Here is your chance to win a brand new Blackberry Curve 8520. Suggest a creative concept for the logo of the famous Aditya Group of Educational Institutions, Andhrapradesh, India.
Our creative wing BrandMango is doing a brand makeover for Aditya Group. Considering the value and impact of this project, we decided to invite logo concepts from all the creative followers of foradian. You dont have to design anything. Just tell in simple words how the logo should look like. Our designers at BrandMango will take care of designing the logo from your concept.
About Aditya Group of Educational Institutions
Aditya is a well known and respected group of institutions based out of Kakinada, Andhrapradesh. Established in 1984, Aditya Academy entered the noble field of education with a public school to cater to the prerequisite demands of primary and secondary education. As the journey progressed, Aditya Academy simply grew from strength to strength, thus spreading its wings to Junior Colleges, Degree Colleges, P.G. Colleges, Engineering and Pharmacy Colleges, Nursing Colleges and Teacher Training Institutions. A gamut of 50 educational institutions in different streams, with a faculty of 5,000 members and surging student strength of 50,000 stands testimony to the pillaring effect Aditya Academy has had on the society in the past three decades. A small dream was transformed into a flamboyant reality indeed; this is the story of Aditya Educational Institutions.
Preferred logo concept
In the words of N.Deepak Reddy, Secretary, Aditya Educational Institutions
For an educational institution as mighty as Aditya, some serious responsibility lies on the shoulders for we not just mould careers but lives of individuals. There are great instances and cases where students join at the KG level and leave us only at the PG level, so they technically spend two decades trusting and believing brand Aditya. I am proud to say that we at Aditya, have always realized this and have performed our duties with utmost care and interest.
The logo should portray the concept of evolution of a 3 year old toddler to a 22 year old professional in his stay over the years in Aditya. How this idea can be portrayed through a simple logo. Give your inputs and win the blackberry.
How to submit your concepts ?
Submit the concepts via the comment form given below. Dont forget to leave your email id, so that we can contact you later. You can login with your facebook or twitter accounts also. If you have any image to upload, use http://imgur.com/
How the winner will be selected ?
The submitted concepts will be reviewed by Deepak Reddy of Aditya Group and Arun Raveendran of BrandMango. Proper feedback will be given on good concepts. BrandMango designers will be designing logos based on the favorite concepts. Once Aditya Group approves the logo, the winner will be announced.
Conditions
Anyone can participate in this competition except Directors of Foradian Technologies.
You can submit more than one concept or design.
If more than one person submits same concept, advantage will be given to better description and clarity.
Other people may submit concepts motivated/inspired from yours. If you don't want this to happen, please don't participate. If you love your concept, set it free.
There will not be any consolation prizes.
The copyright of the selected concept will belong to Aditya Group.
Most of you might be already knowing the KISS Principle. Some like to read it as "Keep it Simple, Stupid" and some others "Keep it Simple, Sweet". There are also other variations like "keep it short and simple" or "keep it simple and straightforward"
For us, it is "Keep it Simple, Sincere" - the management philosophy Foradian successfully implemented from day 1 of its existence. It is difficult to be simple and sincere in this world. But it is always beneficial in the long run of the company.
We always communicate every thing in a simple and sincere way to our customers. Our pricings are transparent and we explain why we charge like that for any particular service. During project proposals and milestone planning, we tell in advance what all features will be there and what all features will not be there. This has helped us mainly in avoiding false expectations in customers and saving alot of precious manhours.
Our motivation for Simplicity is Mahathma Gandhi. He is the ultimate role model for anyone interested in a simple life or minimalism. The leadership team at Foradian respects and believes in Gandhian principles and adopted them for our management practices. Following is a slideshare presentation of "10 Leadership Lessons From Mahatma Gandhi"
Want to succeed in something?Then work hard for it. Want to get something done? Just do it! We complicate our lives for no reason. Keep it simple! Plan, persevere and be persistent. This is the basic mantra for any successful venture, or to achieve any significant goal in life. Have a vision toward the goal, plan for it, and work hard to achieve it. Gandhi can be your best mentor
Regarding the magic word Sincere, we loved the awesome speech of Chetan Bhagat at Symbiosis, Pune. The highlights of the speech is given the following image. You can read the full speech here. We loved the phrase don't be serious, be sincere. This is another principle the leadership team at Foradian lives by.
Our creative wing brandmango delivered a beautiful logo and associated brandbook to KopyKitab - India's first online text book rentals. Have a look at our design process and the focus we give to minute details. Click on the images to view in full screen.
If you want a logo to be designed by the creative brains of BrandMango, send a mail to info@brandmango.com or call Arun Raveendran directly on 09743 1098 22.
People often ask us how we run a profitable business using an opensource product. Hope you know that our main product Fedena is opensource and available for free download. Fedena is usually a product of reference in startup discussions related to opensource business models.
