business plan competition

Congratulations to IBA, and the 2 teams who were recognized for their plans.

Mend It - provides trained personnel for all home maintenance needs

Novus team – TV in white cabs with social, entertainment and infotainment

Couple of industry seniors are coming for surprise appearance on award day

Missing In Action – Projector

Guess whats missing . the projector. BBA 2 Section 2 is being thoroughly questioned by the student councilor regarding the missing projector. the whole class was standing outside the office of the student councilor and each student was being questioned individually.

The seminars for the semester are apparently cancelled because the projector went missing. 

ICICT fines

for a moment there i thought they had forgotten the fines. guess i was wrong. they never leave an opportunity to make money out of the poor students.

Sometimes i think the fines should be more like thought paper on some topic rather than just money going to IBA’s account.

Someone once said, authenticity is doubted, that there is a bank account where all the fines go and no one is supposed to take money out from the account. i doubt that .

I SEE ICICT WOES – DAY 2

So on Sunday instead of snuggling in nice warm blankies we make towards the campus they have painted dirty dark pink (I claim the color as Dink. For it being dirty, dark, and the campus dean and director being Danishmand.) well, the roll call again, and we attend to it. Sitting through one boring lecture after another. By now the body is used to the seat so sleep comes naturally. Morning tea doesn’t do much. Reports of fines run amok and then slowly vanish as the day moves along. Akhter Kamal spoke about how people could go to Australia and study instead of his designated topic. He could have chosen how to help the power shortage problem in Pakistan but apparently nabbing students for Australia was a better alternative. The humor that had the audi in laugh in the opening ceremony was a bit dry too. The only speaker who made an impact was Naeem Zamindar from Mobilink. The Venture Capitalist on the lookout for potentially great start up. He talked about his life , his journey, the mobilink story and how we can just change the face of web in Pakistan with web apps. Made me think for a while. He talked of people coming out of LUMS and launching startups that he’s funding. Why don’t we have something from IBA… Cause they aren’t teaching us to think free. The education here is doing more to restrict growth to a set path rather than taking risks and making a worthwhile change out in the real world.

Then we had the guest of honor to close the ceremony. Sindh Caretaker Minister for Information Technology, Environment, Alternative Energy, Mines and Mineral Development Jam Karam Ali. My apologies but the minister could not link up two sentences in English let alone talk about ICICT and how conferences like these are really going to help us as a nation or even inspire. He kept on talking how he would be available to answer any questions through out his speech and how students can approach him and ask him questions and how willing he is to answer the questions put forward and that it is a very good conference and how Information technology is critical for the progress and prosperity of any nation[The News], nothing else. I wonder what the speechwriter wrote . And after finishing his speech and the awards being handed out I just saw him rushing out without answering any questions. Talk about going back on your word as soon as you say it.

The conference ended. And guest left. Students were told they would have to sit through another roll call which was a bluff and they called it as soon as guests were out of sight and at the pleas of MOCs that students have been through enough. Skip the roll call.

 

So the so called delusionally successful international conference came to an end. We don’t have any fat ladies singing to mark the end. That’s sad too.

I SEE ICICIT WOES – DAY 1

So finally, like the most delayed conference , that too the second one , they managed to put together something. HEC funded it if they had agreed to hold it in the teeny tiny campus. So the auditorium(audi) with its broken chairs was decked up for the event with the back drop and was filled with students who didnt want to be at campus cause they had done their share of spending time on campus thru the whole semester. but the lingering threat of Rs.5000 got those who couldnt exempt themselves from the event to be there, just enough people to fill up the audi to a respectable capacity. We were suppposed to show up at 7.45 so that the roll call could start. 359 students roll call. can you imagine, roll call for an international information and communications technologies conference?

anyways. the conference starts , a few minutes late, which is acceptable by any standards. we have the speakers do their usual round. Big D says weird unbelievable statements. Anyways after the initial ceremony we move on to an assigned classroom. around twenty students. in one classroom listening to a speaker from UK , if i remember correctly talking about mobile ip and then about communications in space. both interesting topics. then lunch in the basketball court. when we came back to the class to listen to someone from FAST NU presented on SRSS document. The importance of correctness and completeness, which i believe didnt add much value. then someone from Allama Iqbal Open University on interoperability between different networks. anyways after she left and the next speaker couldnt make it we had our fun. got into a little trouble for that but i guess a little fun cant hurt anyone Workshops were held in CEE , while two more presentations were taking place in Room One and the audi. I overheard an attendee of the workshop saying it was totally worthless. i would not doubt that.

the management of the event was not upto the mark. Small complains which should have been handled at a lower level went up bringing down a lot of threats of fines being imposed. talk about stick approach to handling the event.

We werent allowed to use the cell phone, or even hold it during the conference’s duration. it got confiscated if found using

We werent allowed to read anything during the conference.

We werent allowed to sleep during the conference, but that was more cause the seats were so bad they gave us back aches.

anyways, so we had around three to four roll calls during the day. which pretty much made it look so beyond forced attendance. The target audience for the conference was so mismatched that we really didnt learn anything of value from the conference. I dont know what this conference accomplished other that the fact that IBA hosted a almost irrelevant so called international conference on Information and communication technology [A more relevant conference on Finance was scrapped by the director the semester before last because apparently he was resigning so he couldnt chair the conference and the scrapping came at the very last moment too ]. The other reason would be that it was a platform for people to just get the paper published. i wonder what happened to quality control or did they not get enough papers to actually enforce quality control.

we didn’t even get any giveaways for the conference. no Schedule , no pens, no folders, no nothing. no proof of attending the conference either except a card that says , ” Student ICICT 2007″ and the roll call sheets.

they tell us to get there on sunday at eight. insaneness i say.