Need Talented Hardware & Software Electronics Engineers For Different Types Of Projects - IMRAN™

As a Pakistani-American and UET Lahore Electrical Engineer, I know how many brilliant minds, even technical geniuses, were just in my own class of 80-Electrical. So, I always think of Pakistanis as well as UET students or recent grads first when I have ideas where I may need to hire someone for side projects or new ideas I want to develop into something more. 

Sometimes I need to hire someone for a short project, sometimes longer. But I would also love to find one or more very capable electrical/electronics engineers I can use regularly, not fulltime, but part-time on different projects and ideas. Could that be You?

Ideally you would be great at designing and prototyping innovative new things in side projects for me. That takes more than just having a degree. (After all, even I have that. 😊). Here are some of the skills I would require.

You have great command of English, total ability to hear an idea and technical requirements, and design the hardware / prototype and / or write the middleware / software or web apps. By that I mean more than "Oh I can do responsive website and SEO for you!"

A full understanding of intellectual property concepts and areas (including patent, trademark, copyright, and licensing) is essential. I repeat: Knowing about what patents are, and what is needed to get one issued by USPTO or Pakistan PTO, is absolutely essential.

The following are skills specific to various projects that I do NOT expect any one person to have. So I may need different people for different projects related to:

Electrical/Electronics Engineering

- Wireless / Home Automation and integration to other IoT systems, including interface and middleware. Nothing massively complex, but being able to make seemingly unrelated things interface and communicate. (e.g. …this is just an EXAMPLE... if I wanted to have a doorbell ringing outside the house to trigger a dot matrix printer to print Hello World, then he or she would be able to make that happen. Again, this is an EXAMPLE, not an actual idea!)

- Mobile Phone (iOS and Android) expertise to design accessories for Apple/Samsung etc. devices with apps to use that accessory. (e.g. design an extra external camera accessory for smartphones and software to capture data from the external and built-in device together). Only for EXAMPLE check out the FLIR InfraRed external camera for iPhones. (www.flir.com/flirone/ios-android/ )

- Android open source operating system customization (e.g. and this is only an EXAMPLE.... to customize Android for an IMRAN-Phone that just changes the screen display based on location and temperature). 

- Web Apps. not websites, development expertise. For EXAMPLE, think more about building FaceBook the SYSTEM not just offering to do FaceBook’s index.php page design.

- BlockChain, with knowledge of micropayments and BitCoin, smart contracts, digital currency.

Patent Drawing With Mechanical Engineering A Plus

- Patent Drawing EXPERIENCE of actually FILED patent(s), not just wasting my time by saying “I can draw plan, elevation, side view!” or that “I can do anything in SketchUp or other 3D or illustration program.” You need to ACTUALLY KNOW and have experience of having MADE the very SPECIFIC types of PATENT DRAWINGS required by the USPTO. Please do NOT waste my time if you do not know what I am talking about specifically here. This person can be a NON-ENGINEER or non-Electrical engineer, or even a talented teenager.

If you already do this type of work through sites like Fiverr, etc. that would make life simpler. I will need you to sign NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) and agreements to ensure that the intellectual property is protected and that you will neither re-use it nor use it yourself nor let anyone else have or use or copy from it. If interested, write in detail on what your areas of expertise are, what kind of time you are available, and rates. You may contact me via: http://imran.com/contactus.php but make sure to use an accurate and valid email address. To make sure your message is found and not lost in spam blockers, leave a comment below also to let me know. Let's see what great projects we can do together!

IMRAN

Spectrum's DialUp Age Service & Stone Age CRM - IMRAN™

Spectrum's DialUp Age Service & Stone Age CRM - IMRAN™

I had to tweet about the "Moronic #UXdesign POS #UserExperience Spectrum. Dead service.Stupid phone menu identifies my account from callerID but doesn't know what service I have!"

Even a caveman era CRM system would know I do not get any shitty service from Spectrum other than Internet, which is that lame asymmetrical 200/20.

Yet, their retarded CustomerService number (20 minutes to get a rep) lists through their various services I do NOT have to ask if I am calling about those. Retards.

Spectrum is shitty enough to make me give sleazy Frontier another chance for the symmetric speeds.

© 2017 IMRAN™

No Interest In Exploring This Frontier Of Lousy Internet Customer Service - IMRAN™

To Achieve Greatness In The Digital World, Respect Intellectual Property & Innovate, Or Be Irrelevant! - IMRAN™

The article (Tech In Pakistan 2014) in the reputable Pakistan newspaper, Dawn, makes good points lamenting the mind numbingly stupid, and self-destructive, policies and factors that make for such “tepid performance” in Pakistan. The author, Y. Brohi, points out how one does not need an army of people to launch a startup. My personal experience proved that, indeed, even one person can start a revolution or entire industries for others to build on.

