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This is a guest post by Anthony Mitchell from InternationalStaff.net, who is a frequent contributor and commenter here on Green & White.

The question of how to encourage startups is complex until we break it down into readily solvable components. Here three barriers are addressed.

The first barrier startups face relates to the mindset that what is Western oriented is automatically better.

During the colonial period, economic activities were focused on exporting to Western markets.

Today when someone thinks of starting a technology-enabled business, too often it is directed at immediately serving customers overseas. This creates risks because not only does a business have to go though the effort to set up, but also to understand and penetrate an unfamiliar, remote market where there are strong established competitors and where marketing can be expensive.

Customer service can be difficult and expensive to provide internationally. There can also be legal barriers to market entry that entrepreneurs are not aware of when they begin operations.

Press coverage of startups, expectations of peers, and established cultural patterns perpetuate the popularity of startup strategies in Pakistan that are high risk and often impractical.

Government support is weighed in favour of export-oriented businesses. This can be counterproductive because if a startup can first gain traction and experience locally, then it will be in a better position to expand internationally when the time is right.

PTA’s announcement of a contest in Pakistan to nurture local technologies is a brilliant step in the right direction and one that needs to be followed by other public and private sector organizations.

A second barrier to startups is the lack of access to capital. One of the best places in the world to invest in early stage startups right now is in Pakistan.

A young company in Pakistan can hone its product and services lines domestically, and then expand globally, creating tremendous revenue opportunities. Revenue opportunities at home are strong because of pent up demand for technology-enabled services (such as mobile banking), demand for more efficient retail distribution systems, and the high penetration of mobile devices. Risks of starting up in Pakistan are lowered by the presence of a highly skilled labour force at extremely low costs.

Every other country in the world would like to have the advantages available in Pakistan for IT/ITeS companies.

But without access to capital, opportunities will be wasted.

The cost of launching an IT/ITeS startup have dropped dramatically in just the last two years, thanks to cloud computing, free online services and other spinoffs from the global technology revolution.

A startup venture fund of from $25-50 million dollars per year in Pakistan would, if properly managed, contribute vastly greater amounts back into the local economy. The venture fund can and should be government supported, perhaps with foreign aid funds earmarked towards capacity building in the private sector.

The venture fund could be accompanied by an incubation system to provide marketing and legal advice to small companies. Technology inputs could also be made available at no or low cost. Cohort training by specialists can help IT/ITeS companies build capacity for marketing and technical tasks.

The third barrier to startups is the lack of access to transparent role models. I recently sanitized my NDAs and contracts and sent them to an IT industry association in Pakistan, to distribute to their members. Young companies need to see how established businesses operate and be able to access those business practices on-demand.

Startup opportunities are better in Pakistan than anywhere else in the world. These opportunities can and should be realized with the help of a pro-Pakistan orientation, access to capital and startup role-models

This is a contributed review by a reader. We have confirmed that the author is not related to the website in any way. Thanks Omair for the initial tip.

Toss Down is another addition to the glut of portals providing information regarding local businesses for their users. We’ve covered karachisnob.com and yello.pk and toss down at first sight appears an agglomerated version of the features of both these websites. However,  apart from the impressive GUI, the home page seems to be too crammed up with information, unlike mazaydar.com which is optimized to suit a user-friendly interface.

The search engine , however, is commendable  with various search options to limit your search. However, the database still needs to be updated and amended. For sadder is not in satellite town in Rawalpindi and nor is Cave any more in Rawalpindi. Plus I found a couple of outlets absent from the database, perhaps because it is still in the process of being populated.

A useful tool, the map mode does give the precise location of the restaurant, however,  the locations of not all of the restaurants are available as yet, perhaps owing to the website being just in its beta version for now. Which brings me to another point that is  that the restaurant listings should be accommodated on a separate link , rather than having to scroll all the way down the home page to view them.

What sets tossdown apart from mazaydar.com is the videos of the outlets, along with snapshots and user reviews. A touch of exclusivity, the website has featured discount offers for its users, in fact anyone who surfs through the page can avail the discount offer from the associated partners. However along with that, the idea of a blog covering the user reviews is a good idea for it provides an interactive board for people interested, giving them a first hand experience of the services being offered.

The toss down mobile version is also available and provides a quick on-the-go way to read user-contributed reviews of restaurants in your city, with all its search features, map modes and contact details integrated, will prove to be a viable tool for many.

Whats left to be seen, ofcourse, is that since this website will eventually rely on user-contributions for fair reviews, how will the quality and quantity of these reviews fare over time. Naturally none of the food review sites will become dominant unless they have the bulk of the most reliable reviews on the net.

I just came across this great local community based store-listing site Myoffstreet.com. I have to say, this could not have come out at a better time – with internet awareness amongst people gradually on the rise. With the old directory system and the notoriously-poor-service of 17 – it used to be a nightmare to look for business phone numbers in Pakistan.