Our CEO was interviewed by Abhay Tawase from University of Liverpool for his dissertation on "The Study of Open Source Business Models: An Investigation into the Economic Viability and the Strategies of Open Source Software Companies". Founded in 1881, the University of Liverpool has an impressive history of pioneering education and research, with a particular emphasis on 'education for the professions'. 9 Nobel Laureates and countless thousands of professionals have passed through the University since 1881.
Screenshots of the pages mentioning Fedena (pages 81 to 84)
Fedena is evolving very fast and reaching to new markets. Our enhanced website with rich content will be launched next week. If you havent seen the GloboSchool version of Fedena, which is successfully marketed in Latin American nations, see the video given below. It is in Spanish.
Arvind G S (CTO - Foradian) and Vishwajith A (COO - Foradian) met Kris Goplakrishnan (CEO - Infosys) and discussed about Foradian's achievements and strategies for future. Kris was really impressed with Project Fedena and the strategy of opensource business model implemented by Foradian.
We asked for his advice and we were lucky that he provided us with lot of information which can be used to succeed in our present projects and deals. We felt the following advices are applicable to all startups similar to foradian. So sharing the valuable mantras.
Advice #1 : Learn to Sell
He mentioned that inorder to sustain a business, other than building a great product we should "sell early and sell often". Even if you dont have any product, if you can sell, you can run a profitable business.
Advice #2 : The founders should Sell
It is not enough that your marketing team makes the sale. If you want your company to successful, the founders should sell. And need to learn the art of sales in the hard way
Advice #3 : Focus
Foradian is slowly entering to ERP developments in the million dollar range and Kris adviced us to focus on a certain area. Since we are already successful in education sector, he told us to focus on erps for universities, group of institutions etc.. In short his advice was to concentrate on a single thing instead of diversifying to multiple products and services.
Other than the above advices we got advices specific to our current projects and government deals, which we are not revealing here. Anyhow it was a great experience to meet and talk with a Man who is part of an empire they built from scratch.
Kinect is one of the greatest inventions of our life-time. If you havent tried it yet, you are missing the taste of future. It is revolutionizing the technical innovations and is the biggest thing since the iphone, maybe bigger.
Foradian is experimenting with Kinect to build futuristic application like virtual shopping. We are also building a cool virtual UI for Project Fedena similar to the ones you see in hollywood films. Keep tuned to the updates.
Story of Kinect
Kinect was launched in on November 4, 2010 and Kinect holds the Guinness World Record of being the "fastest selling consumer electronics device". Even though Kinect was meant to use with XBox, the hacking community started reverse engineering the drivers and published opensource drivers within weeks of launch of Kinect. You can read more about Kinect at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinect
How Kinect works
Kinect is based on software technology developed internally by Rare, a subsidiary of Microsoft Game Studios owned by Microsoft, and on range camera technology by Israeli developer PrimeSense, which interprets 3D scene information from a continuously-projected infrared structured light. This 3D scanner system called Light Coding employs a variant of image-based 3D reconstruction.
With the availability of opensource drivers, hackers around the world started experimenting on Kinect, which caused a kinect hack revolution. You can also download the drivers and start hacking Kinect from http://openkinect.org
It all started with the blog post by Brad Templeton "Where will 3-D cameras like Kinect lead?". There was a already Kinect hack in youtube which demonstrated an autonomous robotic car.
Team Violator contacted its creators, but there was no response. So Team Violator with the help of Srihari (Internet Engineer - Foradian) built a quick hack using a Kinect and OpenKinect drivers. The aim was to study the use of Kinect as a depth detector for indoor uses. Entire thing was built on two to three days.
Limitations
It wont work outdoor
Area of movement of the car depends on the length of power/data cable of the kinect (Can be improved with a wifi hack or Carrying Laptop along with the Kinect on top of the car with DC power)
Tools used
PC running Ubuntu 10.04
Openkinect drivers
RC Car
Kinect
Breadboard
Transistors switch electronics
How to clone the hack
Difficulty level: High
You should have system level knowledge on linux. You should know how to compile a custom C program using "cmake" utilities. Also information on i/o programming and some electronics knowledge on switching circuits using transistors.
Warning: This is a quick and dirty hack which can damage your PC and other things around you. We are not responsible for any damages. Do it at your own risk.
Our suggestion: If you have plenty of time available, we suggest you to use a good electronic prototyping hardware like "Adruino". We used a dirty hack of parallel port, since there was some issue with interface using USB and it needed more time.
Here we go. We strongly suggest you to play with the glview functionality of the openkinect library before you begin step4.
Step1: Buy Kinect Hardware with all the interfacing cables
Step2: Buy an RC car, which has the ability to carry a Kinect on its top. Preferably a laptop too, incase you plan to improvise the hack.
