New Delhi Times - Gaurav Bhatnagar reporting from New Delhi, India

We had our Geek/blogger/Micro-content dinner last night here in Gurgaon. Marc and Ashish have already blogged the event. The attendees were Marc, Ashish, Manish and myself (from Tekriti), Alok (newly VC and successful entrpreneur - jobsahead.com), Sunil (fellow entrepreneur, blogger and semantic web researcher - he is from the RDF camp), Jatin from Indiastreams.com, Siddharth and Sudesh from WebChutney, Neeraj from Times of India, Sachin from Makemytrip.com, Amit from Uzanto and Kunal (ex-TRAI and telecom entreprenur who will cringe on seeing Marc call him a "government official"!). So it was a mix of entreprenurs, bloggers, media people and geeks in general.

Not surprisingly, the hot topic of discussion was the Ebay-Skype deal. Sunil talked about his wireless startup and his ideas around semantic web and RDF. When asked to choose between XML and RDF, Sunil gave the diplomatic reply of "well practially XML works better but...". Alok is going to be India's first VC blogger! Cool! The guys at Web Chutney are doing some really creative stuff for very impressive clientele. They have also promised us to help us find good design folks - a skill we really need desperately here at Tekriti. Marc and myself independently made the observation that Kunal has a resemblence to Anil Dash. Marc even found the accent similar. I find it really funny that Marc thought of him as a government official. He looks anything but that. Sachin mentioned that Makemytrip.com is providing domestic ticketing as well . I hope we get something like priceline here in India soon! Amit, Neeraj and Marc had an animated discussion about something that I can't seem to remember. But I did point out to Neeraj that indiatimes.com is like Web 0.5 website in a Web 2.0 era and they are totally missing the boat on this. I spotted Manish and Jatin discussing his media streaming technology and how it could possibly get used in many of our projects.

This was a great event to have! It took effort to organize but it was totally worth it. I heard many "we should have more of these" comments. So hopefully such blogger dinners will become a more regular feature in the Delhi tech circle. There is no better way to get to know fellow techies, exchange ideas and help each other out!