** I do not maintain this space any more**
** Please visit www.nikhilkulkarni.com for my updated online identity **
** Visit www.nikhilkulkarni.in for my blog **
Extra-Curricular
I have put my genius into my life, whereas all I have put into my work is my talent - Oscar Wilde
Bloozle.com – a peer reviewed content Segregator (Idea on hold now)
I conceptualized and designed the concept of ‘bloozle – a peer reviewed content segregator. I had created a team of volunteers to develop the concept in form of a Web2.0 application. However, we hit a lot of roadblocks in late 2009 like economic slowdown (resulting in drying up of VC funds), decline in blogging as a culture and personal issues; as a result of which we put the idea into a cold-freeze. More on learning from the venture here.
I came up with the idea way back in 2006 and initially coded the first version of the web application. However, I could never complete the development due to commitments at work and resulting lack of time.
But not ready to let the idea die down, I hunted for volunteers to handle coding of the web app. Subsequently as the concept came to life I expanded the team and added members to take care of other functions as well (like publicity, community development etc). My overall role in the project was ...
Scouting for potential volunteers through Business and technology networks
Managing the work and the team - motivation, on-boarding etc
Developing the concept specifications (Also wireframes and look-n-feel)
Planning development activities, setting milestones and managing the project deadlines
Managing publicity and external communications through blogs, emails etc; Guiding development of FAQ and tutorials
Coordinating and scheduling team meetings, conference calls etc
In all, the project gave an opportunity to get a complete organizational experience while managing professional commitments. My friend Hemantkumar Jain is also actively involved with me in many of the above activities.
Arbit Choudhury – World’s first Management Comic character
Arbit Choudhury is the world's first managemet comic character and a web comic series which releases fortnightly. I have been a part of the Team Arbit right from the time Arbit Choudhury was first conceived. I have helped my friends Hemant and Shubham - the "Official" creators - at each stage of Arbit's development, in technical and creative areas.
Currently I work with Shubham and Hemant to release Arbit comics on a fortnightly basis and maintain the Arbit Choudhury website and sometimes share the responsibility of sending fortnightly mailers, evaluation of comics on the CS3 criteria and PR work relating to Arbit.
MastishK ’04 – India’s first fully online B-school challenge
During my term at NITIE, I conceived and lead a team of 30 batchmates and juniors to launch India’s First fully online Business Simulation Games Event - MastishK. The event received unprecedented popularity in its debut year with
17500 hits
1000 to 1200 average hits per day
Over 2500 registrations
Accessed from 20 countries around the world
Corporate Participation from over 50 companies
The event comprised of 7 different business simulation games played on the web. I was responsible for not only conceiving the event but also driving the complete development primarily in PHP, HTML, JavaScript and Photoshop.
The games were designed and developed in-house and as the conceiver I was responsible for dividing role and responsibilities, resource management, technical oversight, scheduling and publicity of the event. Along with Hemantkumar Jain, my friend and co-coordinator, I led the team to run the event for 15 days without any lapses in schedules or failures in technical aspects.
The event is now an annual event managed by the current batch of students in NITIE and is eagerly awaited by B-school students and corporate alike. The debut edition of the MastishK website is archived here.
Web Based Portals
If you have read this far, you would have guessed by now that creating web-sites, web-apps etc is a hobby with me. So here are a few other web portals I have tinkered with ...
I designed and developed workflow portal for placement related activities as a member of the ethics committee at NITIE. More details on this are available here.
I reviewed the information infrastructure used for procurement by the Aditya Birla Group, as a summer trainee at Corporate IT division. Thereafter, I developed specifications for an e-Procurement Portal for the Group.
I was briefly involved with ControlCase in designing a workflow tool for SEC registered companies in the U.S. to help them comply with the Sarbanes Oxley Act. This tool manages the documents related to business controls implemented by the company and has a role based access control. The tool gives the client flexibility to use standard control frameworks like COSO, COBIT etc or to define its own custom control framework by defining its control objectives.
Every user’s rights can be defined to an extreme granularity of testing, reviewing or approving (the test of) each control objective defined by the company. The access control model has roles and user groups. Roles defined are – tester, reviewer and approver (or maker/checker/authorizer) while a group is responsible for a certain subset of control objectives. The group and role of a user in conjunction define his/her rights in the system.
** I do not maintain this space any more**
** Please visit www.nikhilkulkarni.com for my updated online identity **
** Visit www.nikhilkulkarni.in for my blog **