Step3: Reverse engineer the RC car and its control system. Remove the cover of the remote control of the RC Car. Study how it works. We need to interface this remote control with the PC which process the depth data using kinect. There are various ways to do this. We used the parallel port available in the PC and used the data pins to control the remote control and thereby controlling the car. The main controls are "steer-left", "steer-right", "start", "stop". We can forget the other controls for the moment. Our aim is to build a car, which thinks on its own. An awakened machine :)
Step4: Install Parapin Library in the PC (Ubuntu).
Why the parapin Library ? We first wanted to do a laptop mounted car, so that it will have good coverage and it is more flexible. But the I/O program using USB to Parallel/Serial converters are a bit tricky and demanded more time and research. So we decided to go for the classic parallel cable communication to save time.
We modified the glview.c in the examples directory to suit our need.
We also need to compile this file with parapin library headers. Modify the cmake file to do this. (Line No. 54)
Modifications in glview.c
For locating the obstacle , we divide the screen into three areas(Left,Center,Right).The following function returns which area a particular point is in:
Now in the glview main loop , we locate the area with minimum obstacle :
Step6 : Compile the modified program, you can find the compiled executable in the examples directory itself.You will need to run it as a superuser for accesing the usb devices.
Step7: Connect the parallel port cable to the remote. Port number 2,3 and 4. You can test the port numbers using an LED.
Step8: Powerup the remote control and switch on the car. Your car will have its own life.
Happy hacking. If you have any doubt, you can leave it as comment below.
Future of this hack
We have no plans to improvise this hack since more powerful hacks are available as opensource from the ROS user community. See the video given below.
The Kinect is mounted on a quadrotor and used for closed-loop altitude control and basic obstacle avoidance. You can make a similar one using the instructions available here - Quadrotor Altitude Control and Obstacle Avoidance
This hack was part of the Driverless car project done by Divya R Pillai, Arun Asok, Varun K, Arun Ramesh and Aparna Rajeevan. They have successfully completed the project. If you want to do internship at foradian, contact us via join@foradian.com
We have a great news for the foradian fans of North and East India. After repeated emails and phone calls from interested candidates from there, we have arranged a recruitment drive at Kolkata, West Bengal on 27th February with the help of Nicco Ventures.
Venue:
Calcutta Institute of Engineering and Management,
Prasanta Sur Campus,
24/1A, Chandi Gosh Road,
Kolkata - 700040.
Our COO (Chief Operating Officer) - Vishwajith A is coming to Kolkatta to hunt down the best talents from the energetic and passionate youth of Kolkata. We respect Kolkata and its people for their rich culture and the contributions they made in every sphere of life.
Vishwajith A - Cofounder, COO and HRD Director of Foradian Technologies
Our open-source project Fedena (A school erp developed on ruby on rails) got selected by Government of several states in India, which will be implemented on a large scale in coming months. We are in need of talented and passionate software engineers who want to join our team and be a part of various projects by Foradian. Your experience don't matter to us. If you have the IQ and ability to learn new things yourself in a short span of time, you can be a well respected internet engineer at Foradian Technologies. If you already have experience in web application development in latest frameworks like Ruby on Rails, there is nothing better than that. Initially you will be trained at Mangalore, Karnataka. After that be ready for a thrilling career with lot of hacking and fun. We work in the most agile fashion. So you can expect talented, motivated, intense and interesting co-workers.
We are getting amazing response for the recruitment drive and have twelve colleges enrolled as of now which includes Techno India Group - Asansol, B.P.Poddar Institute of Management & Technology - Kolkata, Calcutta Institute of Engineering & Management - Kolkata, Calcutta Institute of Technology - Uluberia, College of Engg. & Management - KTPP Township, Durgapur Institute of Advanced Tech. & Mgmt - Durgapur, M.C.K.V Institute of Engineering - Howrah, Mallabhum Institute of Technology - Buishnupur, St Thomas Engineering College - Kolkata, Seacom Engineering College - Dhulagarh, Institute of Science & Technology - Chandrakona and National Institute of Technology - Durgapur
Recruitment drive will conists of an initial screening test on 26th Feb by Nicco Ventures. The selected candidates of the screening test will have to write the written test of Foradian Technologies. It conist of both technical and aptitude questions. A sample question paper is attached. Selected candidates of the written test will undergo Technical and HR interview of Foradian. Follow the instructions provided by Nicco ventures.
^ Previous year's question Paper of Foradian Technologies.
UPDATE (02 March 2011) - Final Results
The following candidates are selected after the technical and HR interview. Selected candidates will get offer letter and further instructions via email.
