ArashAfrooze.com

It’s February. The 2010 Winter Olympics are only weeks away, and I’m not even excited, not even a tiny bit. Why? well it’s plain and simple. Winter Olympics suck!! for several reasons.

First off, I want to take a few seconds here and announce that I don’t believe winter sports should even be qualified as ‘Olympic-worthy’. I mean really, if African’s can’t do it, then it’s not a sport. OK that was a joke, but it gets the point across. In all seriousness, how many countries in the world have the luxury of competing in winter sports? Not very many. If my memory serves me correctly, Olympic sports should be worldly. Take for example, curling: really? Curling is an Olympic sport? What’s next? poetry? Same goes for pretty much every single one of the winter Olympics events. There are just not enough countries in the world that pay enough attention or budget for these sports. I mean there are athletes from Ghana and Morocco and Iran and Pakistan, but not in a million years will any of them get on the podium. So truthfully, these so called “Olympics” sports have half a dozen of competing countries, in every single category.

Another reason why I don’t like the winter Olympics is they cost too much. I mean we’re talking about billions of dollars here. Money that was never well spent. It’s no secret that the money being brought into the city by visitors will never match the money that was spent on the Olympics. Some argue that it’s a good thing for the city of Vancouver in the long run, because it puts Vancouver front and center and will attract more tourism in the long run. Seriously? Vancouver is already one of the most visited cities in Canada, and certainly doesn’t need a multi-billion dollar tourism campaign. I agree that some things are beneficial to us, like the Sea to Sky construction (which again turns out to be quite useless for the Olympics itself, since individuals are not allowed to drive up to whistler during the Olympics) and some additional jobs that were created, but all of these things could have been done with a much lower budget.

Bottom line is that the Winter Olympics are just not that popular. OK I’m not a huge fan of winter games myself, but I’m not the only one am I? I don’t think the level of excitement for these games will be anywhere near what people experience during summer Olympics. Someone told me that all the visitors that will be here for the events are already here, but I keep failing to spot any of them. When I was in Germany for the World Cup, you could see visiting soccer fans every other inch.

Like one of my friends said: “It’s a 17 day party that will take us 70 years to pay off”.

Cheers,

froozle

Hello world!

As a lot of you already know I’ve been working really hard recently with a couple of other guys to start a web business, Designtourney. I’ve been working my day job at Public Works, and evenings I’ve been a designtourney.com employee. The whole thing started when I got in touch with an oxford graduate, Terry Beech, who had the idea of starting this website. Terry, his twin brother Doug and myself have been working non-stop for the past 6 months. I’ve been coding and deploying, and they have been pumping out ideas, marketing and getting everything else done.

So far everything has been amazing. We’ve had over 30 clients and thousands of designers. Soon after launch, we realized that we need not to stop here. In order to be successful we need to surpass our competitors. We started thinking of new ideas to expand our business.

Terry and Doug started looking for possible investors, and we found a few. In about a month, they will fly out to London, England to pitch the idea to a board of investors at Oxford in hopes of getting some cash. This means we’re in business, for real!! As of yesterday, the three of us are the co-founders of Crowdsource Networks Inc. with equal shares of the company, and I am the Chief Technical Officer of our young company. Now that really means nothing at this point, but heck that would look good on a business card, wouldn’t it?

Now how does Designtourney work, you may ask? Well, it’s very simple. Let’s say I’m an owner of a new business and I’m in need of some sort of design, be it a logo, website or other. Traditionally I would go to a design firm, and pay them a sum of money, usually in the thousands, and they would come back with a few designs. I’d pick one and get on with my business. With Designtourney, you have the power of directing a virtual team of thousands of designers, from hundreds of countries across the globe. So I, the business owner, fill out a design brief, pay a fraction of the traditional cost, and watch my virtual team get to work and pump out amazing designs. I can provide comments along the way and my designers will tweak their entries to my liking. Within a few days, I have a professionally designed logo, website or other, and I feel good about it !!

Crowsourcing is a very new concept. A lot of people still don’t know about it and the market is still wide open. With our suite of crowdsource based applications, we are hoping to become the market leaders, and with the team at hand, we are very confident. If you have a few minutes, check out Designtourney. We have three other web sites in the works and will launch those in the near future.

Check us out and let me know what you think. You’ll want to do that, because I may just be the next millionaire !!

Cheers,

froozle

I am back! That’s right. After months and months of inactivity, I’ve managed to get my site back up and working again. I have so very much to write about, and have so little time to do it in. I will, however try to spare a few minutes here and there every couple of days to update my blog.

Just so you don’t worry about me, I’m good and healthy, happy and not wealthy. Check back tomorrow, I’ll tell you what’s been up.

Cheers,

froozle