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Since the budget 2009-10 was announced, i was looking for what impact would it have on the local IT industry. Even though not all that much has been written on the topic by journalists, which was kind of disheartening, I did find somethings online. As with everything, there’s both good news and bad news here.

The good news is, there is word on Phase II of PSEB’s certification scheme coming along, with a whopping fifty (50) companies for CMMI level 2, thirty (30) companies CMMI level 3 and fifteen (15) companies CMMI level 5. Also, this time PSEB will fund twenty (20) for ISO27001 Information Security Management System and twenty (20) for ISO20000 IT Service Management System certifications for member companies across the country. These come at a hefty Rs. 460 million price tag to the national exchequer, but will definitely help put a lot more Pakistani companies on the world map.

For the uninitiated, PSEB’s past certification schemes (since 2002) have so far led to 120 companies being ISO9001 Certified, and 21 companies assessed at various maturity levels of CMMI, with 4 currently undergoing assessment. PSEB subsidizes the consultancy fee and the audit/assessment fee for selected organizations at different rates. Uptil now, it’s been either 80-20, 75-25 or 70-30 subsidies where PSEB bears the larger amount and the company bears the smaller. E.g. for 80-20, 80% cost will be borne by PSEB and 20% by the selected organization. This reduces the certification costs drastically, and allows the selected company to compete head to head with bigger business in the international market.

Also, we have word on new IT parks being setup at Karachi & Lahore Airports at a cost of Rs. 50 million, which should help in subsidizing start up costs for various companies.Why choose airports for IT parks you ask? I have no idea either.

Overall, the government has earmarked Rs. 2.3 billion for IT in this years’ Public Sector Development Plan (or 0.42%) through 65 projects.

As for the bad news, since we (the IT industry as a whole) come under the Services category, there’s the question of imposition of 16% GST. Quite plainly, it means that whatever we earn (locally and internationally), gets taxed. This will come as a devastating blow to all of us, simply because it means that our prices (or margins) for the next year will expand (or shrink) dramatically. So far, i’ve only seen Netsol’s Salim Ghauri’s views on the subject. Why is PASHA quiet here, i’d like to know!

So there you have it. Comments and questions are welcome!

Update: So i hear that PASHA is not quiet at all, just not publicizing their stance much. I’ve been informed that they’ve sent a letter of recommendations for the revival of the IT industry, which does contain some very good points mind you, and are very pushing hard for it.

Image Credit: Dailytimes.com.pk

When the internet was in its nascent stages here in the country, one of the first uses it got was setting up matrimonial matches. The fact that it could facilitate oversea’s arrangements made it quite popular and I’ve heard of quite a few people (first hand accounts, no second hand) of people finding their partners through one service or the other.

So it’s quite a surprise that it came so late as a VAS over a telecom network.  Ufone launched it’s RishtaPoint service recently which quite simply allows you to setup a small profile and record a little intro. People can then search over the network for prospective partners, listen to their profiles and if you like it have confidential first conversations. Ofcourse, the prospect is sent an sms of the callers profile first and asked to confirm. It’s confidential, because ufone doesn’t give out the phone number for the first call, which is quite a big concern for users and i’m glad they thought of it.

Since many in our part of the world are so involved in the shadi business, i’m sensing a big business opportunity here. However, the question of whether it will actually be successful, depends on how much users are educated in it’s use. I’ve checked the IVR instructions and the possible options, and it does get quite complicated.

The campaign for this VAS is simple, and so far i’ve heard it only on the radio and no other media. I love that they’ve actually incorporate their own slogan into the product. The ad ends with “kya pata koi aap ko kehna chahye… tum hee tou ho (the last four words sung in ufone’s own tagline format)” from their own “ufone.. tum hee tou ho” slogan.

I am a big proponent of effective management. Whether it be in your daily life, work or even relationships, effective management of any area will increase a person’s productivity and make them happier. At least that is how the theory goes. In most practical cases however, we have a tendency of becoming complacent and putting off for the future what could’ve been accomplished today. Its not our fault, i hear its something we get through genetics. A kind of self-serving mechanism developed over centuries of evolution arising from the flight or flee response. Some amongst us stay and fight, become revered in society and history while others flee to protect themselves or maybe to fight another day.

In his latest book, Strategy and the Fat Smoker, David Maister writes that just by knowing what is good for you or bad for you will not help people choose the better path. If that was so, he argues, everyone would be exercising and not indulging in the habits of smoking or drinking. After all, everyone knows that is the path to a healthy and better life. Humans are inherently self serving and looking out for number one, i.e. themselves. And they are not rational creatures, but creatures of emotion. At most, they create circles around themselves and include people whose needs they might also serve, but for many, that circle includes only one. When thinking about management, especially management of people, this is one of the basic truths or facts of life one must embrace if they want any chance at moving forward.

