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I just returned from an online marketing workshop arranged by P@SHA and Google here in Lahore. A similar session was conducted earlier in Karachi and one is due in Islamabad. Badar Khushnood was the speaker and I don’t remember where those 3 hours went when it all started. The focus of the workshop was obviously on the online marketing and both paid and free methods of promoting a product online were discussed.

The environment was set great right from the beginning like most of the other P@SHA events and there were more than a hundred participants including members of tech and non tech industries, agencies and marketing guys and some students as well. Live blogging by Fariha was adding to the whole feel of the session.

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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.