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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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1:44 am
Interesting idea but their website needs a lot of work. I have used GoBig Networks and its pretty good in connecting startups with investors.
1:50 am
Obaid,
Have you guys been successful in fundraising through GoBig? Any issues with the PK angle? Any tips you want to share with the community here?
7:23 am
Osama,
We did get 2 VC via goBig Network. Unfortunately, the terms didn’t work out between us.
As far as PK angle is concerned, so far we have had mix reactions. Pakistanis based in US are much more open to invest in our product as compared to those based in Pakistan.
Hopefully once we completely launch our product and start approaching these investors we will get a better picture of the situation in Pakistan.
3:13 pm
Btw, regarding wixd how is wixd handling the IP issues? As far as I can tell any VC would be hesitant to invest in a site like wixd because of legal issues.
What do you say? Osama? Obaid?
3:17 pm
Another thought, do we have any successful ventured backed web 2.0 firm in Pakistan? iScrybe recently secured funding but it’s not really successful.
Success can be defined on the lines of rozee.pk (according to the site they are silicon valley VC backed) or 2btechnologies (funded by TMT ventures). Both these firms are quite profitable.
3:19 pm
Regarding iScrybe’s success, I meant they aren’t really profitable yet. Apparently secured 1.5 Million from Adboe and LMKR but it’s yet to see whether they’ll be able to turn the product into a profitable revenue stream or not.
8:29 pm
Asim: With WiXD we are working towards implementing IP protection schemes. The site will transform to be a mesh of user generated and underground band media.
So far we haven’t had any reasons to go get an outside investment for WiXD and we hope to convert it into a success story without taking any large amount of funding..
I played around iscrybe beta and honestly, I wasn’t that impressed. Its a nice fancy flash app but they really need to convey their msg a bit more clearly. I can use google calendar so why should i turn to scrybe? How often do i need an offline access to my calendar when i can have my BlackBerry or SmartPhone with me 24/7?
7:13 am
Obaid,
Interesting comments. I have worked on a few underground band portals and I can tell you that IP won’t be too much of a problem for these. Though, I guess you’d know better about the revenue stream.
Regarding iScrybe, finally I have someone who’s echoing my feelings about scrybe. I’ve not really played around with the beta, but from their video I had exactly the same feelings. Also I feel the major innovation in scrybe is it’s user interface (not papersync, that’s a neat idea only) and it’s not hard to replicate it. Which means that there will (and probably are already) competitors out there who will developing such apps and distributing them for free. But i do really hope that they become successful – I can imagine a lot of hard work has gone into it.
Best of luck with wixd, btw
11:20 am
A minor comment – perhaps you’re not defining innovation fully accurately here.
Papersync may not feel like an innovation but for a person who doesn’t have a smartphone (the average consumer) it might be incredibly useful to have that with you.
If scrybe’s target demographic is general consumers then papersync may make more sense that blackberry sync.
The user interface is innovative — but why?
Not because its cool — if we measure the time it takes and the number of keystrokes and clicks to enter a calendar item in outlook, and compare it you’ll notice a dramatic reduction in total time of transactions. Also, the process is smoother because at no point am I stopped with an ugly modal prompt that stops me in my tracks.
These things add up to economic profit for the person using it when compared to alternatives.
Scrybe isn’t the only calendar to provide that profit througth a better UI — Zimbra has one of the best team calendars I’ve used.
The third innovation (although I agree that its not hard to replicate) is the idea of merging a task or calendar entry with the context behind that calendar entry — a birthday with ideas for birthday gifts taken from the web.
That doesn’t always make sense if you think about it that’s a huge step. Without context, a calendar is just a bunch of boxes with text scribbled on it — the human mind usually gives it the context needed.
With people getting busier every day, the requirement to keep the context in our minds is adding a subtle mental pressure on us — a calendar that lets me dump (and continue to dump) context easily, I dont have to keep it my mind and hence my economic profit increases further.