Pakistani Startup Profile: Ooober

Qurtaba takes their Urdu App to Kindle

I love what Qurtaba are doing in a niche area of Urdu Language. Although their start was from Nan-Map for which they now have an iPhone App.There love for Urdu language related apps has been flourishing in recent months. Most of their apps are doing very well on app store, some impressive numbers for their popular Urdu apps are as follows.

Urdu Writer: 10K downloads in 3 months – average 200 downloads…

Food Connection Pakistan

I happened to be in Quetta on a business trip last month with no idea of where to dine alone. Being a typical Lahoriite, a die-hard food lover, it matters to me that I try the best food of the place I visit. So this is where FCPakistan came to my rescue. I simply logged in, typed in my desired specifications and got atleast 5 suggestions.

The listing included their opening times, specific facilities like ease for physically disabled customers, credit card acceptance, smoking areas, take away facility, whether valet parking was available or not, and even directions to get there! What more could you want.

Although that was the…

FourQuants.com Jawwad Farid’s new venture

If you have any thing to do with entrepreneurship, its impossible you have not come across Jawwad Farid either in person or in virtual world of his blogs and judging different events realting to startups in Pakistan.  He is also the author of Reboot which we reviewed a while back.

Jawwad has been writing on Finance, Risk and Treasury for some time now on learning corporate finance.

I guess that has lead to  FourQuants.com. FourQuants helps people understand concepts related to finance. Following topics are mentioned in about us section of the website

• Risk management
• Derivatives products
• Option pricing models
• Basel and capital adequacy regulation
• Financial modeling
• Treasury

…

OLX Pakistan Investing heavily in advertisement

OLX is a global online retailer and auction site. They have an impressive footprint in a little less than 100 countries, each with their own specific domain (like .pk for Pakistan and .in for India).

In Pakistan they have been operating under olx.com.pk for some time with people using it to sell things online.

Recently they have started advertising heavily on Television, a medium seldom used by online businesses previously. The ads (two of which have appeared ) are witty and fun to watch.

The most important factor of these adds is that they are being advertised on media which previously none of our online businesses have used.

Most of…

TiE, All Asia Business Plan Competition

Round 1 of TiE is about to reach its completion on 22nd of Jan, 2012 at Marriott, Islamabad in which ten teams will participate. Four teams will be shortlisted for the level 2. I also had the opportunity to participate in TiE All Asia Business Plan Competition 2012 along with my team members in the first few stages of level 1. Although we didn’t have the chance to go beyond stage1 but just participating helped us understand our own idea better and to polish our proposed technique along with development of a solid business plan. TiE all Asia Business Plan Competition provides a platform for generation and development of new…

TenPearls Launches Multi-Platform Mobile Apps for Dawn Media Group

TenPearls has announced the successful delivery of mobile apps for Dawn.com on multiple platforms,   including Apple iOS (iPad and iPhone), Android and Symbian (Nokia). The mobile apps have received great feedback from the users from around the world. It may be worth mentioning here that DAWN.COM is the #1 English News website from Pakistan averaging over 16 million page views a month, and 3.1 million unique visitors from around the world.

More details can be accessed at mobile apps for Dawn Media Group by TenPearls.

Second Pakistan Blog Awards by CIO Faces severe criticism

CIO Pakistan started blog awards last year. Its is a good sign when some one takes initiative and starts some thing new. However its also difficult to introduce this into an already budding field of new media in Pakistan. Last years (or two years back now since its 2012)  Awards were initiated so as it is expected it faced initial growing up pains. It always takes time for such thing to wins the trust of the community. And bloggers are one of the most hard people to win over, most of these are rebels in their own rights people who have started blogging to show the world their opinion…

Do We Vote : A great statistical tool by PakReport.org

Pakreport.org a tool which was instrumental in gathering statistics during the massive flooding in Pakistan, has created another study/stats gathering tool for our electoral activities. Interestingly its called do we vote

With political scene in Pakistan heating up it provides very valuable information to party supporters and their leaders.  A quick look at it shows the all known facts that people in rural areas take their voting more seriously than all of us supposedly educated and enlightened urban population.

Pakreport.org was an initiative launched by Faisal Chohan of BrightSpyre during the floods, the effort enabled people on the ground to send sms (the most spread out communication medium in country)…

Stay for the work not the perks

This is a revelation that came to me when I recently quit my comfy corporate job for the second time. If you are below 40 and some one asks you about how is your job going and your answer is not in tune of “I like my job because I love the work”. 

You need to pause and asses your career, last time I answered this question my answer was “I like the job, because the benefits are good”, and that made me think (offcourse there were other factors as well). But if you are doing a job in which to satisfy your own self you have to look at…