People management has always been a very interesting subject for experts around the world. They recognize the need for having a structured environment for people to work in, to have a schedule of tasks to complete and a clear and concise goal to achieve. The funny thing is, most people who have to be managed also recognize this need. Yet, often quite a big disconnect keeps on appearing in organizations around the country (and the world) and a lot of productivity (read: money) is lost in the process. In order to bridge this disconnect, we increasing find the need to satisfy a employee’s personal needs and align them to the company’s need in order for the big money to start rolling in.

So how do we bridge this gap? Any idea’s?

Advertising campaigns by telecom companies are all the rage these days. It seems they are the only ones left with enough money to even buy media space anymore. Lately, they seem to be going after each other aggressively, especially after zong opened up operations in the country.

Recently, Zong set up an MNP campaign which aired all over the place. The campaign was centered around the following group of TVCs.

Now this ad may have been very informative to the customer on what MNP is all about (namely, you get to keep the complete number, including the network code when you switch) it wasn’t very pleasing to other operators seeing that their customers were being targeted.So Ufone came up with a campaign of it’s own. Only they didn’t release it to any of the traditional media streams, they kept it viral. It’s been making rounds on facebook, youtube and other sites and has been viewed more than 10,000 times on youtube only, facebook is another story. Read the rest …

When the Obama Administration came into power in the US, a lot of people expected that Government 2.0 would become mainstream. And for quite a few departments, it has been.

But did you ever expect that Pakistan would follow in it’s footsteps as well? Well, apparently we have!

The first signs of web 2.0 have appeared, in what is the most critical government departments of all, the ministry of finance!

I present, The Finance Ministry Blog! Hosted off their main finance.gov.pk website nonetheless!

It comes complete with comments, tags and RSS goodness! And has been operating since March 2009 with the first post appearing on 30th March 09. So far they’ve been updating it with all little tidbits of news regarding the minister and the budget.

I congratulate the powers that be behind the finance ministry on this brilliant step into the future! And hope to see similar initiatives by other area’s both within the government and the private sector of this country.

One thing is for sure, Blogging is definitely here to stay in Pakistan!

Popular belief has it that it is mostly very young people who start their own companies, usually kids right out of college, with bright idea’s and low risk. That’s the US model, what’s ours?

A brief analysis of the participation in Startup Insiders event confirms that it is pretty much the same here. Its mostly college graduates or those with a couple of years of experience that are attending these events (and by extension, more interested in starting up their own business). Common sense says, the older you get, the less risk you might want to be exposed to.. right?

WRONG!

Finally, we have data (at least from the states) that the most active age group starting up their own businesses are between the ages of 55 to 64! Yes, read that again… fifty five to sixty four! ‘young’ people (aged 22-34) were least likely to start their own company! The data was gathered by the Kauffman Foundation and can be found here.

So my message to all you ‘old timers’ who feel like they’ve been left out of the race is… it’s time to make your own race! Open up a business and be your own boss! Afterall… the ‘americans’ are doing it

P.S.
Observations around my own person reveal that quite a few businesses (and i’m including non-IT as well) are actually setup by people in their late 30s or early 50s. These include shops, boutiques, beauty parlors and even gymnasiums.

P.P.S.
Hope you realize, start ups are not just IT, they do tend to exist in other domains too.

Source: GigaOM

This post is very late in posting, but some thing which can be termed as a trend in forming. Let me cite the incident and then the analysis.

On the morning of 27th May the day there was bomb blast near the ISI Building and Rescue office, at the time I heard a slight vibration thinking of an earthquake as I had just logged in to my PC I posted on twitter asking if there was an earthquake in Lahore. I am not a regular twitter user, there are people like teethmaestro who fully utilize the service, how ever my turninng to twitter for my query was simple, I was sure that even if it was an earthquake our news channels web sites (which bye the way have improved alot on the breaking news coverage ) will still take some time, and 10 am is not a time to call any one at home to check the news channel. So I posted my query on twitter hoping some one would reply and within in few minutes of my posting this query , i received a reply from Jehan Ara telling me about the blast and that she has learned this from a tweet by Dr Awab (teethmaestro).

So here are some of the reasons twitter is picking up now in Pakistan, even with the flooding of news channels the first person reference is some thing always more powerfull, if the news is reporting a complete shutter down strike in a city (hostorically we will always doubt the accuracy of news channels), some one tweeting from there will actually give you a more real picture, reason that some one has no hidden interest in spreading false news, how it validates is also a very interesting phenomena, if you were lying some one would pick up and point you out and at a channel so wide and visibility so great you can’t risk your creditbility by lying about some thing. What this guarentees is a first person account is the community pressure to tell the truth and an audit in real time by the community it self.

