Read axdimensions.com using WAP

I had this little task pending from few weeks and I even tested out few plugins for it – but none of them worked really well. However, yesterday I tested 2 more plugins and I finally found what I was looking for! Yes, MobilePress does this job really well. Users can now simply type ‘axdimensions.com‘ from their handsets and they’ll be automatically redirected to the WAP version of my blog. Below is a snapshot of how a blog looks on WAP:

Enjoy reading!

Good luck, Imad & Munir!

Last Sunday, I went out on a lunch party thrown by some of my batch mates. It was really nice meeting everyone after such a long time and sharing whats happening in our lifes these days. We had lunch at BBQ Tonight and then for the ice-cream treat, Om Batra took us to Gelato.

The main reason for which the get together was organized was to celebrate the recovery of everyone from what happened at Nuvica. And I was really happy to know that all my friends got into well known firms around the city. However, Imad and Munir went off to open another firm and have been doing quite good so far. Munir is really one of the most talented person of our batch and Imad, he is good at creative stuff. I hope they do well in their venture (currently their expertise are in ASP.Net, PHP, desktop, mobile applications and creative designing).

Immy & Munir – I wish you all the very best for your new start!

UserFly.com – Web usability testing made easy

‘userfly‘ is a very remarkable startup by Ashvin Kumar & Chris Estreich. It captures user events on your page (website usability) and playbacks very smoothly on your browser. All you have to do is insert 1 line of javascript on your page and the fun begins! It’s really interesting to see how users actually interact with the website. ‘userfly’ can help a lot in evaluating and improving user interfaces.

The project is in beta phase and has limited (10 users per hour) package that’s free along with premium one! Going through their FAQs, it seems that they are currently working over AJAX and might be capturing AJAX calls soon. I tested it on one of my websites and really liked it. I’m really hoping for some more exciting features from the team.

Test your website now by visiting www.userfly.com.

Doddle – a free SIP web client

If you Google out ‘VoIP web phone‘ even today, it’ll be a little hard to find a free online SIP softphone through which you can place phone calls. But yesterday, while going through some RSS on my Google Reader, I came across ‘Doodle‘ – it’s an amazing web phone that works with couple of VoIP providers and you can easily integrate it in your web page – that’s the best part!

Take a look at Doddling.com for more details.

Em 2007-2008: A year in review

It’s been a year since I started blogging, started doing startups, started going on a daily job after my graduation and a whole calendar year has passed too (2007-2008 as well as 1429 to 1430 Hijrah). Life in university was quite different than it is in industry!

January 1, 2008 was the day when we launched PakMarkaz.net (PMN), my first startup (with Ammar Faheem). PMN was started to unite the voices of our nation – a place where they could share their thoughts. Due to some serious delay in enhancements and lack of features, we couldn’t continue PMN with the same throttle and both of us got busy into daily life leaving PMN a little on the side. Since I couldn’t participate fully, I left the project circle in the second-quarter of 2008.

While PMN was going low, STUPEFY (a close friend of mine) had an idea through which we could enhance his final year project and convert it into a venture that could help people around the country to make free international calls! Unlike any other venture, this project required couple of investment and we had no clue to if we would be able to generate any ROI because the system worked in an odd way – yes, that is what we used to think about it in the start! We started working on it from last week of January 2008 and used to work day and night on the weekends. Finally, after testing up couple of features we were confident that it would work with every other user. Held a usual brain storm session and named the product ‘Connect2Pk‘. Launched its beta version on March 3, 2008 and with no SEM or SEO skills, we started promoting the product through our contacts. MashAllah, it’s been 11 months since the venture is up and running with a user base of more than 13,000 users and counting! We’ve learnt a lot from it – in fact Connect2Pk has been the core part of my every experiment on the web. Improved the layout, applied various SEO techniques, implemented AdSense, generated around 25% traffic from my blog (in the early days), sent invitations through email and the best part is – provided rapid support to our dear users!

Hopes started gathering around when I saw Connect2Pk growing. And guess what? I had another startup fever :$ But this time, I wanted to build up a proper team so I did couple of meetings with my university group. We shared couple of ideas and finalized to work on one – “Qeemat – a community based pricing system!” We had a team of 8, big enough to even build a social network but may be not everyone was motivated or interested. I had been always excited about my ideas and really wanted to see it live but things started getting delayed. My friends selected me as their team-lead but still the deadlines were part of dreams. I soon realized may be it’s a wrong step to start a startup with a bunch of people and I separated out hearing comments ‘un-realistic deadlines’ etc. Anyway, I started working on my own and set up certain deadlines and Alhamdulillah – Qeemat.com was up & running on that specific point of time. The venture did get a good response from the industry but not much from the users due to which I never looked back at it to improve its set of features. (And I know that’s a wrong attitude!)

Connect2Pk was the only venture that was up & running then. Since things were running quite smooth – I had a chance to explore things. I played a lot with WordPress, even ended up developing a plugin for it. And trust me; I’m really a fan of WP today! I don’t care how bad its code might be (as couple of developers commented negative over its architecture) but it really makes our life easy in putting up small content based web sites and/or blogs.

(Oops! There is just one more to list down..) Back in mid-October, STUPEFY felt like testing another project. How about we aggregate news from local sources and put them in one single place? The idea appealed to me and I suggested if we could give user a more reader-friendly interface by the help of AJAX and DIV (I was inspired by the way Google Reader displays all RSS items). On November 4, 2008 – we launched PakHeadlines with a very basic set of features. This little project of ours still needs some pending work to be done and the response on the website has been so far a little below average. However, I hope if we’ll manage to implement the updates before it gets further late – we might get lucky enough to catch some more readers!

Hmm, that was all about my startup experience during 2007-2008. Today, I’m employed in TPS and working on ‘InSight – ATM monitoring and management suite‘ and was earlier employed at TeraData (from 07-01-2008 to 31-07-2008). I did a small post on my blog when I switched the job (you can read it here). Alhamdulillah things have been quite smooth up here. I am really getting to learn a lot. My colleagues are really amazing – at times I feel blessed! And they really appreciate (and respect :$) me about all the venture experience I’ve been through so far. Anyway, I believe a post like this should have been done earlier but I was quite busy with my job and was trying to concentrate totally on it due to some high priority task.

At the end, I would just like to share few main factors that I believe were the major cause of failure:

• Love your product and dedicate yourself 100% on bringing it right
• Keep struggling hard to improve it
• Even if you fail, you can always learn and improve

And for the last one, I would like to give credit to Jehan Ara who recently shared an amazing video on her blog. Thank you ma’am!

Well, that’s about my past year – I would really love to hear some feedback and suggestions from my dear readers especially if they would like to drop their 2 cents to help me improve on the startups. Err..yes, I do have 2-3 ideas in pipeline for this year and InshAllah I hope to bring them in a more better & positive way.

Have a nice day!