At the end of the eighties and in the early 1990s, I was fortunate and blessed to pioneer and launch Internet email service in Pakistan right from my home in Gulberg-III, Lahore, while I was studying for my MBA at Columbia University Graduate School of Business in New York City. Together we, my then partner & neighbor Ashar Nisar and I, were able to launch the .PK ccTLD, literally putting Pakistan on the brave new digital world’s map.

I later also had the opportunity to make another, less known but also important, humble contribution to Pakistan’s economic progress, by bringing and launching global credit cards in Pakistan, starting with issuing the first MasterCard license to a Pakistani bank in the early 90s. The availability of credit to the middle class can be a major driver to drive economic activity and the creation of products, services and related jobs.

Both of those industries were launched with no government funding (actually, we succeeded despite resistance and other tactics of the authorities of that time that I will not mention), and without venture capital, which at that time was near impossible to get in Pakistan.

My reason for writing this is not to boast on past achievements but to exhort the dynamic and industrious Pakistani entrepreneurs to learn from what the article says and what my experience shows.

You, one person, can start anything you want. There is nothing stopping the next secure identity and privacy solution to be created in Pakistan. There is no reason that Pakistanis cannot pioneer artificial intelligence or secure cloud computing methods.

If there is one thing that I have been frustrated by, and feel is a core reason for Pakistanis not creating world changing new things, is the disregard for intellectual property rights and concepts. From people ripping DVD movies to kids ripping games without payment, to the shameless way so-called respectable newspapers (excluding Dawn) steal and reprint others’ creative output, theft of intellectual property is commonplace, and something people almost boast about.

How then can people think in terms of creating intellectual property if they are themselves busy stealing someone else's? That attitude is embedded in our culture and needs to be addressed. Without that, all the creative capabilities of Pakistanis will continue to be wasted on copying or reverse engineering others’ work, not creating brave new IP to change the world. 

I would love to see that topic get discussed at a national level. There are few nations that have so much creative entrepreneurial talent than Pakistan, as I have seen in my ~30 years of traveling the world.

Let us find ways to stimulate that and channel that and guide that for the greater good of the creators and the nation. That is why, in speaking to groups of Pakistani entrepreneurs and technology professionals, I say, “To Achieve Greatness In A Digital World, Respect Intellectual Property And Innovate With Your Own, Or Be Irrelevant!”

 

IMRAN™
http://imran.pk

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Why Email Is Here To Stay, Whatever The Platform Or Interface

It is ironic, and a sign of the times, that the two most interesting discussions in my office email (with many colleagues far smarter than me!) AND on my personal FaceBook page (with many friends even more opinionated than me!) are both about Email, and whether its time has come and gone.

My prediction: Email is here to stay.  Here is why.

Everything has a time and place (and audience). Face to face, telephone, old fashioned hand-written letter, email, post, tweet, all have their uses and none of them really replace any of the others.  As a matter of fact, they complement each other. They enable us to build deeper relationships leveraging these micro-contacts even when we are time-constrained and distance challenged.

I am all for social media. I love interacting with many among the nearly 10,000 people following me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/imrananwar if you’d like to connect), and nearly 10,000 more on FaceBook and Flickr. But it would be highly impractical to pull all of them  into my “real” Address Book or inundate my EMAIL Inbox.  The ones who become important to me on social networks are “upgraded” (or as they become real friends, colleagues, associates) to communicate with me via my “real email.”

BUT, here is something I like to point out to people who wonder if Social Media somehow will be a replacement for EMAIL? No!

What they are talking about is simply exchanging emails in much less robust, far less searchable, far less open, and far less secure, proprietary platforms of social media firms than traditional email systems.

Here is what that means….

We do not hold discussions with clients (or even personal family members) in newsgroups or mailing lists. We interact with them usually in one-to-one exchanges of messages sent in “electronic” “mail” called “EMAIL”.

The irony is that the “one on one” communications that takes place on Social Media (FaceBook, Flickr, you name it) is in one-to-one exchanges of messages just like traditional web-based email, that are exchanged out of the public eye, not on the Wall, not in the Timeline, not on a stream, but in specific areas, e.g. called Messages. And with far less flexibility, accessibility, security, or manageability. 

In other words, using  social media to “replace” Email simply means sending private "messages" on their platforms, simply email by another name!

