Archive for the ‘small business’ Category

Reboot goes on sale online, gets featured at CIO, the Standard, Network World or the Ides of March

What a week it has been.

Last night was the first night in 7 days that I slept for 7 hours. My average naptime for the week was an astonishing 4 hours, excluding the time I spent power napping waiting for the red traffic light to change to green, on hold waiting for customers to [...]

March 13, 2010  Tags: , , , , , , , , ,   Posted in: Blue Screen, Columbia Business School, Desi Startup, Education, Failure, Pressing words, Startup, Startup Insiders, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  No Comments

I feel like a rock star – part ii

I don’t like narcissist posts on principal. After all what is the use of having a fan club/site/page if you have to blow your own horn all the time. But this morning when the SP Jain student feedback quietly sneaked into my mailbox and I saw the most generous comments I have ever [...]

February 16, 2010  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff, Failure, Startup Insiders, Training, new ventures, small business  No Comments

Dubai Tech Nights – 9th February 2010

It ended up being an evening full of surprises.

When Adnan first checked with me about my availability on the 9th for Dubai Tech Nights I thought we were talking about a small gathering. So when I walked in at 5:45pm after following some really colorful directions to Room 212 at the RIT campus at [...]

February 10, 2010  Tags: , , , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff, Startup, Startup Insiders, TIE, Training, new ventures, small business  No Comments

Memories, Cookaracha Guides or Venture number two…

Much before Reboot and the Blue Screen of Death, before the Alchemy discussion on our family dinner table and the wild dreamy bet that turned out to be Avicena, before blogging and before DesiBackToDesh, in a land far far away (then marked as Geocities in Jedi lore) there was once a venture named Cookaracha [...]

February 5, 2010  Tags: , , , , , , , ,   Posted in: Blue Screen, Columbia Business School, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Failure, Personal shit, Writing, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  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 second best job in the world, part two…

To the three batches (Division A, Division B, and EMBA Batch 13), who made me feel like a rock star two Thursdays in a row. Thank you. Keep them pictures coming J

December 20, 2009  Tags: , , , , , , , ,   Posted in: Columbia Business School, Education, Failure, Startup, Startup Insiders, Training, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  No Comments

Dreamers in Dubai

Kumar, the soft spoken driver from Kerala, has been picking me up from home and dropping me back for the last seven days. On Wednesday night he finally asked if I was working the hours I was working by choice. Starting the day at 8 am and landing on Villa 16, Cluster 35 [...]

December 12, 2009  Tags: , , , , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Education, Failure, Startup, entrepreneurs, small business  No Comments

The Reboot presentation at TIECON, Karachi – Revisited

The TIECON 2009, Karachi, 4th November 2009, Reboot presentation was the first time I was able to shrink the story in under 20 minutes. Spent three days putting the presentation together but it will be a while before I am able to get to an editor that will run the presentation and the video [...]

November 27, 2009  Tags: , , , , , , ,   Posted in: Columbia Business School, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Education, Failure, Pakistan, Startup, TIE, computer science, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  No Comments

Telecompk on Reboot

Babar Bhatti covers Reboot on the Telecompk blog.

November 24, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Blue Screen, Columbia Business School, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Failure, PASHA, Pakistan, Startup, Writing, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  No 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

A review, a review, my kingdom for a review

Finally, courtesy of Salman Latif at the Book Review blog, a review of Reboot, Second edition.

‘Reboot – in search for the land of opportunity’ is not the sort of book you usually find on stores. Take a quick walk down the shelve-lanes of bookstores and you’d find hundreds of self-help books with success stories [...]

September 27, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Blue Screen, Columbia Business School, Failure, Writing, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  One Comment

Here you go Mohtashim

Here is my well thumbed copy of Reboot (the book) on my startup bookshelf along with other well thumbed titles.

And for those of my friends who have difficulty reading anything other than IBM manuals on Strategy in Bulgaria and Dubai (yes that means you Adnan), this edition also has lots of pretty pictures, at [...]

August 30, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Blue Screen, Pressing words, Startup, Writing, new ventures, small business  No Comments

My crazy ride to see my word in print

For more than a decade of my life I was a professional student (which means that I worked, took exams on the side for a professional designation and waited for a very long time to add three letters against my name). A chapter that started in the monsoons of ‘89 in Bombay finally [...]

August 25, 2009  Tags: ,   Posted in: Blue Screen, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Education, Failure, Personal shit, Pressing words, Startup, Startup Insiders, Writing, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  8 Comments

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

Stop press

2nd Edition of the blue screen of death has now gone to the press. Expected release date, somewhere in the next 8 weeks. You are looking at the million dollars, 4 color, fully automated Mitsubishi printing work horse in Singapore that will be responsible for bringing this fine piece of scholarship out [...]

April 4, 2009   Posted in: Blue Screen, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Failure, Startup, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  One Comment