Upon my (glorious?) birth, my parents gave me the name 'Ahmed Farooq'. I am the Director of Stuff (my official title) at Enthropia Inc. I run the company.

Enthropia Inc is a little (25 or so employees) webdev firm that dabbles in everything. The site's front page is just a taste of some of the projects we can (and want to) show off. It is not nearly indicative of all that we do!

The benefit of having something this large is that it allows us to do quite a bit of stuff in-house. While it may not make sense for iBegin (a local search site of ours) to employ a designer, having one for the entire company does. This lets us make changes rapidly - from design to JS to programming to advertising, we have a large base to work on. It is quite cool. Some of our specific services we offer to the public - such as our brilliant Design Disease web design company.

My own focus these days is in local and our blogging network. As of June 14 2007 we get roughly 20,000 unique visitors a day to our local search sites, and roughly 85,000 unique visitors a day to our blog network. I've never been a big fan of 'personal branding' - I prefer to stay relatively anonymous while giving my employees the limelight. At the same time, after following some blogs (especially the most excellent Screenwerk by Greg Sterling) and commenting non-stop, I decided it was time to share some of my thoughts to the world. Being heckled non-stop by Jacob (he manages our Bloggy Network) to start blogging only egged me forward - anything to make the harassment go away.

I'm going to close this About rant with the infamous "5 things you didn't know about me meme":

  1. I'm 24, and I have lived in 10 different cities and 17 different residences. My longest stay at one address has been four years, and my shortest has been 2 months (we are talking about a complete unpack/pack scenario). I left Toronto in September 2006, move to Phoenix, and moved to another city (on January 1 2007). I do intend to stay in this city for at least 18 months. And no, I was not in a military family.
  2. While still a student at the University of Toronto, I created a sponsorship for students who were almost on the Dean's list (80%+) and were also working (site note: At UofT 80%+ is an A, and above 60% is a pass). The idea was that with the money they wouldn't have to work, could study more, get on the Dean's list, and ideally have better opportunities. I was told they had never had a student do that before in their 100+ year history. The sponsorship was named after my grandfather, who rose from utter slums to become a Supreme Court Judge in Pakistan.
  3. My family is as diverse as they come. My background ethnicity is Kashmiri (the piece of land that India and Pakistan keep fighting over), and I am a Canadian citizen. My brother is married to a Vietnamese who converted to Islam. My older sister is married to an Indian Hindu. I am engaged to an American Christian (I myself am a Muslim). Different backgrounds and different religions are a great way to see things differently.
  4. I used to be an elite-division soccer player in high school. Those dreams came to an end when one day (while playing soccer) I turned around. Or well ... everything except my leg turned around. I tore my knee's mensiscus in half, tore some ligaments, and had my knee fill up with synovial fluid. It has been over six years since that day, and I still cannot run for over ten minutes without feeling my knee cramping up. In a related manner, I used to be a baseball pitcher in the little leagues. That was until (during practice) my coach hit a pop fly into my mouth, fracturing five of my teeth, chipping 3, and breaking one in half. I guess I'm destined to watch.
  5. For those that play MMOs, I was the one who arranged all the website purchases by IGE. From little EQ Druids to OGaming (which I actually founded) to the mighty Thottbot, all those acquisitions by the 'evil empire' were done by me. My best purchase for them was L2Orphus - the revenue generated by that site equaled the sale price in two days.

You can always contact me to talk about this blog or any of the various sites I am involved with.