ORIGINALLY WRITTEN FOR KARACHI TIPS

Those who tell the stories, rule the world (Navajo proverb, also attributed to Plato).

I do not know whether such people can rule the world or not but they surely rule people’s heart. What’s the proof? #SavingFace started trending on twitter after the path-breaking win of co-directors Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and US-based Daniel Junge at the Oscars. *OMG! Bhangra & Teary Eyes*

Saving Face, Pakistan’s first nomination and win for the Academy awards, is a short 52-minutes documentary on the issue of acid attacks in Pakistan. It competed against God Is the Bigger Elvis, The Barber of Birmingham, Incident in New Baghdad, and The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom. The short documentary is filmed entirely in Pakistan and scheduled to be aired in March 2012 on HBO.

While the theme in consideration might be considered as a story of despair by many, but for the director the stance is, “Should we not talk about these things just because they are negative? Because Pakistan can fix its problems if it so chooses.” (Dawn Interview) and “this was not going to be a story of despair, but this was going to be a story of hope because far too many stories of despair come out of Pakistan” (RFE/RL Interview).

The film narrates the pain, struggle and healing of two women Zakia and Ruksana who were attacked by acid. One of them fights to see that the criminals get the toughest sentence. The film traces the travels of British Pakistani plastic surgeon Mohammad Jawad, who performed reconstructive surgery for them. It also features the lawyer who takes up the case and also the work of women politicians to get a bill passed in Parliament. It also highlights the effort of a NGO that works to rehabilitate these survivors. When multiple people work towards a problem, the problem has to bow down. Solution has to arise. In this way, the story is beautifully layered and inspirational.

Filed under: art, New Media, Odes

Had Steve Jobs been alive today, he would have been turned 57. The man who shaped contemporary consumer technology died on October 5, 2011.

Steve Jobs was, as everyone can and will tell you everywhere and in every way possible till the world ends, a visionary. And my 2nd greatest inspiration, I must say.

Happy Birthday to Steve Jobs! His legacy will be, inspiring and encouraging others to be creative. Thank you for that, Steve!

Come one, come all, to Sci-toons, an all-Pakistan Science Comic Competition – the first of its kind in the country, brought to you by the National University of Science & Technology from February 18th-24th, 2012! Young adults around the country now have the chance to participate in a unique blending of science and the arts. Participants … Continue reading »

Presenting a Strategic Plan is something of a poisoned chalice. On one hand it is an ideal opportunity to demonstrate your understanding of the business and impress pretty senior people about your business acumen. On the other hand its very nature, unlike that of operating plans, invites very wide-ranging intellectual discussions with executive management during the presentation. A slip there can have very serious and permanent consequences.

The challenge therefore is to build up a reasonably believable plan and present it in a manner that, at the end, you still have your job intact. Having survived a number of such sessions, and now mostly having the pleasure of being in the reviewing audience, I do get asked for advice on best survival tips. In my opinion it’s more of a matter of avoiding certain key pitfalls. So here goes my two cents or seven and a half halala’s worth of advice…

First, bond thyself and thy audience. Now this is the real easy part, provided of course you are hot, blond, of the right friendly disposition and can successfully give Pamela Anderson a run for her money. For all the rest of us this is a big challenge.

It always pays to be humble and suitably deferential towards the audience, most of whom , except for the owners progeny, are unlikely to be anything other than shrewd and seasoned business executives. Time-honored openers like “it’s a pleasure presenting to all of you”, work all the time.

Stating that all your labor is, at the most, only likely to lead to a better understanding of the business challenges is another time tested winner: does all this sounds corny? Yes it is, but remember this is all about survival. Nobody likes a wise guy who pretends he is the biggest know all ever, so please do not come across as one, especially not at the start.

Second, know thy business and its limits. Pretty obvious, right? But seldom adhered to! While discussing the key objectives of the plan, we all have this irresistible urge to impress the audience. And in our zeal to impress, our vision comes across as being on par with the desires of a modern day Alexander. However, unless you are a Harvard dropout or had been given away at birth, and now are willing to cheat, copy, bully and lie your way to top, chances are slim that you will be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs and lead your organization to everlasting glory. Plus of course, there is the small matter of having a high enough IQ.

