I recently subscribed to the daily Business Recorder newspaper (a Pakistani national paper), in an attempt to get the latest in business news that help someone like me. I found the newspaper more than dismal as I, being an entrepreneur, and working in the (very) small and medium industry, did not find the newspaper as helpful as I’d hoped. I am not much concerned with the affect of stock markets on the national economy, nor the implications of some legislation on the country-wide situation on the availability of sugar. I wanted something more local and more concrete, something that talks directly to someone who qualifies as an entrepreneur (I found out quite later into the game that I am an entrepreneur actually). I am sure that there are many others out there in Lahore itself. I want my blog to represent this gap, and be a resource for the Pakistani entrepreneur. Of course, entrepreneurship being an attitude (definitions coming soon God willing), many of the subsequent posts on this blog will equally be ‘talking to’ any entrepreneur in any part of the world.

Had I been a businessman, I would have subscribed to a trade magazine. As an entrepreneur, I find it more riviting to hunt for new ideas and opportunities: the unavailability (as opposed to the shortage) of sugar, for example, presents an opportunity of business for anyone who can provide a steady, if not ample, supply of sugar to any shopping center within a reasonable rate. A businessman involved in the business of textile, for example, will not be bothered with such opportunities. And that, to the best of my limited knowledge, is the real difference between a businessman and an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur, at an given time, can be behaving like a businessman when he is focusing on only one enterprise, and a businessman can be acting like an entrepreneur if he is looking to diversify his business, or expand in other markets etc. Yes, the conclusion that I am trying to get at is that there is a very clear difference between a businessman and an entrepreneur. It is this very difference that allows for an entrepreneur to work seamlessly as an employee and work on his or her ideas to generate some returns.

In fact, entrepreneurship is very much a wholesome approach to life itself. The creativity and action-oriented attitude of a good entrepreneur is very much a desirable situation to be in (or to work towards).

My blog, LifeETC, will now be focusing on this very spirit from now on. I will be ‘reporting from the trenches’ in the coming weeks, inshAllah, and I hope to learn a lot of new methods of improving one’s quality of life by being a better entrepreneur. Hope you guys stay tuned.
(your feedback, at all times, will be appreciated)

This post is about 4 tools available online that you SHOULD be  using. The tools are essentially free (some charge you to go for premium accounts, but you can easily get by with the free versions as long as you are just starting out – and aren’t we all just starting out?)

Also, note, these tools will help you individually, to manage your next entrepreneurial bout with your market. These tools will not only cut costs, but give your an edge and will directly influence your personal work flow (and as you are an entrepreneur, your personal work flow sometimes is your business work flow).

Mozy

Mozy is your ultimate backup champ. The ease with which the Mozy backup works is exactly like you’d want a ubiquitous backup application to work. If you already don’t have a Mozy account, please do yourself (and your enterprise/project) a favor and get one right now:

1. Sign up for a free account
2. Download the Mozy client for your computer (login required)
3. Easily configure it to backup your critical folders
4. And then forget about it.

That’s what I did, and only recently I checked, the backup was done 16 hours ago, and the file size (just topping out at 1GB) is well below the 2 GB limit that Mozy offers. Of course, this is all free.

And if you belong to the group of people who don’t take backups, perhaps you also need to be explained the realities behind the stork, Santa and unicorns as well. The latter are important, but the former – the backups – they are just too darn necessary, please.

The ‘main attraction’ for Mozy is that it takes automatic backups. ‘Automatic’ is the keyword here. Research shows (and I am making this up here ) that you don’t take a backup of your computer files because really, you don’t want to be ‘hassled’ into first finding a blank DVD, take out that Abba CD ‘out’ of the CD-ROM (shame on you), put the blank DVD in to the CD-ROM, then run a DVD-burning program, burn the files onto the DVD, then place the DVD in a safe place, only to forget what that ’safe place’ was when you really do need to restore your backups.  These are all ‘hassle-some’ steps. With Mozy, you just install it on your computer once, and your are good to go. Seriously, this is exactly what you – that lazy, Abba-listening you – would need.

