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Cambridge Venture Creation Weekend
Just a weekend for a breather and then back up at the Judge Business School for another event: the Innovation in Smart Tech and Education Venture Creation Weekend. The weekend kicked off with a talk given by none other than the “Father of Siri”. Blaise Thomson. Blaise founded a startup called VocalIQ in Cambridge which was later acquired by Apple in 2015 and he went on to lead the team that developed Siri! After the insightful talk about how a startup should allocate its resources, we head to dinner (for which I only took a picture of the dessert but that is what matters the most right?) The next bit…
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ZNotes: a journey in identity
It’s surreal looking at the original ZNotes logo and realising that 15-year-old-Zubair’s free WordPress blog still lives and has grown to a point where brand guidelines and trademarking has to be done! “Why is it called ZNotes?” “Because you’re Zubair..?” Well, yes and no. The decision was really made by an algorithm. You see when I first arrived on WordPress.com to register a sub-domain, my initial choice of ‘studynotes.wordpress.com’ had already been registered and as it had my name on the account, the form suggested “zstudynotes”. I’d been sitting there trying different permutations of ‘revision’, ‘study’ and ‘notes’ and tired of it all, I just clicked proceed. I didn’t imagine…
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The Social Venture Weekend in Cambridge
Rumbling through an ombré British countryside, Friday brought me to the quirky building of the Judge Business School for the Social Venture Weekend run by Cambridge Social Ventures – a packed out two-and-a-half days of intensive training for people on the journey of building and growing a business with an inherent positive social mission. Day 1 It all kicked off with an academically rigorous lecture on the importance and impact of social ventures and helped bring light the different models of how social ventures are currently being run. It continued with an introduction to the theory of change and how social impact should be measured. For the last bit, I…
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The One Young World Summit #OYWS19
What happens when you bring together over 2000 young leaders from every country in the world? The One Young World Summit is one of the most inspiring gathering of youth from all over the globe who have collectively made a positive impact in the lives of over 20 million people. At it’s 10th anniversary, the summit returned to it’s inaugural city of London; the world’s melting pot. The summit is catalysed by the global leaders that champion it as counsellors like the 7th Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan, Nobel Peace Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus and even the Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle. I was lucky enough to attend…
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The Return to Insta (& other news)
I am backed up with blog posting so here comes a bunch of disconnected tales at full speed – a short story compilation if you may: A Fishy Experience Many of my foodie posts have been quite sophisticated dishes but that is actually not as often as you may imagine. A blistering hot day in Madinah and having had red meat consecutively for too many days, we went to a fish place for lunch. Now this is no any ordinary place, the shop is located in a major street selling pretty much the same thing! The way it works is you pick out a fresh fish from the freezer, often…
