azeem.azhar

Sixty per cent of my time is spent with customers, forty per cent with investors, thirty per cent with my team and thirty per cent doing work. The result is a busy schedule made easier by these ten great products.

1. Pzizz on iPhone : totally essential. Pzizz is a power napping application which I have been using since it was an app on the Mac

Builds unique sleep environments, allow for refreshing 15 minute power naps during the day. Sadly usually only have time for one every other day.

2. Docscanner on iPhone : constantly running around, so you never have the paper work you need when you are near a fax or scanner. And vice-versa. Docscanner takes better than average photos of documents and then allows you to transform them into scans that are acceptable to lawyers and bankers.
3. Berghaus Extrem Incinerator Duvet: London has been freezing these past two months, and I have done much more walking and running around in this wet, snowy city than I would like. My Incinerator Duvet jacked has kept me warm and dry. Plus doubles as an sensory-isolation chamber during power naps. (You need to see it to believe it.)
4. Quaker porridge oats : Eaten on most mornings to get me through to at least eleven am.
5. Sharemyplaylists : Great for finding a suitable playlist for late night working sessions. Something laid back for writing presentations, some more thumping for building a training set for one of our modules.
6. Dropbox : Just have to add my entrepreneur love for Dropbox.
7. Xpad : Very simple Mac App for keeping scratch notes. Autosaves, but sadly doesn’t sync easily across Dropbox.
8. Chartbeat / Analytics App / Server Density : three apps that help us stay on top of our site performance and uptime. Chartbeat has become completely essential, but Analytics App which is an iPhone app for grabbing headling Google Analytics data during the day. David Mytton’s server density is a useful Nagios-as-a-service.
9. Blackberry Bold : Great device for writing emails, to dos and tweets, while carrying a laptop bag in the order hand. Unlike my iPhone I can pretty much navigate this with one hand, while walking/running. It also functions really well in 2G mode, giving me better-than-odds chance of reaching 10pm with a mobile phone that still has batteries.
10. iPhone tethering: When it works, money saving. No more £10 trips to Starbucks just to pull a presentation or check something online.

Number 11 … of course there is a number 11.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 100% [?]

Lots of people have helped us in our journey to build the world’s database of professional expertise. To name but a few, by their twitter handles: @robinklein, @rayyans, @nauiokaspark, @wdavc, @eileentso, @quixotic, @moia, @umairh, @aainslie, @harikunzru, @julien51, @philiphotchkiss, @marklittlewood to name but a few.

And I thought it might be worth accounting for my government’s help in our entrepreneurial journey:

• Education: Of our (extended team) of eight, I am the only one educated in the UK. And then my degree (PPE at Oxford) is of tangential relevance. The others, whether on the development, product management or knowledge engineering side,  have been educated in Europe, Canada, US and Australia.
• Company support: HMGs input so far has been to send me constant reminders to file my 363, now threatening to strike us off the company record. Yep, we’re a 13 month old company with £6k in revenues, and you want my 363 already? Should I spend time filing it ahead of working out the global licensing agreement framework with X Megacorp? Or reviewing the latest developer release of the iPhone app? Or indeed writing this blog post?
• Taxation: HMG has also been kind enough to pester us with VAT returns every quarter. From a cashflow standpoint this is fine because I have a few refunds, but in reality that puny cashflow doesn’t matter a jot to our business right now. And anyway, you sent me a cheque rather than making a direct bank transfer, because obviously waiting in a queue is the best use of my time.
• EIS: thanks for the EIS relief, although I have to confess that less than 10% of the capital we raised was eligible for EIS relief. The paperwork is absurdly complicated both for submission and for the forms themselves. Why make it this complex, when it could be simple and allow me to spend more time on–I don’t know–talking to lead customers.
• Employee options: Yep. It’s really important to incentivise employees. And thank god one of my cofounders had  trained as a solicitor. And we still had to iterate the forms three times.
• Enterprise finance guarantee: To misquote Harrison Ford, ‘You can put up the website for it, but you sure as hell can’t get the banks to lend’

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 32% [?]