Folio3 Chronicles Q4-08

The Chronicles

The Chroniclers

Mujtaba ZiaMuhammad ZuhaibFaisal Abidi

Sarfaraz AhmedSanam RiazZeeshan Ashraf

Contents at a glance

From the Top

The Feat Sheet

Project Spotlight

I Know What We Did Last Quarter

Δ Roster

Personnel Lives

Teching Up

Hot Shot - November

Hot Shot - December

What Happens @ Folio3...

Offshored

01

02

04

06

11

12

13

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15

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17

Vol. I October - December 2008

The Chronicles

From the Top

Oct - Dec 2008

Adnan LawaiCEO

www.folio3.comLogon for further information

very satisfied customers, who are happy to be references and to spread the word about us. All of this has been earned by our dedication, passion, and commitment to excellence. The drive to keep going until we get it just right, the all nighters and weekends and the unrelenting focus on ensuring that our customers and partners are satisfied, are all bearing fruit in a tangible way. As we face the challenges of a global recession, with the opportunity for further growth – both as individuals and as a company - I am confident that these qualities will propel us to greater heights.

For most of us, perhaps the most rewarding aspect of our work is our tremendous sense of community, and the great fun we have working and playing together. I’d like to congratulate the Folio3 Chronicles team for providing another avenue to bring us together.

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We are witnessing the Folio3 team growing at a pace where we are passing the hundred mark if we count our Inter-national locations. With growth comes the need to communicate in new ways so we keep the best of our close-knit community aspects, and at the same time grow to take in the new members, who have a great deal to contribute to this dynamic and highly capable community.

This newsletter is an important step towards achieving that, and I encourage you all to fully participate in it, share a little bit of yourself, to make this into a rich mosaic of the very diverse group of people we have in Folio3. Help the rest of the company know a little bit more about you, whether it is through sharing your insights in hi-tech, your hob-bies, trips, favorite jokes or personal milestones like engagements and new family members. Remember, what makes you different, enriches us all.

I commend Sanam Riaz and the EC team for initiating and putting together The Folio3 Chronicles. I hope this first shot will set your creative brainwaves flowing.

Go “The Chronicles”! Naveed QaziVP of Engineering

Since this is the first Folio3 Chronicle, I’d like to remind ourselves of the tremendous progress we have made as a company. Three years ago, we were a group of about twenty five people, with one major customer, and had just started working with two more. Today we are a hundred person company, we have worked with about 60 customers, at our two locations in Karachi and Sofia. In Karachi, we occupy an entire building in the heart of the city, with our logo proudly displayed on it. We have acquired a great deal of expertise in new technology areas like Flex, Content Man-agement Systems, Web 2.0 Development and Mobile Applications, to the point that we can now compete based on our expertise, not just cost. We have two products – Websilo and SmartGal lery - that are gaining traction in the market. Most importantly, we have several

Hello everyone,With the launch of the Folio3 Chronicles, let me say that while this is a way to stay informed of im-portant events and developments in the company, it is as much a forum for the Folio3 community to present, inform and entertain.

The Folio3 community has traditionally been closely knit. We are used to staying informed of the latest happenings about the company, about each other, what’s new in town, the hi-tech world etc. And be-ing a small group has helped with that in the past.

The Chronicles

The Feat Sheet

Oct - Dec 2008


... Achievements of the Quarter.

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Secret Builders:

SecretBuilders touched upon a successful pub-lic release (http://jehanara.wordpress.com/2008/12/14/secretbuilderscom-spread-

ing-like-wildfire/). SecretBuilders is a virtual world with an emphasis on creativity and historical adven-ture for children 6 to 14 years old. Children live and play among fictional and historical characters and learn concepts from the arts and humanities. They take quests, publish artwork and writings, play scores of casual games, enter contests and participate in an extensive virtual economy and social life. Chil-dren are also given the tools to build out this virtual world with their own ideas, activities and actions. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif. For more information, visit www.secretbuilders.com.

