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When the Obama Administration came into power in the US, a lot of people expected that Government 2.0 would become mainstream. And for quite a few departments, it has been.

But did you ever expect that Pakistan would follow in it’s footsteps as well? Well, apparently we have!

The first signs of web 2.0 have appeared, in what is the most critical government departments of all, the ministry of finance!

I present, The Finance Ministry Blog! Hosted off their main finance.gov.pk website nonetheless!

It comes complete with comments, tags and RSS goodness! And has been operating since March 2009 with the first post appearing on 30th March 09. So far they’ve been updating it with all little tidbits of news regarding the minister and the budget.

I congratulate the powers that be behind the finance ministry on this brilliant step into the future! And hope to see similar initiatives by other area’s both within the government and the private sector of this country.

One thing is for sure, Blogging is definitely here to stay in Pakistan!

This post is very late in posting, but some thing which can be termed as a trend in forming. Let me cite the incident and then the analysis.

On the morning of 27th May the day there was bomb blast near the ISI Building and Rescue office, at the time I heard a slight vibration thinking of an earthquake as I had just logged in to my PC I posted on twitter asking if there was an earthquake in Lahore. I am not a regular twitter user, there are people like teethmaestro who fully utilize the service, how ever my turninng to twitter for my query was simple, I was sure that even if it was an earthquake our news channels web sites (which bye the way have improved alot on the breaking news coverage ) will still take some time, and 10 am is not a time to call any one at home to check the news channel. So I posted my query on twitter hoping some one would reply and within in few minutes of my posting this query , i received a reply from Jehan Ara telling me about the blast and that she has learned this from a tweet by Dr Awab (teethmaestro).

So here are some of the reasons twitter is picking up now in Pakistan, even with the flooding of news channels the first person reference is some thing always more powerfull, if the news is reporting a complete shutter down strike in a city (hostorically we will always doubt the accuracy of news channels), some one tweeting from there will actually give you a more real picture, reason that some one has no hidden interest in spreading false news, how it validates is also a very interesting phenomena, if you were lying some one would pick up and point you out and at a channel so wide and visibility so great you can’t risk your creditbility by lying about some thing. What this guarentees is a first person account is the community pressure to tell the truth and an audit in real time by the community it self.

I am still not a twitter fan i tweet a lot less then a lot of my friends who i follow, how ever for me the best source of news has become twitter channels like #lahore, #karach, #islamabad and #idp

For me the trend started with the long march, because a lot of people like us were in the long march some of them did an excellent job of keeping the twittter channel for long march updated. For me that provided the most accurate upto the minute account for the most historic movement of our times. after that i became hooked up.

So next time you are looking for breaking news, some real comments on a political or social scandal try out twitter and see if your experience is same as mine.

Check it out - http://www.ittazee.com/2009/05/31/worldcall-evdo-broadband-service-the-3-month-usage-review/

TED; a Technology, Entertainment and Design conference that covers informative and impactful talks by world leaders and inspirational people all around the world, has just recently launched an innovative project that will make their presentations available globally in forty languages along with English subtitles. Their goal is to reach beyond English speaking crowd and let their information be available for all cultures and languages. The great news is, Urdu is one the featured languages.

This is a plus point for Urdu language speakers because there is a huge percentage of people who are comfortable with their mother language and for them, this recent TED Talks launch in Urdu will definitely provide a comfort zone they need. A wide range of population will be able to access, comprehend and share the videos of thought leaders like Al-Gore and Seth Godin while they share their knowledge that was previously limited to few people. It will be great since they will get to see and know these successful and inspiring world leaders sharing their thoughts and ideas about global issues, current and future technologies and design to be implemented in upcoming years. With the wisdom of such people all around the world available locally, it will bound to create a positive impact on us.

This will actually be a collaborative translation, as according to the TED Talk media Executive Producer June Cohen, every TED Talk will now have sub-titles and will have the capacity to be translated in forty languages by the volunteers worldwide. The project has been funded by Nokia to subtitle and index video content online as a step towards a big win for humanity.

Every talk on TED.com already has English subtitles and number of translations will vary according to the number of volunteers who will be elected to translate the talk. Along with subtitles, TED.com also features time coded interactive transcript that are indexable by search engines. So now viewers can watch videos with English subtitles and Urdu transcript or according to their preferred language transcript. As for the quality and validity of translations, according to TED Talk website:

“To help ensure quality, we generate an approved, professional English transcript for each talk. (This is the transcript upon which all translations are based.) Once the talk is translated, we then require every translation to be reviewed by a second fluent speaker before publishing it on TED. TED controls the final “publish” button. All translators and reviewers are credited by name for their work.”

So far, 306 translations have been completed and so many are under process. TED Talk deserves a round of applause for their outstanding project. You can find out more about this on NPR and All Thing Digital as well.

