I was invited by the Institute for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley to lead the final debrief session at the 2016 Fulbright Reentry Seminar for scholars from Pakistan. This is a short-clip of the full talk. Clearly, I was having a good time.
I was invited by the Institute for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley to speak about Social Enterprise at the 2016 Fulbright Reentry Seminar for scholars from Pakistan. Unfortunately, the video quality isn’t great, but here are the slides.
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 […]
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: […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]