Zahid Lilani – Technology and Social Media for Business

NaanMap: Making it Easier to Find Halal Restaurants & Stores

Posted on 18. Jun, 2010 by Zahid Lilani. View Comments

Halal is to Muslims what Kosher is to Jews. Majority of Muslims eat at restaurants that have a sign saying “HALAL.” Up until now there was only one website Zabihah.com that provided a list of Halal restaurants. The problem with Zabihah is that it tries to do a lot and ends up destroying the user experience.

NaanMap is trying to change all that by providing a user friendly interface for anyone to look up a Halal restaurant to dine at. I recently learned about the service and after following them on Twitter decided to DM and see if they would answer few questions of mine. Response was positive and I got to learn a lot more about NaanMap and the person behind it.

Mudassir Azeemi, who blogs at Bongeek, is the developer of NaanMap. He is a UI or User Interface designer and feels the same way about Zabihah the way I do, cluttered and confusing.

Following is his response to my questions:

Q: Who is behind NaanMap?
A: Qurtaba LLC Team owns NaanMap – it’s their product.

Q: Your biggest competitor is Zabihah.com with large market share. How will you differentiate yourself?
A: If you’ve been keeping up with NaanMap and Zabihah for the last couple of months, you would notice that the current Zabihah site is actually a shameless copy of NaanMap.

We are here to show a better approach to searching for halal restaurants and stores. We have many other things that are already in the pipeline and are quite different from what Zabihah is doing.

Sure, they may have a bigger market share, but NaanMap is pretty new. Our distinct advantage is the usability factor. In fact, we want to make this our core strength. NaanMap is simple and usable, not clumsy and annoying.

Q: What can we expect from NaanMap in future?
A: We plan to integrate many new and innovative features. For instance, we’ve noticed that the current review system on Zabihah is a total mess that wastes the user’s time and frustrates them. We have devised a solid and usable review system that we’re going to introduce pretty soon.

Q: Anything else you would like to add?
A: Keep in mind we are still in the process of innovating and refining the initial idea of NaanMap. This will take some time but it shouldn’t be for years on end. We are agile and our focus is on creating a satisfying user experience. The business owners come second. We know what users really want, and the market out there is big enough to cater to more than Zabihah or NaanMap.

Personally, I would like to see the following new features on NaanMap:

- iPhone App
- Reviews
- Ability to add new restaurants and stores without registering
- Facebook integration

NaanMap can do a lot more because of the vision it has to provide crucial (its FOOD) information in the simplest form. I wish them all the success.

Google and Entrepreneurship

Posted on 12. Jun, 2010 by Zahid Lilani. View Comments

I just got done with my last seminar class at SFSU. There was a Google employee in my class who enjoyed celebrity status because of his association with Google. Our professor was too intrigued I suppose and asked him to do a small presentation about Entrepreneurship. It was suppose to coincide with the lecture on the same chapter topic.

He gladly accepted and took charge. Here is what he had to say about certain Google offerings that are shelved or have lot of resources allocated to it.

- Google Checkout is pretty much a done deal. As soon as it went bust and Google’s hope of becoming the next PayPal was shattered, they dumped it and now its completely neglected and no resources are directed towards its growth.

- Orkut was the brain child of a Turkish engineer and at a point was very big in Asian countries especially India. The response in the U.S. was dismal and it wasn’t able to compete with heavy weights like Facebook and MySpace. Pretty much shelved, no resources allocated.

- Doubleclick which Google bought has not yet married AdSense. In other words, two different project managers working under one supervisor and no real integration between the two technologies. AdSense focus is mainly text and Doubleclick is sticking with its banner advertising.

- Google TV is going to be the next big thing after 3D TV phenomenon. It will be launched in coming months. It is currently going through a process called “Dogfooding” which means you should be able to eat your own dog food. In English it means Google employees are testing the new product rigorously and giving feedback.

- Google health will digitize medical records for you and your Doctor to access when need be. It will be fairly secured since Google will be storing more identifying information about its users. That is the reason they are having such a hard time making alliances and creating partnerships with different health care providers.

Rest of the presentation was about how Google lets its employees to work on projects they think can be beneficial for the company and provide users with better value. Entrepreneurship is the very reason Google has been so successful. Google is putting a lot more resources towards developing the next big thing in Mobile because that’s where everyone is headed.

Not Worth the Time for Small Businesses to Embrace Social Media

Posted on 01. Jun, 2010 by Zahid Lilani. View Comments

Being a small business owner, there is nothing more important to me than to get the word out about my tax and accounting services business. But is social media the answer? Does it pay off? I have trouble with all the experts and gurus saying that if you are not leveraging social media then you will miss the boat. Just because they have a theory doesn’t mean it is proven that small businesses must use social media or cease to exist.

Maybe someone can explain to me if people go to Facebook to click on ads and visit fan pages of local yogurt shop or to communicate with friends and family? I have personally never clicked a single ad on Facebook and/or become a fan of any local small business that I frequent (I am a fan of few small businesses but have never given them a dime and never will).

Question is, should small businesses waste time promoting their business using the social media?

My business does have a presence on Facebook and Twitter. Since I am into blogging and tweeting, I hardly find social media extra time investment. In fact, I think even before I started my business, I was out there trying to network. Not every business owner is tech savvy and has the luxury of time to research all that is out there.

Most of my clients know about my social media engagement and my love for everything computers and tech. They are curious about Facebook and Twitter because of the hype. They have many questions.

“Should I be on Twitter and Facebook?” is usually the first question. My answer is Yes, you should have a presence. Then I ask them what is your purpose for getting on Twitter and Facebook and they say “Customers and Sales.” I tell them it doesn’t work that way because social media is like networking on the world wide web, you have to engage, converse and sell your knowledge and personality before you sell a product or convert a lead. They usually make a face that says “no time for that.”

