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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.

Striking GUI and catchy phrases grabs your attention in DareMyCompany at first glance. Latest venture of Zigron Inc., DareMyCompany is a portal that provides platform to companies seeking healthy competition within geographical region.

The concept and idea of starting a gaming challenge network is innovative and first of its kind in Pakistan.  The idea of this portal is to let companies challenge other companies – for online games – and the company who win the most challenges climbs up on the ladder standings. Since it’s pretty new on the cyber world so only five Islamabad based companies have registered so far and not many challenges have been taken up and Zigron is so far the winner of one cricket game. Registration of this site is pretty easy and free of cost and any company can register. For those companies who are interested in registration may find their how it works section interesting.

Clearly the site is all about gaming challenges or to be more precise; virtual sporting challenges like Cricket, Football, Tennis and Baseball. Some board games like chess and poker as well as some arcade like Counter strike and MOHA are up for challenge at the portal. The winner gets a higher ranking on the ‘ladder’, thus the company with better rankings will be the winner. However, it is not clear whether more than one company can accept challenges at a time.

The project, overall, is a nice step towards promoting healthy competition between Pakistani companies in the virtual world.

Back in my university days, when we were the final year students, our biggest problem in lives used to be making of Final Year Project that has to be both innovative and functional. Some expert programmers and developers actually did manage to do that yet they couldn’t sell their work because university has clear cut policy that university projects are solely their right and cannot be sell to industry unless you’re doing a sponsored project for a corporation. Back in those days it made sense that any project done for academic purposes using university facilities belongs to university.Recently I came across an article ‘Whose IP is it anyway’ that made me think should university have the right to own your work?

There was a recent controversy about the controversy around the American gaming institute DigiPen Institute of Technology and four graduate students lead by Zach Aikman. These students developed award winning game in 2008 and were approached by several publishers yet they couldn’t sell the game because it was owned by their university so they decided to sell play mechanics but they were banned by their university to do that. University has the complete right on art, assets, codes and IPs and they refuse to make an exception in their case as well, according to Aikman words which are quoted from here.

“We knew the school owned the copyright on all the art, the assets, and the code, but you can’t copyright play mechanics. So, after we graduated, we began talking about taking the game concept and starting from scratch with different code.”

DigiPen was not amused and reiterated its claim to all intellectual property developed at the school, including derivatives of such work:

They were dead set on not setting a precedent because, if they let us keep the IP, they were afraid other students would want the same. But I believe there’s something wrong with the idea of DigiPen owning games it has no intention of doing anything with, while discouraging people like me who could really make use of our efforts and use it as a springboard to a career.

It’s like going to an art school and creating a painting while you’re there. Does the school own the art that took so much of your time and effort? I don’t see why the same thing shouldn’t apply to games.

His words had me all nodding my head and agreeing to he said but during my research for this article, I came across the strong defensive approach by Comair, the founder of DigiPen.

Our policy, which has been our policy since day one and which is laid out in our student agreement, is very clear—everything that is done within the school and presented as homework or as a product to be judged by a teacher ends up being the property of the school. IP, code, artwork, everything…..Students come to DIT to learn and get the most out of their education, not to ship a game they created at school for profit. We are a school, not a production house, and therefore our goal is for the students to gain the knowledge and experience they need to be successful in the field. We may lose students based on our IP policy, but this is not as important to me as is maintaining the quality of the education.

I don’t agree on this but I can see his point of view. There is a heavy discussion already going on, those who are interested in can check this and this. It’s not like my verdict will solve this issue but still I like to make one anyway, students at least have some of the rights of their product if not all because its their hard work and creativity that lead to create such good products and university tools are just tools that facilitate their creation so its their right to retain at least half of ownership. What do you say?

This review was long overdue. Zameen is a property portal with a professional and catchy outlook. It is a site that provides services in real estate, property trade and consultancy. If you’re looking for selling, renting, or buying property in Pakistan then you can browse the catalog provided by the site for 48 cities in Pakistan and find your deal. It offers wide range of Pakistani property listings though to search for property, you need to be a member of this site which is easy since registration is free and simple.

Key sections are plots, commercial, rentals, wanted, agents and development where you can search or browse through the featured offers. Hot developments are featured in home page where as featured homes are showcased in the bottom of the main page as well. One can find the complete description of home, its area (given in both Sqr.ft./ Marla) price and contact information. To sell or rent the property, one needs to fill in the information like area, price, images and location and submit it to Zameen.com. The slight drawback here is that they have not mentioned whether there is a price tag for this service or not and if there is then how much they will charge.

This site provides information on home finance as well, all you need to do is fill in the contact form and send it to them. Their news section is updated regularly and provides information on both Pakistani and international properties and upcoming housing projects. I would prefer it if the users of the site or members are able to comment and give their own reviews on the features and pricing of the property and usage this site provides them.

