The BIG 2-OH.

We just launched CampusChai 2.0 . This release brings a slew of features that should change the college placement/recruitment landscape in India. Some of the features include

1. Colleges will be able to use our end-to-end placement web service to manage all their placement activities. This includes features like inviting employers, generating placement stats etc.

2. Companies will have the ability to co-ordinate placements with multiple colleges and look at college/student profiles.

3. Companies can drill down colleges by location and placement data.

4. College Alumni will be able to network with other alumni and current students.Alumni can also share information on what it takes to work in their company.

5. Students can gain insight into the companies that the alumni are currently working in.

We are almost there!

Update: We are putting the finishing touches on our next release. The second contest has now ended. The winner is ……….

Priyanka Chaurasia with 11780 points.

Congratulations Priyanka, please send us your address via email.

Its taken us a little longer for our next release but we are now almost ready. Its all going to happen on Feb 10. Watch this space!

Contest score so far…

Updated Results Feb 8 2007

Top 3

Priyanka Chaurasia – 11288 points

Kamles Bharti – 8428 points

Manish Jain  – 7133 points

please refrain from scrapping orkut users who may not be the target audience for CampusChai. Also, the contest will end on Feb 10 with the 2.0 release of CampusChai.

Top 3:
Priyanka Chaurasia – 3234
Kamlesh Bharti – 961
Deepesh Shah – 155

Next posting of points on: Jan 20th

Scores from Contest 1

Sorry for the late posting. We have been really busy with new feature requests and in preparing for Proto . This still does not excuse the delay and we apologize for the same. The final scores on Dec 31 , 2006 were as below,

1. Kamlesh Bharti 2943

2. Priyanka Chaurasia 2891

3. Deepesh Shah 2530

Kamlesh, we just shipped your PS2. Please send us a picture when you receive it.

There will also be less posts on the contest going forward and more on our progress and features. Our next big release is around the corner, we hope you will be as excited as we are about it.

UPDATED – PS2 contest round 2 – the rules

Here are some guidelines for round 2 of the PS2 competition…

The winner of the first round of the competition, Kamlesh, can compete in this round too.  However, in a case where he wins again, he won’t
be awarded the PS2.  Special arrangements will be made for a different prize.

Also, if the difference in score between him and the runner up is less than 200 points, the runner up will receive the PS2.

So what I am trying to say is, to avoid all this confusion, Priyanka and others who want the PS2…roll up your sleeves and start promoting CampusChai harder than before.  You can’t let the same person win twice!!!

UPDATED
Also, this time around there will be prizes given for 2nd and 3rd place.   The 2nd place holder will get an iPod Shuffle and the 3rd place holder will receive a digital camera.  Feb-15 will mark the end of the contest.

Good luck!

You asked and we delivered…

Although we don’t particularly like the idea of extending the contest due to a variety of reasons, we have had a great number of requests asking us to do so. So we we have decided to extend the contest until Feb 28. All counters will be reset to zero starting yesterday and everyone will have the same opportunity to participate.

We are also looking for people to submit articles on CampusChai related to placement/recruitment/interview options. The prize will involve an opportunity to work as an marketing intern at CampusChai. Please contact us at marketing@campuschai.com for further details.

We have a winner! but the contest may not be over ..

Well we now have a winner.. And it was so close that it could have put the Bush/Al Gore race to shame. It was so close that vegas casionos would have taken bets on it. But at 12:00 AM Jan 01 , IST we had the winner. Without further ado,  our winner is

Kamlesh Bharti 

Congrats Kamlesh. We will get in touch with you via email for the formalities.

So is the contest over? We will be posting about the future of the contest and also about who is #2,#3 and their counts in a few hours in a more detailed post.

We are inching closer

Commiting to deadlines is a bad thing. atleast in public. Once you commit to a deadline you have two options,

a. Ship your product no matter how sucky it is.

b. Add x days and proclaim new deadline. repeat n times. (Vista release schedule perfected this technique)

At CampusChai we are working on some really cool stuff. So we are not going to commit to any deadlines, it will be ready when its ready.

What do you folks think is the best code release technique?

a. Users love broken code and sites that don’t work.

b. Code it and throw it out there and let your users figure it out.

c. Make incremental improvements. Make sure it works 80%.

d. Develop an n-tier architecture and put it through a unit, functional,UAT, pre-alpha,pre-beta… testing.

btw, Here is a sneak preview of what’s coming your way.

Contest Update

Well, we are coming to an end of the PS2 contest and as in everything else in life, one can be #1 for only so long. Kamlesh Bharti has been our #1 promoter since day 1 until 3 days ago, our new #1 is Deepesh Shah. We still have about 25 days in the contest and a lot can still happen between now and then. Here are our top 3

1. Deepesh Shah – 868 points

2. Kamlesh Bharti  – 827 points

3. Rahul Basu         – 756 points

Thanks again everyone for participating.

Got my Degree, where’s my job???

The New York Times talks about getting your degree and still being umemployed and highlights the fact that most unemployed college graduates in India lack three essential skills,

• Bad English/Poor accent(Poor communication skills)
• Rote learning
• A general lack of soft skills( group interaction,body language etc)

While the overall message of the article is well conveyed, the author states that the development of the desired skills are only to be achieved by those attending IIM’s and IIT’s. (Quoted below)

But the chance to learn such skills is still a prerogative reserved, for the most part, for the modern equivalent of India’s upper castes — the few thousand students who graduate each year from academies like the Indian Institutes of Management and the Indian Institutes of Technology. Their alumni, mostly engineers, walk the hallways of Wall Street and Silicon Valley and are stewards for some of the largest companies.

Similar articles always seem to brand Indian educational institues into two categories. The IIT/IIM lot and the others( and usually ‘others’ stand for everything bad about the indian education system). I disagree on that aspect of the article, just because you went to IIT does not mean that your accent is impeccable and you are pitching creatives in madison ave to the fortune 500. I know a lot of folks who went to IIT and were brilliant analytically but had trouble with basic grammar. A lot of these articles tend to see the colleges as black and white and seem to miss the grey. The grey are those colleges where they accomplish 60%-80% of developing an employable graduate. For ex: A lot of colleges in the major metros fall in this category. The students speak great english have semi decent analytical skills and seem to do just fine finding jobs.

I do have to agree with Anand(the author of the article) on the fact that colleges in India do need to place emphasis on the soft skills. Academic capabilities carry far more importance and students generally seem to lack the back-slapping,personable natures usually needed to get ahead in the corporate world. Somebody needs to fill this gap. Aptech/NIIT are passe now, Language/personality schools are in. There is a huge market opportunity for somebody to step in and start offering courses with emphasis on the  communication and creative sciences.