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Irfan caught somethingvery interesting from the tubes - the latest Mobilink commercial hints that it will be offering an iphone soon.

This is deliberate, and not just a coincidence, because thats the only phone in the commercial that gets its own frame-shot.

Anybody with inside news? Maybe we can call this number (marketers leave hints like these to special customer support lines, especially in movies)….

Great catch Irfan

Notice how they’re also particularly rude by using all caps for PAKISTAN every time. Its like they’re using the word as an insult.

With all the gender wars going on in the world, and the workplace slowly shifting into a more politically correct one, with ‘person’ replacing man, coding seems to be the next target on the list of these warriors. I read a blogpost today which claims that best practice coding is a feminine trait.

Emma McGrattan, the senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres–and one of Silicon Valley’s highest-ranking female programmers–insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They’ll intersperse their code–those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs–with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it.

Men, on the other hand:

Men, on the other hand, have no such pretenses. Often, “they try to show how clever they are by writing very cryptic code,” she tells the Business Technology Blog. “They try to obfuscate things in the code,” and don’t leave clear directions for people using it later. McGrattan boasts that 70% to 80% of the time, she can look at a chunk of computer code and tell if it was written by a man or a woman.

While this may or may not be the case in the US, what about us pakistani’s? How many good women developers do we have in our workplace? While most women in IT in Pakistan might be considered to stay within the domains of quality assurance or technical writing, has anyone witnessed the productivity of women here to be greater to that of men?

Image via flickr

What do you do if you want the latest news on the Long March? Visit dawn.com or geo.tv and you’ll get canned news reports that sum up a few hours worth of activity. Too little detail! Turn on a TV channel and you’ll find anchors filling in the gaps between gaps in news reporting, still not good enough.

Bravo the forces of new media then - this long march has created one of the finest demonstrations of citizen journalism I’ve seen.

SeeNReport has emerged as an incredibly active platform of SMS + MMS based reporting showing pictures of the march that no other news agency has been able to capture. PKLongMarch has bloggers from the midst of the horde sending minute-by-minute important news bulletins, but bringing together citizen journalists from all the cities the march passed through.

Combined, they dont just provide high frequency of updates, but make the news more relevant because they make you feel like you’re a part of the rally. In other words, they pretty much beat the socks off of all the biggest news organizations combined.

Citizen Journalism is alive in this country - old media should catch up and learn to tap into this monster, or give up.

What is also interesting is that citizen journalism doesnt really need fancy platforms to make it work either - a blog and seeNReport are both very simple platforms, but the community has chosen and adopted them moreso than, say, allvoices or the platforms being created by Dawn. This really makes you wonder about the viability of CitizenJo-based business models or startup ventures.

Speaking of which, Dawn has been trying to experiment with new media and citizen journalism recently too, but they’ve approached it with about the worst way possible - the Dawn Blog has anything but relevant-to-now stories or opinions…. they’re just using it to publish stories that wouldnt otherwise make it to print. The Dawn Citizen Journalism initiative is a farce on the medium because they’re asking submissions using a long-winded process.

If Dawn REALLY wants to get serious about this stuff they need to acquire SeeNReport today…. thats the type of platform you use for this. You get people energized to a cause, not send ads in papers.

Gmail is apparently still one hour behind when it comes to showing local time (maybe its a browser/javascript issue and all websites are - I havent checked).

Thats ok though, because up through 1 hr before I landed even the Islamabad Airport was showing flight times one hour behind. Like when this experiment ran last time a few years ago, much of the population is still running on old time.

These are small impacts that we might ignore because our life isnt bound so strongly by time, but cant we just agree on daylight savings and let the world know that this would be a yearly phenomenon?

I for one like having an extra hour of daylight… it beats having to face rush-hour traffic in the dark with no street lights (thank you energy).

Do you hear that? Thats the sound of the old-media dam bursting. Desperate for content and finding it impossible to compete with blogs when it comes to niche news coverage, Flare magazine has started ripping off content straight from blogs into their magazine, and claiming it to be their own.

Babar Bhatti has all the evidence here.

Spider has quoted Green & White a few times in the "around the blogosphere" section but they atleast give credit and a full link back to us.

This is shameful, particularly because they’re forgetting that blogs own copyright for their content and can very very easily file a case on this. Maybe this will be the start of a longer debate between old and new media on content ownership and distribution. From my view it is very easy for old-media to reposition itself as content aggregation and distribution channels. Print can still achieve higher distribution numbers (atleast on paper) and get the content to some demographics better than blogs, but blogs and the nature of bloggers can sometimes create deeper feature articles.

If print simply chooses to pay bloggers for each story chosen just as they pay freelancers, I dont think many would have a problem with this. But something needs to be done about people who are assuming that blog content is free for redistribution.

Flare’s contact info is:

flare.mag@gmail.com
Voice : +92-51-2890054
Fax: +92-51-2891339

Someone, please get on their case and get a response from their editor to the comments below. We need to do this for Babar and the rest of us.

Orange Telecom has just recently invested about $50-70M in Telecard. Telecard has been a WLL + LDI company offering a range of call and internet cards, and have also operated the GO-CDMA brand.

