Jimmy Wales recently traveled to Chennai, in India, to take part in WikiCamp, India’s first wiki unconference. Wales is the founder of Wikipedia and president of the Wikimedia Foundation. He stayed with Kiruba for two nights while he was there.

This conversation includes Wales’s take on the difference between Wikipedia and Wikia, advertising or lack of advertising at Wikipedia and the future growth of the phenomenon.

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Professor Maheshwari is the vice chancellor of BITS Pilani, one of the most prestigious educational instituitions in India. He has held various top-level positions at the instituition over the past 35 years. He has published four books and over 80 research papers in the ares of semiconductor electronics and university-industry linkages.

Professor Maheshwari talks about the entrepreneurship programs and incubation center that prevails at BITS Pilani. He also talks about the vision of creating a Silicon Valley around educational institutes in India the same way Stanford University helped develop the valley.

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Shreyas Srinivasan is one of the co-founders of RadioVeRVe, an Internet radio station which focuses on promoting Indian independent and indie music. The site began as an experiment in late 2003 to help independent musicians across the country promote themselves.

RadioVeRVe runs out of a garage and Shreyas talks about how the various founders have well-defined roles, their plans for the future and whether they are seeking VC funding.

Shreyas has worked at Novell India Ltd for two years in their Linux Desktop Group and currently works at Geodesic Information Systems.

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Vijay Shekhar Sharma is the managing director of One97, a mobile value-added services company. One97 has many firsts to its credit, including India’s first short code sms service, 3030.

Vijay talks about how they started, the various offerings of One97, impact of 3G and the overall VAS market in India among other things.

The company offered an innovative business model of revenue share in mobile VAS services. This was a landmark decision, not only for One97, but also brought about changes in the entire VAS business model and helped the category grow immensely.

One97 currently comprises a staff of 125 people with offices in Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Bangalore.

 

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Apurv Pandit is the chief editor of PaGaLGuY.com, India’s biggest Web site for MBA students. (”Pagal” actually means “Mad” in Hindi)

This site, which had a humble beginning as a discussion forum, has grown tremendously to attract close to 100,000 members.

In this interview, Apurv shares the story behind PagalGuy, site monetization and their future plans.

Prior to this, Apurv has had five years’ experience as a reporter in a number of national newspapers and an international news agency.

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