Dropbox

While putting together this list of 4 Free Online Tools necessary for your business, I was tempted to just include Mozy as the backup tool of choice and not include Dropbox at all. But that is because sometimes I am stupid. I initially thought, rightly, that Mozy and Dropbox both store my files online on their respective servers, so therefore both are basically different tools for taking backups. That conclusion is stupid. You see, if Mozy’s game is ‘automated’ backups, then Dropbox’s game is ‘accesibility’ to your files from anywhere! Mozy is backups, Dropbox is mobility.

I use Dropbox to store files that I access on a regular basis. So if I update a file I use on my laptop, I get the same updated file when I log on to my PC. I could be using the Laptop in Pakistan, and accessing my PC in South Africa, the file would not only be accessible, but updated and ready. A typical real-life example is when you update your  ‘accounts’ spreadsheet (yes, that’s right, not an Excel sheet, but a spreadsheet – more on that below).

So, to get Dropbox, simply download the Dropbox client. That will automatically install a My Dropbox folder on your computer.

Any file that you place in that folder, that file will get synced with Dropbox’s secure servers. To access that file on any other computer, you just need to download the Dropbox client from their website, and your files will be downloaded onto that PC and accessible and synced. Beautiful is the word here people, beautiful.

Agreed, this makes the Dropbox somewhat of a niche tool, that is used more by people who are usually on the move. But as this is a list targeted primarily for entrepreneurs, and mobility is always (or rather should always) be one of the priorities for any budding or seasoned entrepreneur, Dropbox shines out as a necessity. Given that it is free (up to 2GB of storage), it pretty much becomes a no-brainer to start using Dropbox and enjoying more mobility.

Google Apps

Google Apps should be like the main pole that supports the tent of your business communication. In many cases, Google Apps has the capability of being the tent as well, covering all gamuts of your communication needs.

A lot of enterprises start out with your average hosting and your average email servers. Ranging from anywhere between 20 USD per year to USD 300 per year, people are buying up domains and getting their emails set up with their hosting providers. The moment they actually start using the email service, they wonder how is the world so excited about emails when the emails are so broken (can’t access the mail server), so unreliable (the email never reaches the destination – or lands up in the oblivion of a spam folder) and so tiresome (a billion emails manually stored in to a million folders).  Of course, these people don’t know what an enterprise-grade email setup should look like. Really, they don’t know what they are missing out on Google Apps.

If you are an entrepreneur and use email, take my word for it, there is no better ’system’ out there than Google Apps. If you are not on it, you should be. It is free to begin with, allowing you to grow your business in to the premier version of Google Apps (which is still cheaper than Microsoft’s offering).

Consider the following as a real-life example how using Google Apps affects your personal productivity and saves costs (remember, Google Apps essentially is free, and gives you ample time to grow your business into it):

I use Google Apps for my email, calendar and document management. I started with email (the super-duper Gmail on my own domain) and then got comfortable using their Calendar application and finally their Google Docs.

I check my email either online or get the email on my phone (a Blackberry) – I don’t use email clients like Outlook, although Google Apps works well with Outlook too.

I use the calendar to set up any event that needs a reminder (it is anything ranging from birthdays, to the next FC Barcelona game to a meeting with a potential client – I run a small consultancy on online marketing and infrastructure). Thanks to Google, I can sync my Blackberry calendar with my Google Apps calendar (click here for more on syncing your calendar using Gmail and Blackberry).

The most interesting usage of Google Docs is that I now use it to Invoice my clients. I already have set up an Invoice template from the many templates available online at Google. Anytime I need to invoice a client, I save a copy of the invoice template, make the necessary changes (such as client name, invoice number, amounts, dates etc) and then share that document with the client.

