Category — Startups

We all are living in geographical boundaries created by men, separated from our loved ones. The distance between us and the people who matter in our life keeps on increasing with time, due to limited resources. Together with infiniti, we’ll make you feel closer and connected to your loved ones! Stay tuned..

I missed it, couldn’t make it to the live coverage on the weekend to drop in my testimonial. TeaBreak.pk completes its 1 year of amazing service last weekend and the team celebrated TeaBreak’s 1st birthday online: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=113440610567&ref=nf

TeaBreak has really done a great job throughout the year. Initially when the little venture was launched in beta phase, the features didn’t impress me much but I knew the team would shape it in a better way. With the new UI, the team did not only make the aggregation more interesting but also introduced various features including ‘Featured Tea Bags’. I am myself running a venture (Connect2Pk) along with STUPEFY, and I know it takes a lot of efforts to come up with creative and new stuff that would keep your audience around. But TeaBreak has been really striving with new ideas like NewsBreak, TeaBreak newsletter, HotTea etc.

The team is currently working on TeaBreak v3.0 and I hope TeaBreak will give us a good break from our work for a mind blogging experience!

While going through some startup stuff, I came across an inspirational video:

“..but if I fail and I try again, and again and again but I just want you to know that it’s not the end, it matters how you’re gonna finish. Are you gonna finish it strong? You will find that strength..”

Few weeks back, I submitted our little venture Connect2Pk on KillerStartups for a review. I am a regular follower of KS but during past couple of weeks, I couldn’t follow up all the feeds due to my busy schedule at work. Luckily, I was Googling ‘Connect2Pk’ and some other keywords yesterday and I came across this review that was posted 24 days ago.

Global recession did make us worried but this little venture is still progressing well Alhamdulilllah, much beyond our expectations. We’ve hit 17,000 users during last year and we are really looking forward for much more in the upcoming months! It was really encouraging to find Connect2Pk featured at KillerStartups.

You can see the review at: http://www.killerstartups.com/Site-Reviews/connect2pk-com-free-voice-calls-from-pakistan ..and don’t forget to vote for the startup!

‘Public Timeline – Sheesha.pk‘ was launched today by Fahim Ilyas and his team. Twitter did start the trend of micro blogging and here we have is a localized version; Sheesha – Pakistan’s first social micro blogging service.

Sheesha is a social micro blogging service which allows you to post frequent updates about yourself. Share it with friends, family and colleagues. Join groups; send out messages to different groups of your interest. And you can also export your data in RSS/ATOM format. Sheesha team has also planned to integrate social giants like Orkut and Facebook in future.

‘A social micro blogging startup could be the next thing for Pakistani users with the growth of Twitter usage‘ said Fahim. However, I believe Twitter account integration is must in the initial feature set. And the team has promised as the very next feature.

Micro blogging is on hype these days. But I believe the venture might have a tough time in the start gaining some market. Many people today use Twitter not only for “What are you doing?” but for many other things more than that. Sheesha beta release needs a little bit UI improvement and so does the ’send message’ feature. During the last few weeks, I have been seeing a lot of startups based on Twitter that have been using Twitter API. And on the other hand, I read many negative reviews about Twitter on high profile blogs like ZDNet. I am not sure if Sheesha would click Pakistani users but may be – we can help make our Pakistani startups become a better service for us. Hmm, I think I came across couple of Twitter based services that also supports grouping feature. And battling against all such services would be a little difficult. Unique feature set can definitely give Sheesha a great edge!

Will Sheesha really hammer the rest? Drop in your 2 cents for Sheesha if you have some clicky thoughts in your mind. Positive feedback can really matter a lot. Good luck Fahim and team for Sheesha!

Update (9:15 AM 2/5/2009):
Sheesha.pk has been developed using an open source micro blogging service ‘Laconica‘ developed by Control Yourself, Inc. Another live example can be seen at: http://identi.ca/

Few days back, I came across an article which had really bold tips for startups/entrepreneurs. Founder of Huddle.net spoke about 20 must-knows in starting up your own business and much more!

• Take advantage of every connection possible
• Design, build, then test and carry on with that cycle
• Focus all your energy on getting the product great
• Never lose sight of what you’re doing..

You can read the complete article at: ZDnet – Student Technology Day: how to start a start-up.

Another venture in the row by SIM, a great effort indeed! Asim Imtiaz, one of the brains at TeaBreak.pk has launched TheDaySite.com

Early morning today, when I opened up twitter, I saw a link posted by Asim – and it didn’t say clearly if it was one of his projects but the moment I saw the design, I could feel and tell that its powered by SIM (:

What exactly is TheDaySite, let me quote from their blog:

It lets you have its homepage for a day and allows you to upload an image (with a link to your website) to be displayed on that day instead. The homepage displays just your image for the entire day and nothing else!

Once the day ends your homepage is archived and becomes a part of the Internet Calendar. The day is permanently marked with your name (ofcourse your image) and is destined to be there forever.

The idea seems interesting, layout is impressive (color seems a little dark though) and I hope that the new venture helps Asim to achieve his target. I haven’t checked out the functionality yet  but will  check it soon InshAllah!

Just thought to help my friend in spreading the word!

Ever wanted to view all headlines on one page? PakHeadlines does it for you. We fetch news from popular news sources around Pakistan and provide the headlines on just one single page! Yes, users do not have to browse the site any further as we display all headlines in our reader.

Mobile users can view latest news from our WAP website> wap.pakheadlines.com

We’ve launched PakHeadlines as beta and we’re still struggling to improve it further. If you’ve got any comments or suggestions, feel free to drop us a note at: info@pakheadlines.com

We hope you enjoy your stay!

- PakHeadlines Team

Oops! Just a week has passed and we’ve upgraded from version 2.0 to 2.1. But it’s not just the change of layout, we’ve upgraded our back-end system, tweaked the layout a little more to give a fresh look, included Fring support for mobile users, enhanced our FAQs, setup auto-reactivation process for ‘In Active’ users and one more surprise that’s still left to be announced!

Connect2Pk.com v2.1: