Speaking in Lahore again

7th December 2006, at FAST ICS - Lahore Campus. Zia Imran used the book as part of an undergraduate course on new ventures. I will be speaking to the class on the 7th and answering questions. If you would like to attend, call up Zia.

8th at the LUMS Entreprenurial Club in the evening. If you would like to attend, please contact Rabia Tirmizi.

Web logs statistics - pre free downloads

I thought it was about time to take a deeper look at the weblogs and see how much of an impact the free download offer would have on traffic and downloading patterns over the next six months. For the benchmark, here is the summary for the last 5 months.

For the time period starting 17th April 2006 - 17th September 2006
Domain - www.alchemya.com including the http://bluescreen.alchemya.com website, Alchemy Associates and Alchemy Technologies home page and the three blogs (DesiStartup, DesiBackToDesh and Bluescreen of Death).

1. 28,700 unique visitors
2. 48,500 page views
3. 109,000 hits (of these 25,000 were attributed to spiders and crawlers)

560 copies of the first 25 pages downloaded
170 copies of the table of content downloaded

880 visitors from Karachi
518 visitors from Lahore
230 visitors from Dubai

The rest distributed all over the world including places like Ripon, California, Hinckley, UK, Beamsville, Canada, Bombay, Singapore, Kualalumpur, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and ofcourse Islamabad, Pakistan.

Blue Screen Complete Edition - Free Download

Inspired by Cory and the Eastern Standard Tribe, the complete edition of the Blue Screen of Death is now available for a free download. As Cory said, Money is not a problem, Obscurity is

Cory Doctorow link: http://www.craphound.com/est/
Free Download pdf: http://bluescreen.alchemya.com/BSOD.pdf
Creative Common License link: http://creativecommons.org/

Update: December 04, 2006
My apologies for all the 404 that came up because I didn't update the link in time. It should work now. Just incase you still have an issue just go to the bluescreen home page, click on downloads and follow through to the end of the page. The free download link is immediately after the buy the book links.

The blue screen presentation on failure

The book presentation on new venture failure as presented at PASHA, Punjab IT Board, FAST ICS, Karachi University, LUMS, SZABIST, Hamdard University and others. Download here

I have had great fun delivering this in front of students, academics and practitioners and the act improves every time I do it.

Press coverage

The Blue screen of death, a desi’s misadventure in the land of opportunity and Jawwad get coverage in the August 2006 issue of the Actuary. The magazine is Society of Actuaries membership newsletter that reaches 30,000 Fellows, Associates and students world wide. Follow the review link for more details

In case the link doesn’t work, you can also try the following:

Goto www.soa.org
Click on The Actuary link on the right hand side panel
Click on the August 2006 issue
Click on if at first you don’t succeed…

BSOD debut's on Microsoft reader catalog at number 83

Quite pleased and surprised to find an MS Reader catalogue entry for the Blue Screen of Death when I ran my daily google search for the book this afternoon. The book debut at number 83, just after David's Vise' Google Story.

Thank you Microsoft and Vaqar Khamisani (I suspect).

Amazon update

Amazon.com terminates it's relationship with Ingram Micro, which in turn kills the Lightningsource catalog. The ebook is no longer available for sale on Amazon, though you could read the reviews and the product statistics.

Two options available now are to list it as an edoc - unprotected pdf or to sign up with mobipocket books, an Amazon subsidiary that wants the same distribution credit as a typical paper book. Not sure if I am too keen on that.

Lightning source forwarded another amazon email address that I have written to, lets see what they have to say.

You can still buy the book at Powells and Diesel Books

Hiring lessons from BSOD

The honest truth: No one wants to work for a small company with no money and possibly no future. Deal with it. You sell to every one you touch, starting with employees. If you haven’t already, learn to sell.

Hiring sources: Your network is your single best source of leads, referrals and future employees. Let it know of what you need and be patient. Job advertisements and recruiting agencies do not work for young businesses.

Hiring Motivators: People switch jobs because of boredom, change and desperation. Not money or opportunity or the chance to change the world. Hunt for passion in boring places.

Ask the right questions. Listen.

Be honest and fair: If you work with old technology say so; if you will not pay salaries on time say so; if you want them to clean cupboards say so. And if they still want to work with you, hire them and take care of them.

The Blue screen of death, revised edition

Running a business while at school

Your single biggest obstacle when it comes to entrepreneurship is opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is the size of your current pay check that you would forgo, if you stepped out as an entrepreneur. If you earn a six figure pay check today, letting it go to starve and struggle for a few years may not fit in your definition of moving up in society. At school you have already given up the paycheck (and the opportunity cost problem) in your quest for self improvement.

Can you actually do it? Graduate school is a walk in the park if you tackle the problem of mixing business with studies correctly. In my last term at school I structured my classes from 8 am to 6 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, wrapped up my assignments by 9pm the same day, and was free to work on Avicena for the remaining five days of the week.

In that term I made the dean’s list, competed in two business plan competitions, finished the proof of concept, marketing, strategy and financial projection documents, closed the Aleph and Appsys deals, managed an introduction with a recently retired head of a big five accounting firm and moved to California.

School is also interesting in that you have access to a unique microcosm of society that may open future doors and give you valuable feedback for free. My social network at Columbia had a Bankers Trust MD, a hedge fund analyst, a fund raiser for the Clinton campaign, a member of Reuters management team in North America, the son of IBM’s CEO, four actuaries, an F-14 pilot, two nuclear submariners, two engineers from Qualcom and Intel, a popup video editor, a fair mix of Indians, Pakistanis, Portuguese, French, Englishmen, Australians, Peruvian, Italian and exactly one Venezuelan (potential) contender for the Miss Universe title. This was just my network; imagine what the other 700 students looked like.

Revised edition coming out in August

With a foreword from Shane Chalke and a Takeaways section after Avicena emails.