Actual template that I use - click for larger image

Note that the document is placed on Google servers, and I just email a link to that document to the client. This keeps a central repository of my invoices. I have found this to be an effective way of managing the low volume of invoices that I need to give out to my clients. And whenever I receive any payment, I update the payment on the same document under the heading “Payments against the Invoice”, and then send an update to the client to acknowledge the same. This way, I get to have an ‘online record’ of all invoices and payments, that is accessible by me and any set of clients that I choose (privacy settings are controlled by email, so the client has to log in through his or her email, which makes this simple invoicing system quite effective & secure – so far). Although I do not suggest that you use this exact system for your invoicing, this should give you a fair idea on how you can ‘hack’ the system to suit your exact needs.

Using Google Docs as the standard document creation and management tool is, frankly speaking, not that good an option. Google Docs still has issues on offline mode and the whole experience does feel a bit awkward and sketchy. The charm that Google tries to sell, that of Online document access, is easily handled by using Dropbox combined with OpenOffice.

OpenOffice

You are in business, or are planning to be into one – freelancing, enterprising, running your family business, starting a new one, whatever your circumstances, you would need to have a decent document creation tool. I have already mentioned that using the free Google Docs as your primary tool for this purpose is just not a viable option (yet). So you get what everyone else is already on, Microsoft Office. Now, as a principle, one must always spend wisely, right? Right. Spending the USD 350 or so dollars for Microsoft Office is not even under consideration here people, I suggest using OpenOffice based strictly on the principle of ’spending wisely’.  Again, I give you a personal example:

I have been using OpenOffice as a direct replacement for Microsoft Office for the past 8 to 9 months. Remember please, I prepare and deliver presentations, I prepare reports, write letters, print out bills, update spreadsheets with 100’s of customers, I do all of that on OpenOffice. Not once have I ‘missed’ any of the features available in MS Office (well, OK, I used MS PowerPoint to make and deliver one presentation).

All said and done, OpenOffice has served me just fine. I would go ahead and say that it is perfect because apart from being a direct replacement of the most popular office software (MS Office), OpenOffice is free (thank you Sun, the company behind OpenOffice).

Given that I have extensively used PowerPoint during my college days and have freelanced not only as a presenter, by as a presentation ‘maker’, it is only fair that I tell you that PowerPoint is the most useful software put out by Microsoft. Yes, yes, I know, Excel is considered the end-all of all products from Microsoft, but the thing is, OpenOffice Calc easily replaces the MS Excel when it comes to basic to intermediate usage. OpenOffice’s Impress (that competes with MS PowerPoint), on the other hand, has some way to go to completely replace PowerPoint for me.  But for general, everyday usage, and given the savings, I’d suggest Impress over PowerPoint to most entrepreneurs. Unless you are not heavily into presentations (like me), you would do just fine with Impress.

So, with OpenOffice, you got a replacement for Word, for Excel (hells yeah), for Access and for PowerPoint. And you are 350 dollars richer. To download OpenOffice via their website, click here.

So, these are the four tools that should be a part of your arsenal. These tools not only help in reducing cost (as all of them are Free!), but these tools also are finely engineered to work seamlessly in the background and let you do what you set out to do in the first place: be enterprising.

If you found the above article helpful, do leave a comment/response – all sorts of feedback is appreciated. If there is anything you’d like to know about using any of the above mentioned tools, also ask in the comments section below.

Two things have happened in this week that are well worth mentioning.

Well, OK, three things.

The first thing was that I was finally convinced to have a topic for my blog (this blog that you are reading right now). It does not sound like that big a deal, but for me it is.

I have grappled with the idea of finding a niche for my blog here since, like, ever! From religion to academia, from technology to self-improvement, from society to music, I have seriously considered all. But it took the writing prowess of this new bloggerette (that is NOT a word yet though) that I stumbled across, to finally knock some sense into me.

