Author Archive

Over the last few years I have seen a tremendous rise in interest in entrepreneurship. Surprisingly, a large number of early stage entrepreneurs keep making expensive mistakes which are completely avoidable. One of the reason for such mistakes is the lack of access to seasoned entrepreneurs who can be a source of learning. I previously wrote about the startup guide written by Naeem Zafar. That guide laid out the necessary steps one needs before starting a new venture (you can get a free copy of the book by signing up at Startup-Advisor.com). As a followup to that, Naeem has recently published an eBook called The Definitive Entrepreneur’s Guide to Lawyers.

As any experienced business person and entrepreneur can tell, legal matters are extremely important. It so happens that law firms can be intimidating to many and legal matters also tend to be costly. Naeem’s book helps entrepreneurs to get educated about the whole process and to get the maximun value out of your legal spending. The book provides many little-known facts, secrets, techniques, and tricks which can make life easy for a startup team.

Some of the important points Naeem touches upon include:

• The different things lawyers can (and cannot) help you accomplish.
• The inner workings of a law firm, and how to use that knowledge to lower your legal bills.
• Choosing the right lawyer for you.
• When you should first contact a lawyer.
• Why you might want to choose a large law firm over a small one—or vice versa.
• When you may need to create a legal entity (incorporation), and what options you have.
• How to leave your current employer in a way that causes minimum trouble later.
• How to protect your ideas.

Naeem stresses the need to educate yourself and to start a relationship with attorney, even if you don’t hire them right away. This is what I have done and I can tell you that it is a very good strategy to get started. As you go along you educate yourself through books, online resources and from others. Then when you are ready and you need help with a particular legal document, you know what to do and where to go. So do your home work and read this book.

A version of this post appeared at TelecomPk.net

I have been reading a very interesting book, Social Media Marketing by Ajit Jaokar, Brian Jacobs, Alan Moore and Jouko Ahvenainen. The book is about marketing, role of data and the the emergence and convergence of three distinct but connected (based on data and conversations) media types: Mass Media (such as TV or outdoor), Social Media (social networks) and Mobile Media. Its a must read for marketing professionals, technologists who are interested in marketing analytics and for executives who want to understand the big picture and to see where the opportunities are.

Social Media is defined as any media form that links people and communities – including many smaller sites, mobile internet services and telephony. This book is interested in approaching marketing communication from a social media perspective, and in the data and analytics (from online and from mobile telecommunications sources) that allow us the opportunity to improve that process.

Most of the media is (or used to be) in broadcast mode: “we talk, you listen.” The rise of online social media has changed perceptions. The book talks about Hot Media vs Cold Media and shows the opportunities available with the transition from the age of mass media to an age of networks.

Social media marketing can be used as a part of a two stage process: – first, to identify certain patterns in data, second to verify those observations by specific social media campaigns which also seek permission from the customers.

The provider sends personalised messages to the receiver, and over time, the visibility of the participant’s digital footprint grows and leads to better personalization. Therefore, we start with passive digital footprints (based on data patterns) and transition to active digital footprints (based on trust).

The Importance of Data – this is the key point and the value of this book. Here are some excerpts.

A data led approach to social media is universal because every organization has access to such data from the many touch points through which it engages with the customer.

Like the impact of the social media, the impact of mobility is also disruptive for the traditional media. The mobile operator faces a different problem from the broadcaster. The operator might know the customer individually, but not know much about the customer. Specifically, the operator does not know the user’s preferences, which can be used to create a more personalised message (and by extension a message that is more likely to be useful to the receiver).

Mobile media complements mass media (like television) by providing the individual with the personalization which mass media lacks.
This can happen in potentially three interconnected ways:
a) Patterns: Spotting behavioural patterns
b) Promotions: Specific marketing activity or promotions to validate observations from the patterns
c) Partnerships: Creating partnerships between traditional media and mobile media to get as wide a network as possible (or extend
your own network within a converged ecosystem)

The discussion about digital footprints is where the data and analysis starts making the connections.

There are two classifications for digital footprints: Passive Digital Footprints and Active Digital Footprints. A passive digital footprint is created when data is collected about an action without any client activation, whereas active digital footprints
are created when personal data is released deliberately by a user for the purpose of sharing information about himself/herself.

Cross Post from TelecomPk.Net

SMS has always been popular with Pakistani users and the recent data from PTA provides evidence to this. During the year 2007-08, cellular mobile operators generated more than 25 billion SMS. One reason for this growth is that a majority of user base in Pakistan is young and they prefer to communicate via SMS.  On Eid and other celebrations, it is now common (default?) practice to send and receive greetings through text messaging. Text messaging also allows people to be more creative, though the SMS may not always be original. Mostly it is a chain of forwarded messages. There is spam SMS as well, which remains an unsolved problem.

All cellular mobile operators have competed aggressively for SMS and that has resulted in a price war, eroding the ARPU but increasing adoption and volume. The mobile operators offered lucrative SMS deals including special one-time buckets of messages for nominal charges. For instance, Telenor launched SMS Fulltime offer for its prepaid customers in which its subscribers can send up to 10,000 on-net SMS with charge of Rs. 99. Telenor even offered free SMS for those who are on Hajj. Zong has similar offers: 500 sms/day for Rs.3 only.

