Updates from hariskhan
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Haris Khan
3:03 pm on July 10, 2008
Wherever.tv was launched yesterday in SINO Consumer Electronics Show, China. It recieved great reception from both conference attendees and press. It was covered on Forbes.com , Engadget.com , PittsburghLive.com and Examiner.com
Wherever.tv is a sleek new device that delivers hundreds of international TV channels straight to your television instantly over a broadband internet connection. You can learn more at their site.
Wherever.tv is one of Zigron’s Inc startup based in Pittsburgh,PA
Haris Khan
11:32 pm on July 1, 2008
Tags: ATM, Technology, UI, User Experience, UX (2)
For some time I have noticed that in blogosphere, User Xperience has mostly been associated with Web 2.0 companies and hardware devices, well actually only one hardware i.e iPhone. So I decided to go out and see where I can find innovation in UX apart from the web.
On this great adventure the first experience I stumbled across was Bank Of America’s ATM on Van Ness street in San Francisco. I had this old check, which I was planning to deposit for sometime, but hesitated because my last experience with Chase’s ATM in Chicago to deposit a check was very clumsy. One had to seal the check in an envelope, which the machine will vent out and then write the amount and your account info on top of it. One also has to feed in the check amount. Usually I don’t have a pen with me so it was another embarrassing moment and interestingly most ATM machines have a slanting face which makes it even harder to use it as base to write on it.
Anyway this time around, when I was expecting the ATM to throw an empty envelope out, it just asked me to slide the check in a slot which had a blinking light. For a moment I was taken a back and didnt know what to do but the ATM kept beeping. After gaining some intelligence I decided to slide the check in and said to myself that worst come to worst I will just lose it as it wasn’t that big of an amount. It was from a friend who owed me some grocery money, luckily she wasn’t that hungry while grocery shopping.
Eager to see what will happen, the ATM showed me the scanned copy of my check with the exact amount to two decimal points. It had scanned it on the fly and by using some recognition software had understood my friends handwritten amount to the exact amount. While I was still star struck and excited with the experience, I had my receipt in my hand with a scanned printout of the actual check I just deposited.
Now I call this a true user experience. Next time I will make a video of it. So feel free to send me some checks and please feel free to be liberal with the amount 
Haris Khan
2:11 am on June 5, 2008
PingMyCompany is a Zigron Inc product. It was recently featured on Mashable.com. You can read the post here.
Haris Khan
8:49 am on May 31, 2008
Tags: HR
This blog post covers the behind the scene action for any resource we plan to hire. For this I conducted an internal survey with few of the individuals who actively participate in selecting new hires for Zigron as we need to make sure that our vision is in aligned with what our team practices.
First I need to share what is Zigron’s philosophy behind hiring. Our main goal is to find resources who are truly excited about the job they are about to take in our firm. We as a firm don’t want to or try to dictate what each individual should love. All we prefer is that they should be excited and passionate about something (we will prefer that’s their new job).
Now the trick is how do you select a resource and to be honest there is no simple answer. We at Zigron conduct quite few interviews. They range from simple HR to few technical rounds and then finally to the ultimate gut checking session. I will try to sum up few of the key characteristics we look for and how we come to a conclusion.
Note: Most of these conclusions are based on the internal survey.
How do we select a resume ?
As expected “Skill Set” and “Experience” turns out to be the top reasons for any resume selection.
(My View) I personally look for something unusual and out-of-box elements. It can be a strange hobby or a part-time work experience.
How do we assess “skills” ?
This is always a tricky one but one thing which struck me out from our survey was the level of importance which is given to how someone communicates their skill set.
Few prefer to gauge by assessing the basic understandings of the skills they have written down or by giving them a hands on problem to solve. One approach I liked was as follow:
“Asking first about the strength of candidate, then some questions from that area and taking him towards the weak side to measure the variance”
(My View) I personally prefer any hands on real life situation and see what solution they can recommend. So if it’s a User Experience position then I will ask them to rank Zigron’s work and how they can make it better.
Ratio of structured vs. non-structured questions ?
60% structured and 40% un-structured .
The interesting point is that within Zigron we don’t have any company defined structured questions so I really don’t know from where we are getting these questions ?
(My View) I have about 20% pet questions and the rest are all based on the discussion I am having with the individual. One of my favorite questions is “Which are the top 2 firms you want to join and why didn’t you get in there yet?”
How we analyze the candidate and select one ?
For analyzing the best tool is to put the candidates in different scenarios and then judge their response. This tool seems to be hot favorite among Zigron team. Part of this approach is to ask very tough questions to see how one reacts to them even though we don’t expect them to know the answers.
When it comes to selection criteria there is no single winner. “Potential/energy” is a must but with it a resource should have “skills” to utilize their energy to efficient use. “Out of box” thinking is also appreciated but again does one have the smartness to deliver it.
(My View) For me one the biggest selection criteria is that how honest the individual is to him or herself. Does he really know his/her strengths? Is he really passionate about something or is he just fooling oneself.
At the end I will like to give a single suggestion to all who plan to apply for a job anywhere in any firm. Please be true to yourself and just follow your own passion proudly.
Good luck you all.
Haris Khan
7:34 pm on May 8, 2008
After reading some really interesting comments on a post about Zigron Inc on Green & White blog I decided that we need a site where people can share their positive and negative opinions about different firms.
So as a fun project we decided to create PingMyCompany.com. Its a simple project where users can add different companies and give comments in favor or against different companies. Its more like theFunded.com for companies.
Please feel free to give us your suggestions as comments to make this site more fun and interesting.
Update: PingMyCompany.com is having accessibility issues thanks to GoDaddy.com please access it at PingMyCompany.net
Update: Got reviewed on Green & White blog. You can read it here.