Most small businesses are barely surviving in this economy. They don’t have time to waste on something that is still in its infancy and has never yielded anything of substance. Businesses that were already very popular in terms of their products and services are the only one that have benefited from social media.

Social media is FREE, that is both good and bad. Good because there is no barrier to entry, nothing to invest. Bad because it is time consuming and doesn’t guarantee any ROI. Social media is about networking first, selling second. Look at it as your local chamber of commerce mixer. You are a member, you are invited to a 2 hour long event where there are other business owners, you attend the event, get to know other businesses, exchange cards and then go home.

You might never get a customer this way or you might only get customer this way, it all depends on the kind of business you engage in. Think of it this way… broadcasting your message over social media is like standing on a street corner and yelling. In real life, people will ignore you… same thing with social media.

Social media is not worth the time investment for most small businesses. Your marketing strategy should include what works for your kind of business and not what everyone else is doing.

What do you think, am I not making sense? I welcome all comments especially if you have had any success with social media, I would love to hear your story.

Can 2 Million Pakistanis Change Facebook Policy?

Posted on 20. May, 2010 by Zahid Lilani. View Comments

There are 2 Million+ Facebook users in Pakistan according to Facebreakers. A Pakistani court on May 19th, 2010 decided that they would place a ban on Facebook until the end of the month. The ban was in response to a Facebook page called “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!” to be held Thursday May 20, 2010.

It is been vastly reported (TechCrunch | Al Jazeera) that 45 Million Pakistanis use Facebook which doesn’t make sense because according to most recent internet usage statistics, Pakistan has roughly littler over 18 Million internet users. My number, 2 Million seems more in line with reality. So now the questions becomes, Can 2 Million Pakistanis Change Facebook Policy?

Personally, I think Pakistan and the Lawyers involved with all this are simply over reacting and wasting time. This ban is not going to make a dent in Facebook’s popularity or bring about any change in their policy. This is what Facebook said about this whole controversy:

While the content does not violate our terms, we do understand it may not be legal in some countries. We are investigating this. In cases like this, the approach is sometimes to restrict certain content from being shown in specific countries. -TheBigMoney

Unfortunately, Facebook practices double standards. As soon as a Pakistani blogger named Farrukh Zafar created a facebook event page in response to the “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” titled “Everybody Ridicule & Draw Holocaust Day” calling people to draw the sketches of the Holocaust, Facebook took off that page within 20 minutes of an action alert issued by Jewish Internet Defense Force.

This shows that Facebook prefers one side over the other but I honestly don’t care. With all that Facebook has been doing with the Privacy of its users lately, it is no surprise that it happens to be struggling when it comes to making policies and sticking to it.

I don’t think there should be a “Draw a Mohammad Day” or “Ridicule Holocaust Day.” All this leads to chaos and more animosity. I think Gandhi said it best when he said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

The world would still be rotating around the sun if South Park makers hadn’t embarked on their journey to touch a hot button topic in the Islamic world. Muslims don’t depict the Prophet in images in either positive or negative light and neither should the rest of the world.

UPDATE: Facebook page that led to Pakistani ban removed

Winning An iPad

Posted on 09. May, 2010 by Zahid Lilani. View Comments

Good News: My in-laws got real lucky at a competition and won the first prize, an iPad. Bad news: Only one per family.

Nonetheless, an iPad is an iPad, doesn’t matter if only one member of the family got it. If it is in the family, I can use it whenever I want. I am now thinking that getting married at a young age was not a bad idea after all.

So… how was it?

Well since I am the geek in the house, they gave it to me and said “Open, configure and set it up.” I have an an iPhone so I thought how difficult can this be. The problem was, I was dealing with an Apple product and I should have seen it coming.

Unlike the iPhone, you don’t just turn ON the iPad and start working it. You have to first connect it to your PC, download iTunes, register, and create an account on iTunes. That took about 15-20 minutes. Setting WiFi up was a breeze and within 25 minutes of opening up the iPad, I was watching Potter Puppet Pals Videos on YouTube with my 11 year old Sister-in-law who thinks Potter Puppet Pals are hilarious.

After the Potter Puppet, I decided to test out the iTunes store and downloaded some apps. I didn’t like the iTunes app on the iPad. It is not as user friendly as the one on iPhone. I like to have a tab that takes me to the Free apps and iPad seems to be lacking there big time. I downloaded few games, Angry Birds was one of them. Since Angry Birds is made for iPhone, you have to zoom in and that results in grainy pixels. It was an OKAY experience playing Angry Monkey on the iPad.

iPad’s screen is magnificent. The clarity is excellent and watching videos is one heck of a treat. If you want a portable video player that is also connected to internet (WiFi in my case) then iPad is the way to go.

It is not something that will replace a laptop, not anytime soon. It is portable yet it is heavy, drop it once and that’s it. It is so thin that it creates an illusion for someone picking it up for the first time that it is lighter than a feather. But just because it is thin doesn’t mean it is not heavy. Even before you drop the iPad, there is a possibility that it might just slip out of your hands/lap.

iPad is revolutionary, in many ways and one of which is the way portrayed in movies depicting future. iPad or similar devices will make it possible for us to control everything in the household. Security alarms, TV, Music System, Lights, Energy, Garage Door etc. You can watch cooking videos on YouTube and make food exactly like the Chef. You can look at each and every corner of your house when you are on a vacation using a surveillance camera. These things are all possible right now on a computer connected to internet but iPad just makes it more portable.

More than 1 Million iPads sold so far, there is definitely a market out there. I would really like to see more competition, something as promising as the iPad but with Flash enabled and lighter.