Quick Facts
Biography
Komeil Bahmanpour (born January 28, 1978) is an Iranian entrepreneur, software architect and author. He is a co-founder and the president of Chortkeh.
Early life and education
Komeil Bahmanpour was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. Thanks to his father being an influential banker, he grew up learning about IBM mainframes at Tejarat Bank Bureau of Informatics. Starting his profession as a teenager in 1992, he studied computer programming in IUST and obtained his IBM mainframe Assembly programming license. He has also studied software engineering at Azad South Tehran University of Technology.
Career
In 1999, Komeil Bahmanpour was introduced to an American eforms software company willing to open overseas subsidiaries for the purpose of Middle Eastern software development and marketing. The deal went on and Chortkeh (Persian: چرتکه)—back then doing business as Chortkeh Rayaneh Hamrah, LLC (Persian: چرتکه رایانه همراه، شرکت با مسئولیت محدود)—was established.
Chortkeh
He was assigned as the chief software architect also managing development teams working on projects in different fields such as eforms conversion, virtual printer, object recognition, barcode, etc.
Persian Open Directory Project
Since 2003, Komeil Bahmanpour has been the managing editor of Netscape's Persian ODP, still maintaining its Persian portal at Dmoz.ir.
He won the Best World/Farsi Editor at the 2004 ODP Autumn Editor Awards.
As the Persian ODP managing editor, Bahmanpour was behind a big decision to change the URL of the Persian ODP from Dmoz.org/World/Farsi/ into Dmoz.org/World/Persian/. Believing in the fact that employing Farsi instead of Persian across the English Web is betraying Persian language, during a month-long discussion between him and the ODP meta editors, he persisted on replacing the transliterated word Farsi with the more adequate word Persian, but metas on the other hand precluded the change based on the assumption that URLs have been promoted for years, so it will not be a wise choice to change them. Eventually, in March 2007 the URL was changed.
Unicode contribution
Multilingual software and fonts have always been his main interests. He has contributed to the development of the Unicode Standard, especially in Arabic, Persian and Hebrew languages. He also authored Chortkeh Font Toolbox, a font management software suite comprising the freeware Chortkeh BDF Font Viewer since January 19, 2002.