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. 

Multiple instances of Skype

Ever wanted to run multiple instances of Skype without having to download third party multi messengers, here is how you can do that for windows and Mac

On your PC open a command prompt and type


cd /

cd "Program Files (x86)"
cd Skype
cd Phone

skype.exe /secondary /username:your-username /password:your-password



On your MAC open a terminal

ehmedk$ cd /Applications/Skype.app/Contents/MacOS/
ehmedk$ sudo ./Skype

Type in your password and you have sucessfully started another instance of skype on your computer 

Eye-Fi

Ever wanted to make your camera wirelessly transfer photos to your PC. Eye-Fi enables your camera to do it even if your camera doesn't natively have wireless capabilities. For more information click here http://www.eye.fi/how-it-works/basics 

disconnect

Personal information should be treated with respect, you should be the steward of your digital self, and you shouldown your own data. But today, you’re getting a bum deal. Thousands of companies and organizations are taking, analyzing, and auctioning off things like the history of the webpages you go to and searches you do, without even telling you.

There is a platform to put you back in charge and let you decide who does what with your online data. Disconnect, Inc. is an award-winning startup based in Menlo Park, California. They make simple tools to help users understand and control the data they share on the web.

To download the plugin for your browser and take control of your data get https://disconnect.me/tools