Haris Khan
9:13 pm on May 7, 2008
WherevetTV recently got a post on Pop City Media. You can read the post at here.
Haris Khan
7:56 am on April 20, 2008
Tags: startup school, Techcrunch, Y Combinator
Today I had the great pleasure of attending Startup School 2008. It’s a brain child of Y Combinator which invests into young startups by students/hackers to come up with really cool ideas. Its like summer camp for startups. It was a day long event and following are few key highlights:
- First of all I loved the way everyone got connected with each other via Chat room on Chatterous.com, Twitter , live feed from Justin.tv, live pics and a wiki. It was great to get live feedback from everyone.
- Greg McAdoo from Sequoia Capital advised startups to consider their potential markets as waves. He suggested that startups should think like surfers to respect the wave and get on it when the time is right to make the most out of it. I kinda agree with the fact that without Flash from Adobe and high capacity bandwidth, YouTube would have never been a hit.
- Apparently Jeff Bezos , Amazon’s CEO was the main speaker but apparently he wasn’t well received. He kept talking about AWS and AWS. Nothing special there.
- Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and FriendFeed had a very good presentation on “Listening”. He gave some really good tips and he shared his experience that within Google their decision to launch Gmail was decided when 100 internal users were “happy with Gmail” not error free but happy. I think it’s a great way to test your product and we shall start doing the same.
- Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington was next and I was expecting some fireworks. He mentioned that he only got 15 mins which in my view was fair complaint because he deserved more as his session was way more interesting. He quoted that he wants to write stories that startups don’t want about themselves, which makes sense at times for Techcrunch. He suggested a book Purple Cow by Seith Godin. His final take away was if anyone wanted him to write a story, its better to yank him once and hard rather then pitch him continuously and become a noise. I liked the fact that he was a straight shooter and got to the point very quickly.
- There were another presentations too and you can see the recorded video at Justin.tv or read about it on Techcrunch.
Later, I got the chance to meet Mike Arrington in person and to be honest I was expecting he be hard to impress/get through. Well I was right but what I learned that he does genuinely love startups as he quoted earlier. I just introduced him about Zigron and how we are working with startup with our offshore office . This got him some what excited and he asked me to contact him later to meet up. I didnt expected that he will be interested in anything beside killer products but he did prove my assumption wrong and listened to me very carefully. Though in a second I tried to be a smart ass and gave an impression that I didnt approached him for PR to which he got back to me instantly and said “you do want f***ing business with me”… which is true Anyway lets see how it goes.
Overall it was a great experience to see what makes Silicon Valley so special.
Update: You can see 37Signal’s David Heinemeier presentation notes here and corridor discussion here.
The first round table discussion was on “State of Industry”. I didn’t get to learn anything new except US market is now waking up to the fact that SMS does hold alot of promise and it should be properly utilized. They need to travel to Asia more often!
The second discussion was “Teens Know it Better”. For this they had brought in few young teens and they were asked different questions.Following are few facts which were really interesting:
- There are about 60 million people in age group of 12 to 24 within US.
- They spend about $176 billion each year and college student spend about $236 billion.
- 59% think that they are not perfect but still they dont want to change themselves.
- Interestingly, teens dont mind watching ads on free content.
- Surprisingly teens are big on participating in campaigns which tend to make a positive social or green impact. Basically, statistically speaking teens are more socially responsible, at-least when they are online.
- 89% teens will change their brand if the other brand is more social conscious
Today was the much awaited ad:Tech San Francisco . First off was a keynote presentation by Kodak CMO, Jeff Hayzlett. I will say it was the best session of the day. It was interesting to see that how big firms like Kodak are embracing the niche area marketing strategy rather then to conquer the entire world strategy. Kodak canceled its Olympic sponsorship that they use to sponsor for so many years. This will open up great avenues for niche content providers, as now they are one of the main advertising channels for big corporates like Kodak.
Another interesting thing I noticed was that how much effort Kodak makes to get its value statement out there. Jeff mentioned that they created a special challenge in The Apprentice show around Kodak and his prime objective was not just the product placement but to also get its value statement repeated again and again by the stars. They also showed a very cool ad, which was just created for their internal employees. It was an offset of their The Sopranos ad campaign (as its an internal ad so coulndt find it on YouTube).
There was another panel discussion “The Art of Conversation” which in my opinion was a complete flop. In my view the panel was just not able to connect to the crowd and it was very visible by the fact that everyone was either leaving or just not paying attention. The panel was just too busy to get cozy to each other.
Finally there was this huge exhibit hall. Now I will try to put another post on few good companies I found on the floor but I will just finish it off with a single thought.
There were so many digital marketing firms out there that I can only think of one word again and again, which was BUBBLE!! I am kind of confused that do we need so many firms just to track our behavior online, considering dominant ad networks already have a pretty decent reach. Anyway, one thing is for sure that with so many marketing/tracking firms, you should say bye bye to online privacy.
Yesterday I attended a technology meetup “The SF New Tech Meetup” in San Francisco. It had some great presentations including a very cool robo dinosaur Pleo. This toy has a self learning behavioral engine which develops over time based on how one treats it. Users can also code new behaviors for it.
pluggd was the startup which got my attention. They have a patented technology which helps user search within a video and then the result is displayed in a form of heat map on top of it. For now they are not in direct competition with Google Video Search as pluggd is a back-end platform which any video publisher can use.
It got me thinking that pluggd can be a very interesting fit for one of our startups Wherever.tv where our goal is to get the online video content to your tv set without the hassle of operating or learning a pc. It can be a great feature where users can search different keywords within a video to find appropriate content. Now there is a major usability issue because users hate typing text with a tv remote.
Despite this issue I think its a great technology which can still be utilized in Wherever.tv. If anyone of you has a better idea on how to grab text via remote without making it a nightmare, please feel free share.
