Team | Coffee Shop Gurus
Back L-R: Hasan Talal, Momna Chaudhry, Buraira Gerwal, Jaiser Abbass, Muhammad Asid
Front: Rohan David

Coffee Shop Gurus (A project of Green & White Pakistan) is a Social Enterprise of Social Media Experts. It is Pakistan’s First Real Entrepreneurial Incubator platform that promotes entrepreneurs working in any domain. Yes! It does not matter that whether you are starting a Home Bakery or making some Mobile App, Coffee Shop Gurus incubates them all from the grass root level. Here young entrepreneurs join hands with experts and bring to reality their entrepreneurial ideas. Promoting women entrepreneurship in Pakistan is a high priority.

During the incubation process the entrepreneurial ideas are put through strict process that polishes the idea. Due to a number of gurus attached to single idea, the attendees of the program get various view point about the same thing which helps in building a true market analysis. Coffee Shop Gurus aims to establish Pakistan’s first true incubation center that nurtures number of businesses all together in one place. We strongly believe that future of Pakistan is in the hands of youth and promoting youth for entrepreneurship at the time of economic depression is the best contribution to boost the development of Pakistan.
Making to the training process takes a lot of scrutinization of the entrepreneurs. After the nomination of the entrepreneurial projects and the interview process, the projects that make out alive are ready to be the part of Coffee Shop Gurus training process. To make the entrepreneurial projects successful, they go under rigorous training for 5 weeks. The meetings are held every Saturday, during the training session, which are mandatory for the entrepreneurs to attend. The week breakdown is: Week 1: Idea Tailoring & Branding, Week 2: Business Planning, Week 3: Marketing on Social Media and Internet, Week 4: Sales & Networking & Week 5: Reviews.
The syllabi and training process of Coffee Shop Gurus has develop after almost 2 years of research work on environment of incubation on the Pakistani Culture. The process has been exactly tailored to the requirements of this region. With a great deal flexibility with in the program, it can also be replicated around the world with almost no changes. The project holds the honor of conducting various country wide researches on social media and its behavior in Pakistan.
Coffee Shop Gurus is also building a knowledge base on entrepreneurial content by transforming the foreign content on entrepreneurship according to local requirement on research basis. Coffee Shop Gurus’ Blog can be visited at and do not forget to look for our Social Media case studies. Don’t forget to like Coffee Shop Gurus on Facebook.

Coffee Shop Gurus @ TEDxSummit, Doha, Qatar

The Lighter Side of Coffee Shop Gurus

A pictorial tribute to some of our famous risk takers and DOERS who are acknowledged worldwide.

We wrote an article about TEDxLahore last month. Some of our editors and authors attended the event as well. A personal feedback by one of our editors Rafaeel Akbar with the title “How “I” saw this year’s TEDxLahore” is available at his personal blog. Moreover other featured reviews are available on the following links.

TEDxLahore Team will upload all the talks on 31st August 2010. Those who couldn’t attend the event should definitely take out some time to listen the “Ideas Worth Sharing.”

It was late 2005 when I started promoting entrepreneurship, social media and startups amongst the techies in Lahore. I came up with a name called “Technology Entrepreneurs Den (TED)” for our meetups but little did I know that there was already a global phenomenon known as TED. I got to know about it when few people asked me if I am coming up with a local TED event. I had to drop down the name but at least it introduced me to the wonderful TED Platform and since then I have listened around 80-90 phenomenal TED Talks.

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TEDx program and the annual TED Prize.

The TED Conference, held annually in Long Beach, is still the heart of TED. More than a thousand people now attend — indeed, the event sells out a year in advance — and the content has expanded to include science, business, the arts and the global issues facing our world. Over four days, 50 speakers each take an 18-minute slot, and there are many shorter pieces of content, including music, performance and comedy. There are no breakout groups. Everyone shares the same experience. It shouldn’t work, but it does. It works because all of knowledge is connected. Every so often it makes sense to emerge from the trenches we dig for a living, and ascend to a 30,000-foot view, where we see, to our astonishment, an intricately interconnected whole.

Last year in July, when Asim Fayaz told me that a license has been acquired, I was overjoyed that finally we would have a platform to share ideas and reach out to masses. Asim did invite me to earlier events at LUMS and Kinnaird which were held on July 25 2009 and February 23 2010 respectively but few professional commitments didn’t let me join both the events. On May 22, 2010, I got an email from Asim for the third event. I decided the very day that this time over I’ll definitely register for TEDxLahore and make it to the event. (more…)

Winners - mBillionth Awards 2010

It was Jehan and Rabia Garib’s twitter feed that led me to register my product for the mBillionth Award 2010. When I registered, I knew that we’ll be rejected in even short listing as we couldn’t find an appropriate category to nominate our product. Moreover our application was unlaunched and running in private alpha amongst our own company employees. We thought that by the time jury will judge our entry, we will launch the public alpha. But if you are in a telecom business where operators have an upper hand, launching your service independently becomes a herculean task. I don’t know which place did we end up in Grand Jury held in Colombo last month but I am happy that we were at least shortlisted for jury.

