XGear - The pirate experience !

Startup Pirates is a one week acceleration program for entrepreneurs in the making. Basically, through a combination of training, mentoring and idea development they help participants structure and develop their ideas and in the end they give them the opportunity to pitch their ideas to investors and successful business leaders. Though I am a bit late on expressing my views on the pirate experience, but its never too late to do anything so here it goes.

It all started when I read somewhere on the internet that something was happening around Lahore to support young entrepreneurs developing their business ideas the name was so compelling that I decided to attend the event so I compiled my thoughts and filled out the form to participate. The event was planned to span over 8 days and 3 different locations, I was so excited to meet new people with great ideas.

The first three day were planned to be held at University of Lahore, the first day was for introductions and ice breaking sessions, I had some prior commitments on the first day so I couldn't attend hence I can't share much of what happened on the first day but the ones who attended the first day told me that it was an amazing experience, having a chit chat with the founding members #Rafael Pires. The second day started with a really energetic session by Mr. Sohail Zindani - Living your strongest life, his session was all about exploring the horizons and living your dreams, followed by the session the participants were told to pitch their ideas since I didn't attend the first day I was at first hesitant to share my idea but then I improvised and gave it a go to present the idea. I had a great opportunity to meet some of the very extra ordinary minds that very day including Anthony Williams, Muhammad Haroon, Muhammad Abbas, Fatima Rizwan, Muhammad Ali, Ijlal Baig they all had brilliant ideas. The third day started with meet-ups with industries success stories and interactive sessions from Irfan Elahi from TownTawks and Samir from Hybrid signals followed by a task based session by Dr. Umar Farooq on Competitor analysis and Strategic management this marked the end of the first three days of startup pirates at University of Lahore.

The next three days were held at University of Engineering and Technology, fourth day started with a session by Ms.Maryam Baqir Corporate Communications Specialist, Lahore Stock Exchange she was surprisingly forthright which resulted in her making a mark as someone one can never forget, after her session Mr. Muhammad Ali Information Security Professional, Lahore Stock Exchange shared some of his insightful thoughts on how to successfully manage projects after that we had some engagement activities among ourselves to refine our business ideas. The fifth day started with a working session by Mr. Muhammad Ali on project management activities followed by one of the very best sessions of the whole event by Mr. Arslan Larik he started with a bang and continued to be one of the very energetic session throughout. On the sixth day we didn't have to do much as Mr. Salim Ghauri didn't show up because he had some foreign delegation to attend to but the participants made full use of it by discussing the business models and the Lahore startup pirates team did a great job keeping the participants engaged.

The final two days were held at Lahore University of Management Sciences, with session by Mr. Jazib Zahir - Pakistan Business Development Advisor where he shared how the final pitch should be organized and afterwards had individual mentoring sessions with the participants followed by a session by Abbas Shahid Baqir from Student Shelter in Computers. On the eighth day we had to pitch our ideas to the judges and everyone was rated on the idea they had, everyone was a winner that day we all were transformed in a very good way.

Startup Pirates enabled us to tackle the challenges and overcome our fears of rejection and failure to make us true entrepreneurs at heart. The organizers did a great job Ali Awais Amin, Osman Ahmed, Sharjeel Nawaz, Umber Nawaz, Fatima Khurshid, Shoaib, Ali Raza and team. 

A visit to Plan 9

Plan9 is Pakistan’s first nationwide tech incubator. An aid to those Pakistanis who want to become aspiring entrepreneurs one day. They accept teams who are well integrated and are working on a tech based product. Young, fresh and inventive entrepreneurs fall back in developing the right connections, gaining expert attention and covering seed investment. Their incubation is one of a kind, a tailor-designed process !!

Incubators are a great place for young entrepreneurs to groom themselves for becoming ready for industry, and I think even if you are a year or two down the road and need some assistance you should join an incubation program.

It all started from a Session of Mr. Jawad Farid at Plan 9 which was about Pitching to Customers and Investors - A Crash Course, I wanted to attend this session because I had a product XGear which is still a work in progress, handling the technology aspect was not a very big challenge for our team but developing the business side and knowing how to pitch the product to investors was a challenge. I contacted Ms. Hafsa Shorish (Marketing and PR Manager Plan9) to ask if I could attend the session, she told me as per policy the session was only for incubates but I should send in my project description anyway, I took my chances and emailed a brief introduction of what the product was all about and to my surprise the generous team of Plan9 arranged a meeting out of Plan9 for me to benefit from Mr. Jawad Farid's knowledge.

We decided to meet at Avari Hotel over breakfast at 7:30 in the morning where I discussed the product in detail with Mr. Jawad and Mr. Nabeel (Program Manager Plan 9) and they gave me some really substantial insights on how I should prepare an elevated pitch, how to do customer segmentation, and how to make business and financial models for my product and by the end our meeting I had a chance to demo my software after which I was offered to pitch the idea in front of the Plan 9 board to further refine the idea.

After that session I really regretted the day I choose not to apply for Plan9, as if a one hour session could help me achieve this much I would have done wonders if I had an opportunity to attend the complete 3 days workshop on Pitching, and this was only one session out of the numerous given by the experts of industry. I believe that Plan9 is one of the best initiatives that Punjab Government has taken lately.

Keep up the good work !!

If you are wondering what my product was all about, here is a glimpse of XGear, it basically enable users to login to their cars from anywhere in the world using smartphones and computers to locate, monitor, control even diagnose their cars by communicating realtime with their vehicles.

Is youtube really blocked in Pakistan?

Pakistani government banned youtube several times following certain events but the last ban placed on September 17, 2012 is the by far the longest ban on youtube in Pakistan imposed by the government, because of the blasphemous content posted on the video sharing website. The government has taken desperate measures to take down the content by blocking the site altogether.

In my opinion, blasphemous content should be removed from the website on top priority and measures should be taken so that something of this sort and magnitude never happens again, but this generally is not how the internet works, we have to understand the dynamics of the internet to get to a solution for this problem.

With all due respect to the government of Pakistan, I think the actions government is currently taking are not capable of resolving this issue. Being a networks professional I know it is not very hard to implement content screening services to block specific URLs containing blasphemous content considering we find efficient ways to screen HTTPS service requests, but for how long will we keep on doing that, once we block everything on internet there will be new content for us to start over.

We have to think of a rational solution as the site hosts abundant educational content like khanacademy.org, the need to access such educational content has enabled even non-technical users to use proxy softwares to access the content? So, I fail to understand if youtube is really blocked in Pakistan when everyone can access the website by just installing a freely available proxy software to access the content. I think we should think out of the box to get this issue resolved, some of the solutions I can think of over the top of my head are:

1. Block youtube and all other video content hosting sites, provide alternates in Pakistan which replicate all educational videos and non blasphemous videos from all available content hosting sites to a pakistani video content hosting site so we have complete control. Just like China did.

2. Calculate MD5/SHA1 for the video and compare that with all the videos available on internet and search for identical MD5/SHA1 hashes and if any found the links are forwarded to some moderation authority to process.

3. We can do a frame by frame analysis on each and every video available on internet based on frames on blasphemous videos as there is a possibility that the uploader modifies the same video to change the MD5/SHA1 hash, for every video if it achieves a certain frame match threshold ratio the video is forwarded to the moderation team to take further actions.

4. We can start a crowdsource video tagging initiative where the end users tag video as inappropriate and the moderation team blocks the content.

Yes, I understand that method 2 and 3 would require a lot of compute power but this could be the only possible sustainable solution.

Please share your thoughts.