Directly from Jehan’s blog:
Here is a video of Ammar Yassir, Mohammad Nawaz, Syed Talha Izhar, Fariha Akhtar, Jamal Ashiqain and Muneer Usman making an appeal to each and every Pakistani to become a part of the mission to offer relief and assistance to the people of Swat.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover -Mark Twain, author
A very true statement. I often get asked what is it that I want to do in my life? After all I am at the start of my “professional” career, don’t have a MBA or 15 years of industry experience. In fact, none of our team members at Deensoft have more than 5 years of “industrial” experience. We have advisers who do have that sort of experience and that is great. To me experience is something that is not quantitative, its qualitative.
What we do have is a great understanding of how the web works, how your website, your web application, your mobile application should look, feel and work. We have strong understanding of how to build early stage business and how to help our clients focus on the core while we deliver the solution for them.
So to all those friend out there waiting to get that “industrial” experience, my advice would be to jump in. Find what you love to do and then do it. As Mark Twain said above, twenty years from now, you will be more happy that you tried.
And also check out this awesome video.
I have been reading a few blog posts by various Pakistani bloggers on how Paypal should start offering services in Pakistan. You can read this blog post to get the idea of how much we really want it.
Now I am all for improving web services in Pakistan. Online payment gateway will definitely open up a lot of ecommerce related websites and will encourage us to make more and more services available online.
But I also think that it is useless to ask Paypal (an American company) to cater our needs. Why should they even consider expanding their services to Pakistan? What good can that possible do for them? 160 million (well not all of them) users? nah, if I was Paypal, I wouldn’t even think about expanding to Pakistan. I am sure Paypal has many other countries to expand to that are worthwhile.
Banging our head against their walls doesn’t really solve the problem. Actually, this is a good problem to have. It leaves the space open for innovation in Pakistan. So lets get our NED and FAST and LUM heads togther and do something about it. Trust me, there is a HUGE first mover advantage in doing this.
So instead of writing letters and spaming Paypal, lets hold innovative sessions on campus (or off-campus) and think about how can we solve this problem. If our banks are playing hardball, than we need to find a way to play around it. Remember, nothing is impossible.
We all will be working together to create these services in Pakistan. We started Mazaydar as our first step towards that mission. It is a long road — a tough road, but I know there is a light at the end of it. So lets get back to work.
This video makes me wonder what we will see in future interfaces. My favorite part is pretty much towards the end where she takes out “digital wallet” and selects which card to use. Now that is a neat user experience.
Remember there is a difference in User Experience and User Interface/User Interaction. So who wants to work on that “digital wallet”? 
Well in an interesting turn of events, Dawn.com surprised me this morning. After my last post, I didn’t really have any hopes of change, but I was certainly greeted with a nice surprise.
The ultra-new Dawn.com does not suck (that much) anymore. The layout is clean, neat and better. Check it out!
So what could have prompted this change? I certainly hope that I had caught them off-guard with their previous layout and they were already working on better layout and design. They certainly have made the site look much better and kudos to them for taking the step.
I will do a much detailed review of what I like and what I don’t like of the new layout in coming days.