Mr. Habibullah N Karim founded Technohaven in 1986 as an IT solutions provider which grew from a 1- person operation to a 300-plus  person operation by 1996 serving corporate clients in South Asia that included trans-nationals UN bodies, global service funds, Bangladesh government and NGOs. In 1998 Technohaven was incorporated as an independent software company. It serves clients in Asia, Europe and North America.

Mr. Karim represented the software industry as a full member of the Bangladesh Prime Minister’s ICT Task Force between 2001 and 2003 and spearhead at a number of initiatives meant to accelerate the growth of the software and IT services industry in the country and remove the regulatory and policy level hurdles along the way.

His paper on how information and communication technologies can help reduce poverty in Bangladesh was included as one of the thematic papers in the World Bank study on poverty reduction strategy in Bangladesh. He is regularly interviewed by Bangladeshi as well as international media including the BBC and Forbes.

Mr. N Karim helped found the ICT Business promotion council (IBPC) in 2002 under  the aegis of the Ministry of Commerce, government of Bangladesh – a public private partnership set up to promote Bangladeshi  software and services. As the founder vice-chair of the IBPC where the commerce secretary is the ex-officio chair, he initiated moves to augment Bangladesh software industry’s global reach and capacity.

Earlier in 1997 he helped found the Bangladesh software industry association named Bangladesh Association of Software & Information Services. As the founding secretary general of BASIS he authored a five-point charter of demand and action plan in order to provide a definitive direction to the fledgling software industry of the country. All the charter demands have since been met which included software copyright amendment bill, expansion of computer science education, deregulating data communication and others. He was elected president of BASIS for the term 2002-2003. During his tenure as president of BASIS he took significant steps to institutionalize the set up and operations of the organization. He has also been re-elected President of BASIS for the 2008-2009 term.

Mr. Karim is currently the chairman of the IT Committee of the American Chamber in Bangladesh (Amcham) and a former member of the Executive Committee of the Bangladesh Employers Federation. Since 1998 he has been the editor & publisher of ‘Bichoyon’ – a social research journal on Bangladesh which is published in Bangla. Bichoyon has produced so far 10 monographs and research compendiums on issues of topical importance to the country. He was the convener of the working group of the ICT policy Review Committee in 2008 and is the principal author of the Bangladesh ICT Policy 2009. A BSEE degree holder of Yale University Mr. Karim anthored numerous papers on ICT business and socio-economic issues which have been published in many countries. His paper on impact of ICT on the Bangladesh trade and economy has been published in the commonwealth Ministers Reference Book 2006. He attended an executive program for growing companies at Stanford University, Graduate School of Business in 2001.