Technology: Java, Flash, Smartfox Comm. Server

Telonu:

Telonu achieved a successful public release in December as well. Telonu is a cool, powerful, rock-your-world online community where you

can tell one and all about the really important stuff. Read and write ‘Tells’ (reviews) on your office, your school, the people there and everything else. You can post ‘Tells’ in several ways: anonymously, with a nickname, or under your user name (first name, last initial). You can also mingle with other ‘Tellers’ and ask questions about organizations and people that you need to know about. We call these questions ‘Asks.’

Additionally, the terrific Telonu logo designed by Salman Talpur received distinction from Abduzeedo.com (a classy graphics design blogging website) and was

PHANTOM:

Public Health Awareness, Monitoring and track-ing of Morbidity – under DiagnosisOne is being certified by the state of Puerto Rico in United

States successfully and is going Live in the month of January. Phantom is the disease surveillance sys-tem used to report communicable diseases at state level. Public Health Departments in US states are responsible for the collection, analysis, interpre-tation and dissemination of communicable disease data. Our web-based solution is capable of fulfill-ing above needs of US Public Health Department’s needs. The solution is compliant to HL7 (Health Level - 7) Standard and is built on using the Public Health Domain of HL7, is extensible and has the flex-ibility of encompassing future needs of the industry. The system encompasses of two main modules: Pa-tient Tracking Module and Disease Surveillance Mod-ule. Supporting modules are Reports and/or Graphs which provides quick and one-stop look to the dis-ease trends, Disease Comparative Distribution etc.

Technology: Java, J2EE, Hibernate, Flex 3, Live Cycle Data Services, Web Services, MS SQL Server

Oct - Dec 2008

Adnan LawaiCEO

Naveed QaziVP of Engineering

ranked at the top in its week 45 list (http://abduzee-do.com/best-week-45). A great recognition indeed!

Technology: Java (Search), PHP, Drupal, MySQL, Amazon EC2 Cloud

http://dreamxtream.wordpress.com



www.secretbuilders.com

http://abduzeedo.com/best-week-45

http://abduzeedo.com/best-week-45

The Chronicles

The Feat Sheet

Oct - Dec 2008


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weather information. For further details visit www.proxpro.com.

Technology: BlackBerry JDE (Java Development En-vironment), Python and Linux

Many of the Folio3 family have touched upon personal feats as well. Najm-us-Saqib is a Software Engineer at Folio3, is well known figure for his optimism and passion, and happens to write a blog under the name DreamExtreme’s Blog (A geek’s life) (http://dreamx-tream.wordpress.com). He started his blog about a year ago which has been expanding rapidly. Recently one of his blog articles (http://dreamxtream.wordpress.com/2008/11/23/web-de-velopment-ide/) about NetBeans IDE was added as a featured article at their community website. Another landmark achieved by his Blog was that it was list-ed in Wordpress list of Growing Blogs.

We currently have the following job openings Software Engineers (Java/C++) with 2+ years of expe-rience

Software QA Engineers with 1+ years of experience For further details visit: http://www.folio3.com/ca-reers/index.php

Proxpro:

Proxpro’s product Prompt won the People’s Choice Award for the enterprise category at the SiRFecosystem’s Location 2.0 Summit (Septem-

ber 2008), because of its “superior use of the power of location to enhance the daily lives of individu-als, enterprises and communities, as well as its level of innovation, impact on the market, features and benefits to end users”. Proxpro provides advanced software solutions for the mobile workforce man-agement and location-based services industries. The company’s situation aware products present just-in-time information to empower professionals and mo-bile teams to make better decisions, reduce costs and improve customer service. Founded in 2005, the company is headquartered in Weston, Mass. Proxpro Prompt fuses GPS to the blackberry® calen-dar (patent pending) and provides “when to leave” alerts, traffic information, routes, directions and

