Well I’m sure many of you could have seen this coming all year.

Infact I was planning on sending this post out sometime in September but other business needs and a very long illness prevented me from doing it.

So it started with giving this community of people more freedom to participate in green & white. Since then a LOT of people registered user accounts for the site but I found they needed more specific leadership to help get them started.

I’m very glad then, a very able person agreed to lead Green & White forward from here onwards…. Qazi M. Atiq has agreed to take over the assets and user-community of Green & White and to manage its servers and community.

I’m sure you’ll agree that he’s really the best choice for this role. I remember pretty well when and how he started contributing to the site – first through comments, then through voluntary posts… and since then has been one of the strongest supporters of the cause of this site. For a year or so he was also one of the inner-editors of the site, dealing with all the controversy and community-management challenges that come with it. Plus he’s deeply connected in the “right” circle of the tech industry – startups and small tech firms that are often ignored by other industry organizations. I’m very glad he’s going to be taking the baton forward on this place.

I’m very proud of what I’ve been able to contribute to this industry by starting Green & White – what I’ll remember is that when we started “Professional Blog-based newspaper and analysis sources” didn’t exist. I’ll remember every time the owner of a current leading tech / political commentary blog in pk has told me that Gnw was the inspiration for them to get started.

I’ll also remember every person who found me in the crowd in the Startup Insiders event series because they specifically wanted to shake my hand – I’ll remember their faces and secretly thank them for considering me worthy of that respect.

But as much as I love green & white, I’d like more to know that I’ve been able to start initiatives that can take on a life of their own and became an iconic part of the industry. I started the “Startup Insiders” event series that was later picked up by P@SHA, Brightspyre, NUST, and even students in FAST-KHI and Abbotabad from what I hear.

And I started this community – that grew from zero to 1700+ rss subscribers, from 1 post to 1060 posts by a large number of contributors, from 1 comment to 10,000+ comments. And I cant wait to see what Qazi has in store for this place in the future.

As for me, I’ll try to do an occasional guest post as much as I can. For now though I’m looking forward to a very exciting 2010 for my other work and projects. As some of you know, I’m running two companies that have really taken off the past year.

Our Social Media Marketing Agency has hit a pivotal point in growth in that we’ve begun to manage 6-7 $figure marketing budgets for 8-12 month campaigns from some of the leading companies in their spaces in the USA, Austraila and New Zealand. We’re always welcoming new talent and also new sales partnerships – and are working on opening a formal branch in the US soon.

Our software product company has had a stellar year in figuring out product / market mix through several more rounds of end-user-testing  – CDF Snip (now called “Snipdesk”) is now more differentiated and useful than ever and I cant wait to unveil all that its become. Seriously, if you have any trouble working together as a team or creating content on a short timeline, Snipdesk will make you stop and take notice.

Feel free to email me at hashmi@cdfsoftware.com if you want to connect.

With all this going on in 2010, I can’t commit to Green & White – but as I said I might do the occasional post.

Hey! Now I get to make suggestions on what I’d like to see on gnw too! My two cents are that gnw has been focusing a bit too much on news reports but not enough on open-ended bold questions – like discussing the “big elephants” in the industry’s proverbial room — the controversial stuff that everyone is concerned about but people are afraid of openly discussing – so that everyone can offer constructive solutions…. I’d like to see those passionate discussions here again.

Thanks for all the coffee sessions guys and gals (and special thanks to Babar Bhatti and Mansoor for being early-adopters of gnw) – and bye for now!