Archive for the ‘Karachi’ Category

Karachi city update

Was at work all day and then went from Baloch Colony bridge to Khayaban-e-Bahria to pick up the kids (5pm) and then took Kalapul, Shahrae-Faisal and Karsaz to head home to Gulshan (5:30 pm). Roads are open, traffic is thin, lots of security being deployed and petrol stations are closed.
Two blasts in [...]

February 5, 2010  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: I can't hack it, Karachi, Pakistan  No Comments

Pakistan Macro Economic Update – January 2010

The figures for July- December 2009 are guardedly encouraging as there are some signs that the economy is on the road to recovery. Trade deficit has narrowed due to a decline in imports (because of reduced oil and commodity prices in this period as well as the slowdown in economic activity) which have outweighed [...]

January 31, 2010  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: Karachi, Liquidity Risk, PASHA, Pakistan, the economy stupid  No Comments

The Caltex, PSO, Shell Challenge…

Good petrol pumps (gas stations for my friends from an earlier life) are hard to find in Karachi. Good petrol pumps that will give you consistent mileage weeks after weeks are even harder.

After painfully experimenting with almost every brand and every locality I have now built my own list of three pumps that [...]

January 31, 2010  Tags: , , , , ,   Posted in: Karachi, Pakistan, the economy stupid  One Comment

Talent ,Technology, Management

Ages ago for an upcoming PASHA career expo I did a piece on hiring. A few months earlier I had done a presentation on knowledge workers at Zayed University Campus in Abu Dhabi. Today at the Nutshell forum I used ideas from both pieces to do a different take on talent management [...]

January 23, 2010  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, I can't hack it, Karachi, PASHA, Pakistan, Startup, Startup Insiders, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  2 Comments

The Larry Ellison Fix in Karachi…

The first car that I ever wanted to drive was a Honda Accord. Don’t ask me why, there is a long convoluted tale behind that desire that goes all the way back to Abdullah Haroon Road, traffic duties as a prefect and my school days. Twelve years later the car I first learnt [...]

January 10, 2010  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Karachi, Pakistan, Personal shit, Taha  No Comments

MIT CEF BAP 2009 – Finals (unofficial, unsanctioned, undercover coverage)

I have been spoilt rotten.

After blogging about the PASHA SI session as well as the Tech Crunch Awards live, I expect events to be blogged about instantenously. My pictures, my videos, my time.

Which is why when I decided to gate crash the MIT CEF BAP party, I brought my own camera. Though [...]

November 14, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Karachi, Ken Morse, MIT BAP, entrepreneurs  2 Comments

The many faces of Alchemy

I did this slide deck a year and a handful of months ago. We were riding high and the cycle had hit but hadn’t really hit us. When I started working on the deck the objective was to showcase all the interesting things we had done together as a team. It still bring backs [...]

November 7, 2009  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff, Columbia Business School, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Karachi, Startup, entrepreneurs  No Comments

Reboot presentation @ TIECON

Here is the slide share version of the Reboot presentation I made yesterday at the TIECON 2009 event in Karachi. Had a lot of fun putting this together.
Alchemy Reboot @ TIE CON Karachi
View more presentations from jafcbs.

November 5, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Blue Screen, Columbia Business School, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Failure, Karachi, Pakistan, Startup, TIE, entrepreneurs  3 Comments

Heal Thyself or TIECON 2009, Karachi

The best of friends are the conspring kind.

When Sabeen and Jehan conspired together to get me to speak at TIECON 2009 in Karachi, the original plan was to do my presentation, stay for the post presentation Q&A and then head out. I even parked in Sheraton’s outdoor parking to ensure that I wouldn’t [...]

November 5, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Failure, Karachi, PASHA, Pakistan, Startup, TIE, entrepreneurs  7 Comments

Steve Jobs in Karachi or why I feel old or welcome to the future

Yesterday for the first time in many years I actually felt old and irrelevant. As part of the pre-PASHA Award event we took a sneak peak at the 10 odd companies that were competing at the PASHA TECH CRUNCH GONG show on 14th October.

Two of participants were very good. The first pitched their [...]

October 14, 2009  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Karachi, PASHA, PASHA ICT Awards, Pakistan, Startup Insiders, entrepreneurs, small business  One Comment

Yusuf Jan goes and breaks out a song…

Yusuf Jan took out two weeks out of his busy expat schedule in Karachi to trounce the geeks can’t sing and produce jack myth. His Green and white song is slowly climbing the viewing numbers on Youtube and was played on a number of FM stations today in Karachi. Yusuf is conspiring [...]

August 14, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Karachi, PASHA, Pakistan  One Comment

An abridged history of the technology industry in Pakistan, three

When the time came for us to graduate things had started to get exciting. GUI tools were getting more impressive. Borland was getting the whacking of a life time at the hands of Microsoft in everything other than development environments and was returning the favor in IDE’s (Integrated Development Environments). The era of Word [...]

May 1, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Karachi, PASHA, Pakistan, computer science, entrepreneurs, small business, the economy stupid  2 Comments

If I could give away the Nobel prize, or Taliban bogey II

When it comes to combining objective writing with scathing sarcasm no one comes close to my honorary friend, Sepoy, at Chapati Mystery (actually we have never met and have exchanged all of two emails over the last 24 months). But the gent in questions writes such lovely prose and says exactly the things that [...]

April 29, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Karachi, Pakistan  No Comments

An abridged history of technology industry in Pakistan – one

Every now and then someone comes along and questions how far we have come as an industry or what have we achieved as a group over the last two decades. I have been thinking about doing this post for a while but a recent exchange on CIO Pakistan reinforced the urge. Here [...]

April 29, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Karachi, PASHA, Pakistan, computer science, entrepreneurs  No Comments

You were saying, a rejoinder four…

Look here and here. There is more behind the G-20 and Nato protests than these selective images show case. The violence is hard to ignore but it overshadows the cause, the concept, the organization or the impact.

So if I was the only source of information you had, my commentary the basis of [...]

April 5, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, I can't hack it, Karachi, PASHA, Pakistan, the economy stupid  One Comment