Please ensure that you come across as someone who knows the difference between a vision and a dream.

Third, sell strategies they, not you, think are implementable. Therefore, please spare the audience the details of your grand designs related to the new world order. Banish the thoughts of revolutionizing the industry , stick to leveraging what your businesses core competencies are and you should have a built up a fairly reasonable pointer towards where all of you could possibly land up in another three to five years. And please keep the language simple and avoid grandiose expressions. The number of times I come across the words “passion” “anticipation” and “excitement” would make most of our film starlets blush.

Fourth, explain thy key plan assumptions well, and near the start. This does not mean showing a bewildering array of charts setting out endless population, GDP, inflation and sale trends numbers. Try building on something more interesting based on consumer insights, price points evolution, channel segmentation, etc. It is advisable to invest some money on good market research beforehand instead of downloading pages from CIA fact book. This should add credibility to the numbers you are building your whole plan on.

At the fifth place comes tackling thy enemy’s evil plans. Please keep in mind that everyone in that room is aware that you are not, unfortunately, the only player in the market, and that the enemy would also be planning your business’s demise. So an inadequate competitive analysis section makes you look quite foolish and out of touch with reality. Both of these outcomes can have very serious career repercussions.

As for number six, please be cautioned that Capital Expenditure both mattereth and hurtheth the moistest. Now you are on really dangerous grounds. Your audience will know, from bitter experience, that imprudent CAPEX outlays have a striking resemblance to bad marriages. You continuously regret getting into them and it’s impossible to avoid the consequences; and no wonder as most of the CAPEX requests I review are meant to look good on only one place, the Operations Directors CV! So only present what has been thoroughly assessed. Think instead of upgrades, and possibly leasing, and thou should be on safer grounds. This, by the way, applies to romantic liaisons also…

And seventh and the last, and the most critical. Do not wait to be asked questions, you do it all the time. Take the lead in asking them questions and then pointing out the answers in your presentation impresses them a lot, also makes them feel grateful for not having to think too much!

The best way as ever is to be well prepared and to understand that strategic plans are a means to an end, not an end by themselves. This way you will enjoy the experience. And hopefully survive to fight another day…

Dustin Dwyer’s latest story on Apple brings up in detail 3 points we all knew at the back of our heads as to why Apple will not manufacture its products in the USA. Excerpt from the article: 1. Cheap labor Apple executives may not want to admit it, but Liker says one of the biggest [...]

3 Obvious Reasons Apple Will Never Produce in USA is a post from: PakMediaBlog All Rights Reserved.

I present to you one of the most famous images of Steve Jobs. It always makes me wonder.

It is not the eyes and that very subtle smirk on his face. It is that hand. That hand in front of his face, which seems to be supporting his chin. I have stared at it, and wondered, and questioned it. It baffles me. I have no answer to it, but I present to you a few theories:

– He just had a zit on his chin and wanted to hide it.
– He was developing a bald patch on his chin, and wanted to hide it.
– His hand is making the motion ASIAN (desi) people make to indicate the word ‘money’.
– His hand forms a triangle, which signifies the pyramids and the all seeing eye on top of the pyramid, and hence only fuels all the conspiracy theories about his products having a single ‘i’ in front of them.
– His beard is not real, and it is a wig, and was falling off and he is trying to hold it in place.
– If you look closely, it is evident that this is not his own hand. It is somebody else’s hand. This is the only way he could allow his secret love-child to become a part of history.
– Following on the other hand theory, Steve Jobs was asleep and the hand was required to keep him up.
– He had just hurt his thumb using a hammer and had been sucking it. He only took it out for the picture.
– He was giving a thumbs up and the picture was taken a few precious moments before, but turned out so good they decided to keep it.
– He had ripped his shirt or dropped something on his shirt and was trying to hide the stain.
– He had a coffee and the seat was steaming up his glasses, so he held his hand over it to stop it from doing so.
– He was really mad at the photographer and was just forming a punch.

I leave you with these thoughts. Feel free to add some of your own.

