Humayoun Alamgir
Founder and Managing Director of ClickBD

Humayoun Alamgir, founder and managing director of ClickBD, launched Bangladesh's first e-commerce portal in April 2005 and has been instrumental to its growth ever since. ClickBD.com is the online marketplace that enables you to sell or buy anything in the click of a mouse and the blink of an eye.

“It was just myself back in 2005 and when I tested out to see if there was any market for e-commerce in Bangladesh, I got a really good response from users,” says Alamgir, a graduate of Arizona State University.

Alamgir has worked as a software engineer for companies in the US, UK and Bangladesh and says it was his continued passion for software engineering and desire to contribute to Bangladesh's internet revolution that led him to create ClickBD from scratch.

“In 2006 we launched the complete site with all its features and it took off,” says Alamgir, who employs 11 staff. “It took a lot of effort to get here but we're happy that we are able to provide a good service to people here in Bangladesh.

“ClickBD received foreign investment from a group of European investors in 2010, so for two years we've been operating as a multi-national company,” says the founder and managing director.

The website is now one of the most popular sites in the country for the tech savvy youth of today. ClickBD has been at the forefront of the internet revolution in Bangladesh, providing the country its first and most reliable e-trading platform.

The website claims people send more time on ClickBD than any other Bangladeshi site, making it the most popular site of the country.

“Recently we launched e-store, which allows people to run an online shop without the hassle of creating a site from scratch. We provide everything all together with the e-store service,” explains Alamgir. “Customers get an A to Z service for e-commerce and it has been quite successful.”

Alamgir, who has made a successful business out of his website, hopes ClickBD's success will inspire more ICT entrepreneurs to come up with new and innovative ideas to shape Bangladesh's future in IT.

Compiled by Star Correspondent

Mehdi Hasan Khan
Creator of the Avro Software

Like many sections of our national history, the amazing journey of digital Bangla remains largely unknown. The reason why Bangladeshis today can easily type in Bangla and create content for websites and chat by writing in Bangla is because of a cross-platform, phonetic, graphical keyboard layout changing software called Avro that was created by Mehdi Hasan Khan in 2003.

Avro enables users to write Bangla through English letters in real time, thus removing the dreary process of remembering complex keyboard layouts altogether. The advent of the software has seen a rapid gain in the usage of Bangla in social networking websites such as Facebook and various other online platforms like blogs and online forums.

Though there were a number of individual initiatives for the same cause such as the Shahid Lipi in the 1980s, Bijoy and Proborton in the 1990s, none of them fitted the requirement of the Bangla key layout in an appropriate manner. The main difficulty of course was memorising the different layouts of the different softwares. There was also the problem of sharing Bangla texts online as both the parties needed to have a similar set of Bangla fonts installed.

In 1996 the advent of the Unicode opened up the possibility of using Bangla without thinking too much about the fonts. Thus after a series of experiments, Khan came up with Avro. So, instead of one complex layout to memorise, they included a phonetic keyboard which does not require memorising the whole layout.

Perhaps the most amazing factor about the third-generation software was that Khan did not have a business motive behind its creation. Before the national elections, he let his software be used for free which eventually saved the government crores of takas.

As if creating a software that would enable Bangladeshis around the world to type in their own mother tongue wasn't enough, Mehdi Hasan Khan decided to give it away for free. The sacrifice that young doctor has made has put Bangla on the world map and has made him a role-model for the future generations of the country.

by Naimul Karim

Emran Hasan
Co-founder of Right Brain Solutions

Emran Hasan is a Technology Entrepreneur with a business background. He is the co-founder and CTO of Right Brain Solution, a software development company specializing in web technologies. He and his team provide specialised web development services to international and local businesses who need to develop enterprise ready softwares, high traffic consumer portals, social applications, and interactive games.

Emran has been in the IT field for more than 10 years, having started his career in his early college life. He was one of the pioneers in IT freelancing from Bangladesh and was ranked top in the country for several years. He left freelancing in favour of his job in Somewhere In Net, where he worked as a web developer and built the first ever and still the most popular Bangla blogging platform - Somewhere In Blog. He later moved to work at Pageflakes - one of the pioneers in web startup pages. They won web awards beating Microsoft and Yahoo for two consecutive years in 2007 and 2008. During both jobs Emran was studying BBA at BRAC University and shortly after his BBA graduation, he started his own company.

In his company, Emran has always focused on providing his customers quality solutions. They are one of the early adopters of agile software development methodologies. They have so far worked with governments, corporate houses, NGOs, media agencies, early stage entrepreneurs and have developed social networks, job portals, workflow management system, e-learning portals, etc. Their most notable project is the Bangladesh National Portal Framework, a system that they are now developing with the GoB - this system will run all government web portals of Bangladesh once deployed.

Besides his regular work, Emran is a very active community leader among the various technical communities in the country, most notably the phpXperts. He is one of the core moderators there. Emran speaks at major technical events and also blogs on his personal blog (www.phpfour.com) where he shares both technical and management insight.

Compiled by Star Correspondent

Mr. Kazi Golam Ali Sumon
Technology Innovator

About 12 years ago, when Sumon was an HSC student, one of his relatives' poultry farm with about 15,000 chickens, was threatened for closure by his neighbours. The neighbours were disturbed by the strong foul odour that the poultry droppings produced. Sumon remembered seeing biogas plants at the Bangladesh Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (BCSIR) as a student. He asked his relative's neighbours for some time, and ventured into designing and building a large 1500 cft digester to produce gas with the bird droppings.

After a few months of trial and error, he succeeded in building the digester successfully. This stopped the foul odour while generating a lot of biogas, which was used to burn cookers in many houses and in the nearby market. Eventually, he started driving generators producing electricity. The odour was gone completely but the semi liquid sludge coming out of the digester became a problem again, making the whole premise damp and muddy. This sludge could be used as a fertiliser, but there was more sludge than could be used by the neighbourhood. This time he made an oven, run by biogas, to dry the sludge by heating, which he then packaged in polythene bags and marketed as fertilisers with profit. Moreover, he thought, why spend energy to dry the sludge? He made mechanical arrangements to separate the liquid part, added some natural organic nutrients and pesticides and found that he has created a new liquid fertiliser that could be sprayed into the gardens directly, killing harmful pests and providing nutrition to plants. Through research, he established that this produces better quality vegetables compared to those grown conventionally. Thus, he created his own design of biogas digesters using poultry droppings, dry and liquid fertilisers, and started making such units for others.

Sumon also developed a moveable bio gas digester (500 cft) using kitchen waste from 10 families (with added black molasses) that could also generate electricity for all the 10 homesteads.

With the financial support of two partners, he established his firm, 'Creative Technology for Global Resource Development Ltd' with its head office in Dubai. So far he has made and installed more than 50 biogas plants ranging between 500 and 5000 cft for his customers in Bangladesh. Sumon's projects were so successful that he was invited by a businessman in Malaysia, where he helped design and install a similar biogas and fertiliser plant. Recently, he has set up branch offices in both Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.

Sumon achieved all this at an age of only 29 years! Unbelievable. He has to his credit about 250 awards including the President's Gold medal three times.

Compiled by Star Correspondent