Earthquake Relief DonationTeam Folio3 really stepped up and donated generously for the relief of those struck by the October 29 earthquake in Balochistan. Two separate collections were made and the company matched the amount in one of them. The gesture goes to show that good enthusiasm can be infectious and that we have a great group of people here at Folio3, who think of helping our country-men in need. That is something to take pride in.

http://www.proxpro.com



http://dreamxtream.wordpress.com/2008/11/23/web-development-ide/



http://www.folio3.com/careers/index.php

http://www.folio3.com/careers/index.php

Oct - Dec 2008

The Chronicles

Project Spotlight

Oct - Dec 2008


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Secret Builders:

SecretBuilders (www.secretbuilders.com) is a virtual world for children 5 to 14 years old powered by a web 2.0 community of children,

parents, educators, writers, artists and game devel-opers. On SecretBuilders, children explore virtual lands, undertake quests, play games, maintain a home, nurture a pet, and interact with their friends. Three features which form the backdrop for Secret-Builders distinguish it from other online worlds: Recent Achievements:

Within 6 days of their Press launch (in the first week of December).

Children learn through immersing themselves in the stories, themes, and concepts from the best in literature, arts and humanities. They interact with famous historical and fictional figures and are introduced to content and characters from world civilization and the great thoughts and ideas of human creativity.

Children can create this site, not just consume it. They are directly involved in creating this world with their ideas, critiques and contribu-tions on virtually every aspect of the site and many of their ideas are implemented!

Children publish their works – writings, art, vid-eos – making SecretBuilders their own personal store of creativity. They can invite friends and family to view their works, and comment upon them. Seeing their works published and enjoyed by others boosts their self-confidence as well as motivation to do more.

TEAM MEMBERSAmir Ibrahim – Project ManagerFaisal Abidi – Software EngineerShakil Awan – Art DesignerZakia Taqi – QA engineer / Moderator

They were in 63 countries

Ranked among the top 150,000 sites (up from 3.8 millionth two weeks earlier)

Daily registrations had gone from about 10 per day to 200+ per day; the blogosphere is picking up the site with great enthusiasm

Disney’s Virtual magic Kingdom fans have gone fanatic on SecretBuilders : the special “I love VMK poster” they made has gone off the charts.

A lot of the growth is outside the USA (they were covered in about 8 Spanish publications) and they are really big in Italy (No. 2 country ahead of Canada and the UK).

SecretBuilders is in the process of setting up server presence in Europe and Hong Kong via Amazon’s cloud computing.

Turn for more Screenshots

www.secretbuilders.com

The Chronicles

Project Spotlight

Oct - Dec 2008


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Customize Your Avatar through provided apparels!

Treasured Island

Huanted Valley

Oct - Dec 2008

I Know What We Did Last Quarter!

Oct - Dec 2008

Event Highlights!

Farm house PicnicThe Folio3 Retreat took place this year at the Riverside Farmhouse.

The Chronicles

Trip to Nothern AreasLast time it was Fairy Meadows… this time it was destination Deosai.


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Birthday CelebrationsCome back with a blast in an explosion of colors, tastes and emotion, celebrat-ing the birthdays of 4 months at once!

Farm

hou

se P

icni

c

The Folio3 Retreat took place this year at the Riverside Farm-house. After a long and treacherous drive through traffic packed Shahrah-e-Faisal, we finally arrived at our destination.

Welcome to La Farmhouse! This is a strictly computer, pda and cell-phone free zone.

This pool can easily ac-commodate 40+ people…

just take our word for it.

Pulling an all-nighter.

New friendships were formed… a goal

achieved.

by Faisal Abidi

The Chronicles


Oct - Dec 2008

Event Highlights!



Trip

to

nort

hern

are

as:

Des

tina

tion

Deo

sai Last time it was Fairy Meadows… this time it was destination

Deosai. The rough and tough lions of Folio3 packed their bags and headed off into the untamed north, where few had gone the year before.

This is a story of twelve gritty travelers, walking unbeaten paths, backpacking through the wild, so focused on their objec-tive (getting back alive) even a landslide couldn’t stop them (re-ally!). Don’t let the soft exteriors fools you, as underneath we are adaptable warriors who can undertake any challenge.

