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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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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/