Penelope Trunk writes about careers on here blog http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/ and she nailed it for me. The whole post was talking directly to me and that hardly happens, as any piece that comes off as written just for you is not easily found. Obviously, that post is highly, highly recommended for any blogger (or bloggerette) out there who wants to take blogging a bit more seriously. A humongous, insanely-large THANK YOU to Ms Penelope Trunk for that.

Second big thing that happened was that I was thumbing through a book by Anthony Robbins, and in that book, while writing under the topic of ‘Keys to Success’, he goes on to mention the necessary step of handling complacency. I did not remember reading this bit when I first read his book (which was oh, I dont know, 10 years ago). Because at that stage, being complacent after being successful was too far fetched an idea for me. But as I have mentioned a few times before, I have seen success Alhumdulillah and now I live in the realm of complacency as if I own it. Pathetic, I know.

So again, a big shout out to Mr. Robbins for writing something so long ago, that still has the potency to change attitudes. God willing. (The book’s titled Unlimited Power – Check it out at Amazon)

Third big thing was my birthday. My wife yet again managed to make it the best birthday so far, with friends coming over at 12 midnight to surprise me (felt like college all over again ). And the surprise worked. At 12:30 AM, there were about 15 people, friends and family that made this all the more special. Thank you.

I turned 29, and the sorriest bit is that for the last two years, I have felt like 50. That is why the above two ‘discoveries’ feel so important to me. The first one gives me direction and focus, and the second one gives me direction and focus. I sometimes think it is this very passion that one’s focus gives that can make a 29 yr old feel 50 (if he hadn’t found the passion) and a 50 yr old feel 18.

God Guide Us All. Aameen.

(If you wish to avail this momentous occasion to give me a gift for my birthday, there is a great way for you to do that. The birthday was on the 5th of Nov, but you still have time. Head over to my Wish List and give me a gift right this moment. Remember, chances like these come once every year. Due to popular demand, I am extending the date to receive presents till today. Act now!)

There must be simpler ways of wasting your money, but this is surely a unique way of doing it:

Ad for a web portal, without the web address

I saw this in today’s The News. The Overseas Investors Chamber of Commerce & Industry (OICCI) invites us to “walk through the doors of history on a journey into the rich heritage of the Chamber which has been navigating the country’s economy since 1860″. I think this is just swell, given that the country in question came into existence in 1947.

The ‘Overseas’ Investors Chamber was created three years after the war of Independence against imperial British was lost (in 1857), so their loyalties back then can easily be inferred, if not judged. Point being, it is nothing to be proud of.

So a score of 0/10 for delivering the message the ad was supposed to deliver (that ‘we have a website’). And a score of -5/10 for claiming that they have been providing services to a country for well over a 100 years, when the country only recently turned 63.

P.S. The actual website of the Organization in question is very much present at www.oicci.org. A small note on web dev of the site: The website itself is designed entirely in CSS (and not using tables), which is a relief given that the development was done by a Pakistani company (http://www.e-creatorz.com).

That is a powerful line, that. “I am not proud to be a Pakistani” sends a very strong message indeed. If I say this, you are thinking, “OK so this guy is sick of one or the other aspect of the society that we all feel bad about. And has taken his feelings perhaps a bit too far,” or something like that.

So what is the counter to that feeling? You say “I am proud to be a Pakistani”.

Did you get it? No? Thought so.  Let me try again.

Quite some time back, there  was this sudden surge of badly printed t-shirts that had ‘Proud to be Pakistani” written on them. You’d see a fair amount of people wear them, from your average Bashir (our generic version of average Joe, of course) to celebrities like Shoaib Akhtar etc. Here’s what this shirt is actually saying:

I know that you wouldn’t be proud of being a Pakistani, but hey, guess what, I am. I am proud to be a Pakistani.

