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Popular belief has it that it is mostly very young people who start their own companies, usually kids right out of college, with bright idea’s and low risk. That’s the US model, what’s ours?

A brief analysis of the participation in Startup Insiders event confirms that it is pretty much the same here. Its mostly college graduates or those with a couple of years of experience that are attending these events (and by extension, more interested in starting up their own business). Common sense says, the older you get, the less risk you might want to be exposed to.. right?

WRONG!

Finally, we have data (at least from the states) that the most active age group starting up their own businesses are between the ages of 55 to 64! Yes, read that again… fifty five to sixty four! ‘young’ people (aged 22-34) were least likely to start their own company! The data was gathered by the Kauffman Foundation and can be found here.

So my message to all you ‘old timers’ who feel like they’ve been left out of the race is… it’s time to make your own race! Open up a business and be your own boss! Afterall… the ‘americans’ are doing it

P.S.
Observations around my own person reveal that quite a few businesses (and i’m including non-IT as well) are actually setup by people in their late 30s or early 50s. These include shops, boutiques, beauty parlors and even gymnasiums.

P.P.S.
Hope you realize, start ups are not just IT, they do tend to exist in other domains too.

Source: GigaOM

Its good to know that an event series that we started is still going. I just received this press release from NUST that I am pasting below verbatim - Osama

NUST SEECS Social Entrepreneurship Club along with P@sha and BrightSpyre is going to host an exciting Startup Insider Session on May 8^th , 2009 from 6:00pm to 9:00pm  in the premises of SEECS. The purpose of this session is to help young motivated and brillant people, who are thinking of launching a startup , get a handle on really what they’ve got and the way to make it a success- an idea, a feature, a product, or a business and what not. Individuals will get a great opportunity to talk and discuss their ideas with successful entrepreneurs

Past events have attracted sizeable crowds of over 100 plus people per session. This session will feature a panel of successful serial entrepreneurs with remarkable business experience. They will lead the audience through a series of evaluations critical in implementing the ideas into successful ventures. You are encouraged to avail this fruitful opportunity to become a successful Leader of Tomorrow!!!!

The last date for registration is 7^th May 2009. For registration please log on www.seecs.edu.pk. Limited seats available therefore registration will be done on first come basis. 

 In case of any queries , contact Ms.Shamila atshamila.keyani@seecs.edu.pk or Wahib-ul-haq atwahib.haq@seecs.edu.pk.

This is a guest post by Anthony Mitchell from InternationalStaff.net, who is a frequent contributor and commenter here on Green & White.

The question of how to encourage startups is complex until we break it down into readily solvable components. Here three barriers are addressed.

The first barrier startups face relates to the mindset that what is Western oriented is automatically better.

During the colonial period, economic activities were focused on exporting to Western markets.

Today when someone thinks of starting a technology-enabled business, too often it is directed at immediately serving customers overseas. This creates risks because not only does a business have to go though the effort to set up, but also to understand and penetrate an unfamiliar, remote market where there are strong established competitors and where marketing can be expensive.

Customer service can be difficult and expensive to provide internationally. There can also be legal barriers to market entry that entrepreneurs are not aware of when they begin operations.

Press coverage of startups, expectations of peers, and established cultural patterns perpetuate the popularity of startup strategies in Pakistan that are high risk and often impractical.

Government support is weighed in favour of export-oriented businesses. This can be counterproductive because if a startup can first gain traction and experience locally, then it will be in a better position to expand internationally when the time is right.

PTA’s announcement of a contest in Pakistan to nurture local technologies is a brilliant step in the right direction and one that needs to be followed by other public and private sector organizations.

A second barrier to startups is the lack of access to capital. One of the best places in the world to invest in early stage startups right now is in Pakistan.

A young company in Pakistan can hone its product and services lines domestically, and then expand globally, creating tremendous revenue opportunities. Revenue opportunities at home are strong because of pent up demand for technology-enabled services (such as mobile banking), demand for more efficient retail distribution systems, and the high penetration of mobile devices. Risks of starting up in Pakistan are lowered by the presence of a highly skilled labour force at extremely low costs.

Every other country in the world would like to have the advantages available in Pakistan for IT/ITeS companies.

But without access to capital, opportunities will be wasted.

The cost of launching an IT/ITeS startup have dropped dramatically in just the last two years, thanks to cloud computing, free online services and other spinoffs from the global technology revolution.

