Author Archive

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!

Odd post for Gnw? Me talking about coffee? Odd? How!?

A new company Gourmet Coffee has started importing and selling packs of premium coffee beans, brought in from Yemen. Its worth pointing out that considering the nature of their business, its surprising to find how beautiful the company’s website is – we dont see so much effort and investment go into a website for importers normally. Well done.

The coffee packs are available at Espresso cafe in Karachi.

Naturally, I’m thinking of ordering a couple of truck-loads.

This sent to me straight from Sharjeel – sorry I dont have time to do a writeup, but congrats to 2’s complement for their persistent hard work over the past few years, and to Umar Saif’s incubator program!

—-

Hello,
I am excited to announce that SeenReport (Pvt) Ltd. has achieved another milestone by closing a Series-A round funding from an international VC firm. With this step SeenReport joins the very small pool of Pakistani Startups who have raised VC money. We believe that this will mark a new era taking Pakistan’s name to the next level where internationally people would start taking Pakistani Startups more seriously and may be more opportunities would open up for Venture Capital injection. Pakistan would start to get even more attention for being a place where innovative work is being done. Hopefully this will also encourage many other young Entrepreneurs who are working to make an impression or thinking about starting their own business.
Here is our official Press Release:
Source: http://blog.seenreport.com/report/2009-09-01-seenreport-successfully-closes-series-a-round-investment-by-al-janabi-group/

SeenReport Private Ltd has closed Series A round of funding from Al-Janabi Group, a leading media investor in Middle East. SeenReport is the largest citizen news portal in Pakistan and provides both users and media organization expertise in combining traditional and new media by leveraging its rich social media suite.
SeenReport CEO, Sharjeel Ahmed, says, “We are really excited to acquire investment from Al-Janabi Group. As a prominent media venture capital firm, they bring a lot of experience and guidance to the table. Combined with the passion and expertise of SeenReport’s team in fusing traditional and new media, we will certainly achieve higher grounds.”
When talking about the way forward for the company, Sharjeel said, “SeenReport is making a strong impact on the way news is created, shaped, distributed and perceived by the people. Traditional media has already started to embrace SeenReport’s platform. We feel that the funding is well-timed and will enable us to grow our company. We will use this funding to expand the company, strengthen the platform and explore the international market.”
Since its launch on 10 June 2008, SeenReport has made huge strides and now offers a full blown news sourcing and publishing platform. The platform is specifically geared towards gathering news via cell phones, micro-blogging and live casting. The platform supports rich multimedia content and taps into the prominent and emerging social networks and blogs in order to create a comprehensive social media suite.
SeenReport has made its mark with news sourcing platform and unique business model to provide its off-the-shelf social media suite to news organizations and media companies. Already engaging thousands of people and establishing a client base, the social media suite is capable of powering any international news organization’s citizen journalism arm.

Here are Yaser’s views on this: http://www.bhonpoo.com/2009/09/02/seenreport-raises-series-a-vc-funding/

You know, this website keeps surprising me.

As you know, I havent really written much or paid much attention to this place so far this year – and I had expected people to start declaring GnW dead over time and to lose interest of the community (some of them were doing that even when the site was fully active).

But man, you guys just keep coming back – our awesome contributors and editors like Mansoor, Qazi, Babar and others keep posting great, relevant, topical posts and analysis, and people keep commenting and discussing them and following them.

I take a look at GnW things about once a month these days, and everytime I see traffic’s increased, RSS subscribers and twitter followers have grown organically, about 4 people a month have emailed us wanting to write or contribute posts, and 3-4 startups have announced their launches here…. and our Community friends and regulars like Atif Mumtaz, Faisal Chohan, Anthony Mitchell, Obaid, Salman Munir, Sohaib Athar, nash, M. Mirza and many many others keep pinging us on the twitter account and elsewhere, giving tips and wishing us the best.

Its endearing – this little-website-that-could has achieved its final stage of community-maturity: Its growing and propagating on its own!

So with that, its only fair to change the rules and finally – and fully – put the ownership of Green & White back into the hands of YOU.

Starting today – anyone can signup for a writers account and contribute articles to Green & White. There’s no immediate vetting process. But editors may choose to manually approve posts.

