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Could Iran Be A Software Growth Market?

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Iran couldn’t possibly be a breeding ground for software industry development could it? Even a casual search of recent tech news relating to Iran throws up a history of grey market dealings, restricted Internet access and life under economic sanctions.

Despite the skills challenges and possible misperceptions over the role of open source ‘free software’, Iran’s tech sector may be showing a few rays of sunlight. Taskulu is an Iranian born online project collaboration platform that claims to have over 14,000 international users (in 100 countries) since launching in 2014. The software came in third among 100 startups from 40 counties at the Startup Istanbul Challenge 2015.

Taskulu: it’s a Farsi word, kind of

Meaning ‘pouches’ (or perhaps containers/receptacles) in the original Farsi language, Taskulu is the brainchild of co-founder and CEO Farhad Hedayatifard and developer co-founder Kazem Keshavarz. The name is actually a play on the words ‘task’ and ‘kulu’, the latter being a Zulu term meaning ‘great task’.

Essentially this is a role-based project management platform. Of course it has to have a USP (unique selling point) so the spin here (from the mouths of its makers) is as follows.

“[The problem] all other project management platforms have is that they treat every person involved in the project as if they all have the same role -- and that’s not how things work in real life. People involved in projects have different roles and different permissions to see or do specific tasks. Taskulu fixes this issue and makes the whole process easier by allowing project managers define different roles and set different permissions based on the context of their projects as needed,” writes co-founder Hedayatifard.

Technically speaking these claims may be a slight overstatement i.e. most project management platforms from Huddle to Atlassian JIRA all the way through to the project management functionality found in Salesforce.com feature a good degree of role and permission-based access control.

Hedayatifard admits that his firm’s new efforts see it try to differentiate itself through extensibility and integration capability.

The software does indeed unify task management, real-time chat and time tracking into a single interface. It also provides two-way integrations with other services such as Google Drive, Google Calendar, Dropbox, Github, Gitlab and Appear.in with a good degree of customizability.

“We wanted to build something that would help small to medium-sized software development companies work with their teams and clients without the pain of using and scattering their data into several different tools. We believe Taskulu is very simple by default, you’ll be able to customize it and add more functionality to your projects based on your own needs,” Hedayatifard claims.

Economic sanction challenges?

So what of the challenges involved working inside a country under restricted economic controls?

“We started with the international market in mind and we’re sure that we’ll be the symbol of the startup ecosystem growth of emerging countries like Iran,” says Hedayatifard. He adds “There are many challenges on our way. The sanctions on Iran prevented us from accepting payments from our international customers (who make up over 60% of our user base). But the tables are turning fast and we’ve proven our ability to survive during these hard times.”

Are things getting better in Iran for technology? It’s tough to say based on one very internationally aware startup obviously. IBM closed up shop in Iran back in 1981 and hasn’t reopened on the ground operations since that time.

Hedayatifard himself can be found tweeting openly about the improved Internet penetration in Iran (now 82%, apparently) although a deeper analysis of access freedoms is probably called for.

 

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