GO CDMA had the tough task of being the first-to-market with a new "innovation" for this market, WLL. Being the first in these cases is hard because you have to bear the entire cost of introducing the new concept to people - your competitors just wait to launch until people understand what this new innovation is and can launch at a fraction of the total communication cost.

At its launch GO-CDMA had done a pretty good job of introducing itself in the market, but low service quality and lack of funds to expand both regionally as well as in services-breadth has left uptake of this service relatively low.

It is unclear what TeleCard will use the investment for, but they might be wise to expand their network to become CDMA2000x-RevA compliant and give reasonable broadband / videophony to consumers.

Do you think its time for video telephony?

Whoops… what happens when your team takes their annual leaves right when the last milestones were met, things are stable, and you’re out for a week-long trip anyway?

Green & White goes down for 6 hours.

Sorry about that - we’re back up now.

Started on 31st July, 2006 by one Osama A., Green&White has grown from humble beginnings to becoming the place for technical discourse in the country. With discussions (an average of 10.59 comments per post in the last month) on topics as diverse as advertising, marketing, software management, startup culture and human resources, G&W is today the very embodiment of the vision of the ‘other osama‘:

I think blogs are very important for this point in time for our country. Pakistan is going through a very delicate transformation into a new economy that thrives on information. While old-media paces to catch up with the news, it will inevitably be the writings of those who are on the front lines of the movement that present candid fact to all waiting for inspiration both abroad as well as within the country

Almost two years down the road, blogs like G&W, The Metblogs network, Jehanara, Jawwad Farid, Mohtashim (among others) have seriously transformed how we share ideas around the industry, bringing IT truly into the lives of the practitioners.

On my end, i’m glad to be part of this little piece of history, a platform which is surely to evolve and grow into something few of us ever imagined. (As Osama keeps mentioning, a series of events are in store and if nothing else, they are sure to make people sit up and take notice!).

On behalf of Osama and the G&W authors, I thank all the readers and commenter’s to this blog for turning it into the vibrant community that it is today.

As a parting note, remember knowledge is the only thing which isn’t reduced when shared. So invite your friends, tell them about G&W and make the participate in the discussions. There’s something new to be learned everyday and it is best learned from each other. (Use the share link below).

So kick your shoes off, grab a cup of coffee and talk your heart out on something you are passionate about! Green&White is definitely here to stay!

The Innovation Journalism program is a Stanford-run initiative that focuses on the business of covering the practice of innovation and forward-thinking societal and industrial events in journalism and the media. Its interesting because it is actually focused on training people on becoming better at identifying and following future trends. The program is run in a fairly elaborate mix of academic workshops, hands-on industrial training and longer-term initiatives in partnership with multiple countries, Pakistan being one of them.

In addition to this, the program engages leaders from traditional and emerging media industries from all over the world on how journalism and media itself is changing (”New media”) and how people can better prepare for news-consumption in the future.

The annual conference is a gathering of the top technology and innovation journalists from all over the world - this year some of the presenters and panelists include Michael Kanellos, Editor-at-Large, CNET News.com, John Markoff, Silicon Valley Correspondent, New York Times, Matt Marshall, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, VentureBeat [See their coverage here], Tony Perkins, Founder, AlwaysOn-Network and other participants from XConomy, DFJ, The Kauffman Foundation, PC World, GigaOM, SF Chronicle, Wired and more.

This year I have been graciously asked to also participate and be on a panel in the conference to discuss “Developing Authenticity in online communities in New Media”. I will be representing Green & White as a publication at the conference.

According to the conference agenda, the other people on the panel are:

• Jeffrey Taylor, Editor and Bureau Chief, Bloomberg San Francisco;
• Ian King, senior correspondent, Bloomberg SFO;
• Osama A. Hashmi, technology blogger ‘Green & White’, Pakistan;
• Peter Magnusson, entrepreneur

The panel is complementing the main presentation on this topic by Mr.Khaleeq Kiani who has been one of this year’s innovation journalism fellows from Pakistan, and otherwise works at Dawn.

Representing new-media and Green & White in a conference like this is quite an honor for me, so thank you to the Innovation Journalism Pakistan program for nominating me.

The InJo Pakistan program - run by the Competitiveness Services Fund - is also taking about 7 more people to the conference to appear in panels or to present. The delegation consists of:

• Mr. Mushtaq Malik - Chairman, PEMRA
• Mr. Amir Jehangir - Special consultant, Innovation Journalism Program at Pakistan
• Mr. Arthur Bayhan - CEO of the Competitiveness Services Fund
• Other leading mainstream journalists

The keynote speaker at the conference this time is Mr. Zafar Siddiqui - Chairman CNBC Arabia, Chairman CNBC Africa, President CNBC Pakistan and President SAMAA TV. He will talk about intellectual freedom and the Internet’s affect on global media organizations.

So if you’re in the San Francisco / bay area and want to meet up, why not come to the conference - its free to attend but you have to register beforehand. Mudassir, Haris, maybe that would be a good place and time to meet.

Also, if you consider yourself a “futurist” and analyzing innovation trends interests you, why not pursue this is a career choice? CDF is currently offering summer Internships on New Media reporting and associate editor roles to very sharp forward-thinking people who are brimming with potential, where I’ll happily provide coaching on technology and innovation coverage and new-media practices. Go here to apply for them today or email me at osama@greenwhite.org.