A startup venture fund of from $25-50 million dollars per year in Pakistan would, if properly managed, contribute vastly greater amounts back into the local economy. The venture fund can and should be government supported, perhaps with foreign aid funds earmarked towards capacity building in the private sector.

The venture fund could be accompanied by an incubation system to provide marketing and legal advice to small companies. Technology inputs could also be made available at no or low cost. Cohort training by specialists can help IT/ITeS companies build capacity for marketing and technical tasks.

The third barrier to startups is the lack of access to transparent role models. I recently sanitized my NDAs and contracts and sent them to an IT industry association in Pakistan, to distribute to their members. Young companies need to see how established businesses operate and be able to access those business practices on-demand.

Startup opportunities are better in Pakistan than anywhere else in the world. These opportunities can and should be realized with the help of a pro-Pakistan orientation, access to capital and startup role-models

This is a contributed review by a reader. We have confirmed that the author is not related to the website in any way. Thanks Omair for the initial tip.

Toss Down is another addition to the glut of portals providing information regarding local businesses for their users. We’ve covered karachisnob.com and yello.pk and toss down at first sight appears an agglomerated version of the features of both these websites. However,  apart from the impressive GUI, the home page seems to be too crammed up with information, unlike mazaydar.com which is optimized to suit a user-friendly interface.

The search engine , however, is commendable  with various search options to limit your search. However, the database still needs to be updated and amended. For sadder is not in satellite town in Rawalpindi and nor is Cave any more in Rawalpindi. Plus I found a couple of outlets absent from the database, perhaps because it is still in the process of being populated.

A useful tool, the map mode does give the precise location of the restaurant, however,  the locations of not all of the restaurants are available as yet, perhaps owing to the website being just in its beta version for now. Which brings me to another point that is  that the restaurant listings should be accommodated on a separate link , rather than having to scroll all the way down the home page to view them.

What sets tossdown apart from mazaydar.com is the videos of the outlets, along with snapshots and user reviews. A touch of exclusivity, the website has featured discount offers for its users, in fact anyone who surfs through the page can avail the discount offer from the associated partners. However along with that, the idea of a blog covering the user reviews is a good idea for it provides an interactive board for people interested, giving them a first hand experience of the services being offered.

The toss down mobile version is also available and provides a quick on-the-go way to read user-contributed reviews of restaurants in your city, with all its search features, map modes and contact details integrated, will prove to be a viable tool for many.

Whats left to be seen, ofcourse, is that since this website will eventually rely on user-contributions for fair reviews, how will the quality and quantity of these reviews fare over time. Naturally none of the food review sites will become dominant unless they have the bulk of the most reliable reviews on the net.

OK, this is going to be an open discussion, all of your readers who have been reading silently and have a start up I request all of you to speak up for the greater benefit.

There is some one who runs a financial consulting organization, has a lot of experience in Accounts and finance of IT setups, who has kindly agreed to provide Financial consulting to budding entrepreneurs.

There is how ever one thing that need to be ironed out and I need your help in finding those small details so this friend of mine does not end up doing every thing and step back from his pledge.

First few things to note the help is initially for 6 months (to see if this even works out and he can spare time to  actually help those) I am sure he would extend this period if we don’t take un due advantage and either pay him when the venture becomes profitable or get permanent accounts guys if not and let other get some help.

So what do I need your help on this is to determine what kind of financial consulting or advice entreprenuers need in their ealry days.

Few things I can identify at start is

1. Figuring out tax for employees and organization.
2. Help in filing for exemption if any applicable to your industry
3. Making sure your accounting procedures and documents are in order for any audit you need down the road.

These are few of the things that came to my mind, but I know there will be other problematic areas to highlight.

Again this discussion is for helping startups if you hold back it will be loss for all of us so help me out in getting these crazy entreprenuers some free help.

 WordList [ITunes link] is an iPhone and iPod Touch application by developer TinTash that aims to help people memorize words that usually appear on verbal sections of the SAT or GRE tests.

The application is fairly straightforward and woks like index cards - it shows you a word, and then optionally flips around to show the meaning of the word. It has a number of word lists, including SAT or GRE specific word lists that can be purchased separately.

This is TinTash’s first iphone app - earlier they have been involved in flash and mobile game development, as well as game development for platforms like Facebook and (oddly enough?) Allvoices.

We’ve been seeing a number of attempts at local city-wide listings recently, but Yello.pk adds a couple of new twists to the idea, although I’m not convinced its entirely useful just yet.

