CUPERTINO, CA—Claiming that he completely forgot about the much-hyped electronic device until the last minute, a frantic Steve Jobs reportedly stayed up all night Tuesday in a desperate effort to design Apple's new tablet computer. “Come on, Steve, just think—think, dammit—you're running out of time,” the exhausted CEO said as he glued nine separate iPhones to the back of a plastic cafeteria tray. “Okay, yeah, this will work. This will definitely work. Just need to write 'tablet' on this little strip of masking tape here and I'm golden. Oh, come on, you piece of shit! Just stick already!” Middle-of-the-night sources reported that Jobs then began work on double-spacing his Keynote presentation and increasing the font size to make it appear longer.

via Frantic Steve Jobs Stays Up All Night Designing Apple Tablet | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source.

Here’s the quick and clear guide to clarity in writing:

Short: Short words are the rule that makes your exceptional words sing. Short sentences make powerful points faster.

Talk: Write like you talk, except better. Better words, better arrangement, better flow. Know the rules of grammar, then break them like you do. But better.

Care: Clarity comes from deeply caring if people truly understand.

Do you?

via Three Quick Steps to Clear Writing | Copyblogger.

A Pakistani startup Help Me, an off-shoot of NextGen Innovations, was featured in VentureBeat last week. VB is a major Silicon Valley based tech blog, and its quite notable for a Pakistani startup to have caught their attention.

Farzal, the founder of Help Me, identified the  unmet requirement of mobile apps to offer support for to their user base. Currently the customer support for mobile apps is atrocious at the best of times. Even for apps that take significant development effort, after sales service is limited to angry App Store ratings, and customer complaints sent on untracked email addresses. App developers, often lone geeks, don’t have the infrastructure or experience to manage customer service when their apps hit prime time. That’s where Help Me comes in.

They bring technical expertise, customer service experience,  multiple delivery channels and flexible pricing (e.g. pricing on per ticket basis) to startups that don’t want to abandon their customers to obscure FAQs. Awesome idea, well executed!

Great work guys!!

-Adnan

Many people, myself included, remain suspended in the search for the earth shattering idea that will change everything; the idea that meets at the very least the following criteria:

1) It’s solves a real problem
2) People will pay real money for it
3) Competitors can’t replicate it
4) Market is large and growing
5) Differentiation is substantial and sustainable

Now, nobody said running a business, or starting one was easy, but aren’t these standards too high. How many successful businesses do we know of that met these requirements when they were founded? With the exception of a few, highly specialized businesses, backed by a portfolio of patents and years of PhD research (e.g. Nanoink), I can’t think of anything that is not imitable.

If you build a widget (especially the web 2.0 category), by the time of your second sale you’ll have a competitor. Building software has just become too easy. If you think you can differentiate based on technology alone, then I think you’re deluding yourself. So the questions is: Are these tech entrepreneurs, and the investors who fund them infected by some denial-of-reality bug?

What was novel about Facebook, or inimitable about StumbleUpon, Delicious, Upcoming. What was so earth-shattering about Yelp? Each of these solved a real problem, BUT:

• People weren’t willing to pay any money for them
• There were incumbent competitors operating successfully
• There was no question of sustainable differentiation

The last I checked these businesses, and many others like them, are the poster kids of what it  means to be a tech startup and an entrepreneur. We aspire to build companies that don’t meet the text book criteria of a sustainable business. Somethings gotta give.

This movie should be a must watch for all educationists. Education is not about sticking your degree on the wall, its not even about having a degree at all-its about learning. Thats the part that we so often miss. In my academic life, I met hundreds of students, and so few of them enjoyed their curricula that its disconcerting. “IT mein bahot scope hai” was the general wisdom, as people were lining up for H1Bs-the gateway to a good life. And it was all for naught.

Busts and booms come and go. There will be a new “in” thing, the mouse-trap of the future. Screw all that. If you want to be an artist, a historian, a writer or an imperial entomologist-why the hell not?

I absolutely loved the movie, and highly recommend it.

I just came across one of the most impressive promotional  ideas I’ve seen recently, and it just costs a couple of hours of effort and heap-loads of talent. While googling for a review of Smashing Magazine, I came across a critique of the website. Now this critique wasn’t the usual flat, ugly blog post, but a beautiful, individually styled analysis, employing and referencing best practices from usability and typography. It striking enough to receive over 70 comments, including one from the editor-in-cheif of Smashing Magazine.

Out of curiosity, I clicked on About to see who the designer was. I was expecting a formally trainer graphic designer out of California. Surprise!! It was Amrinder Singh from Mishriwala, a tiny village in Punjab, India. He really stands out from the clutter of web designers and design shops…and he just graduated two years back. Very impressive.

For those running outsourcing web design shops or design studios, there is a lesson to be learnt here.

