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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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Jaffer makes an interesting observation that while the entire world is trying to set a world record of software downloads in a day when Firefox3 officially launches, Pakistan has very few pledges to also be a part of the action. Says Jaffer:
9:28 am
I monitor analytics for more than one pakistan-centric blogs and websites, and they usually have more FF visitors from Pakistan when compared with IE or Safari etc. so I’m pretty positive this has a lot to do with us worrying about the price of food and fuel these days, and perhaps being too busy doing stuff that actually matters
Speaking for myself, FF has been my primary browser for a few years now, and I will just let adept upgrade from 2 to 3 whenever it wants to… and to be honest, I don’t really see the point of pledging to create a software downloads world record. What are the FF people trying to prove here? Doesn’t everyone ALREADY know that its a much better option than IE? I’m sure each new episode of Battlestar Galactica gets many more downloads than a browser
9:55 am
Doing stuff that actually matters? What could matter more than getting the world rid of IE6?
http://www.savethedevelopers.org/
9:59 am
I m the one who also opted for world record..I didn’t kept the option of world record in mind but the ease of use and extensions that are associated with firefox was my main concern.
Already m running on Firefox 3 beta!!!
FF Rocks!!!
10:24 am
one of the reasons I can think of is that people are not aware that such a launch is going to happen, and that there’s pledge to make.
In my case, I only knew about the pledge through this blog post. I’ve been using Firefox 3 CR. and naturally been expecting the firefox 3 full realease, and in most cases firefox does the update itself, you only have to restart the browser, eliminating the need for me to go to the website and check for the latest updates.
Pakistanis are great technology enthusiasts just the same my friend.
11:22 am
@punslinger
As long as IE6/7 have the lions share of users on the internet, people at Mozilla will need to keep doing such things because, clearly, not a lot of people know or have used Firefox. (think about non-techy people using non-linux OS’s)
These activities are also meant to celebrate free and open software. But I guess that’s pretty hard for us to appreciate, considering I can go out and buy a Rs.60 CD with a host of Microsoft applications in it. We live in a country where I’ve had people argue with me as to ‘why’ its ‘wrong’ to buy pirated software, so I guess appreciating FOSSoftware goes out the window … :/
11:26 am
We live in a country where I have to argue with people ‘why’ its ‘wrong’ to lie to your employer saying your ‘grandmother has pancreatic cancer and you have to go back to your village for the next 10 months’ just to get out of a non-compete agreement and work for your competitor.
Especially when ‘they’ are telling me I’m ‘wrong’ for wanting to tell the former employer.
“Yar if you do that, he will get in lots of trouble!”
Duh!
1:47 pm
surprise to see that even Afghanistan is above 1000
besides developers, students didn’t even know about Firefox
5:23 pm
What I’m really interested about is how Iran has so many pledges. What’re they doing that we aren’t doing?? Any social scientists out there who have the answer?
10:56 pm
for those who can’t get through Mozilla’s website being DDosed by genuine traffic, here’s a link to the Firefox 3 download:
http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.0&os=win&lang=en-US
thanks to http://www.besttechie.net/2008/06/17/download-firefox-3-early/
11:50 pm
uumm.. i’m already using firefox 3.. ? why should i pledge for something i already am doing?
p.s. if you want to increase the pledge amount, put a pledge link up here too
11:52 pm
Hmm.. what I’m really curious about now is why this post in particular got viral and got so many hits… to be fair its not a particularly exciting title or content piece.
Is it because the title says “party”?
1:35 am
Its coz the post is about firefox
9:18 am
Though I wasn’t much in favor of downloading it on 17th … for a record .. that does not matter. Was alreday using Beta version. But Pakistanis can’t resist either :~)
9:20 am
BTW, KSA’s got more pledges than us o_O
9:27 am
Yes, because people in KSA are very excited about Firefox 3. Almost everyone I know here is not much fan of IE.
10:34 am
@Osama
It’s because the post is about Firefox 3. If you have party and Firefox3 in the same sentence, Firefox3 will always grab more attention ;D
2:50 pm
There still haven’t been as many downloads from Pakistan, as there should have been. But as a local web master, I can testify to what ‘punslinger’ has said. In my personal experience, I’ve seen more Pakistanis use FF than IE.
8:58 pm
I think the word didn’t get out that quickly (at least here in Pak). Despite being an early adopter of FF 3 RC1, I wasn’t aware that FF 3 is releasing on June 17th (:$), nor that there is a pledge to make.
I have blogged about the issues I faced with FF3 RC1, so I would have been more than happy to make the pledge.
As for the lack of interest of Pakistani technologists, I would highly agree with Asjad’s comment on the original post (on Jaffer Haider’s blog).
9:14 am
I pledged for it after I accidentally came across it. One of the reason maybe Pakistanis are not avid news and blog readers.
Although pledge was for around 1,900+, total downloads crossed 9,000+ mark (http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/). Although India has around 145,000+, look at Iran 419,000+ downloads, higher than China, India and Australia.
People wouldn’t have switched to Firefox 3 at work because of lot of web based projects have aim to be Firefox 2 compatible, although there is workaround of running them both people generally avoid it.
I am using Flock for online living and run Firefox 2 & 3 for work. Flock 1.2 will be based on Firefox 3, so there is time when it will come out.
9:19 am
http://www.millionface.com/l/the-download-day-and-the-iranian-record/