Yello provides a Google Map mashup with local news and business listings from the area - it will show a satellite map of your city, and if you search for something (e.g. "pizza") the service will show you map locations for all nearby pizza parlors, including details on demand. Think of it as what you would used Google Local Search for, but with more details.

In addition to that, they provide local geo-coded news reports, very similar to the old AllVoices.com interface (before they took out the map) - basically you get a map at the top, and news reports from that visible region below. Unfortunately currently the news on there too broad to have local relevance.

However, some of its features have great potential, particularly its social elements. Zoom into the map and going to the "neighborhood" section will have Yello find all other yello members who live closeby to you - and this I think is an awesome way of discovering new friends nearby. You can also browser their profiles and see their chosen restaurants, shared news items or businesses or classified listings, which would be an interesting vector to see if you would get along with someone.

Their classifieds section (also again with map-based locations across the city) also has potential, especially for real-estate, where it would be atleast possible to research the area (including nearby people / potential friends / businesses / restaurants all through yello) before making contact.

But the trouble is that all of this would become incredibly useful only if a detailed street-map was available / enabled rather than having all of this happen through a satellite view. Ultimately, having dots on a satellite view doesn’t help me at all to understand where a certain restaurant is.

This comes back to the fundamental challenge of location-based services - the maps just dont exist on google or elsewhere in any open format to let services reach their true potential.

Yes, I thought that was an odd combination too.

Fighter Pedia is a new iphone app made by TkXel - a relatively new company that Umair Javed is a part of. The app is an encyclopedia on all things related to fighter jet planes, providing detailed information, pictures and wallpapers of war planes over the decades.

To me it seems like an odd topic to build an app around, but then I have seen people who are passionate about those planes. For them, the detailed stats and wallpaper collection may be enough to draw them to the app.

Check out the video below for an overview of how this works.

After covering these recent iphone apps I cant help but wonder the same thing - there are so many useful apps that can be made on the iphone that I wonder why this talent isnt utilized for that. You can argue about there being good money in memes but there’s always a lot more money in something that’s consistently useful to a large set of people.

GenITeam recently started a new line of business developing their own iphone apps. Their first application on the apple App Store,  iSaidHi lets people send “moving messages” to your friends by gesturing with your iPhone. Basically if you wanted to say “hi” to your friend you could simply wave with your iphone. You could also “punch” them, “blow a kiss” or other gesture-based notifications.

The app was launched in partnership with Magnatron Kinetics.

I wasnt able to try this out myself so I’m not sure how the receiver “sees” these greetings, but Khurram had done a demo of the sender-side recently in Karachi. Although an app like this sounds pointless at first thought, when you consider the type of apps that are blockbusters on the app store right now this app isnt too far off from the target segment - its a quick, fun, cool app that’s interesting enough for someone to buy and then discard once they get over it.

But then I could be wrong - they’re targeting youth and social networks so it could even become a hip new way to communicate.

In any case its an interesting use for the iphone accelerometer.

If someone’s used the app feel free to explain out its uses a bit more. In the meantime, we’ll look forward to what else GenITeam has in its pipeline.

It’s always good to come across interesting new initiatives to innovate on the newsreporting and media space by local tech people. A recent such initiative is by Asim Imtiaz, who recently launched Newsbreak - a visual representation of news of local and global topics of interest.

They offer a new user interface to present news, and have based the user interface on a reader’s cognitive tendency to look at darker shades with higher contrasts first before moving on to lower contrast shades. We naturally respond to such maps and depict visual patterns easily. Effectively this means that the site aims at guiding your eyes towards more useful news quickly, which can certainly help deal with information overload.

I’m not sure how the algorithm determines how recent or significant a news story is, i.e. what criteria is used to make something bigger than others or to assign it a certain set of colors, and that might be its biggest challenge to adoption - as long as users agree with the criteria used by NewsBreak to categorize news, it could be incredibly useful to the reader. However, if they disagree with the reordering, the site may become confusing quickly.

Here is their source of inspiration:

“Humans can quickly understand the relative position of the different entities and their relationships in a picture. Interface designers can capitalize on this by shifting some of the cognitive load of information retrieval to the perceptual system. By appropriately coding properties by size, position, shape, and color, we can greatly reduce the need for explicit selection, sorting, and scanning operations.”[Shneiderman, 1994]

Currently they’re just sourcing news from Google News API against keywords.