Social media firms know email is, and likely will, remain the most used mechanism for one-to-one exchanges…. with the flexibility of multimedia multimodal multiple-use that even telephone calls do not offer.  

FaceBook is even more obvious in showing its recognition of this fact, by forcibly inserting  YourName@facebook.com as your default EMAIL address in the About > Contact Info page, until there was a huge outcry about it. Trust them to go back on their word… Even today they have NOT "fixed" the problem as they promised and most people's pages still show FaceBook.com addresses.

Even worse, for those of you daring enough to place their entire (email) stock in a social network, think about this…

You post something that FaceBook deems inappropriate, or if you send out 20 invitations to people and 10 are not accepted, the clerical-gods of FaceBook (and other networks too) may strike you with e-Lightning and cancel your account. If that happens, good luck recovering your email, or any of your content, from there.

With traditional email providers, even if, say, Yahoo shuts down one day (sorry, Marissa!), Hotmail migrates to Outlook.com, Gmail spying gets too intrusive, you can still easily drag your emails onto another provider/server/account/computer/device. You still “own” or have far greater control over your emails/messages in these “legacy” email approaches than you do, or likely will, in the social media sites’ Messages boxes.

The tragedy of “regular” email is that many great discussions like the ones I mention above, including those with actual knowledge transfers from smart people answering questions, are lost in email folders’ deep recesses forever. Mail apps and operating systems like Windows and OS X are getting better at helping us "spotlight" what we need to find, but it can still be a pain, especially in corporate mailboxes. Sometimes you can have 200+ email messages with the same keywords mentioned and poorly written subject lines (a pet peeve of mine) making it next to impossible to find THE particular email you are looking for with the answer to that complex question someone had answered 3 months ago.

In my humble opinion, detailed technical topics, with specific questions asked and many valuable replies sent (that are the majority of traffic on most companies internal email discussions) would be so much more effective, less intrusive, and more useful to others later, if they were held on suitably tailored Microsoft SharePoint or Wiki type collaboration platforms. So, yes, for that email is not the right tool. And the unnecessary traffic (plus resultant bloated mailboxes with each reply-all containing the last dozens of emails in each discussion, in every instance of each message, in all of our mailboxes!) give rise to the type of very discussion my Enterprise Architect colleagues are having. 

When, over time, we are able to influence people to use collaboration tools where appropriate, social/mobile media (Yammer/Twitter/Lync/SMS) as practical or needed, somehow overcome a propensity to hit Reply-All on almost every email (another pet peeve ;-) ), get in the habit of writing better Subject lines (PLEASE, You can do better Subject lines than "Doc attached" or "Here it is" or the dreaded "RE:" !!), learn to judiciously delete previous body text not relevant or required, many of the reasons we complain about email would be reduced. 

So, yes, it may shift platforms, take on new interfaces, become more “intelligent”, but Email is here to stay, regardless of what platform we exchange it on…..

What do you think? Email me! 

 

Imran Anwar is a New York based Pakistani-American entrepreneur, Internet pioneer, inventor, writer and TV personality. His day job is with the world's best software company, but these opinions are his and his alone. He can be reached through his web site http://imran.com . You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/imrananwar

Use Tweets Instead Of Bullets To Win Your Wars

The last two weeks have been a blur of activity all over the world. Ranging from the good to the bad and the ugly, everyday we learn not only how flat our world is but how interconnected everything is.

The attacks that took place in the Indian city of Mumbai were just the kind of excitement that we did not need this holiday season. I can understand Kashmiri freedom fighters and their supporters wanting to lash out at India, and its economic centre, saw the Indian occupation of Kashmir and the treatment of the Kashmiri people. I can even understand their frustration that61 years have gone by but the rest of the world does not seem to care about United Nations resolutions calling for the Kashmiri people's right to self-determination.

In the meantime more and more American, and European, investment continues to pour into India. From Bombay to Bangalore one can see India becoming a magnet for international investment as well as outsourcing of jobs from countries like America. Even the Indian film industry, which used to be entertaining, to say the least, has now become a force and is beginning to make its mark felt even in Hollywood and the West.

Perhaps it is for this reason that the Mumbai attackers decided to target tourists and visiting businessmen, whose Dollars and Euros are strengthening India and enabling its to continue its policy of occupation and terrorizing of the Kashmiri people.

However, there is no excuse for the indiscriminate murder of innocent Indian citizens going about their daily lives. I cannot understand how this attack on Mumbai in any way made the Kashmiri issue more important to the rest of the world. Or, how it made the world in any way more sympathetic to Kashmir.

