction to Drupal 7 by Ankur Saxena
13.00-14.00 : Lunch
14.00-17.00 : Hackathon - Building a Blog, Brochure Website, Community Website with Drupal 7 by Kinshuk Sunil
17.00-18.00 : Drupal Quiz

Day 2
10.00-13.00 : Developing Drupal Modules Workshop by Sudhir Porwal
13.00-14.00 : Lunch
14.00-17.00 : Theming Drupal Workshop by Gaurav Mishra
17.00-18.00 : Cutting the Drupal 7 Cake and networking

Parallelly, Day 2 will also have an ongoing hackathons

Some planned hackathons:
Drupal 7 Translation Sprint : http://groups.drupal.org/node/113499
Drupal 7 Documentation Sprint
New website for OSScamp.in
FOSSEvents.in

If you are in Delhi/NCR on 8-9 and have love for Drupal, dont miss it.
The Drupal team at OSSCube will be present there and our community manager is part of the organising team. We will love to interact with you at the event.

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Chip magazine interviewed Sonali for their Chip Plus feature of the November 2010 issue. Following on to the successful closure of OSI Days 2010, Chip used the story to talk about what open source is and what are the issues and challenges that open source currently faces in India.

You can read the article below:

Interview of Sonali Minocha in Chip Plus, Nov 2010 - Open Source: Look beyond the FREE Tag View more documents from OSSCube LLC A Global Open Source Enterprise for Open Source Solutions. Hide from blog:  No

At OSSCube, we are looking for “C” and UNIX Developers for Pune. The desire profile would be required to Designing of the functional document and involved in Coding in C/C++, Shell Script according to the functional document and Testing.

Responsibilities (includes, but not limited to):

• Handling testing, system integration, debugging & troubleshooting of the application.
• Ensuring adherence to quality norms across the development & implementation process.
• Designing of the functional document. C/C++, Shell Script according to the functional document and Testing.
• Analysis of the specifications provided by the Client
• Designing of the functional document.

Experience:

• 3yrs+ on C and UNIX

Technical Skills:

• BE/B.tech/MCA qualified with 3+ years of relevant experience in development and maintenance of systems software in C/C++ and Linux platform.
• Experience with writing and understanding multi-threaded C programs on Unix platforms.
• Experience in Unix/GNU development environment.
• Experience in software engineering, debugging and testing is required.
• Proficiency in algorithms, profiling and performance tuning of C/system programs is desirable.
• Candidate must exhibit a strong desire to learn/explore new technologies and demonstrate good analytical/problem solving skills.

Send your profiles to careers at osscube dot com

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OSSCube is pleased to announce the availability of OSSCube Recruit, free and Open Source advanced Candidate Recruitment Management software built over the SugarCRM platform. The system is designed to help organizations and hiring companies to completely automate their recruitment processes - right from raising hiring recruitment requests, approvals, candidate sourcing, to evaluations and offer letter management; every step is a part of the system. The software is currently running in beta and has over a 100 users as listed on SugarForge.

OSSCube Recruit can be used with the SugarCRM Community, Professional or Enterprise editions. Developed as a SugarCRM component, OSSCube Recruit spans across your organisation’s levels and provides all team members an access to create and manage job openings, candidates, evaluations, references, past employers, and recruitment agencies.

“OSSCube Recruit is going to be very useful for organizations of all shapes and sizes. Its integrative approach covers every aspect of recruitment management. We launched an online demo of OSSCube Recruit in August at http://recruitment.osscubecrm.com and has been seeing a steady traffic that is reflective of the interest in the application. We are seeing satisfactory deployments of OSSCube Recruit and it pleases us” said Lavanya Rastogi, President, OSSCube. He added “OSSCube Recruit was created by us to manage our own recruitment processes, I can tell from my customer #1 experience - it works!”

SugarCRM is the leading open source CRM software being used by organisations worldwide for managing their businesses processes, especially Sales and Marketing. With OSSCube Recruit, the Recruitment processes are also now extensively covered within SugarCRM.

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