Ajit Gaddam: TechNews and Security

Okay, this is one of those situations where I think I am at the right place at the right time. I am currently in India right now and from one of my buddies who works in Google, India, I came to know of this Speaker series by Dr. Vinton Cerf, one of the “fathers of Internet” along with Bob Kahn.

I promptly sent a request asking to be invited to this highly sought out meeting. I was asked to send information such as Name, email and other contact information besides Occupation, current role etc.

Google sent a reply back thanking me for my interest and told me I was in the queue. When I saw the disclaimer in the end, I wasn’t too sure of my chances of successfully getting in.

Disclaimer: - Everyone who registers with us does not necessarily get an invite to this event. You must satisfy the criteria for invitation.  The event will be held in Bangalore on the 21st of February and in Hyderabad on 23rd of February 2007.

Word later trickled in that Google had closed down the invites with estimations of less than 250 invites going out based on the seating capacity of the Marriott Hotel’s convention center seating capacity. However, after a wait of little over a week, I finally get the invite and get a chance to meet the vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google.

” A father speaks about his child’s past, present and future” was how the official invite was titled. One could guess that Vint Cerf was going to talk about Internet, Net Neutrality and maybe even enlighten us on “series of tubes” of Sen.Ted Stevens

I’ve been following the press releases coming out from Bangalore where Vint Cerf gave a similar presentation.  Cerf is predicting that mobile phones and not personal computers, will fuel the growth of the worldwide web as countries like India snap up millions of handsets monthly. The man widely recognised as the `Father of the Internet’ — he presided over its birth and co-wrote the protocol that underpins it — thinks the “baby” has grown too big for anyone to play nurse.

“It is a huge, new democratic opportunity and beyond any one agency’s political control,” says Vinton (Vint) Cerf, who is at present the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, even while remaining Chairman of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the agency that oversees and allocates “top level” Internet addresses.

India, a country of 1.1 billion people, alone is adding seven million mobile phone users a month. Worldwide there are 2.5 billion mobile phone users, whose numbers are growing rapidly in developing countries led by China and India, the world’s most populous countries, Mr Cerf said in his presentation.India, a country of 1.1 billion people, alone is adding seven million mobile phone users a month.

The company also wants to tap the talent of Indian engineers to innovate technologies and widen its range of services, Mr Cerf said. India is estimated to have 40 million people online, a meagre 3.5 per cent of its vast population, he said, adding Google will focus on local languages, culture, content and delivery of new business models to widen the reach of the internet.

Keep watching out this space for more. I will update this blog once I get a chance to meet Dr. Vint Cerf tomorrow with some pictures and more details about the speech.