Even if calling attention to the Kashmir issue was their primary goal, one would at least expect some communication from the masterminds or strategic leaders of this kind of attack. One would request them to at least explain their version of a rationale for such mayhem. Even the PLO, when it was successfully hijacking airliners in the 1970s, was communicating to the rest of the world that it was trying to call attention to the plight of the Palestinian people. Of course, as we can see that did not lead to the independence of the Palestinian people from Zionist Israel.

At the same time, carrying out an attack like this when it would obviously lead to severe Indian reaction against Pakistan shows that these terrorist killers were no friends of Pakistan. It would be foolish of us to argue that they did not come from, or have some support in, Pakistan - as my fellow Pakistanis tend to do. At the same time the jingoistic and "let's use this as an excuse to bash Pakistan" tone and tenor of India's words on the issue is not the smartest response either.

One hopes that saner heads prevail on both sides. Not that I am in any way advocating war, but India would be well advised to remember that Pakistan is its nuclear armed, capable and militarily strong neighbor.

Pakistan may not be able to "defeat" India in a conventional war, but any war that takes place because of the circumstances can easily spiral out of control and turn into a nuclear conflagration. In that, neither India nor Pakistan would win. They, and the whole world, would be defeated.

It is for this reason that it is essential for Pakistan and the Kashmiri people to immediately start using more effective tools of communications to call world attention to these issues. We are living in a connected age. Almost everybody has access to the global network, either through computers connected to the Internet or even through SMS on their cell phone.

Services like Twitter, which enable millions of people to have a real time conversation with short messages of 140 characters (called Tweets), are where the current and future battles for hearts and minds of the global audience take place.

In places like these Muslims in general, and Pakistanis in particular, are few and far between. People from, and supporters of, India and Israel are always active in general. They become even more hyperactive when Muslims, or Pakistanis, or Palestinians, carry out these types of murderous attacks we saw in Mumbai, which backfired on all of us.

If you have not already done so, and have Internet connectivity, I invite you to join up Twitter. Follow the conversation and respond to it. The easiest way to start is to go to http://twitter.com/imrananwar ,sign up and use the Follow button. This way you can see what I am saying in response to the attacks on Pakistan.

Then simply by clicking Reply you can join the conversation. In this case not only would your response come tome, but it would go on the "global public timeline" which means it is there for the whole world to see.

As you say interesting and useful things, or have interesting points and counterpoints, more and more people will begin to follow you. That enables you to build relationships as well as open doors of communication with people from all over the world.

Remember, just because you are not in the same room as the person you are responding to, don't lose your sense of decorum no matter how angry they try to make you.

Being abusive, narrow minded, or just plain offensive only ensures that your words reflect poorly on the very country or cause that you are trying to support. Or it will mean more and more people blocking your messages AND opposing whatever you were supporting!

Remember, a conversation is most effective when you are open minded and balanced. Even people with opposing, or somewhat negative opinions of your country or cause, can become more aware of your point of view, or even become supporters. Be opinionated, but be courteous. Be firm, but be open-minded.

That is the most effective way to communicate your point of view, as well as helping educate the rest of the world on what the root cause of the Pakistan and India problem is. In one word, it's Kashmir.

The only way to win that battle of hearts and minds in a global, interconnected, world is through using tweets instead of bullets to win your war. Get online, follow and tweet me!

The Last Mile, The Shortest Delay - Will The Internet Slowdown?

According to a recent article by Shamus McGillicuddy, News Writer at SearchSMB.com, titled 'Internet not growing fast enough, researchers say, "according to new research, demand for Internet usage will start to outpace the capacity of the Internet's access points. This potential crunch could spell trouble for CIOs."

I am flabbergasted by the conclusions drawn by this team of researchers that the writer is reporting about.

They seem to be unfamiliar with the rapid pace of change in technology in general, and in Internet related innovation in particular, when making their semi-dire predictions.

Yes, there is a huge growth in Internet traffic. And, yes, some slowdowns can happen. But, the last mile to the home or business is, most often, NOT the bottleneck. As a matter of fact, I have 1.5 Mbps DSL in NY and 6 Mbps DSL in Miami, and some web sites can respond equally slowly regardless of where I access them from.

"Slowdown" is NOT a generic problem that afflicts the entire Internet, as the 'research' would suggest. The problem can be specific to certain sites, domains, news events of the day, and, much like the highways analogy the news article referred to, it is nearly impossible to build broadband pipes that people and applications will not find ways to clog.

What is needed is intelligent research on where the clogging is likely to be, rather than generic predictions, based on weak logic and an apparent disdain for the reality of the rapid pace of technology innovation.