What the hell? Is that’s how it is now? You already assume that people think you ought to be shameful of being a Pakistani, as if you have something to hide. Much like a little girl blabbering out to her Mother, “No mommy, I didn’t eat that chocolate cake,” without the mommy even asking. That’s guilt written all over it. Heck, it is gawddamned understood that I belong to this place, it is called Pakistan, the flag’s green and white with a crescent moon and a star, and no, our flags don’t really have Mickey Mouse on ‘em or anything. This place right here, this place right here is my country, my home and my two by two or four by four or whatever. This is me and I don’t need to tell you that I own it.

P.S. Wearing yourcountry’s flag’s colors on your person is not the same thing, people. That shows association and nothing wrong with that. Boasting your flag on your blog or ‘Going Green’ is all good, as it is an exercise in assimilation. Saying something like ‘Proud to be a Pakistani’ just does not cut it, folks. I have more than one foreigner poke mild fun at these so-called ’slogans’, and that only proved what I had been saying, stop being so defensive, find the truth and stand by it.

Amazon has been lazy, has been slow. The Kindle was introduced with the dinosaurs it seems, yet only recently was it upgraded to include countries other than the US. Fantastic, because I would finally be able to take my book-skimming habits with me – well, not so fast, the damned thing STILL does not work in Pakistan, where we ride to work on camels and use rocks to light fire and use pigeons for emails. Putting the ‘US-is-the-world’ bias that runs through pretty much any high-tech company, let’s see if the new Barnes and Noble e-reader will give Amazon a run for its money.

Short answer: Hell yes.

On with the long answer now:

There are quite a few e-readers in the market, just like there probably are a lot of pet detectives in the market as well, but just like Ace Venture is the best pet detective there is because he is the only pet detective that you know of, Amazon’s Kindle is the best e-reader out there. Which was good, but only for Amazon’s bottom line. From a long list of gripes that people had with the Kindle, to the utter lack of choices in the e-reader market, the average consumer was sorta stuck. Not anymore, as Nook is here to eat Kindle’s lunch, dinner and the midnight snacks to boot.

As I mentioned earlier, it was quite odd that no one was messing with Amazon’s Kindle. The Kindle, with all it’s flaws and follies, was the de facto market leader in digital book reader (e-readers). If you dig a little deeper, you will see that there are many e-readers in the market, with Sony even jumping in the fray. Sony’s attempt, at best, can be seen as a half-hearted foot in the door – which in the long run means a good thing (a good thing for the consumers of course).  Bottom-line: Kindle had no competition till Barnes and Noble’s Nook came along.

So Where Does Nook beat Kindle?

Everywhere, really.

• Nook has a better display thing going for them
• They have color as well
• You can browse through thumbnails of books to select which one to read, which you just can’t in Kindle.
• It is the second smaller touch screen at the bottom of Nook that lets you have all the above mentioned features – and you guessed it, Kindle doesn’t have any separate ‘navigation’ screen.
• You can share your books with your friends. The more common term for book readers is ‘lending’ by the way. So you can ‘lend’ a book from your collection to your friend (who has an e-reader, or not) for 14 days. And as any avid book reader will tell you, 14 days is enough time to go through any good read. Kindle just doesn’t know what we just talked about, so Nook wins there as well.
• According to Nook’s Houdini-inspired website, Nook also offers you 500,000 free e-book titles to download and read. Heck, that’s not a good thing folks. There are a million books out there, you have to select the ones that are good which is a charm for a book reader itself, this selection and discovery process. 500-freakin’-000 is just too big a number to inspire me really, as the figure shows that the it’s more like a project Gutenberg than a pruned collection of readable stuff.

But it can’t all be that bad for Kindle, can it? They have been in the market for so long and have the early bird’s advantage, right? Well, they should have. What they got going for themselves is:

• Kindle has been in the game for a much longer time than Nook, that should have amounted to some pretty smart upgrades on Kindle’s part, but I don’t know if you can call the new Kindle upgrades that smart. (so, this is not really a good thing now, is it?)
• Kindle is now globally available, whereas Nook seems to be only available to the US public. That is a clear winner for Kindle. (although the camel-riding Neanderthals of Pakistan still don’t get the goods from Kindle, akkhh!) – but remember folks, the jump from US-only to so-called global will take a lot shorter time for Nook, you can bet your old ‘global’ maps on it.
• I think that is pretty much about it for Kindle’s good points as compared to Nook’s. Anyone here cares to remind me about any other points that I have missed out, please do so in the comments below. Nook’s dubbed as the Kindle Killer, after all.

