The next highly anticipated episode of the Startup Insiders saga starts this Saturday (March 22nd) from 3pm to 6pm at the Pixsense offices. 

Good food, great people, and advice every startup could use is part of the menu.  You will learn how to pitch to customers and close deals. You know, that thing that actually brings in the cash and keeps the dream going…

Registration is open, all you need to do is show up, but show up on time, or stand for the duration of the event! In the last 6 events seating ran out in the first few minutes. Don’t miss it!

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Kraysis, a startup in Lahore that focuses on Quality Assurance and testing services has signed an agreement with Microsoft to be part of the QA effort for the epic Age of Empires III game. It will also do some R&D, usability and performance testing. This is big news, with kudos going to the team at Kraysis. These guys have in a relatively short while gained a strong customer lineup for its niche area.

Kraysis was incubated at LUMS and started out with 2 people. Recently it has spun out of it shell and moved into its own offices and has a team of 20 professionals, and one awesome business model.

The problem they solve? Most software firms, especially the smaller ones face significant QA challenges. Its easy to write the code, but there is arguably more pain when it comes to QA, validation and performance testing, cycle after cycle. Sound familiar? Kraysis comes to take away that pain from you, gives you quality assurance ability usually found at the Microsofts and SAPs of the world. (Sniff, you had me at hello ) Read the rest of this entry »

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In the Spirit of the SI series, here is a great article by the well know Joel Sposky on the link between Innovation, ebay, wikipedia and naval gunnery:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080201/how-hard-could-it-be-inspired-misfires.html 

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I unfortunately missed this event, I really wanted to be there,and I heard it went very well. To the person that came up with the Yellow cards idea : That is just brilliant!

Adil has a great post here on SI6 :

http://adilsaleem.blogspot.com/2008/02/startup-insiders-6-lums-lahore.html 

6 events, in less than 3 months, all over the country. I think our version of Barcamp has gone what one might call “viral” !

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Lots of online coverage on the Innovative series that seems to have already etched itself inside our tech culture, its all going down this weekend in Lahore and Islamabad. Follow the link below for locations and times:

http://alchemya.com/wordpress2/2008/02/22/startup-insiders-islamabad-and-lahore/

This time LUMS has gotten on in the action as well. Seems like they know an epic in the making when they see it

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We had an exhilirating, amazing Startup Insiders Episode 4. Talk about the season getting better and better.Jehan kept the line-up in check and accounts by FQ, JAF and Zia were simply fantastic and I’ve never seen Salim Ghauri so animated! Amer’s views were inspiring and if you go by his account, we are sitting at the start of the next big IT wave. It was wonderful to hear the speakers’ experiences, audience interaction was immense, the whole thing was like a drug… The session was supposed to be wrapped up at 8:30, it went on till 10:30pm. Started at 6. A big thank you and kudos to the P@SHA team!

Alot more coverage on all major local blogs will be up soon, keep tuned in for pictures, videos and when we’ll do session 5! But more on this later. Its 1am, and unlike most people, I do need my sleep!

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After some very successful SI (startup insider) events with the inaugural one in Karachi, then ISB and then Lahore, the next

SI meet will be happening this Friday (tomorrow) at the Marriot at 6pm. Managed by P@SHA, and hosted by Alchemy (the company I work for incidentally), we will have Jawwad, Yusuf, Adnan, Jehan, Amer (si3)and a host of others entrepreneurs to talk about startups and answer questions.

Full details are on Jehan’s Blog. This time, due to such high demand, you have to register, and there is a more planned out format.

So, be there and bring your demos, business cards, friends, etc. the more the merrier

Venue: Marriott Hotel, Karachi
Time: 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Date: February 8, 2008

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Just a small mention here, Pakistan seems to be appearing more and more on the US tech blog/community radar…in a positive way. Here is another small example of this pattern I keep seeing alot now in the blogosphere:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/06/a-look-at-outsourcing-through-odesks-eyes/ 

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Things have been quite active here in Karachi. With the amount of innovation and amazing stuff happening here I think we should now start calling Karachi’s (and/or Lahore+ISB’s) IT hubs as Silicon Gali ( ‘Gali’ means narrow street in Urdu, also can be spelt as “gulee” ). So you have Karachi’s Silicon Gali, Lahore’s Silicon Gali, ISB’s, etc

I think it would surely do justice to the term. After the one IT mecca, Silicon Valley, New York has a “Silicon Alley”, Austin has “Silicon Hills”. I think its time we gave our own hubs a cool name to identify them by. We want  your suggestions and comments, and the new poll that is up has some suggestions for a branding term for the it hubs here, so please vote your for your favourite. I , though, am sticking to Silicon Gali

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Seems like Pakistani enterprises are finally realizing what everyone has known for years : that online is an equal or even better medium than print for marketing and building mindshare on several services, such as credit cards, cellphones, cell phone service, broadband, etc.

In the world of static billboards and quarter page newspaper ads, there are a few companies that have set aside some part of the advertising budget for building an online presence. Some names are HBL, Wateen Mobilink, Ufone, Nokia Pakistan. Mostly they advertise on Yahoo (Google they do, but less), Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, Facebook, and the like. Sure, these are massive companies with huge budgets, but then you also have innovative smaller shops, such as lootmaar advertising on Facebook on and off. Read the rest of this entry »

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