I am still not a twitter fan i tweet a lot less then a lot of my friends who i follow, how ever for me the best source of news has become twitter channels like #lahore, #karach, #islamabad and #idp

For me the trend started with the long march, because a lot of people like us were in the long march some of them did an excellent job of keeping the twittter channel for long march updated. For me that provided the most accurate upto the minute account for the most historic movement of our times. after that i became hooked up.

So next time you are looking for breaking news, some real comments on a political or social scandal try out twitter and see if your experience is same as mine.

Check it out - http://www.ittazee.com/2009/05/31/worldcall-evdo-broadband-service-the-3-month-usage-review/

TED; a Technology, Entertainment and Design conference that covers informative and impactful talks by world leaders and inspirational people all around the world, has just recently launched an innovative project that will make their presentations available globally in forty languages along with English subtitles. Their goal is to reach beyond English speaking crowd and let their information be available for all cultures and languages. The great news is, Urdu is one the featured languages.

This is a plus point for Urdu language speakers because there is a huge percentage of people who are comfortable with their mother language and for them, this recent TED Talks launch in Urdu will definitely provide a comfort zone they need. A wide range of population will be able to access, comprehend and share the videos of thought leaders like Al-Gore and Seth Godin while they share their knowledge that was previously limited to few people. It will be great since they will get to see and know these successful and inspiring world leaders sharing their thoughts and ideas about global issues, current and future technologies and design to be implemented in upcoming years. With the wisdom of such people all around the world available locally, it will bound to create a positive impact on us.

This will actually be a collaborative translation, as according to the TED Talk media Executive Producer June Cohen, every TED Talk will now have sub-titles and will have the capacity to be translated in forty languages by the volunteers worldwide. The project has been funded by Nokia to subtitle and index video content online as a step towards a big win for humanity.

Every talk on TED.com already has English subtitles and number of translations will vary according to the number of volunteers who will be elected to translate the talk. Along with subtitles, TED.com also features time coded interactive transcript that are indexable by search engines. So now viewers can watch videos with English subtitles and Urdu transcript or according to their preferred language transcript. As for the quality and validity of translations, according to TED Talk website:

“To help ensure quality, we generate an approved, professional English transcript for each talk. (This is the transcript upon which all translations are based.) Once the talk is translated, we then require every translation to be reviewed by a second fluent speaker before publishing it on TED. TED controls the final “publish” button. All translators and reviewers are credited by name for their work.”

So far, 306 translations have been completed and so many are under process. TED Talk deserves a round of applause for their outstanding project. You can find out more about this on NPR and All Thing Digital as well.

I just came across this site, Starz.pk. The site is a local business listings site and I was astonished to see the number and details of entries available on this website. The site has listings for 26 possible cities of Pakistan. You can search a wide range of business listings and I must say, the people maintaining this site have done a nice job. I tried several searches in Lahore and always ended up with a relevent list of results. Some of the searches I tried on the site were printing, kabab, fish, books, stationers, dentist, vegetable, sabzi, chinese, dvd, cinema, cricket, software house, milk shop and even tyre shop. Wow, I do get results, may be not very close to my current location, but still, most of them make sense.

The information on the site is again a community effort and the site expects the users to add businesses to the directory. Users can enter the name, contact details, payment modes and ratings for a business. You may or may not be the owner of the business and if you find your business added to the site already, you can take the ownership. The site is well-built, well-maintained and good-looking. I also found several business listings with the Map location and a very neat Google Maps integration that shows the location of the business on a detailed map. Honestly, this is the first time I’ve seen a site giving you driving directions for a local business destination (obviously using google maps). The home page is kept alive by adding dynamic sections like latest reviews, top-reviewers, new-arrivals and featured members.

Signing up is also simple and once you have logged in you can rate a business from 1 to 5 stars or you can write text reviews about the business. The site does’nt say it explicitly but I’ve seen that the moderators are pretty active and they keep reading every post and keep things clean on the website.

Then, I tried adding a business and it works like a charm. Well, to give it a shot, I added a fake business and within minuts the entry was gone from the site. Good job Starz moderation team. Right now, there is only one big down-side of the site. There are a lot of entries for the larger cities like Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, though I dont find many entries in Faisalabad, Haiderabad, Gujranwala or even Quetta. The site owners should put an effort to draw more contributors from smaller cities to make this site a success.

Cross post from Basit’s blog.