But the competition is going to get much tougher

I think that competition will not be from more e-readers in the market, but from more ’suitable’ tablet PCs in the market. The crossover from a digital tablet (such as MS Courier, or TechCrunch’s Crunchpad for example) to a digital book reader is quite slim in fact. One thing can safely be said: if you end up owning a PC tablet (which, if you are reading this, you probably will before Eid next year ), you will not probably invest in a Kindle or a Nook. Why would you? Can the companies making the digital tablets be stupid enough to not incorporate a simple tweak of their software to cater for the large e-readers’ market? Of course they would (and they should). But always remember, some great companies can do greatly stupid things e.g. the D-SLR market was, for ages, without a camera that can shoot a video! The point-and-shoot tribe would laugh at the ‘photographer’ with an EOS dangling from his neck, that “you can’t record a 5 second video even if your life depended on it!” Thankfully, the latest (and only the latest) from DSLR manufacturers are incorporating this ‘feature’ in their cameras.

Let’s get one thing clear, the keyboard is not a good thing. It doesn’t matter if I can type at a million words per minute, which obviously I can, the bottom line is: it is not ‘natural’. Before you go all Darwin on me with this, what I mean by ‘natural’ is that the keyboard itself has no value – it is a separate piece of hardware that just ‘has’ to be present if you want to interact with your computer. Think about it, it was and is a necessary evil to communicate with a machine. The introduction of touch screens was a step closer to a natural way of doing things – it removed the clutter of input devices such as the mouse and the keyboard. If anything, Microsoft’s Courier is a very exciting product that is not a concept and is to hit the markets any time now. If the introductory videos of MS Courier is anything to go by, the new wave of technology will change the game itself. (Of course, Microsoft’s Windows 7 is geared for the touchscreen world, so this evolution of Human-Computer Interaction is no surprise).

The Blackberry-owners would disagree that keyboard is much faster than iPhone’s touchscreen. Well, I own a Blackberry. Say that to any hardcore iPhone user who will set you straight. And note, iPhone is the ‘first of its kind’ – give this touchscreen technology a few more evolutionary cycles, let Microsoft steal it properly (via the super-awesome MS Courier tablet) and then come back and tell me that keyboards are a good thing. Ha!

Freelancing in Pakistan is something that is very much underrated because it is very much misunderstood.

As per definition of the word itself, a ‘freelancer’ is one who:

… sells services to employers without a long-term commitment to any of them

To be a freelancer, you don’t need a degree. Starting from the PKR 300 per day mazdoor to PKR 15,000 per day consultant, a lot of people are making some serious amounts of money with freelancing.

But how many of us want to go the freelancing route but just don’t?

Life-changing stuff, this is.

When I was in college, I think I did two things that changed my life forever. No exaggeration here, these changed my life forever and I feel the effect even today. Thankfully though.

The first thing I did, was ask. And the second was that I was, surprisingly enough, patient.

Asking to Learn Vs. Learning to Ask

You have to first learn to ask important questions. That is basically one way of saying that don’t ask the stupid ones.

Stupid questions are only of one type: if you can find the answer for that question with relative ease, then asking that question is a stupid thing to do.

If I am asking someone like, say, a successful business person, that what is the difference between debt and credit, then that is a stupid question. Disguising stupid questions is easy though, and you can ask “In you opinion, what is the difference between debt and credit?” and get away with it. But really, you should ask with honesty.

I asked with honesty. That means that you first have to convince yourself that you really don’t know much. I did not know which is the best route for me; should I try to earn money by doing one or the other freelancing gigs, or should I prime myself for a good job. And truth be told, I thought I knew the answer back then, but now I know that really, I didn’t show shit.

