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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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I would narrate two personal experiences here to solidify my claim. National Savings is a big financial institution of Pakistan under the control of the federal government. The organization has millions of depositors and thousands of employees. If you happen to visit any National Savings center the first thing you would notice is a long queue of customers and a general sense of clutter and mayhem. This is because the organization has not yet computerized its procedures and still employs the age old system of keeping registers or ‘Khatas’ as they are known in Urdu. Now that is a very lengthy procedure of going through the piles of decades old registers and finding the details and takes a lot of time. These centers have got computers? Yes they have but they are not using them because there is no database of customers and they are placed to just give the place a techy look.Now let’s move to our very own district courts or Kutcheries. Everyone has to visit these places for a variety of reasons and they are still using centuries old system of ‘data warehousing’. The record offices often times catch fire and the precious data is lost.The plan for incorporating e-Govt modules in Pakistan was envisaged in 2002 and an Electronic Government Directorate (EGD) was established in October 2002. The directorate, working under the ministry of information technology, is carrying out some projects on a smaller scale. As mentioned earlier, computers have been provided to many government organizations but the employees either don’t know how to use them or can’t utilize them fully due to their limited scope in their jobs.Now instead of lambasting the government for the slow paced modernization, we can improve the situation. We have to start with those organizations where there is an ample IT infrastructure present but there is a dearth of procedures like National Savings. If these organizations involve the IT firms in creating databases and softwares then we can expect some positive changes.As far as digitizing the data of local governments and record offices is concerned, it’s a long and tedious project but we have to start it immediately.The only hindrance in this regard is the lack of availability of funds and more importantly, lack of will. The rampant corruption present in the traditional data keeping is also a major bottleneck as the folks will have to part with huge chunks of ‘extra income’. India is facing the similar issues but they are trying to combat it. We just need to follow suit.
7:34 pm
I think we need to understand that even if a department has a good semi-use of technology it doesn’t mean that its “top-level” management even understands what IT can do for them.
I have been involved in some private sector companies where all of their business information is in paper form, it was and still is a challenge to make them realize how efficient they can be when a correct IT solution is provided to them.
Efficiency is not about working long hours, its about working smartly for 8 hours
hopefully our e-government will realize this soooooon..
8:51 pm
E-Govt disappeared the same day the illiterates brought down pervez musharraf , it not about politics but what i know is it might have been possible in the Musharraf era and it was being done they even had plans to build a Tech City near Sheikhupura but i don’t see this tech revolution happening under this playboy’s management.
2:37 am
“The rampant corruption present in the traditional data keeping is also a major bottleneck as the folks will have to part with huge chunks of ‘extra income’”
I agree with you on that! they are worried about their extra income because if computerized it isn’t easy to modify things.
9:15 am
@Obaid
Yeah we can only hope for that they will realize the importance of IT pretty soon otherwise they’ll suffer losses as traditional way of doing business is almost a thing of the past now.
@Ehsan
Without sounding political, I do agree that present regime has yet to devise any IT policy.
@Saad
That’s one of the biggest reasons for this as the current system of data keeping is so easy to manipulate
6:16 pm
Yeah and this reminds me that when nadra’s wasnt computerized we got fake birth certificates of my brother made (infact 2-3 times), the guy used to charge 500 and used to come at home to deliver those
but since it has been computerized and we got the computerized bayform we have been told its impossible to modify anything now
2:18 pm
I think the issue is not of computerization but mainly of the funds and lack of interest of even EGD people. Since i have been in a few implementations of Egovt. porjects (District & Province level), but those project succeed where interest of funding agency(like UN or US AID program) is there. Local IT professionals dont even understand its importance by themselves, so they do not cooperate implementing it.
6:50 am
consolodation interest debt consolodation card debt