Debanjan Sengupta - Mallabhum Institute of Technology
Swagnik Chowdhury - Mallabhum Institute of Technology
Priyanka Pal - Calcutta Institute of Technology, Uluberia
Surajit Khan - Calcutta Institute of Engineering and Management
Sanjay Pathak - Calcutta Institute of Engineering and Management
Espirito Livre Magazine published an interview with Arvind GS - CTO and Director of Project Fedena. You can download the new magazine directly by clicking here. The magazine and interview is completely in Portuguese.
English translation of the interview is given below.
Arvind, introduce yourself to readers and talk a bit about his work in Fedena Project.
I am co-founder and CTO of Foradian Technologies – An internet engineering startup based in India. I am a graduate in Electronics and Communication Engineering. After 2.5 years of experience in IBS Software Services as Senior Software Engineer, I was bitten by the startup bug and started Foradian Technologies.
Other than the normal responsibilities as a CTO, I am the Project Director of Fedena – an opensource school management system. I have the responsibility of Project Planning, Software Development Management and Analyzing Feature Requests/Upgrades/Application Enhancement of the project.
Why did you choice the name "Fedena" and what motivated its creation?
Athena is the Greek Goddess of Education. We coined the name Fedena as a coalition of Foradian + Athena. It also has a meaning - the coolest thing alive, usually meaning something come from royalty or from wealth
When you had the idea to create a project for school management?
We were thinking of developing something that will impact the society in a better way and also help us in getting some good revenue and create a great brand value. Education is one of the main things that affects the life of people and is an integral part of day to day life. It is a never ending area also to do business.
When you decided to make it open source?
Even from the initial phase of the project, we thought of releasing it as open source. We have greatly benefited from Open source technologies and so thought of giving some thing back to the society. We at Foradian, greatly believes in the power of open source.
We made the application Open Source mainly due to the following three reasons
No such open source solution till date
No simple and user friendly alternative
Our dream that everyone should get benefited from it.
Many people believe there is no quality education and digital inclusion without free software. Is there any connection, free software and education? What do you think about it?
Yes, I too believe that Free Software has a great role on Quality Education. But more than Free, Open Source applications can create a better impact as the software can be modified to suit your requirements. It is with this intention Fedena is made Free as well as Open Source. Free software is going to be the future.
How additional features are implemented in Fedena project?
Since the application is open source, developers from all over the world are contributing to the project. We at Foradian will analyze these contributions and incorporate the valid ones to the project.
People used to give their inputs and feature requests through the community portal at projectfedena.org
Is there any project to create a library of languages?
Yes, we are currently enhancing Fedena to support multiple languages. Once the implementation is done, it will be very easy to integrate any language to Fedena
Why did you choose Ruby on Rails to development of Fedena project?
Foradian believes in agile development method. ROR is one of the best frameworks which support agility. The increased productivity for developers and inbuilt security features made us choose ROR for developing Fedena
How much time was spent since the project until the final version?
Fedena is still not in its Final version. Currently it is in 2.0 Version and the Version 2.1 is ready for release. We are aiming Fedena to be implemented as a virtual university which will happen by 2013. Our next main target is version 3.0 with e-learning implementation, which will take on moodle. The actual time spent till 2.1 version of the project is around One and a Half years.
Do you have plans to create a commercial version of Fedena project?
We already have Fedena Pro Services, by which we develop custom features for our Pro service partners.
Why do you keep a list of contributors on your site?
We believe all those who contribute to the project are a part of the project. We display their profile to show due reverence to their valuable contributions to the project
How anyone can hire a consultant for implementation of this project?
Fedena is built in such a way that anyone with a little technical knowledge will be able to the implementation. The detailed installation instruction with video tutorial is already available in the community portal. Also the forum is highly active with which everyone can get their doubts clarified.
Would you like to give any recommendations for people to get a better utilization of the project?
Download fedena and install it in your schools to manage school activities. Promote the application if you found it useful. Help some schools nearby you to install it and use it. Translate the help file to other languages. Give suggestions and feedback to us at www.projectfedena.org
When Derek Sivers visited the geographic area under the "Empire of Foradian", there happened an unexpected but planned meeting which had all the ingredients to be the meeting of this millennium. :)
Derek Sivers is best known for being the founder and former president of CD Baby, an online CD store for independent musicians, which he sold in 2008 for 22million dollars. CD Baby was the largest seller of independent music on the web, with over $100M in sales for over 150,000 musician clients. Read more about Derek Sivers here
Today was the birthday of the CEO(Unni Koroth) of Foradian and he along with the President(Abdul Salam) and CTO (Arvind GS) met Derek and discussed for more than 2 hours. They talked about the startup experiences, challenges, failures, sweet victories, long terms goals and strategies of Foradian and Derek Sivers.
If you are curious to know what Foradian and Derek Sivers are upto, watch the following video.