I just came across this site, Starz.pk. The site is a local business listings site and I was astonished to see the number and details of entries available on this website. The site has listings for 26 possible cities of Pakistan. You can search a wide range of business listings and I must say, the people maintaining this site have done a nice job. I tried several searches in Lahore and always ended up with a relevent list of results. Some of the searches I tried on the site were printing, kabab, fish, books, stationers, dentist, vegetable, sabzi, chinese, dvd, cinema, cricket, software house, milk shop and even tyre shop. Wow, I do get results, may be not very close to my current location, but still, most of them make sense.

The information on the site is again a community effort and the site expects the users to add businesses to the directory. Users can enter the name, contact details, payment modes and ratings for a business. You may or may not be the owner of the business and if you find your business added to the site already, you can take the ownership. The site is well-built, well-maintained and good-looking. I also found several business listings with the Map location and a very neat Google Maps integration that shows the location of the business on a detailed map. Honestly, this is the first time I’ve seen a site giving you driving directions for a local business destination (obviously using google maps). The home page is kept alive by adding dynamic sections like latest reviews, top-reviewers, new-arrivals and featured members.

Signing up is also simple and once you have logged in you can rate a business from 1 to 5 stars or you can write text reviews about the business. The site does’nt say it explicitly but I’ve seen that the moderators are pretty active and they keep reading every post and keep things clean on the website.

Then, I tried adding a business and it works like a charm. Well, to give it a shot, I added a fake business and within minuts the entry was gone from the site. Good job Starz moderation team. Right now, there is only one big down-side of the site. There are a lot of entries for the larger cities like Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, though I dont find many entries in Faisalabad, Haiderabad, Gujranwala or even Quetta. The site owners should put an effort to draw more contributors from smaller cities to make this site a success.

Cross post from Basit’s blog.

I would like to Welcome Basit Ali in our list of Writers.

Basit is an old friend and a veteran of Tech Industry here, He was once a popular teacher at UCP.

He has been writing his own blog for quite some time.

http://www.basitali.com

and recently has also started writing for http://telecompk.net/

I welcome him on board, and hope to see some interesting articles from him

After the hilarious first video “The Twouble with the Twitter Tweeple”, the team’s released a second video called “Celebrity Twitter Overkill”. Check it out below.

Its good to know that an event series that we started is still going. I just received this press release from NUST that I am pasting below verbatim - Osama

NUST SEECS Social Entrepreneurship Club along with P@sha and BrightSpyre is going to host an exciting Startup Insider Session on May 8^th , 2009 from 6:00pm to 9:00pm  in the premises of SEECS. The purpose of this session is to help young motivated and brillant people, who are thinking of launching a startup , get a handle on really what they’ve got and the way to make it a success- an idea, a feature, a product, or a business and what not. Individuals will get a great opportunity to talk and discuss their ideas with successful entrepreneurs

Past events have attracted sizeable crowds of over 100 plus people per session. This session will feature a panel of successful serial entrepreneurs with remarkable business experience. They will lead the audience through a series of evaluations critical in implementing the ideas into successful ventures. You are encouraged to avail this fruitful opportunity to become a successful Leader of Tomorrow!!!!

The last date for registration is 7^th May 2009. For registration please log on www.seecs.edu.pk. Limited seats available therefore registration will be done on first come basis. 

 In case of any queries , contact Ms.Shamila atshamila.keyani@seecs.edu.pk or Wahib-ul-haq atwahib.haq@seecs.edu.pk.

YouTube recently invited its community to participate in performing a global internet orchestra - the winners of the activity would be invited to play live at Carnegie Hall.

Users were given notes from the piece to play, and YouTube has selected the best instruments and notes and mashed them up together in the video below.

Its pretty neat - but something many many times more impressive in my view is the “Thru You” project by Kutiman… if you havent seen that yet go check out one of them below.

Basically one video editor spent a few months sitting on his home PC taking and remixing live videos from Youtube.

Its amazing because while the YouTube symphony was based on giving users precise notes, tempos and melodies (which then becomes a fairly seamless process) - Kutiman took hundreds of videos which would normally all have different keys, melodies and tempo and mixed them into beautiful, fresh music.

OK, this is going to be an open discussion, all of your readers who have been reading silently and have a start up I request all of you to speak up for the greater benefit.

There is some one who runs a financial consulting organization, has a lot of experience in Accounts and finance of IT setups, who has kindly agreed to provide Financial consulting to budding entrepreneurs.

There is how ever one thing that need to be ironed out and I need your help in finding those small details so this friend of mine does not end up doing every thing and step back from his pledge.

First few things to note the help is initially for 6 months (to see if this even works out and he can spare time to  actually help those) I am sure he would extend this period if we don’t take un due advantage and either pay him when the venture becomes profitable or get permanent accounts guys if not and let other get some help.

So what do I need your help on this is to determine what kind of financial consulting or advice entreprenuers need in their ealry days.

Few things I can identify at start is

1. Figuring out tax for employees and organization.
2. Help in filing for exemption if any applicable to your industry
3. Making sure your accounting procedures and documents are in order for any audit you need down the road.

These are few of the things that came to my mind, but I know there will be other problematic areas to highlight.

Again this discussion is for helping startups if you hold back it will be loss for all of us so help me out in getting these crazy entreprenuers some free help.