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chOpaal

TechStory: Chopaal and TPI

I spoke with Amir Siddique on his new podcast, TechStory. It was meant to be a wide-ranging conversation, but it turned out to be a candid deep-dive on chOpaal. It’s mostly in Urdu.

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chOpaal Startups

ProPakistani: SMS-All — Pioneer in Group Messaging in Pakistan

SMS-all, previously known as Chopaal, happens to be the pioneer in text based group messaging service in Pakistan. Idrees Butt, company COO tells me that SMS-all now houses over 400,000 established communities, with 1.5 million registered users, 2.5 million users through corporate clients and has exchanged whopping 4 billion text messages on its network till […]

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chOpaal Startups

Building a Scalable Social Networking Engine

For my senior project (aka ‘Sproj’) at LUMS, I chose to work on scaling chOpaal‘s message processing backend. We didn’t have the time, knowledge, or guidance, to move from a polling architecture to an event-driven architecture. Instead, we experimented with various caching methods, and finally implemented memcached. Here are the slides from the final presentation: […]

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chOpaal Startups

DAWN: Technopreneurs — Calling the shots

The rapid rise of online social communities in Pakistan, such as Orkut and Facebook, have revamped the concept of pen pal’s to fit the modern 21st century. They have created a new paradigm for personal networking and given valuations in hundreds of millions of dollars to these networks. However, the ‘connection’ provided by these international […]

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chOpaal Startups

TEDxKinnaird, Lahore

I was invited to speak at TEDxKinnaird, the first university-style TEDx event held at Kinnaird College in February 2010, themed Believe in Tomorrow. There’s no video, but here are the slides and transcript of my talk that should have been titled “19, free and ambitious”. About 2500 years ago, Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, said something […]

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chOpaal Startups

DAWN: Tips and Tricks — Message Sent!

Sharing emails and interests  with your friends has never  been this easy and fun,  writes Nizar Diamond Ali. The usefulness of email has been realised and extended with mailing lists and groups, and through other similar concepts which are now adopted in telecom industry. One such   service is Chopaal (http//chopaal.pk/). This innovative idea of creating […]