Starting today: YOU own Green & White

Here’s how this works:

• CDF Software will no longer play host and sponsor of the community – all Green & White assets will be moved to a separate server
• All money earned from Advertising will be kept in a separate pool for Green & White. That money will be used to fund hosting and maintenance costs
• All assets that relate to the Green & White brand – the logos – will be released with a creative-commons licensing so that its not owned specifically by CDF, but rather by the community.
• The current Editors will also get admin rights to the platform, and they will be able to choose what to do with the money in the bank for gnw.
• Anyone can signup a useraccount with Green & White by going to http://greenwhite.org/wp-register.php – and then they can immediate start sharing their thoughts and contributions
• Admins can then promote your account to authors and editors and admins as they see fit
• Finally, if someone wants to change some tweaking to the code behind the gnw platform, the admins can work with them to share the gnw sourcecode and theme data too.

But WE NEED YOUR HELP TOO

Sorry for shouting, its important… crowd-sourced systems can be challenging too. Green & White was respected I think because of its generally high quality, good insight, bold opinions and fearlessness, and a razor-sharp focus on only some types of topic focuses.

We’ve seen many websites that opened up contributions fully (in this country) and failed because they were either overwhelmed with spam, or diluted because of a general lack of topic focus.

The editors can only do so much, because they’re just volunteering their time just like everyone else… but I hope that I can trust YOU readers, like always, to keep writers in check and making sure they’re on topic and relevant, and to quickly vote to promote or dismiss people to keep balance here.

If you love green&white, and I hope you’ll continue to do so, please get involved!

Help us code the site – update the themes, brands, plugins

Keep sharing and discussing things pertinent and relevant to this industry.

And get more people involved.

And keep this site open, welcoming, fresh, relevant and inspiring.

Remember, the single most important part of what makes Green & White different is ALWAYS choosing to be objective and constructive – there’s plenty of websites out there who are biased in their analysis FOR their friends… we’ve been one of the few who’ve been the first to criticize our friends to keep them ethical.

Btw, today’s the 3rd birthday of Green & White. Thank you for a great 3 years – Hope to see great things from all of you.

Over and out

I’ve been trying to stop myself from ranting here about this – but this is important enough to point out.

UFONE apparently doesnt seem to believe in or understand consumer choice and seems to think that as customers we’re inherently sheep, bound to baa at whatever the overlords in their offices think is the truth – that perhaps the only meaning in our lives comes from waking up everyday to construct effigies of their corporate leadership and dance around them all day singing songs of their praise.

I’m talking about their completely unethical and downright brazen, anti-competitive, anti-consumer-rights act of automatically subscribing people to the utunes service – you know, the service that makes you hear extremely annoying songs when you’re trying to call and reach someone.

I personally hate that idea – the only time I’m calling someone is if its something serious, when I’m thinking about something important in my head about the conversation I’m about to have with the other person… to hear a random love-song or jingle at that time I think is a completely rude interruption.

However, I’ve never spoken about it because I figured that it was the choice of the person I was calling – who was I to complain about what someone does or does not choose as their call-in tone.

But where I absolutely draw the line is Ufone – a dumb carrier I just use to connect with others – interfering in my life by automatically subscribing me to this brazen service too.

This is a consumer rights violation, because (1) I never ask them to subscribe (2) I dont like the service and dont want to ever subscribe as a conscious well-informed choice and (3) This isnt even part of my individual lifestyle or phone behavior. My phone is primarily for business and the absolute last thing I want is for a client to call me and say “Yeah… so why do you have *so and so romantic song* as your tone on your phone number… I didnt think you listened to music like that”

And it doesn’t seem to help that I’ve unsubscribed several times now – it just keeps resubscribing every month… the overlords at Ufone seem to insist that I *must* do as they say – why, because everyone must agree with whatever they believe to be truth?

The only consolation in their unethical behavior is that the number you call to access UTunes is 666 – YES, seriously… atleast they are self-aware enough to know that this service is the manifestation of the devil himself. I guess the only advice I could offer to you then is that if you’re thinking about Ufone… er… repent?!

Check it out – http://www.ittazee.com/2009/05/31/worldcall-evdo-broadband-service-the-3-month-usage-review/