This is their story!

…Left markers for future travelers…

Behold Team GRR! We’re all FFFS (Folio Friends

Forever Status)

Team Folio in action! Camping at Rama Valley.

We went to beautiful places


Oct - Dec 2008

The Chronicles


Oct - Dec 2008

Event Highlights!


Trip

to

nort

hern

are

as:

Des

tina

tion

Deo

sai

…C

onq

uere

d m

any

mou

nta

ins.

.

... renewed old bonds...

Team Folio in action! Camping at Rama Valley.

…made some new friends…


...battled landslides and

didn’t wait around for

them to just go away.

Note: this is AF-TER we crossed on

foot.

…and trekked through the wilds.

But a rainbow brightened everybody’s day.


The Chronicles


Oct - Dec 2008

Event Highlights!


Trip

to

nort

hern

are

as:

Des

tina

tion

Deo

sai


… how to put the TEA in TEAM BUILDING EXERCISE!

Team Folio was safe and sound (in Gilgit, a minor detour to buy a chi-trali sitar… a long story for another issue), albeit with a little less Grr!

...In yet another adventure to the wonderful northern areas of Pakistan, the individuals of Team Folio were reminded of the awesomeness of nature, our insignificance, and most importantly…


Oct - Dec 2008

The Chronicles


Oct - Dec 2008

Event Highlights!


Folio

3 Bi

rthd

ay C

eleb

rati

ons

As you can see here all caps are of equal sizes at Folio3.(front, left to right) Aamir employee-at-work, and Adnan (CEO) supervising.

... Yup! We like to party!!

Birthday CelebrationsCome back with a blast in an explosion of colors, tastes and emotion, celebrat-ing the birthdays of 4 months at once!

The traditional Folio3 Birthday celebrations had been on hold for too long, and the EC was proud to come back with a blast in an explosion of colors, tastes and emotion, celebrating the birthdays of over 40 F3 people (that’s half the team!) all at once.

I Knight thee!


The Chronicles

Roster

Oct - Dec 2008


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Sanam Riaz:

Sanam has more than 7 years of experience in HR and Administration with the US based companies in IT, Logistics and Service industries. In her last

assignment as HR Manager in a leading US based firm her major responsibilities were developing HR stra-tegic and tactical plan, recommending and ensur-ing implementation of strategic direction for people development within the organization, ensure timely recruitment of required level/quality of manage-ment staff, developing and maintaining HR policies; mentoring, guiding and developing HR team, devel-oping, refining and fine tuning effective methods or tools for selection, preparing information and input for the salary budget, maintaining and developing leading edge HR systems and process to address the effective management of people in relation to per-formance management, staff retention, career de-velopment, organization development, succession planning, competency building and benefit program.

Tauheed Yar Khan:

Tauheed has 5+ years of experience in using .Net platform for developing business and fi-nancial web based applications. He has ex-

tensive experience in designing and developing web based performance critical and scalable application and proficient in all phases of designing, developing, testing and maintaining module based applications.

Hatching Eggs (Internees)

Muneeb Abdul Shakoore:

He is student of BS (CS) in Karachi University. His objective is to put all his efforts in the field of Com-puter Science. He was freelance programmer

for more than 4 years and is adept at devel-oping both desktop and web applications.

Naila Ata:

Naila left for further studies to Germany. where she is currently doing her MS. Nai-la has been a valuable asset to the com-

pany and had grown well. Her managers were always pleased and satisfied with her perfor-mance. We wish her success in her future venture.

The past quarter saw Folio3 announce the following new or revised HR poli-cies:

Job Referral Bonus Policy: Now job referral bonuses are directly linked with job specific grades

Modified Leaves Policy: The existing leave policy was modified with proper notification period requirements before going on leaves; and was also augmented by adding Bereave-ment Leave as a part of employee benefits.

