Yep, another year has passed by. I have been a little busy with the MBA program along with job due to which this post got a little delayed. During the last year, I could not blog much due to some random busy-ness but I do not wish to carry forward it for 2010. Anyway, the year started very well and was progressing smooth until we (me and STUPEFY) decided to opt for MBA degree not realizing weekend classes will make the schedule more hectic. Initially the idea seemed all well but when we actually started taking classes, the whole scenario changed until we got used of the ‘change’ and finally got pretty used to of the busy-busy schedule.

March 2009 marked the completion of 1st year of Connect2Pk and by the grace of Allah, we have been progressing well on it – Mash’Allah! During Q4, we finally mustered up some courage, took out some time and finalized upon 1 more idea. We were done with paper work by the end of October 2009 and planned a soft launch by the end of year 2009. And Alhamdulillah we made it! We managed to do a soft launch of project Infiniti (currently targeted to a very limited audience) and we hope to market it as soon as we complete the set of features planned for beta release.

I, on the other side, still believe in few more things, few more ideas related to services that might ponder up during 2010 Insh’Allah. Things around me have changed a lot during 2009. Apart from that, I have completely shifted to LAMP and enjoying the open-source experience on Ubuntu.

activeDimensions, a little space where I share my thoughts and happenings, had the following statistics during year 2009 (sharing top10 posts by unique page views):

1. Doddle – a free SIP web client
2. People I admire..
3. Will ‘Sheesha.pk’ hammer the rest?
4. Say NO to pirated softwares!
5. Em 2007-2008: A year in review
6. The victory was celebrated all over Twitter, #PakCricket!
7. Good luck, Imad & Munir!
8. Revolution starts within!
9. Connect2Pk.com reviewed at KillerStartups.com!
10. Creative browser effects!

Hmm, I just updated my blog theme today and I feel the categories and tags need a re-touch. I feel more inclined towards new technology and working with new stuff related to web. I hope to share my experiences with my readers as I go through year 2010 Insh’Allah.

Have a nice day!

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!

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!

To many people Google Ads might sound annoying but to some, it might be one of their sources of revenue. My AdSense story revolves around my 1st venture with STUPEFY i.e. Connect2Pk.

Back in March 2008, we launched Connect2Pk.com and felt like testing AdSense too. Our business model included free service as well as paid. However, due to some VoIP licensing issues; we dropped the paid idea for some time. Just like any other venture, we started off the project from our own money but wanted the website to generate money so that it can support itself. Trust me; playing around with AdSense is fun! I still remember the early days when we used to get “California Hotel” advertisements on our website. Very soon I realized that we are not going in the right direction and started improving layout and SEO. From few cents in a week, the revenue was enough to support the venture and MashAllah we got much more to expand it! And Alhamdulillah, today Connect2Pk is running 100% on AdSense revenue.

Just like everyone else, I implemented basic techniques like add more pages, blend your ad-units, focus on content and much more. Google does play smart. If you’re not getting much clicks and traffic, don’t expect any revenue. But if you start getting healthy clicks then Google will start displaying more competitive advertisements resulting in more revenue. Yes, that’s the way it is!

Earlier on my blog, I dropped my 2 cents over “Karachi Bloggers Meetup“. Also, somewhere (may be on Green&White) I read that many kids started blogging and put up AdSense to start earning after they heard that two Pakistani bloggers are earning more than $100/day. Well, the key point is that content matters the most to AdSense. Technology blogs usually succeed in making money as compared to personal ramblings. It’s just that, there are many important factors that matter if you really want to earn through AdSense (Google for AdSense tips & go through AdSense blog for basic understanding).

Well, that’s about my 9 months of experience with AdSense. If anyone has an AdSense story to share, I would love to put it up on my blog!

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:

The rise of revolutionary new PC telephony concepts has given birth to a Pakistani venture, Connect2pk.com! The vision is to provide free international telephone service initially and then to expand, making Pakistan and its people proud!

Connect2pk.com lets you call absolutely anywhere in the world for free. You have to register on the website and map a number to your account to enable it to dial for free! The receiver (on a PC) also needs to be a registered member of Connect2pk.com and he can receive any calls using a PC based phone software at the convenience of only a few clicks!

Long distance calls, which have traditionally been extremely taxing on one’s financial resources are no longer a worry. Connect2pk.com saves you thousands of Ruppees!

Just log on to http://www.connect2pk.com and register yourself as a member. Extensive FAQ’s and guidelines will help your way to setup your account!