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General
Team at Qurtaba have added another front to their impressive Urdu language based apps, they have launched their Alif Bay Pay app for Amazon Kindle, as well. Earlier it was released on iTunes.
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…
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Featured Startup General
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…
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Featured Startup General
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
…
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Coffee Session General Marketing/Adv
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…
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General
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…
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Announcements General Mobile Apps Software & I.T.
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.
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General
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…
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Featured Startup General
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)…
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Featured Startup General
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…
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12:21 am
Thanks Osama. We at P@SHA appreciate your support. After 3 years of successful P@SHA Job Fairs, we have upgraded the event and made it the P@SHA Career Expo. In addition to matchmaking company posts with the right candidates, our intent is to give young people an entire career experience in the area of ICT. We want them to understand that the ICT industry is a diverse animal consisting of companies of different kinds – software product companies, software service companies, IT consulting companies, BPO firms, Call Centres,System Integrators,Networking companies, Security firms, Transcription companies, Animation companies, New Media firms, etc etc. This year we are running Career Tracks on most of these segments to tell young people what career progression there is in each sector – in the technology, business and management domains.
We are as usual running sessions on Communication Skills and Interviewing Techniques and are putting together Expert Panels. These panels will have an interactive discussion amongst themselves and with the young people on subjects like the disconnect between the quality of HR being produced by universities as compared with what the industry require.
Counsellors from major companies in the sector will be available throughout the day to provide advise to the fresh graduates and young professionals.
We are very excited about the growth of this event. The first one is being held in Karachi this Saturday at the Expo Centre. Companies have supported us fully by booking booths and volunteering their services. Workjunction.com has very actively supported the event.
The next one will be in Islamabad on June 23. Brightspyre and Green & White are working actively with us and exhibitors have started booking their booths.
The Lahore one will be at the PC on June 30. Bookings have already begun and here too we will be actively supported by Green & White as well as the University of Central Punjab – Zaeem Yaqoob Khan has been a very active P@SHA supporter whenever we have held an event in Lahore. His team of Ambassadaors are very professional and passionate.
In Karachi kids from CBM, MAJU and KU are gearing up for the event on Saturday. Promises to be a great one. The road banners are up, the ads are running in the press and word is spreading like wild-fire on blogs and websites.
Thanks to everyone. This is something that we all need – to put in our efforts towards capacity building. Together we can do anything!!! As you can see, I am all hyped up.
12:53 pm
Zaeem Yaqoob. he is one of the most passionate persons i have come across (Me too from UCP ) who works selflessly for benefit of newer generation. Seriously there is a big shortage of such individuals in out industry I wish there were more.
1:05 pm
I couldn’t agree with you more. I wish others will take the lead from him and work selflessly for the industry as well as the country. Maybe we can clone Zaeem
9:39 am
The Karachi PASHA job fair was very poor. Very few companies and people came to the event, it was very disappointing. PASHA should do better job marketing and organizing, its bad for reputation of the leading IT organization to do bad job. I hope Islamabad and Lahore will be better.
But Islamabad event was post-poned “until further notice” last day. This is very unprofessional without notice. I don’t think green and white should back this effort if it is going to be done in such lazy manner. Proper attendance and professional attitude is must. Organization needs to be good.
2:33 pm
Ahmad
I am going to be biased because I am an organizer of the event and a PASHA CEC member. Here are the honest facts:
a) There were 20 plus companies across Hall 4 of the Expo center in Karachi.
b) There were 2000 plus attendees. Turnout was light compared to Rozee and the event last year but Etlize, Systems, IBM, MIXIT, PIX Sense, TRG, Avanza, TPS, Erwin, Virtual Women Network and Access group’s stalls had steady traffic through out the day.
c) The workshop that we ran on interviewing techniques had great turnout and the counselling and interview rooms were occupied nonstop post 1 pm.
We did the PASHA Job fair last year as a firm as well as this year and are fairly happy with our results. We plan to be back next year again.
I personally believe that this is the only focused event of its kind that showcases the technology industry in Pakistan for the benefit of technology employees.
I told you, I am biased.
4:11 am
Jawwad, Jehan: I keep noticing in companies / leaders over and over and over from the critical analysis we do at G&W, and I’m afraid I’ll have to point this out here again.
IF your CUSTOMER / CONSUMER is criticizing you regarding your PRODUCT, then why does it make sense to simply become biased, defend and deny?
It is as if you’re seeing violence and bloodshed on the streets of Karachi, and you say “Well, I love Karachi, Karachi is great, and I’m biased, so I will just shut off this TV”. That wont stop the actual effects from happening.
Remember, you should worry about the people who are NOT telling you how badly they felt about the event. However, the voice who IS telling you is telling you exactly what they would need to see from you (given their expectation of your product) in order to love you and spread the good word virally.
In this case, I feel that Ahmed may have expected something that he didn’t see, and does have an objective perspective of the event (i.e. isn’t just holding a light opinion) — this platform is the best way to do a cheap focus group to find out what these expectations were.