Oct - Dec 2008

The Chronicles

Personnel Lives

Oct - Dec 2008


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Imran Ali’s son Rumman entered the world on October 30.

Congratulations to Sharique Abdullah, Kashif Siddiqui and Asad Ul Islam who went to perform the auspicious Hajj.

Three juniors were also added to the Folio3 Family.

Kashif Siddiqui’s son Mutahar was born on November 15.

Sameea Ashraf gave birth to a healthy Ibrahim on October 10.

The Chronicles

Teching Up

Oct - Dec 2008


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The Folio3 Tech Forum:

The Folio3 Tech Forum is a place where we ex-tend knowledge, seek solutions to problems and share experiences regarding virtually any

software development technology and architecture paradigm besides staying abreast with the latest trends in the same. The Folio3 architects oversee-ing all that also arrange presentations and work-shops from time to time encircling the hot topics and technologies surrounding the profession. The past quarter saw further continuation of this practice.

a brief history of CakePHP, the ins and outs, how it helps in Rapid Application Development, how it compares with some other frameworks, acquiring and running it on a local machine, the file struc-ture, the libraries and configuration, enabling mod-rewrite on Apache and a thorough discussion of custom application development on CakePHP.

Scrum is an agile development methodology which is getting very popular. Mr. Adbullah Sabooani presented a thorough analysis of the methodol-

ogy focusing on how it minimizes surprises and takes everyone together to have a shippable product at regular intervals. With the tools and techniques pro-vided by Scrum, companies doing in-house product development or consulting (like Folio3) can keep un-knowns to the minimum and accept and incorporate changes quickly and effectively. The interesting pre-sentation covered the related concepts as well as prac-tical implementations by quoting some case studies.

No sooner had Silverlight 2.0 been released than the Folio3 Tech Forum was ready with a presentation! Microsoft Silverlight is a pro-

grammable cross browser and cross platform plug-in that enables features such as animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback that characterize rich Internet applications. Competing with technolo-gies such as Adobe Flash, SVG, Adobe Flex, Adobe Shockwave, JavaFX, Curl and JavaScript, version 2.0 which was released in October 2008, brings addi-tional interactivity and support for .NET languages and development tools. Presented by our very own Fahim Ilyas, it discussed the architecture of Sil-verlight and how to use C# 3.0 and Silverlight 2.0 to create the next generation of web applications.

Shahzad Anees delivered two presentations on CakePHP (an open source MVC framework for producing web applications written in PHP):

Introduction to CakePHP and CakePHP-Implemen-tation. The presentations combined focused on

Oct - Dec 2008

The Chronicles

Hot Shot - November

Oct - Dec 2008


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Folio3 Hot Shots:

November saw the inception of the Hot Shot Em-ployee of the Month contest. Each month, one outstanding employee will be given this award

in appreciation of his or her commitment, diligence and high performance. The selection process is pret-ty straightforward: The employees themselves will nominate amongst them who they think is deserving of this recognition and why. Then, from the nominees, the Management picks the most deserving nominee.

Hot Shot Employee for November ’08 went to Imran Ali. Imran is a dedicated and ef-ficient member of the Folio3 family, loves

Flex and was awarded, among other things, due to his unwavering commitment and productiv-ity on the project DiagnosisOne, and that too de-spite being on the road to becoming a proud father.

Hot Shot for November ’08 went to Imran Ali.

Imran(C) receiving his award from Naveed Qazi(L) and Adnan Lawai(R)

A few words with Imran:Q. How do you feel at becoming the Hot Shot for November ’08?

A: Feeling more responsible.

Q. So what’s the secret behind your commitment and high performance despite the challenges you had to face?

A: My mother’s prayers and the ambition to com-plete the task/project.

Q. Share with us the most interesting moment or incident you came across during this time.

A: These past two months were really hectic and challenging but despite that there were real good moments that we enjoyed. The most interesting – and, in fact, very tense – moment was when Ah-mad ( DiagnosisONE’s CTO ) was standing in front of Puerto Rico team to demo the application. And sud-denly something unexpected happened; the applica-tion stopped working and we had only 10 minutes to resolve it; otherwise we could have ended up with a big loss. But fortunately at the twelfth hour, we made it! It was a huge relief, followed by tasty Bar-B-Q dinner!