PS. And yes, I know the Steve Jobs posts have been and gone, but here is my piece on it, which should hopefully be taken in the right spirit.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGWQBjt95AY

When you double-tap the home button of your iPad or iPhone, the dock will show a list of all the recently used apps and some of them could still be running in the background.

You tap and hold your finger on the app icon until it begins to jiggle and you can then press the red “minus” sign (screenshot) to close one or more of these background apps. If a particular app is not running, this action will simply remove its listing from the multitasking bar.

Close All Background Apps at Once

If you would like to close all the background apps at once, here’s a free app for iPhone and iPad that can help. You don’t even have to jailbreak your device.

Launch the app and then shake your iPhone / iPad to terminate every single app that could be running in the background. Alternatively, you can just pull and release the processes list (see video) to close all the background running apps at once.

Should You Quit Background Apps Manually?

If you are on Windows or Mac, you always quit applications that you are not using so that more memory (RAM) becomes available to front-running apps. However, you many not see any improvement in performance by closing background iOS apps.

Here’s an excerpt from a Q&A that Engadget had with Steve Jobs:

Engadget: How do you close applications when multitasking?
Jobs: In multitasking, if you see a task manager, they blew it. Users shouldn’t ever have to think about it.

John Gruber explains why closing background apps isn’t required:

The iOS multitasking bar is not like the command tab switcher on Mac or Windows. It is not a list of currently “running” applications. It is simply a list of your most recently used applications, whether they’re running in the background, suspended in memory, or completely inactive.

Exception – Kill the Misbehaving Apps

In the past, I have seem apps, especially games, that became unresponsive (freeze) and force-quit was the only way to get them working again. The Process Killer app mentioned above might be helpful in such situations though else you need not worry about shutting down suspended background apps.

This story, How to Close All Background iOS Apps at Once, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 06/01/2012 under IPad, IPhone, Software.

The Zen of Steve Jobs is a new comic book that explores the life of Steve Jobs at the time when he was fired from Apple and particularly his friendship with Kobun Chino, the Buddhist monk from Japan who was Jobs’ spiritual guru as well.

Unlike Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs that is based on actual interviews with Jobs, this 80-page comic book is a mix of both fact and fiction. The illustrations were done by JESS3 and some of the book pages are available for reading on their blog.

The digital edition of this book is however only available for Kindle Fire.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxfDI70ODu8

This story, Now a Comic Book on Steve Jobs, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 03/01/2012 under Book, Steve Jobs, Offbeat.

This is gonna be real serious, I am telling you.
So, well..
Lately, I’ve started to believe that I really need a physiologist cause, little by little, I’m turning into a depressed soul. No, seriously. You know why? Because my new school system is trying its best to discourage me to develop my analytical capacities while my parents, probably not intentionally, want to snuff out my sense of curiousity. Both, in school and at home, I’m told to pay due attention to my studies ONLY and stay away from other resources (like tv, internet and even newspaper, GOSH!) cause they apparently waste my ‘precious’ time. On the other hand, the most torturous thing is that the classes at school involve super long and boring lectures with NO class participations. Literally. I’m told to understand and reflect less on what I study and to emphasize more on what I should learn for exams in order to score good marks. This is becoming a very banal thought pattern. Are marks really a depiction of one’s potential and intelligence? In my opinion, marks are nothing but numbers. Geniuses like Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, Louis Pasture, Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein were all bad students in school/college yet they did what most of us can never do. This reminds me of the Bollywood movie ’3 Idiots’ which has very clearly conveyed the message that gaining knowledge and understanding is way more productive than ratta lagana methord/memorizing. These great believers of ‘rote learning’ are killing my urge to explore the wonders around me. Fml.

Apple has literally conquered the cell phone and tablet market and now it’s time for them to turn their attention to the TV market. Steve Jobs seemed to think that the company was held back from completely diving into the market and it seems that he was able to crack it. We don’t really know [...]

Life the former CEO of Apple Steve Jobs became a movie. According to the International Business Times, Sony Pictures has bought the rights to the authorized biography of Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs and adapted the book into a movie. The report gives Deadline.com as the first to break the Agreement on Adaptation of several million [...]