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Ufone, always a first for innovative VAS services, starts another very interesting service for the Pakistani public.

Partnering with Rozee.pk, they’ve recently launched a mobile interface to the popular job portal. Ufone users can now get mobile alerts, and if they have GPRS enabled, even apply right there through the Rozee website.

How to use it is available on the Ufone website here. Read on after the jump on some views on how this service might be beneficial or distracting.

Read the rest …

the best thing about twitter is that it keeps us connected when on the go. while blackberry users might be having fun with it through the twitter app, the rest of us, sadly, had to resort to a variety of online tools to connect with the service.

thankfully, a lahore based software house, uraan software solutions, has developed a solution to bring the rest of us into the mainstream twitter use.

a twitter-to-mobile gateway for Pakistan, mobi2weet brings twitter usage to sms.

sign up online and send receive messages directly from twitter via sms. all the favorite commands  for sending and receiving messages are there and my initial test proved the service to be quite useful.

it’s relatively easy to use, has dedicated local numbers for all mobile networks (e.g. for warid its 03219600395) for sending messages, and coupled with a sms bundle isn’t heavy on the pocket either.

now the only question which remains is, how will the twitter mania affect the social life here

go check it out: http://www.mobi2weet.com/

ITCN Asia is just around the corner and a number of organizations who booked stalls, both local & international, are now gearing up to show their presence at this world renowned  event. So what a better time than now to look at some of the pro’s and con’s that can be had from event participation.

Pro’s

The one enticing aspect of ITCN is that it’s trade centric. Because it focuses solely on IT & Telecom, it’s a great way to be known in that space. With over 130 organizations participating and over 40,000 expected visitors in around 3 days, ITCN does have much to offer any company willing to shell out the big bucks. You get to brand yourself, be known as a specific provider, and get to see your competition. Also, you get to meet a number of people within your industry, whom you would normally not in the daily grind of life. Which brings us to the next point.

Trade exhibitions are a great way to get leads. A sale, big or small, often begins with a single, humble lead. It is more relevant in the IT & Telecom space, which due to their B2B nature, require a significant amount  of effort put into maturing a lead before a deal is signed. With sales cycles as long as 2 years in some cases, it’s generally a good idea to have a whole lot of good leads around instead of running after a few. Though it does require dilligence on part of the sales team to keep a regular follow up, because of it’s very nature some leads taper off.

There’s also the aspect of being abreast of what’s happening in the market. IT & Telecom is a rapidly advancing field, and while you may ‘know’ whats happening and what kinds of products are coming out, it may very well be out of date before you even realize it. ITCN and other such exhibitions give a two-sided advantage here, they let you present your own latest, cutting edge technologies to the world and take in the current view of the market in terms of competition and general customer interest.

Con’s

While it’s hard for me to chalk out any many con’s of participation in a trade event, there is one which glaringly come to mind. It is the huge cost involved with event participation. I’ll talk more about these costs later, but they come in terms of the participation cost, the materials, and most importantly, the time involved in creating all of it.

Also, in some cases, it might serve as a kind of distraction for the organization from regular work, again dumping it back in terms of opportunity costs.

That’s about it from my end, do you have any more in mind? Please share! Next, i’ll be talking about what to project to potential clients during a tradeshow event.

Babar Bhatti gave an interview for an article on Wi-FiPlanet.com titled “WiMAX gives boost to education in Pakistan”. It’s a very insightful article, one which specifically tells us of how WiMAX can be utilized.

The company in question, KZO is delivering it’s education solutions over the wateen’s wimax network to atleast two schools in Islamabad, and if/when they get funded, which expand it to other cities. Their technology is described as,

The technology that KZO uses to deliver the educational component in the ED-LINKS exchanges—and is starting to use for distance learning in Pakistan—was developed by KZO Innovations, a subsidiary. The company claims its platform goes well beyond other streaming video-based e-learning products, of which there are several.

The KZO technology can use video from almost any source, including professionally-produced lessons and recorded teleconferences. The real differentiator is its Web 2.0 features. Users can text message in real time while the video plays. They can also add tags and other annotations to the video while it’s playing to index and extend it.

There was always a lot of speculation on the impact high speed broadband will have on the country, however, i wasn’t sure education would’ve been one of the first to be impacted. While there are many other issues to be resolved within the education system of the country, this project would definitely be one in the right direction.

I wonder what other applications can be developed for the Pakistani community using Wimax as a delivery method?

