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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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8:07 pm
I am interested in FB apps regardless of FB Fund.
but for iphone i have a problem with the way the platform is structured. Delivering your app via iTunes ONLY? where Apple will keep x% of the share on your app?
That said, I am sure iPhone development will be getting better soon and it will be interesting to see how we can build one codebase to target major handsets..
12:29 am
Thats a very common model for both ensuring consumer security and stability and also allowing the platform to provide deeper integration over time.
The Qualcomm BREW platform is also proprietary and closed, but it seems to work fine.
12:35 am
Qualcomm BREW still enables you to allow users to simply install the app (they get a security warning and blah blah) but to actually push it to the masses all you have to do is get a security certificate for your app.. where as for iphone the only way your user can download your app is to go through itunes..
I am not that comfortable with that distribution idea.. they can keep the x% profit i don’t care.. but charge that for my security certificate ..
but i will still try to make something neat on it.. lets see.. i have been working on getting workspace to port over to iphone.. so this might be interesting .. and we already have a new wixd app running internally for iphone and ipod touch.. but i would love to get an actual application build for iphone..
8:52 am
Actually iPhone is the OSX platform so theoretically you can port your OSX applications directly to iPhone. This is how people have been developing applications before Apple released SDK.
There is no comparison between facebook and iPhone as such; as facebook is very limited in what it can go and in any case they are just two very different things.
By the way, there have been rumors that Apple has been developing a Mac compatible version of Lotus Notes. Once that’s done, it’ll be a UI update for it to work on iPhone. Think of how many businesses have Lotus Notes installed… iPhone will be real threat to Blackberry then.
For all the geeks out there who haven’t had a chance to do Mac development, I think they should try it out along with iPhone and who knows a few millions may come their way
By the way, I am talking about actual iPhone platform application development and not mobile web applications – those are not too interesting (again from GPV – geeky point of view:))
6:17 pm
wow MacDeveloper… that was a bold statement: “I am talking about actual iPhone platform application development and not mobile web applications – those are not too interesting (again from GPV – geeky point of view:))”
Indeed the iPhone platform is *in theory* a OSX BUT in OSX there are limits on how much apple controls your application delivery method.. where iPhone the *ONLY* way you can deliver your application is via iTunes.. correct me if I am wrong but last time i checked you could download Windows Mobile apps from anywhere and same was true with Blackberry apps.
Also, not sure where you heard about lotus notes implementation but iPhone does play friendly with Exchange server and that itself should raise some concerns over at Blackberry folks.
I am not sure if you have seen the way development on iPhone works. There are two SDK’s one for those who are coming from Desktop dev world and then there is a iPhone Web Developer SDK..
Most of the apps that were being delivered to iPhone before SDK launch were via Safari and it will continue to do so.
7:59 pm
Ob,
Actually, unofficially you can run your applications on iPhone. You don’t really need to download them via iTunes. Of course, Apple doesn’t like that and the warranty is void if you run your own applications (as far as I know). But there are ways to run your own applications on iPhone.
From a mass-distribution point of view, yes ITunes is the only way to distribute applications. You are absolutely right about Windows Mobile and Blackberry or for that matter Nokia/Symbian applications.
I’ve seen iPhone development SDK but even before that we’ve been fooling around with running our own apps for iPhone.
9:02 pm
MacDev: Interesting. I didn’t know you can run the app without giving up your warranty.. can you point me to some help article on this? (for my own knowledge sake)
As far as i understood – the only way you can test your app initially is via simulator then you buy your license (whatever that might cost or be free) and then u can test it out via sandbox delivery system.. I might be wrong on this but i will digg up the articles for you
11:51 pm
Actually ob, the warranty does get void – in our case, we din’t mind that as we were just ‘fooling around’
You are absolutely right about the distribution process.
I hope more people come to OSX development in Pakistan – so far, I don’t know of any firm doing some major development on this platform…
11:56 pm
Btw if you restory you phone through ITunes, it’ll wipe out all data from hacked apps and the warranty should stay intact – theoretically at least …
Is warranty even applicable in Pakistan?