About the author
With the success of the inaugral Startup Insiders session, CDF is starting to introduce some of the initiatives we have had planned for several months now. With the start of these activities, I’m happy and proud to introduce the new face and energy behind CDF.
Ladies and Gentlemen, presenting CDF Software, an experience design company.
Generally a company’s brand is only what YOU feel about us, but when I look at this logo, I’m reminded about the fire burning inside our team. I am proud to believe that CDF now has one of the best teams in the country in the area of our work – customer experience design.
This team is not only excellent computer scientists, architects, editors, creative directors, account services personnel, product designers and managers, but they’re all artists at heart. Outside of work, they are musicians, painters, poets, creative writers, theatre directors, actors, game enthusiasts and generally very deep passionate souls who believe in something bigger than just themselves.
They use both sides of their brains. They keep coming back and telling me when my grammer at G&W isn’t correct, when they’re not happy with our outreach collateral, aren’t afraid of pulling me into a meeting at 9pm because they came up with a few nice ideas they wanted to run by me, aren’t afraid of telling me when there’s an option or direction that I’m not considering and should for the improvement of CDF, and most importantly, they complement each other.
They dont call something “complete” until they enjoy using it themselves. After all – if we aren’t happy and excited and proud of what we create from our company, how could we expect customers to be happy with us?
Its this team and this passion that has won the PASHA ICT Award 2007, become a finalist at our first appearance at a regional award at Singapore, made us a Gold Analyst at the Tech Dirt Insight Community, opened content distribution partnerships with newspapers in the US, and has allowed us to serve our community in all the ways in which we felt we should. Alhamdulillah – may this team be blessed and remain passionate.
Here’s to a team that believes.
If you have what it takes to be a part of an insanely fast-paced team that knows that they are faster and have better taste than competitors, yet are still humble enough to not forget to smile and help our greater community of supporters, try your luck with our gruesome interview process online – prove your competence and place in our team and you could pretty much write your terms.
Check out our new website which is also reflecting our new energy – our web address moves from www.coreframeworks.com to www.cdfsoftware.com. So do our email addresses.
My email address is hashmi@cdfsoftware.com. As we said in the Startups Insiders session – email me if you need help or support from us in any way.
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:16 am
yaar Osama,
my all prayers are with you. I can’t say same about my technical tips since you already have a brilliant team
jokes apart, I believe in your talent which I have been experiencing indirectly via this blog and startup Insiders initiative and I am sure Inshallah that CDF would be next google in terms of presenting new ideas(weired or not-weired) in local and global IT market-Ameen
January 22nd, 2008 at 9:37 am
Thank you Adnan
January 22nd, 2008 at 11:24 am
Osamma, ob well done, you are inspiration for many to follow, good luck to you with a new identity
January 22nd, 2008 at 11:49 am
Green&White, in my opinion and others, was supposed to be the “TechCrunch” of Pakistan. The main purpose of TechCrunch, or GigaOm or for that matter even Green&white, is to report industry news. This does not include a particular company’s promotion of jobs etc. More importantly, the guest writers such as Salman Munir (I think) and others who probably write for the online magazine and not for personal promotion or anything, it’s not fair for them that the platform is used to promote an individual company. If that’s the case, then Green&White should be CDF-blog, not a “coffee session for the industry”. I am sorry, I LOVE Green&White, and I think there should be a line between personal promotion and industry news.
From Green&White’s about page:
Green & White was started by Osama A. with the vision of becoming the one-stop place for industry news, analysis and insight. Today we are moving fast towards achieving that goal.
This is a journal about the industry, run by industry members and contributors from all levels.
Our Authors and guest writers are all “volunteers” (emphasis mine) from specific companies.
Because of the news items on CDF (not to mention, it’s morally not right either), I am sorry to say Green&White is no TechCrunch ‘today’ – FAR from it.
Osama, today, one of your FANs is disappointed. Not sure if that makes a difference.
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Ammar,
I’m glad I have your attention.
Yes G&W is not used for personal promotion – it hasn’t been so in the past.
We were even hesitant to write about CDF Snip winning an award because talking candidly about an industry doesnt fit well with a conflict of interest, and we’re well aware of it.
This post doesn’t represent a conflict of interest – we’re not putting down another product and promoting our own.
But a very important reason to talk about CDF is because of Startup Insiders – I got a lot of questions about our own startup journey from two years ago when we had 0 people willing to work for us, to one year ago when we had the wrong team at the wrong place, to now when our team owns the brand.
It is a case study on entrepreneurship – some or even most of our readers may not be interested in it, but there are many in the community who want to know about CDF as a journey.
There are people who need to know that being an artist and a great computer scientist isnt an oxymoron – it is important to know that we can both be cool rock stars and also build a world-class company and product from being “different”.
Another note: Green & white cant be anything without the activities of all of you.
We cant be techcrunch because we dont have 50 startups launching in this country per day. We’re trying to make that happen, but it starts from fans like yourself askign around, hunting for startups and sending us the information to cover.
I like it that you guys consider yourself the eyes, ears and soul of Green & White. So lets keep finding startups to cover – you can email me at osama@greenwhite.org if you know of any.
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Osama, Thanks. Honestly speaking, I was a bit hesitant in posting that comment. You guys are doing a GREAT job, especially with “Startup insiders” is THE best thing going on in our local industry.
I understand you points, and yes people (including myself) want to know about your growth and how things grew. Especially at start when everything looks uphill. A while back you had a series on entrepreneurship stories but we got only two of them, I think. So how about you write about your experience as well? How you started? Why you came back from the US? How is CDF doing now, what are the future goals? etc etc… I certainly want to read more about success stories.
