I was very rarely scolded in my school life. Out of those few incidents, only once I was beaten for not having done my school homework. I was in class fifth then, and I had not done my assignment for English language course. The reason I had not done my assignment was that, I had no page left in my notebook for that subject course. Continue reading
Social Web As Future Network
My earlier post tells the story of why and how I left facebook. As mentioned, facebook is a pathetic social networking site. However, beside office and home, I do need a place to meet my friends, share ideas and feelings and enjoy human interaction. Today my beloved sister lives in Saudia, uncle in Canada and university fellows in all parts of the world. I need to be in contact with all of them for different reasons. My sister couldn’t attend my birthday celebrations this year. One way to virtually let her join was to share the pictures and videos of the events. I often confront technical challenges in office which my friends had already faced, so I need some place to post those problems and let my friends answer them. My love couldn’t completely share her feelings over phone. She needed to talk with me in greater length and more interactively. All these needs demand a nice ‘social networking place’. Has internet got a solution to this need?
Filed under Misbah On Entrepreneurship
Why I quit facebook?
The Holy Prophet Muhammad ( Peace be upon him) bin ‘Abdullah bin ‘Abdul-Muttalib bin Hashim bin ‘Abd Munaf bin Qusai bin Kilab bin Murra bin Ka‘b bin Lo’i bin Ghalib bin Fahr bin Malik bin An-Nadr bin Kinana bin Khuzaiman bin Mudrikah bin Elias bin Mudar bin Nizar bin Ma‘ad bin ‘Adnan bin Add bin Humaisi‘ bin Salaman bin Aws bin Buz bin Qamwal bin Obai bin ‘Awwam bin Nashid bin Haza bin Bildas bin Yadlaf bin Tabikh bin Jahim bin Nahish bin Makhi bin Aid bin ‘Abqar bin ‘Ubaid bin Ad-Da‘a bin Hamdan bin Sanbir bin Yathrabi bin Yahzin bin Yalhan bin Ar‘awi bin Aid bin Deshan bin Aisar bin Afnad bin Aiham bin Muksar bin Nahith bin Zarih bin Sami bin Mazzi bin ‘Awda bin Aram bin Qaidar bin Ishmael (Peace be upon him) bin Abraham ( Peace be upon him) bin Azar bin Nahur bin Saru‘ bin Ra‘u bin Falikh bin Abir bin Shalikh bin Arfakhshad bin Sam bin Noah (Peace be upon him) , bin Lamik bin Mutwashlack bin Idris ( Peace be upon him) bin Yarid bin Mahla’il bin Qainan bin Anusha bin Shith bin Adam ( Peace be upon him) is the most beautiful person of the world.
Filed under Misbah On Faith
PhDs Who Dont Teach
There is a useful discussion going on the yahoo mailing list, Pakgrid. People are sharing their concerns about entrepreneurship in Pakistan.In particular, there is an email by Mr. Zeeshan Ul Hassan Usmani, which says:
Dear All
Thank you so much for all of your advice, emails, and suggestions. I’ve received a ton of responses through Pakgrid, privately to my inbox, and even couple of calls to say “hi”. It feels really “good” when you see a lot of people like you who are either facing the same problems, or are available to help you out, or provide guidance.
We have all the talent we need; we are performing on the fraction of our potential. We are even afraid to think big!
With the recommendation of my advisor “Get good education and Move to a bad neighborhood”, I returned back home a year ago. My dean (originally from Iran) at Florida Tech also used to tell me that “Zeeshan I would rather love to see you working in Pakistan as an above-average Pakistani, than a brilliant scientist in the middle east.” Continue reading
Filed under Misbah On Entrepreneurship
Dharmesh Shah at Business Of Software Conference 2008 Part III
Below is the last part of summary of tech talk of Dharmesh Shah in Business of Software Conference. You can read part I here and part II here.
You can watch the complete video here.
Thanks are due to Neil Davidson for allowing me to use content from the site.
Attention Economy: Dharmesh discourages the adsense/advertisement model of selling the software. The notion of this model rests on the premise that the customer still has some time left out of using facebook etc, and that time can be monetized. There are two problems with this model. First, it involves a lot of uncertainty, something which can not be relied upon for sales target. The second problem is that between the entrepreneur and the customer, there is now a third person, the advertiser. The entrepreneur is trying to attract the attention towards the product, while the advertiser is interrupting that attention: conflict of interest!
