I have been thinking a lot about how a small business owner survives in Pakistan. Yet more difficult is understanding how a labourer or anyone who works on a daily wage manages to get business in this sprawling metropolis.

When I first started out on the road to entrepreneurship, all I had was a laptop in a bag hanging from my shoulder, a list of appointments I had made by cold calling companies and the distance between each appointment that I had to cover on foot or by public transport.

I remember thinking at one point when I had become particularly weary from the great distance traveled that day, that every step I took was taking me towards my goal of getting my first bit of business for my newly registered company. It has been this memory more than anything else which has stayed with me and pushed me to work harder. I am fortunate that I do not have to be out on the road every day looking for clients anymore, but the thought that millions of people sit by the footpath on the streets of Karachi daily looking for work under the grueling hot sun has never ceased to haunt me. Perhaps because I run a small business which is always looking for more work just to keep going, I feel a kinship with the men who are constantly in search of work just to make enough to keep their families fed and under a roof.

Whenever I pass by Gizri and see the line of daily workers sitting shoulder to shoulder waiting for someone to come by who needs their services, I am reminded of how heavy my laptop felt as I walked a couple of kilometers to my next appointment. I have wanted to do something to help the people I see by the roadsides looking for work. It was one of the reasons I thought of a platform which brought together people with what is around them. yellO I hope, can one day bring together the daily worker with those who need their services. I can only hope, that the desire I have to use technology to help the citizens of our city may one day result in making that road to finding a daily wage a little shorter and easier.

Thank you to the faculty of SZABIST for allowing us to set up a stall at the campus and interact with the students. We wanted to gauge their reactions for the application we have built and get them involved with the ongoing improvement process for the User experience. The visitors to the stall ranged from Business students to Part-time web designers and even an anchor for a technology show on TV!

Overall, everyone we spoke to was excited about having a platform dedicated to Pakistan where people can interact virtually on a map and get to know people around them and how they feel about their city. We got some good feedback on the yello.pk application and we are already building in several of the suggestions which we thought were very insightful overall.

So, thank you to the SZABIST staff and student body for a great day on campus and some fantastic feedback on yellO.

The second yellO meetup is happening on 19th April at Copper Kettle on Stadium Road. The guys at CK have been great and really accommodating. From giving us our own area to allowing us a projector and speakers for the multimedia presentation, they have really gone out of their way to make it easy for us to organise the event. We hope to see a whole bunch of you there to make it as much of a success as the last one. This time I will try to remember to get some photos to put up on this blog.

Yipee! yello.pk is now connected with Facebook. This means you can login using your existing Facebook ID without having to create a new one for yellO. This also means that you can choose to publish your activity on yellO back to Facebook to share with your friends. So, say you review and tag a new restaurant on yellO and want to share it with the World at large (or at least the Facebook World!), then your review can be pushed to Facebook at the touch of a button. Cool? We think so.

The first yellO meetup held on 12th April 2009 was at Copper Kettle, Zamzama. We chose the venue because their Hi-Tea is dependably tasty and because they were really nice and offered us a private area where we could meet, chat and watch the yellO presentation without being disturbed.

It was an invite only event and the invitees were chosen on the basis of their answers to a question we posed: If your ABCD cousins are in town and are hot and bothered and bored, where would you take them? We selected 15 people to attend the first meetup from over 700 responses. Some of the funnier or insightful answers are copied below. They didn’t necessarily get an invite though.

• I would take them to the seaside and drop them there.
• I’ll take them to some shanty town or may be a slum so that they can see the picture from the other side and might want to give up a little of their vanity as well.
• I will take them to Fiesta Water park. The amount of “garmi” and “gandagi” they will witness there will bring my cousins back to Earth.
• I’ll take them to the airport and send em back…..
• Will take them to watch a PUSHTO MOVIE! so that they will consider being bored N flies are HEAVEN compared to that torture!

The event was great fun and we hope to repeat the magic of meeting fellow Karachiites and finding something in common to get excited about (I mean bringing a positive change through using yellO as a platform) at the next meetup which is on 19th April at the Copper Kettle near the Stadium. More meetups will follow soon. If anyone out there wants an invite to a meetup, the best way right now is to get it through one of the Campus or Neighbourhood Leaders for yellO. A list of the Campus and Neighbourhood Leaders will be up soon.