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General
When a 19th century romantic French writer by the name of Victor Hugo said “Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come” he obviously could not envision Pakistani bureaucracy. Not only can it reduce an idea to nothing more than its meager skeletal remains squirming in its own vile, it too often does.
Come 2004, the IT bubble is about to burst in a military run, democratic, American influenced politically independent subcontinent country by the name of Pakistan. It is here in our story that along comes an idea. It is a simple idea yet revolutionary in every way, the idea to prepare this country for the…
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Events General
The past whole week I was really excited about going to the exhibition on 5th and 6th at expo center Lahore since the theme read “home expo and super car expo”. I was counting on seeing some innovative home solutions, fancy cars and a lot of appliances for both. As I entered the arena, an ear piercing heavy bike engine race greeted me. Oh wow nice, we have bikes here too… and lots of them, but let’s see if we have the actual products that are expected.
First cars!! Honda Launched its new City Aspire at the event. This attracted a lot of young crowd who wanted to check it…
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General
NOTE: This is a sponsored post
Football. The most popular sport in the world. That may be hard to believe, we being a die-hard cricket nation, but there are many amongst us who get their blood pumping whenever our favorite team kicks some balls (pun intended). There’s excitement in the air, and the airwaves for that matter, when Spanish rivals Real Madrid and Barcelona are about to have a face-off on the field. Manchester United or Chelsea? The answer could incite either jeers or cheers, depending on who you’re surrounded by. It feels like you belong to an exclusive club really, not to mention how convenient it is to…
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Coffee Session General
There are two main things that are currently causing out growth in ICT to stall. One is the lack of original ideas, so most of the entrepreneurs either copy what is already around internationally or locally (same ideas of online shopping, online bidding) we still have not hit the jackpot with someone creating some thing like instagram or drawsomething and being acquired by one of the big names.
The second issue always lamented by entrepreneurs is lack of any funding sources in Pakistan. Over the years we have seen efforts being made to create funds which would help but what ended happening that most of these funds either did…
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Coffee Session General
We all know about the 7 layers of the OSI model. This is the framework by which computer networks are defined. Starting with the physical layer, going through the transport layer and finally culminating in the application layer where end user applications reside. I believe that this should be redefined to include and additional layer – the Social Layer. From the current vantage point, the Social Layer lies right above the Application layer – hence it is served by the Application layer.
The 90s witnessed a boom in what is now referred to as web 1.0. This consisted of static applications hosted over the web. Static applications meant that…
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General Mobile Apps Software & I.T.
Pakistani IT industry has been progressing rapidly over the last few years. It is heartening to see that the industry players are innovating and working in different areas to establish their expertise.
Recently, TenPearls, one of the leading IT companies of Pakistan, launched “Carumba!”, a 3D car racing game for iPhone and iPad. Carumba! has been designed and developed by TenPearls’ innovation labs. Launched as a free game, Carumba! allows users to earn coins during the race, and redeem them to unlock other cars and tracks or to get additional nitro boosts. It has also been integrated with Apple’s Game Center.
The game has received very good response from…
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Events General
‘Rethinking Pakistan’ [and my expression goes LOL and I will explain why] was the theme of the conference which took place at margalla hills Islamabad on March 31st 2011 organized by TEDx, lets just summarize here what TEDx is; before we further dig into the “theme” and happenings of this conference.
TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) and ’x’ denotes the independently organized events under the TED umbrella, mission is “Ideas worth spreading” and this events basically brings together individuals, communities and organizations with the opportunity to excite dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level (geographically). The programs combine live presenters, performers and pre-recorded talks from some of the most brilliant…
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Announcements Events General
ICT R&D Fund aims to provide graduating students a chance to really make their final projects counts. I have always felt that students in their final year some times product excellent products which due to lack of any infrastructure and proper guidance plus funding just go in the Universities Libraries.
Seems ICT R & D fund is giving these students a chance to take their projects to the next level by acquiring funding, if you are a final year student doing a project all you need is to get this form filled and submitted through your head of department .
Last date for submission for forms is 31st…
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Coffee Session General
I wanted to discuss the Thiel Fellowship and sort of run the idea among our readership to figure out if it was justified or not. Bay Area hedge fund manager Peter Thiel started a Fellowship program in his name about a year ago trying to capitalize not on start ups, but the smart kids who may actually come up with the next billion dollar idea.
Let there be no mistake. Innovation solves problems. Bankers, lawyers and hot shot executives are good for only one thing: managing an existing infrastructure. It is the innovators who turn existing ideas on to their heads and enable breakthroughs. Considering the point above, it…
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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.