Anyways, I started gathering information over a period of time from my friends at first. Most of the college-going friends I asked gave an answer somewhere in the lines of  “We want to do a job because that is what everyone thinks is the right thing to do”. But when asked, “did you guys actually asked them as to why are they recommending a job to you?”, they said “No, we did not even ask”. Well that was the gist of their answers and it seemed like a pretty lame answer to something that these guys were planning to do possibly for the rest of their lives. Yes, there were exceptions to this of course. One friend said he wanted to do a job at a multinational and aim to get to C-level within 15 years.. This kind of clarity was and still is hard to find (that friend is working at a good position in Wateen right now – I think he should change from Wateen though :/ ).

Some friends were doing what they loved and told me that they would do that as long as it is feasible. Although this was not the sort of clarity in the answer I was looking for, I think that that was a very good answer. Think about this now:

Having an approach that ‘Doing what you love till you can not do it anymore‘ beats the approach of ‘I am doing X because everyone else thinks this is the best for me‘ any given day! Two of those friends who kept on doing what they loved is now known to quite a few actually, both of them still do what they really enjoy and have earned both fame and fortune. So yeah, doing what you love is a good thing to ‘get into’. But if you are reading this, you are probably thinking, “well, that is rare and I won’t be able to do what I love for the rest of my life. There are bills to pay and stomachs to feed…”. Well, you are right that it is rare, doing what one loves. And you won’t be able to do it BECAUSE you never tried hard enough, or you gave in just before you were about to break out. Needless to say, this kind of a situation is something you definitely should try for. And that is reason in fact, most people choose freelancing, because they get to do whatever tickles their fancy.

more on “going solo in Pakistan” in subsequent posts. You can subscribe to my blog to stay up to date.

Being scared is easy, just try something new.

I have been scared.  A lot. I never thought I could do that I just did do. I tried. But I did it only because what I attempted was easy, just like everything is once you’ve done it. But before that, it seems so worthy, so magnificent, so meaningful, so difficult – like everything worthy does.

Never though I’d contribute towards my first song that will see the air of play . Never though I’d earn from a set of businesses, never thought I’d get to call myself a consultant, never thought I’d have a home office and I never thought I’d achieve my life goal that I had in college, before my life was over. All this and more. Scary stuff, all of it, but only when I hadn’t done it. Allah has created us, after all, so outdoing ourselves is not that big a deal. But only when the deal is done, not before. Before that, it is scary time.

And right now, I am scared.

image courtesy of Gizmodo

I mentioned in a previous post that the Amazon Kindle is operating is a vacuum of sorts, given that all the big guns are focusing on laptops and touchscreen notebooks. It seems that the ‘monopoly’ days for Amazon are very much numbered (6 days and counting).

Barnes & Nobles, the book seller/publisher is finally coming out with an e-reader of their own. The details are sketchy as to what it will be called, but Gizmodo has a good run down of to what the new e-reader by Barnes and Nobles will be like:

1. It will be have the same black and white e-ink display like the Kindle (why can’t they get on the program and come up with a color screen?)
2. The Barnes & Nobles e-reader will also have – and this a first in the minuscule e-reader category – an iPhone-like multi-touch screen (damn, this sentence is over-hyphenated or what!)
3. As Barnes Nobles is also a publisher of books, and not ‘just’ a book seller, they will be giving out big discounts on their own books when purchased via their reader.

All in all, this is a good thing. I still do not know if the e-reader will even work in Pakistan (or any other country besides the US and UK, for that matter. Remember, the Amazon’s Kindle doesn’t work in Pakistan). Also, the device has yet to be named, although it is coming out in less than a week’s time. The guys over at Gizmodo know the name but won’t tell; they only assure us that the name is terrible enough to warrant change before the release. Let’s see, as I will, God willing, be keeping a watch on this developing e-reader market.