-Adnan

Finding like-minded geeks in Dubai has been really tough. When I first came here, the only “entrepreneurship” that people were willing to talk about was flipping property. In a city plauged by superlatives, there wasn’t much place for modest, introspective, “thinking” geeks. Well, hopefully, there is now.

Some guys in RIT (Dubai) and DSO finally decided to get together and talk tech. A fresh change from the networking events littered by suited marketing “executives”, selling crappy products that they don’t understand.

I’m excited; the first meet up is on Feb 9th. Sign up here.

-Adnan

My perspective on learning, knowledge, information and trust has been changing recently. It started with Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness, and has been exacerbated by Nicholas Carr. Funny, didn’t realize they had the same first names. The internet has made us arrogant, giving us the false satisfaction that all knowledge is available on a single click. We are swamped with information that adds no values. Blogs, life streams, tweets, post-casts and rss feeds to syndicate this and make it easy to consumee. It all leads to overload, indecision and the inability to think deeply. Most people I come across revel in the superficial understanding of things (myself included). When was the last time you read a book? Do you know anything well enough to form an information, well reasoned opinion on it?

We are reading more, and understanding less. Google is making us stupid.

“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

Read on…

I’ve been hearing about Augmented Reality for some time now, but just disregarded it as another addition to to buzz-word dictionary. Today, I actually got to see a commercial example and well, it left the geek in me quite fascinated. Ladies and gentlemen, AR is out of the labs.

By GE:

And this one by Esquire:

Is there anything happening in Pakistan on AR?

A few months back I was invited to SZABIST to speak to a class of BS seniors. The outline of my talk was “The things I wish I knew when I was in SZABIST” and before I went into the class room I had the opportunity to catch up with Zeeshan sb, the coordinator of the BS program.

Over the last couple of years, he has led a complete overhaul of the BS curriculum. Most of the amateur tool-oriented courses have been thrown out, and have been replaced by courses in math and social sciences. The class I spoke to was studying the Philosophy of Science, and a glance at the course outline made me want to want to be a student again. So the good news is that SZABIST has not been at a standstill over the last couple of years. If the BS program is representative of SZABIST, then the curriculum has been improved and key faculty (like zeeshan sb) has been retained. But there are deeper issues lurking.

For me, one important issue is the chancellor of SZABIST. A chancellor in the Pakistani system is the titular head of a university. It is a ceremonial role, and in principle is drawn from the top cadre of government, political or business leaders. The chancellor of GIK, PIEAS and LUMS is the President of Pakistan (whoever that might be). It’s simple, apolitical and uncontroversial. The chancellor of SZABIST is Asif Ali Zardari’s sister. My question is: How was she chosen?

Is there a fair process to select the chancellor? And if there is, then how was the unaccomplished sister of an unaccomplished leader chosen as the chancellor? I’m not alluding to any corruption here. There is no money at stake. I’m sure the finances of SZABIST are quite modest and transparent. Furthermore, the chancellor has very little to do with operations, so the position is not exactly lucrative. But what message does it convey to the students and the academic community? That Pakistan’s leading SciTech institute is a family toy with wilful appointments to prove the point?

In my opinion, if SZABIST wants to become a great institute then it must be neutral to politics and it must make appointments on merit, not family connections. Universities in the US often lean left or right (mostly left). But that’s based on reasoned analysis of individual faculty, not cult politics.

From my days in SZABIST, I don’t recall any overtly political themes. While there were occasional effusive lectures on ZAB, and a book extolling his tenure, for the most part, Dr. Leghari made sure that academics and politics were kept in separate realms. And while one might disagree with the politics of Benazir Bhutto, her credentials as a thinker, an author and a leader are beyond reproach. As the founder and the chancellor of SZABIST she sent the right message. But does Dr. Azra Peechoho?

Maybe this is a non-issue, and I sure hope that it is, but the political subtext of SZABIST has always made me uneasy. Ideologies and political parties come and go. The true measure of a great institute is if it welcomes diversity, champions academic freedom, confronts ethnic biases, fights for equality, and keeps the pursuit of knowledge supreme. If it pursues these ideals, it attracts the smartest students and faculty in the world. If it pursues a policy of partiality, becoming victim to politics and ethnic affiliations, then it loses a lot of things, but the most valuable thing it loses is purpose.

Under Dr. Leghari SZABIST has gained the traction, the stature and the resources to take it to the next phase of growth. The coming few years represent a grand opportunity to transform SZABIST into the great institute that it was destined to become but does the Board have the maturity and the vision to take it there? Will SZABIST realize the vision of its founder or squander it through immature family appointments? We will know in 5 years, but until then, I would recommend my cousin to try for IBA and LUMS first. SZABIST is a distant third.

-Adnan