Filed under Misbah On Entrepreneurship
Dharmesh Shah at Business Of Software Conference 2008 Part II
Below is the second part of summarized tech talk of Dharmesh Shah in Business of Software Conference 2008. The first part can be read here. You can watch the complete video here.
Thanks are due to Neil Davidson for allowing me to use content from the site.
Write A Blog: Dharmesh shares a wonderful experience during his Masters from MIT. . As part of his graduate work, he was supposed to write a thesis focused on software startups. In order to collect first hand comments/ideas/feedback on startups for his thesis, he setup a blog. His blog, onstartups.com turned out to attract more traffic than most VC- backed startups could muster, despite the fact that those startups had allocated huge budget for online marketing. The lesson learned is that, one doesn’t need to spend a lot of money to attract customer attention. The focus of entrepreneurs should be on smart marketing, like launching a blog.
Filed under Misbah On Entrepreneurship
Dharmesh Shah at Business Of Software Conference 2008 Part I
Dharmesh Shah graduated from MIT with an M.S. degree as part of the MIT Sloan Fellows Program in Innovation and Global Leadership. As part of his graduate work, he wrote a thesis focused on software startups (more on this below). He is a software entrepreneur and currently the co-founder and CEO of HubSpot , a software company building a revolutionary software platform for Internet Marketing. Prior to founding HubSpot, he founded Pyramid Digital Solutions , an enterprise software company in the financial services sector. Bootstrapped with less than $10,000 in capital, Pyramid went on to demonstrate exceptional growth and was a three-time recipient of the Inc. 500 award. After acting as CEO and chief software architect for the company from 1994-2005, he got the company acquired in August 2005 by SunGard Business Systems , a large $11 billion technology company.
Below is the summary of his tech talk delivered in “Business of Software Conference- 2008” . Thanks are due to Neil Davidson for allowing me to use content from the site.
Filed under Misbah On Entrepreneurship
How to Keep Your Job
Recently Khurram Shah posted the following query on the mailing list BS-Telecom. I have edited it for clarity.
Hello
Hope everyone is fine. Some of seniors might not like my e-mail but I still want to ask some simple questions from my seniors working in telecom sector.
Filed under Misbah on Telecom
Dr Umar Saif Reveals the Success Formula (Part 2 of 2)
Below is the remaining part of interview of Dr. Saif for In the Line of Wire. You can find the first part here.
You can watch the complete interview over CIO Webstudio: Part 1 : Part 2.
Should freshly pass out professionals with zero job experience try ventures?
Entrepreneurship is itself a different discipline which has little to do with job experience. Assume you were a software tester in Google. So, although you were doing a glamorous job, you were really not exposed to situations like IPO, exits etc. In summary, its not a necessity that successful entrepreneurs must have worked for someone before their first startup. Although, he has also worked with successful people who quit their jobs and started their ventures. There is no definite answer to it.
Entrepreneurship is not just about money!
Dr. Saif tells that 98% of startups are a failure in USA. [This sentence wouldn’t have caught my attention if he hadn’t clarified he was talking about USA. – Misbah]. There is nothing wrong in being failed. The really successful entrepreneurs are those who have gone onto the next startup after their second failure in startups. Entrepreneurship is not just about failure or success. Who wants to do the same boring 9 to 5 routine job for 20 years? Entrepreneurship is thrilling, exciting and interesting. Dr. Saif has known people who hate their job, even if they are working in companies that pay bonuses worth one million.
Filed under Misbah On Entrepreneurship
Dr Umar Saif Reveals the Success Formula (Part 1 of 2)
Dr. Umar Saif was the first Pakistani to receive a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Cambridge, where he was admitted to the doctorate program when he was only 19 years old. Dr Saif worked and taught at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) for four years, where he was part of the core team which developed system technologies for project Oxygen– a US$40 million project sponsored by the US Department of Defense and an industrial Alliance of world-class companies including Nokia, HP, NTT DoCommo, Phillips, Acer and Delta.
However, the reason he has caught my attention is not above achievements. Dr. Saif co-founded four technology startups: BumpIn.com (contextual chatting), SeeNreport.com (citizen journalism), ChOpaal.pk (SMS social networking) and TicketMy.com (event tickets) after returning to Pakistan. Dr. Saifis the founder of one of the first startup incubators in Lahore, Pakistan, called SCI. His good work in SCI won him the Young Global Leader (YGL) by the World Economic Forum in 2010.
Filed under Misbah On Entrepreneurship
Misbah's Lounge 