They also claim that more than 5,000 properties are added per month. The activity on the portal is significant but they have not included any tools like number of hits per profile or if a property is still for sale, among other things. As I mentioned above, the outlook is attractive but lack of details, especially about current status of a property, irks the users. They have to maintain an active database of all properties listed.

Zameen.com was put up in 2007 and immediately won an award for ‘best property portal- Pakistan’ and this year too, it has bagged the same award. While awards are certainly a thing to appreciate but the long-term business compatibility of a project plays a more crucial role. Zameen can be a success given the vast scope of business in the real estate sector if they overcome these pitfalls. They just need to implement a business solution and make it a profitable venture.

Our cell phones are not just phones anymore. We have experienced a mobile revolution in true sense. We take pictures, listen to music, make videos, and check our emails on the go. Just then when we wonder what mobile phones cannot do; we were introduced to the concept of ‘mobile TV’ though right now it’s not the rage in Pakistan. I have reasons to believe that mobile TV on our cell phones can be very popular here as well though right now it is not.

According to the statistical compilation of PTA, total number of mobile subscribers in September crossed 90 million. It is estimated that in 2011, number of mobile users will reach 105-110 million, a pretty hefty number by anyone’s standard. With this huge number of growing stats, one thing is sure, anything related to mobile has a huge market here. Put in the entertainment factor and it’s a hit among the masses!

We have a couple of telcos offering Mobile TV but an average user has yet to adopt to this phenomenon. Major reasons are cost and quality, with economy down and basic necessities going out of reach, paying for mobile TV especially when you don’t get a quality service is understandable. But like I said, Mobile TV is not an entirely lost cause and can be a massive success if friendly tarrifs are introduced.

If we speak of our neighbor, India is lagging behind Pakistan in this area with only one broadcaster, Doordarshan, offering the service on a limited scale. On the contrary, all popular local channels are readily available here and we have a much deeper cellular penetration.

Three telcos; Ufone, Mobilink and Telenor are already offering this service in Pakistan and their rates are almost at par with each other – and uneconomical. Mobilink mobile TV give access to various local channels 24 hours and charges PKR 6/MB+ Tax. Telenor claims to provide more than 23 channels to the service subscribers and charges PKR 15/MB+Tax. Ufone also provide this service to its users as well though not much information is given regarding the package on their site.

Mobile TV is only available on EDGE-enable sets, which are unaffordable for a common Pakistani and even if they buy it; EDGE tarrif is way higher.

Telcos are also missing another big opportunity; video on demand TV. I would cite the example of cricket euphoria. Any of these giants can come up with a solution like offering the whole series for let’s say PKR 500 or so. Similary other events like Oscars, Olympics or Football world cup can also be offered. There are many likely customers who don’t want to subscribe to a complete 24-hour package; they want selected material.

Generally speaking, the opportunities provided by a mobile TV are endless. It can be used as a tool for dissipating knowledge and awareness. A Peshawar University report even went to the extent of saying that this service can alter the mindsets of tribesmen. Well I don’t know whether this statement holds ground or not but it can be used as an engine for social change.

PakHeadlines is a new venture recently launched by two NUCES-FAST alums, Abdul Basit and Mustafa Haroon. Currently in beta, the Web site gathers news from popular news sources around Pakistan and aggregates the headlines on one single page.

The portal also provides links to live streaming of popular TV channels like AAJ TV, GEO and ARY. Mobile users can access this website on wap.pakheadlines.com

The design and usability index of the portal is ‘almost moderate’ with a simple design and content-focused approach. However, the Web site would have looked much better if the moderators have done a little more effort. Currently, they usability of the portal is quite low. Add to this the fact that small fonts are used for headlines (15 are displayed on the front page and the page is refreshed after every two minutes) and no abstracts are attached with them. They can fare better if they update the portal to display the most important news instead of giving headlines about the King of Bhutan and Bangladesh political crisis . Another drawback this website has is that they don’t have a large archive; users won’t be able to access news after its 5 days old.

While doing a review on this portal, I asked one of the team members about their plans of future expansion and if they have taken the permission from the channels shown on their website and if they can do well in this age of feed readers.

We’ve launched a very basic set of features in the beta release of our website. The prototype has been placed in the market to see the response of users. Yes, there are feed readers – tons of news website that are available out there. Although we took the risk to provide all headlines that are collected from popular news sources and place them on one single page, avoiding too much of news that one might have to read through any feed reader. All news is also linked back to their actual news source so that interested users can read more from the source. For the next upcoming release, we’ve planned to include full news from the sources so that users won’t have to run away here and there to read more. Quick access to weather forecast and we’re trying to include forex as well.

Let’s see if this venture is successful or….