What about other data services? As shown here (for the US market – source: Nielesen Mobile), there are many other popular data services on mobile phones. There is tremendous growth and opportunity about which I wrote here. It will be good to know the usage and popularity of these value-added service in Pakistan. I hope PTA can start publishing these stats soon.

This post is about Jahanzeb Sherwani’s speech related research work which I mentioned briefly in a post here. The idea is to provide speech-based telephone information system in local language (pilot test is in Sindhi) for community health workers. The advantage of this system is that you don’t need a smart phone, you don’t need a computer, you just need something that can make a phone call, Jahanzeb says.

This pioneering work is ongoing and this is first in a series of posts on this project. I am very pleased to present this positive effort to a broader audience and intend to keep you posted on its progress.

Most of the information is taken from the project website at Carnegie Mellon. The site has detailed information including link to the full pdf report, videos and list of related publications.

Community health workers in developing countries are often trained only for a few months before they begin providing health services, and have a great need to access updated and reliable health information. The HealthLine project’s goal is to design an information access system specifically for such health workers, which they can call any time, toll-free, from any cell phone or landline. Through a spoken conversation with the system in their native language, they would be able to learn more and/or fill in any health information gaps that they may have. This would in turn enable them to provide better health services to their community.

HealthLine is a collaborative research project involving Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA), Aga Khan University (Karachi, Pakistan) and the Health & Nutrition Development Society (Karachi, Pakistan).

The project started with interviews in 2007 to help understand the context in which health worker do their job, their literacy and comprehension skills, as well as their baseline health information needs. By May 2008, the researchers completed a series of user studies with health workers in rural Sindh to understand their preferences with respect to speech-based information access as compared to text-based information access. One major finding was that the initial choice of Urdu as the target language was sub-optimal, as community health workers often are not always fluent in Urdu — even though they may have attended school up till 5th grade.

Based on this finding, the team started re-building prototypes in Sindhi, and is conducting user studies with health workers of varying literacy levels to evaluate the prototypes through objective metrics (such as task success rate, task completion time) and subjective metrics (user ratings).

Link to the paper is here.

Previously published at TelecomPk.Net.

I received this email through one of the technology mailing list. A quick check on naqsha.net showed that the maps are there and there are some POIs (points of interest) that you can search. The quality of maps is decent and it covers a handful of major cities. Just don’t expect the overall experience to be comparable to google/yahoo but its a good start. Maps did not work in Firefox.

The Garmin navigation devices which are being sold with Pakistan maps preloaded are quite expensive, compared with their devices being sold in the US. Devices start at $400 and map only for $120. Anyway, at least its a start for GPS, maps and location based services.

In-car GPS navigation is not available in Pakistan. Data Solutions (Pvt) Ltd in partnership with Tracking World (Pvt) Ltd have launched Garmin GPS units loaded with Pakistan map data. Currently only Garmin GPS units are available for purchase. The units range from in-car dash mounted devices to devices for motorbikes. There is also a unit which can be integrated with the vehicle’s DVD/entertainment unit and displays the navigational information on it. Existing Garmin users also have the option to buy the map for their specific unit. You may view the maps and GPS devices at naqsha.net.

The map has street level detail of major Pakistani cities and all major national highways. Streets are labeled and searchable for Islamabad, Lahore and some parts of Karachi. In addition there are close to 40,000 POIs such as fuel/CNG stations, banks, atms, hospitals, restaurants (categorised), hotels, shops, etc. Most POIs have address and phone number information available as well. Units equipped with FM transmitters and Bluetooth allow hands free dialing from the unit and are able to integrate with the vehicles’s audio system as well.

Corporations see in software’s seductive invisibility and seemingly open-ended flexibility a never-ending frontier of promise, where hope triumphs over reality …. And hope, unfortunately, has never been a very effective strategy.

The above quote is taken from a paper “The Trouble With Enterprise Software” by Cynthia Rettig, published by Sloan Management Review. I recommend it to everyone who is involved with software and business. It is especially useful for non-technical executives. If you are in the IT/software field, it is very common to experience the tension between business and IT. This paper debunks many of the common myths and makes an honest assessment of the often messy situation with enterprise software.

A few excerpts from the paper.

As work became more complex and specialized over the 20th century, the use of data — numbers and facts — as fodder for more and more analysis and fact-based decision making intensified. And digital technology “was perfect for this kind of world.” Of course, digital technology not only supported that complexity but also played a large part in actually creating it, weaving a continuous web of unending data.

What do business executives miss?

Business executives, however, simply want to continue to believe that technology will lower costs, improve processes and reduce the size of the workforce. They don’t want to understand IT issues. In part, this is because technology requires special skills and intellectual talents that are quite distinct from those needed to understand and manage business organizations, markets and strategy. But it is also because executives do not like to hear about the downside of technology.

On the difficulty of aligning technical and business sides:

… long-term plan calls for closer and closer communication and collaboration between the IT and business sides of the organization. While much to be desired, this has proved difficult in the past, and with increasing complexity in software systems, it is unlikely to improve by itself in the future. Differing backgrounds and perspectives, goals, even vocabularies — all hamper efforts to improve communication across this internal digital divide. Biases intrude: A recent study by Forrester Research Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts, found that only 28% of CEOs thought their CIOs were proactive or creative in terms of business process improvement

The pdf of the paper is available through Google search.

The Trouble With Enterprise Software
Has enterprise software become too complex to be effective?
Cynthia Retting
Fall 2007 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 21