A lot of people have their opinions on what would make IT flourish in the country. From academics, individual & company certification all the way towards marketing, there are a lot of varied views going around. There are a lot of problem statements and few solutions floating out there, so let’s document some of them. This is an ongoing series of articles which will focus on a specific area in each post. If you have any idea’s of your own, please feel free to put them up in the comments section. 

Let’s face it, software companies over here are still created and run by IT folk. Engineers who’ve finally given in to their entrepreneurial spirit and to whom all of the world’s problems can be solved by the right technology. Although they are right about technology being a problem solver, the one are they mostly miss out on is sales and marketing.

With many of them, the mentality seems to be “if you build it, they will come” but sadly, in the real world, that doesn’t really work out.. does it? You not only have to build it, you have to find them, tell them, excite them and cajole them into finally convince them into giving you their hard earned money! So why dont most people in IT see it? Many of the software houses i’ve been to, many of the people i’ve talked to still have a very hardened image towards sales people, and especially technical sales people. They prefer the senior people to do sales based on ‘contacts’ instead of going out actively hunting new projects. Oh and by the way, these senior people are also involved in other aspects of the company, so as you can guess.. sales normally does take a back seat. Here’s my take on it.

For many people in IT, sales is a black box which they dont understand! and since it involved people, they dont really want to understand it. Out of the few who do realize that the ‘need’ is there, many hold the view that regular sales people cannot do technical sales, because well, they are not technical. Explaining the technical side of things is then left up to the poor project manager or the bechara developer (who give the demos) most of the time who just fumble through the presentation saying absolutely nothing at all. And then, there are the precious few who actually realize it, who get sales people onboard and teach them how to do a technical sales and let them loose in the wild.

The solution?

The sales jargon employed here are Consultative selling, Service selling, or pre-sales activities! Learn a lesson or two from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft or any of the big software giants who do business here. They’re not sending their engineers to do the sales job, infact, most of the time the sale is done by totally non-technical person who not only gives the demo, but also walks the clients through their objections right through to the sale.

The one mentality i think the IT industry here needs to come out of is not wanting to invest on it’s salespeople.”They should already know how to sell, i can’t spend time and money teaching them this stuff” is not a valid reason. That reason just leaves to you pick up the scraps both locally and internationally. The one thing a sales team does is hunt! Assemble a team that is not threatened by new people or new scenarios and who are genuinely good with people, arm them with all the info you can, give them targets and get out of their way! This applies both for local and international sales teams. Better yet, involve a outbound call center to hunt out who is interested and send your sales team after them!

And finally, please realize that a sale does *not* come cheap! It doesn’t just happen, infact, it requires quite a bit of groundwork, planning, brainstorming, a lot of meetings all joined together

A lot of people have their opinions on what would make IT flourish in the country. From academics, individual & company certification all the way towards marketing, there are a lot of varied views going around. There are a lot of problem statements and few solutions floating out there, so let’s document some of them. This is an ongoing series of articles which will focus on a specific area in each post. If you have any idea’s of your own, please feel free to put them up in the comments section.

So far, i’ve been talking about keeping valuable human resources (read software engineers) around by giving them interesting projects to work on. But how do you get interesting projects? Well, for one thing, many of the corporate organizations offering super-cool and high value projects require vendors to be certified at some quality level. Why? It’s actually quite simple.

In the corporate world, nobody cares about how cutting edge you are or how well you say you can deliver. They care that they get what they asked for, when they asked for and it actually does what they want. The entire quality field in software engineering sprung up from this need. Let me repeat this, client’s dont care how cutting edge you are, they care whether you will deliver what they want, when they want.

Certifications are a means to that end. When a company certifies to ISO9001 or assesses at some CMMI level, that tells potential customers that they value their commitments. Even though there are a few organizations that dont deliver despite these tags, quite a few do. The results speak for themselves, which is why corporates with more and more critical projects require their vendors to be certified.

The solution?

Get your company certified, so you can compete and win the more interseting projects. Get paid more money, work on interesting stuff, deliver on time and within budget with acceptable quality and you get credibility. Ofcourse, if you do it for the right reasons internally, it will also help you streamline your own processes and mature your way of working, allowing you to get rid of excesses, cut down costs and really be profitable. Simple no?

Dont be fooled, certification for the wrong reasons will kill your company, draining you of both time, team morale and valuable productivity. It’s a long process and a very hard one, but the results will definitely put you over the top of your competition.