With an easy to use interface it makes this site a great place for women to explore shopping deals or product listings. By letting them interact directly with the store-owners at such a personal level, they’ve in effect taken the whole experience of store listings to an all new level for local customers.

Apart from the listings, what sets this site apart is the “Market” – where companies can show their products, announce sales and discounts, add photos and engage the users on a personal level. People can add friends, discuss trends, ask the community members for service recommendations. This has a huge potential of growing since no other site in Pakistan is currently offering such levels of social interaction on a single platform.

You can find stores catering to all kinds of markets from contemporary clothing lines to home fixtures. But I think the best market for them are home-based businesses who want a place to market their products/services, and women who want the whole ‘walking in a store’ experience without necessarily having to leave the house. From wedding theme designers to your local grocery stores – you can find them all there.

If they can offer a way for people to be able to subscribe to the “Deals” (perhaps by routing them via Twitter to cellphones directly), that would make the site infinitely more useful. Another small tweak would be to show ’similar’ options in the search results. So even if you don’t remember the name of a specific store or product you should still be able to find it by browsing through other options.

On the whole, its a good effort on the part of the myoffstreet.com team.

This is a guest post by Sohaib Muneer that originally appeared here.

Yes! … while you sleep, there are those who lurk in the dark. Stay in the shadows and make you applications you can only imagine at best. This is a new breed of programmers here in Pakistan. Finally the plague has formed it’s roots here. Yes people, STEALTH has come into the Programmer here now. Let me explain how I got to realize this.

So here I was wondering why the hell I don’t have a portfolio up even after 2 years ? and suddenly it struck me three times, almost like three speedy pats hitting my back simultaneously, the words "and you’ll be like a *stealth* programmer for us". Yes, I recall clearly about 3 clients of mine saying this to me. So what is a "stealth programmer" anyways ? Simple observation reveals that people who wear masks of different companies (some big names like Apple Inc.) are constantly looking for resources. Reliable and efficient resources. People who not only work just so that they earn their kitchen money, but also because they are passionate about what they do. These people are hired by these companies with a promise (technically known as NDAs : non-disclosure-agreements) that they must not reveal their identity and they must not do anything with the code outside their boundaries, may them be virtual or physical, and code them their ideas.

All this commotion about design patterns followed by great frameworks to address them, in most cases, were designed and developed by the "stealth" breed. Authors of languages like Python (Guido Van Rossum) and Ruby (Yukihiro Matsimuto) were stealth programmers. Heck, Linus Torvald had a "stealth" status when developing the Linux kernel. It was this species that lay the foundations of the "open source" community.

Friends, the Stealth virus has officially hit Pakistan. Me, my friends, and a number of "senior" people I know are living examples. And this virus continues to claim people here, as the awareness grows. And I don’t think that I’m referring to "free lancers" here. It’s a big term, a super class that encompasses "stealth" programmers too.

And it’s about time that this "stealth" community should be consolidated in one place. Because most of these people are best of the best in their fields and passionate therefore well motivated. Several companies in the U.S. made use of this breed in the 80s including Apple Inc. and these companies really owe their success to these people indeed. Entrepenuers here can take a hint

This is a guest post by Imran Hussain, Director of IxDC (www.ixdc.org) and a user experience consultant (experiencematters.pk), as part of our post series on world usability day (www.worldusabilityday.org). IxDC recently organized Pakistan’s first usability event called World Usability Day 2008 (www.ixdc.org/events.htm) in Lahore.

This is the second in a series of three posts about usability. In this post, I’ll be looking at some of the skills and components that go into creating a good user experience.

In my first post, I mentioned that most software developers and managers have a very simplistic view of developing software: hire a bunch of coders for programming the backend and grab a graphic designer to design the frontend of an application. The problem with this approach is that both types of professionals usually lack user focus and requisite skills for designing interfaces.

Developing high quality, usable interfaces requires a multidisciplinary approach and a variety of design skills – this is especially true of web and mobile applications which are multifaceted in nature and are usually a combination of features, information, and other media content. There is a great conceptual model called ‘The Elements of User Experience’ <http://www.jjg.net/elements/> which illustrates some of these essential components and skills:

Read the rest …

This is a guest post by Obaid Ahmed

According to ZDNet Mozilla is planning to kill Firefox2 support in mid-december. There seems to be a mixed reaction about this in the blogsphere. I am a bit concerned with the quick push to kill support for Firefox2.

Firefox3 has been in market for a little while now. I have had mixed experiences with it. While the memory usage is better, it does still crash after running all night. The awesome bar needs some improvements before I get used to it.

As a developer I think its too early for Mozilla to end Firefox2 support. A lot of internet users are still using Firefox2 and a vast majority of bugs still need to be fixed. Lets face it, not all the internet users are going to switch to Firefox3 within few months. Maybe Mozilla should keep on supporting Firefox2 for a bit longer until they get satisfactory number of people to jump onto the next version.