Dhaka, the main and capital city of Bangladesh - the residence of most internet users.
In Bangladesh, around 15 million people actively use Internet. It’s 6.5% of our population and we’re in the position of 157th in the world in terms of population vs users ratio. But our penetration is 28.5% which is really high compare to many other countries.
Hopefully by end of 2015, the number of active internet users will be around 30 million which is a very ambitious prediction though.
Our users have a very different approach to internet than what we see in developed country – we consume contents rather than spend online. So it seems e-commerce isn’t going to be any big hit here in near future.
The majority portion of internet users are on-boarded by Facebook. An interesting insight is – many of them have a guilty feeling for wasting their money for no good cause.
Local startups who’re taking internet as their business platform, are yet to set long-term objectives. It’s really hard to imagine what’s going on here as technology and people’s mind – both are changing too fast.
This story is originally published in Medium, both in Bangla and English. As the story is too long, I am publishing it here dividing in different chapters.
It was September 2005 when I first realised that websites could be made by ordinary people like me. Before that I imagined that making websites was similar in difficulty to building spaceships. I have always been very relaxed at work, but when I discovered the ease and beauty of website development – when I realised that this spaceship was easily attainable – I knew I’d discovered the secret to a long and happy life.
I was always good at maintaining pixels. This practice began on the first day of design school, where most of my friends were far better than me at drawing. I knew I couldn’t compete with them with my drawing skills alone, so I began using graph paper to make design plans and layouts. This helped me learn the manual process of using pixels. Over time, I became a pixel dancer. This helped me grab the attention many influential people.
One fine day in 2009, I received an unexpected email from London. A man I’d never heard of wanted to meet me to talk about the current status of the Internet in Bangladesh. At the time, his queries were irrelevant to my work. I was busy consulting for overseas clients who paid me an hourly wage. I had even been tasked with redesigning The Daily Star website! But I really never thought that the Internet could bring any change to Bangladeshi society.
The man from London had an extensive knowledge about the Internet and had even spent time working at Google. He taught me to see the potential of the Internet in a completely different way. I was extremely excited and finally felt that I could finally be a useful creature in society.
We had our first discussion about the Internet in Bangladesh in March 2009. G&R received the certification for incorporation in July 2009. Ours is an amazing story.
Our very first days at G&R were spent doing nothing but exploring possibilities. Early on, we decided to partner with a software company called eBizzsol for technical support. We held several brain storming sessions and drank a few hundred cups of tea. We were trying to find a single solution that would solve a few hundred problems. The word localization was on top of anything. We started following the tagline, Your local site!
Back in 2005 when I first came to know about the process of building of internet product, I was really surprised. Before that it was actually impossible for me to imagine how a simple website works!
In last few years I’ve spent most of time in learning. The same thing still going on and I am not sure how long I should keep learning. The best part of this learning process is – I’m loving i’!
The attached slides were presented at Digital Marketing Summit 2012, held in Dhaka. We had shown few insights which is driving the growth of G&R.
RongDhong was an idea which I heard first time in middle of a night – that was a pleasant story. Later a long time passed which brought a bad story. After blending lot of good and bad stories, RongDhong became public at the middle of 2011.
RongDhong brings stories of life, the writers of RongDhong are you! It doesn’t need any expert opinion or any very thoughtful message. If any of your stories which you think will help other people, can be published here.
last month i’ve started another website www.201loves202.com. there is a long story behind the name. 201 was my class role and 202 was her. this website is totally focused on our works. so we are adding all our academic and professional works there. as well as we are running there a microblog to let you know about our new ideas.
I don't know the name of the flower but it's beautiful.
So, it’s going on.
You can’t say yourself happy unless you are happy. Life isn’t so easy at all – at least here in Dhaka which is declared by Economist as 2nd worst city in the world!
You’ll never know how long you have to wait under the burning sun for a transportation. So the definition of happiness is a term which we have to consider when we’re staying at home.
Have a look to the picture above. it’s from my balcony. I do water it everyday.
Few updates of my work: well, things around me has changed too fast in last couple of months. This is a site I’ve designed few months ago for Dropndot which was selected as a best site. This is a new kind of recognition of my work and I am feeling great about it.
Right now I am working with building an ad network which is quit a new experience for me. I hope I can tell you more about it later. Yesterday I’ve launched another sleepless night idea with one of my colleagues which you may have a look too.
I didn’t get a chance to write here in last couple of weeks though those were some of the most memorable times of my life. A new life began on last 4 March with new things, new responsibilities and new experiences.
Life is beautiful if you consider it in a beautiful way.
The Wise Donkey
The most important part is I am really enjoying my time. I hope this site is going to be more rich as a new writer is going to be added.
Well, life is beautiful if you consider it in a beautiful way. I am posting my beautiful stories in different places. I’ve created pages at blogspot, tumblr and today at odopod. You can have a look and I hope you’ll like it.
i've spent many sleepless nights just to create a strong brand identity for it and still spending nights without sleeping...
it was a dream to see this site live. i’ve talked with several persons… wanted to work with several people but i had to wait more than a year. it was good. because it gave me space to rethink lot of things… made me more specific about what should i do. after all these ajkerweather.com is live for beta.
i love to see weather sites… somehow the numbers create an atmosphere around me when i see them. unfortunately there is nothing from bangladesh. i hope it’d be a potential platform to serve bangladeshi weather updates. wish us good luck!
this is one of my most experimented design. there is nothing special here but i've spent months to complete this work.
it’s the 5th year i am working at ebizzsol! sometime i wonder about this long journey… a journey of memories and lessons with lot of achievements. well, i don’t know how far i’ll go but i was mostly happy with what i had and right now i have some ideas in my head which are making me breathe. so i am alive!
i’ve started working with a new ebizzsol website from the end of 2008. it took a long year! we had some real hard time within this period and the truth is this new website is a kind of effort to regain our faith. i had lot of things in my mind when planning this site but as it’s normal, i didn’t able to express all my ideas. we are still working on some pages like the portfolio, weblog and new services. let us know what you think about it.
On the way to a Marma village where life is so beautiful.
It took more than 3 months to write something about what happening around me. There were few reasons for the delay:
Very recently I’ve started feeling ashamed for my bad English and I don’t know how to improve it immediately.
There was no good or bad story.
I am in a loop of very boring routine.
I was at Shrimangal when the calender was changing. Before I went there, I thought to write a review about the concluding year. But it didn’t happen. Shrimangal tour was wonderful. We were a group of 20 friends and we stayed in a bungalow of tea garden.
If I look back to 2009 as a whole, I don’t know what should I say about it. Most of the time it seemed I am not having a good time though in the meantime I have got the chance to work with some great projects like TripBD.com, Prothom-Alo.com, GoromCha.com.
Once again I have fallen in love! But right now I am with bare hands and mind, looking toward the infinity for a miracle. It’s true and I never lose my faith.