The m-Billionth Award South Asia 2010 was the first of its kind in the region recognizing and felicitating mobile innovations, applications and content services delivery. It was arranged to honour excellence in mobile communications across South Asia spread over 10 core categories. The m-Billionth Award is designed as an annual South Asia’s leading mobile content’s award platform towards larger regional Mobile Congress in media and policy advocacy. The platform was created with the help of DIT and Digital Empowerment Foundation who have come together to create a regional platform and had support of partners like mint newspaper, VAS companies like IMImobile, OnMobile, One97 and the umbrella organization such as IAMAI (Internet & Mobile Association of India). Pakistan Software House Association (P@SHA) was the Country Partner, Bytesforall , the Strategic Partner and CIO Pakistan, the Media Partner from our side. (more…)

I have been approached by few of my Indian friends since last year seeking advice to startup a business or do a joint Indo-Pak venture with them. Considering the relations between the country and money exchange issues, I have been quite careful.

Recently, one of my friends told me about the Power of Ideas organized every year in India. The promotional video (below) just blew me away and refreshed memories of initial struggling time I had while starting my first venture.

The Power of Ideas is the intellectual property of The Economic Times, India’s leading financial daily. In a unique three-way public-private-academic partnership, The Economic Times has joined hands with the Department of Science and Technology (Government of India) and the Indian Institute of Ahmedabad’s CIIE (Center for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship) to create a formidable force that can champion the cause of entrepreneurial culture in India. It leverages on the Government’s remit to encourage innovation and IIM-A’s demonstrated experience in mentoring and incubating start-ups. (more…)

I have been a gaming freak all my childhood whether it be ground games or the video/computer ones. The people of my age have experienced all those wonderful Atari (shown below) and Nintendo gadgets till we entered the age of 386 and 486 to play the DOS Based “Dangerous Dave”. A lot has happened to the E-Gaming Industry since then with faster and most of the times more violent games emerging which an EA Sports Lover like me cannot handle. Moreover with the emergence of Internet in late 90’s in Pakistan, my primary interest shifted from playing games to explore internet technologies.

I think it was the start of the second quarter of 2007 when during a meeting at LUMS, somebody told me that there is a guy in town named Ahmad Murad Akhter who is the CEO of a company called SMCo. Technologies and has formed a website called MobileGames.PK. I didn’t pay much attention to it then. September 2007, one of my seniors at FAST-NU while strolling with me at the driveway of NUCES Lahore Campus told me that he has joined Murad’s company as a Software Engineer. The only expression at my face at that point of time was “A Proper Game Development Company in Pakistan?”. By that time, I didn’t know about Shehryar Hydri’s ventures as well. I felt that Murad is just having fun and his adventure would be over in next couple of months as they would not be able to compete with GameDev Giants. I couldn’t have been more wrong. They survived and currently are one of the biggest game development companies in Pakistan.

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Jamil Goheer and Khurram Mir at APICTA 2008

I clearly remember it was December 2006 when I got to know about a Pvt Ltd. Company working within the CS Department at LUMS. I was like WoW! Why don’t we have such a culture here at FAST-NU.  Later, I got to know that men behind this venture are ex-FASTians who graduated a year before I actually came to FAST Lahore.

After June 2007, we extensively started hearing about this company which called itself the First Quality Assurance Company in Pakistan mainly because by that time Khurram Javed Mir, the CMO of the company was out from LUMS with an MBA degree. He definitely had a plan how to take this company forward. I remember how people used to gossip about this company especially their batch mates. Some liked the idea considering that their companies can now outsource the QA work whereas some were of the view that what a stupid idea they have come up with as every software company has its own QA department. In the opinion of the second lot, they were definitely a failure.

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I recently came across few videos and was extremely glad that how some people here in Pakistan are solving problems. In fact one of them, an elderly man, Muhammad Chiragh didn’t even go for formal schooling and I was amazed how he played around with the concept of “Rahet” (Picture Below) and turned it into a Tube Well. (Video Below).

Similarly, Mr. Syed Toseef Haider Zaidi has made Wind Turbines, Wind Mill etc. locally (video below) to solve power shortage issues. Details are available on this website. Another young guy, 20 years old Muhammad Waqar Qureshi in very limited resources has done some interesting projects which are worth evaluating.

We need to encourage such people. We don’t need anyone else. We can solve our problems on our own if innovators like these are promoted and acknowledged at national level.

Baba Chiragh’s Tube Well

Podcast: Play in new window

Two weeks back, few students told me about “Invent – The Entrepreneurial Challenge” being hosted by IBA Entrepreneurship Society (IBAES), Karachi. This business plan competition is unique in the sense that it includes steps that attempt to stimulate real life such as having teams that have members both from marketing, financial, management and technical background. I remember during my undergraduate study, Mr. Zia Imran (MD, PSEB and Ex-Chairman, P@SHA) used to discuss with me that we should change the concept of final year projects so that instead of ending final year projects after graduation, students can take their projects forward and convert it to companies. The idea seemed great because it would change the concept of traditional “Job Hunt” and everyone would enjoy their work. Also it would create opportunities for other nationals.

I have just received an email  (more…)