Q. Are we going to see you on the winning stand again next month?

A: InshaAllah! When I finish such a challenging task on time (again). :)

The Chronicles

Hot Shot - December

Oct - Dec 2008


Yawar Khan was the December ’08 Hot Shot Employee. As part of the terrific Telonu team, he worked diligently when the chips

were a little down and the deadlines were tight. He met those deadlines, learned and contributed in areas he previously had little or no expertise with and produced deliverables which exceeded client expectations. Rewarded for such efforts, Yawar, however, like a true champion, dedicat-ed and attributed his success to the Telonu Team.

The Folio3 Chronicles caught up with him af-ter the ceremony and had a little chat.

Hot Shot for December ’08 went to Yawar Khan.

Naveed Qazi(L) presenting the award to Yawar Khan(R)

of the company is doing a great job so to guess about winner is not easy. I am very glad about this, because it is an honor of appreciation.

Q. Who or what would you attribute your achievement(s) to?

A. I would say it’s a team game. I want to appreciate ef-forts of all of my team members. They did a really great job and helped me in achieving these tough targets.

Q. Share with us the most interesting moment or incident you came across during this time.

A. There were a lot of moments I enjoyed and endured as well. The craziest things I faced were during de-ployment. Every time we promoted a release on live servers, something always seemed to go wrong over there and the solution had to be implemented within a few minutes. I will always remember how we as team showed grit and solved those issues in time.

Q. Got a suggestion, a plan, a formula to help those interested in winning it the next time?

A. Join Telonu :). Jokes apart. Keep trying. Trying is the key to success. Many targets are tough but they are not impossible if you try hard. Especially as a technical person if you say to yourself “this is impossible”, then you’ll lose the game!

A few words with YawarQ. Would you say the competition was tough-er this time round with everyone more con-scious of the prize? How do you feel at winning it?

A. I don’t think so. No one knows about nominees for this competition but since every individual of

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Oct - Dec 2008

The Chronicles

What Happens @ Folio3 Stays at Folio3... or NOT!

Oct - Dec 2008


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Pushing the Limits

Diagnosis ONE is a team in Folio3 which is known for its enthusiasm and spooky attitude. The team recently faced a real test of skills

and endurance. In the process of delivering a dis-ease surveillance system for Puerto Rico state the team had to have a “90 hours a week” workout.

According to team members, it was hard to cope with changing and extending requirements but throughout these months the feeling of think-ing Folio3 as home and D1 as a family got stron-ger. We really had some daily pranks that made these rough and tough months enjoyable like …

Fahad: “Aaj ghar jaldi chalain jaye gain”. (jaldi = 2 AM)

Imran: “Aaj raat ka khana mien ghar per khaon ga”. (Never happpened)

Saqib (The Internee): “Main to Part Time Internee Hun”. (After giving 12 Hours @ office)

Developers to QA: “Aaj 6 baje release mil jaye gi”. (6 AM not 6 PM)

On asking Fahad about weekend’s plan, Fahad used to reply, “Apni asani dekho… agar aa sako to acha hai”.(Original meaning “Abay waat lagi hui hai, jaldi aao”)

The hard work really paid and we got a lot of appre-ciation from all ends. The application was approved by the Puerto Rico state. Imran Ali was awarded the first-ever “HOT SHOT employee of the month”.

- Najm-us-Saqib

Fixing It

We at folio3 have a knack of solving prob-lems the ingenious way! So when a defect was found in a water cooler at the first

floor, some anonymous genius fixed it… using a fork!

The Chronicles

Offshored

Oct - Dec 2008


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by Muhammad Aamir Ibrahim

Oct - Dec 2008

The Chronicles

Documents

Folio3 Chronicles Q4-08