By the way, I also wish you best of luck with CDF – just don’t want promotional material on “our” greenwhite
January 22nd, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Regarding startups, actually there are quite a few out there. However, most of the startups even if they are involved in cutting edge work, are somehow discarded as typical outsourcing firms – which is a bit unfair. Myself and my friends, we are working in startups and we love our jobs and projects. I know at least five start ups in lahore that grew from 0 to 30+ in less than two years and are doing well. There are MANY MANY of these out there, who are contributing to a lot of jobs and bringing in a lot of foreign exchange into the country. So I think the focus should shift from ‘product-only’ to these company who work very hard and deserve a pat on the back for their contributions. By the way, some of these companies venture into their own products as well – as far as I’ve seen
January 22nd, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Being different, as I usually am, let me tell you that you need to remove your email address (or at the least format it differently) if you don’t like spam.
January 22nd, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Hey. I have been a regular reader of Green &
White for some time now and it’s been great
reading that there are companies such as CDF
in Pakistan who regard design and user
experience of having considerable importance.
“There are people who need to know that being
an artist and a great computer scientist isn’t an oxymoron”. That just about nails it
And yet, considerable passions and good
intentions aside, as far as the cdfsoftware
website is concerned, it is mediocre in its design ie in terms of both usability and visual aesthetics. I’m only guessing here but it seems to be the outcome of a collaboration between a web developer and perhaps a graphics designer instead of an experienced web designer. There is no consistency in terms of the visual grid and the javascript does not degrade gracefully.
I don’t mean to go into a design critique here. Its just that with claims of having one of the best teams in terms of customer experience design in the country, inconsistency in delivering the same degree of user experience and branding on your website was disappointing.
January 22nd, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Hamza,
The design is done wonderfully well in the web 2.0 domain.
“Undesign” is the design implementation in today’s world.
January 22nd, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Hamza,
You sound like the type of person we like to hire – is this criticism a job application? :p
I’m curious to know in detail what you think is wrong with the usability, and how you could make it even easier to use. Email me.
No buzzwords please, like “consistency in terms of the visual grid” and “delivering the degree of branding” because, you know, it could be that you’re defining those things completely differently compared to another person.
Same thing with usability and visual aethetics actually, so email me describing what you mean.
Liek most companies, we’d like our excellent team to work on our core products and things that will help propel the company forward – our website isn’t (yet) a way of winning more business, but once it becomes that I’m sure we’ll be asking the team to focus on it.
January 22nd, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Osama, there are quite a few problems with your website; let me point out a few:
1. On your home page, and others there is a grey border around the website. The same theme is not followed on career’s page.
2. Green&white logo looks ‘squeezed’. Also this is different from actual green&white logo, so for sake of developing a brand; it should be consistent everywhere.
3. Other than the “Snip” logo, rest of the logos look “un-neat”. I know this sounds subjective but then designs are subjective.
4. Logo theme changes on Careers page. Again not good for branding.
5. When you click on an opening, there should be a waiting logo; it’s the basic thing as the user wouldn’t know what’s going on – especially if he’s on a GRPS connection or a dial-up, like myself
Although, all these things are very minor; together they make a website look very amateur.
Faisal, web 2.0 is not about “undesign”; it’s about fast, loading, standards compliant websites particularly with stress on user generated content. Regarding design take a look at numerous “web 2.0″ sites, and you will see the difference between a good design and a bad design is consistency of spacing, colors, fonts, font sizes, and the use of real-estate on a web page. By the way, there are quite a few local websites that have pretty good “web 2.0″ish websites.
By the way, I am neither a programmer, nor a designer – my job is to sell my company’s products and services
January 22nd, 2008 at 11:05 pm
Ammar, you really had to hunt for mistakes there didnt you? :p
Just a note – my job is to do consulting on marketing, branding, media, product strategy etc.
The things you’re talking about dont affect experience or branding, especially #4. #4 actually extends the brand – think the many different google logos. Finally, brand isnt a logo anyway (I can see you haven’t been reading G&W for long enough)
10% of the experience or less may be due to visual design, but these things certainly dont warrant “quite a few problems” that make things “very amateur”.
Ask yourself these three questions with the site:
1- Are 8 of the 10 first questions about CDF answered within 5 seconds of visiting the front page?
2- Will they continue to be answered if the products went from 3 to 50 ; awards from 3 to 50, etc (i.e. does the experience scale)
3- What is the ROI of the user and the company based on?
Oh and web2.0 isnt about the things you mentioned either (from a ROI perspective) but lets not get into that debate, even silicon valley hasn’t settled on it
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Hunting – not too much
But i was wearing the ‘criticise-em-all’ cap which means i’ll just criticise everything that catches the eye
Regarding answers to your questions:
1. Yes, but before the questions are answered I go “design is definitely not the strength of this company, shouldn’t they hire a freelance graphic designer … ah nevermind, lemme read on…”
2. (continued from previous thoughts…)…”Oh cool, they have some award winning products… lemme read on…”
3. I am not so sure what you mean
Regarding web 2.0.. I guess O’Reilly knows about it.. and yeah it’s quite subjective
January 23rd, 2008 at 1:28 pm
For all web 2.0 entrepreneurs …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I
April 29th, 2009 at 11:33 am
ahhhh, love this logo because this was created by ME for cdf, when i work there, Still remember those pains i had in creating this logo…
but after all the efforts what we got was amaaazing.