In summary, the last mile is NOT the problem, and even 6 Mbps DSL lines can find some web sites as slow as 768 Kbps lines. 'Slowdown' is NOT a generic problem across the entire Internet, but is, and will be, a more and more site/domain specific issue. The rapid pace of technology innovation with more reasonable pricing mechanisms will ensure the Internet remains an efficient and effective platform.

Judge sentences porn spammers to 5+ years

Finally a judge shows some wisdom and throws the book at porn spammers who sent sexual images with open images for any adult or child to see. Hope they are treated as porn queens in the prisons they are sent to. Say Hello To Bubba, boys! After they spend some "hard time" here, they ought to be shipped off to Saudi Arabia, even better, Afghanistan, for further hospitality.

read more | digg story

All Roads Lead To 'Bridge To Nowhere'

You probably think I always say the current President Bush says ONLY dumb things or tells lies only. Not true. For once, he IS right (not just too Far Right). We DO need more (or at least better) roads. OK, STOP. That is as far as I can Yield to his point of view, which is too driven by extreme agendas, instead of middle-of-the-road policies. And, yes, enough with the bad traffic puns. Let's get back on course. (Sorry, can't resist!).

This latest highway bill will probably do some useful road building, some repairs, some new stuff, but does it matter how great a road is if it goes to Nowhere, or as in this case, to the $231 MILLION Dollar bridge to nowhere that will be built in Alaska?

What road are we on? As a nation. With Bush, it's "My Way Or The Highway" except, in this case, the highway our nation is on, is going his way, the wrong way --- and there's no two ways about it.

I know we do not have job security, or even security in the subway. Many of us have no medical insurance (health security) nor do we have financial security. Even he says social security is a mess and security around the world is even worse for us Americans.

So, the only hope we have is to make a brighter future for kids here. A road for smart, hardworking people to reach an environment in which high-tech, high-quality, high-paying jobs ensure our economic well being, and standards of living.

Bush says this bill will create jobs of the future.

THAT has me worried. Really worried.

We put man on the moon (forget Bush's now totally MIA plans to visit Mars). We built F16s, Stealth bombers, nuclear weapons, microprocessors, laser surgery, microsurgery, software, operating systems, artificial intelligence, speech recognition, telephones, the Internet and all the jobs Bush can promise are road building crew or bulldozer assembly plant jobs?

Should we allow our nation to stay on this road? To Nowhere?

I say, No. Let's take the next exit behind the Bush.

How Traditional Publications Can Become The Future Of Publishing

How Traditional Publications Can Become The Future Of Publishing
--- The Shape Of Prints To Come ---

Comment By Imran Anwar

People often ask me "Is there a future for traditional newspapers and magazines, and will digital devices not make these "traditional" publications obsolete?"

Well, the answer depends on how "traditional" publishers respond to the threats from digital devices - as their doom, or as new opportunities for them to expand the horizons of publishing.

What we call traditional publications may likely not be around in 25 years, much less in 50. However, I still see a bright future for magazines and newspapers, if we look at them from just two of several possible new angles I can imagine.

One, is a magazine or newspaper considered that only if it is printed on paper? Won't it still be a "traditional" newspaper 50 years from now if I, or more likely my children, are sitting at the beach, flipping the pages of a silicon film digital ink based publication that can be refilled with tomorrow's newspaper wirelessly every night or every few hours even?

Two, even if almost all of the content we seek becomes available in various colorful, handheld devices, traditional magazines can still make a niche for themselves.... by being non-traditional.

The digital devices most people envision replacing paper publications have their own limitations..... e.g. the need to have a one-size fits all device, regardless of whether I am reading the NY Times' news or MacWorld's reviews.

But, "traditional" publications can be printed in almost any size or shape, and, thanks to modern printing technology, on almost any material.

Thus, content design for these new shapes, textures, materials and sizes will allow publication designers huge opportunities of expression that no "all purpose" digital reader can match.

I do not see any reason why imaginative publishers will not create and design their publications in varying paper sizes (poster size or pocket) or with irregular shapes (triangle, continuous scroll, 100-fold single sheet) or having unique textures (cotton, holographic paper, parchment, aluminum, suede) or have different pages filled with aromas (for recipe pages for example) and who knows what else.

Their imagination is the limit. With so much creative freedom in "paper" publications, digital devices may then seem to be limited and limiting of the "reader experience"!

Imagine people wondering, in 2025 perhaps, if "traditional electronic reading devices" will be around in 20 years and if the "real" and "sensory" (i.e. including touch, feel, smell....) magazines and newspapers will replace them. Never say Never.

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© 2005, Imran Anwar
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