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The 5th Innovation Journalism conference was an impressive gathering of the leading mainstream and emerging journalists from around the world. The three day conference brought together people from Venturebeat, GigaOm, AlwaysOn, Bloomberg, New York Times, and dozens of other media publications to discuss prevalent issues in the state of media.

Issues discussed ranged from media as a business, ethical boundaries in accepting advertising as an independent journalist, objectivity, authenticity and accuracy of new media, hype-creation and its need for innovation growth, identifying weak-signals, attention economics, emerging information visualization and consumption research, and some fantastic new-media regional case studies.

What interests me in healthy discourse are perspectives - you get to see and learn from someone else’s point of view and also offer and teach others from your own. Within the conference it was interesting to see how people from backgrounds in different types of media (TV, newspapers etc) approached or thought about innovation within their own work or field.

Other amazing things to find out and learn was just how far ahead South East Asia is on new media and community-centric activities. We got see sites with thousands of very active citizen contributors, whole news-papers running entirely on citizen entries (and professional entries, not just rants).

In the panel I participated, we discussed ways in which communities online can help do fact-checking, and the types of new web2.0 tools that can emerge to solve these issues.

PK overall had a decent presence at the conference - we had a good number of people and some strong speakers as well. More than the speeches our participants ended up making a number of interesting deals there (many of them I cant disclose).

Thanks David and Johanna for putting together an impressive and yet comfortable conference, and Arthur and Amir for the opportunity. It was certainly a good chance to share ideas.

We’re starting a new series on Social Bridges where we want to do executive interviews of some of the biggest companies in Pakistan to ask them about their philosophy for ethical business practice in Pakistan and also elsewhere. We’ll be covering MNC executives looking at social responsibility, social innovators and entrepreneurs, and will try to catch as many interesting or famous companies into the mix as well.

I’m pretty excited about it because this should give us some pretty interesting content to read about what their firms are doing, their core values and strengths.

So keep a lookout over the next few weeks - we’ll be adding them as we get them done.

Google just opened up a wiki-like interface MapMaker for Pakistan with which you can help draw out street maps for the country.

You can add roads, regions, landmarks or other points of interest on the map.

Anyone can get started, and by working together hopefully we can create a baseline over while many useful web apps or services can later be built. Spread the word too, folks, this is important for the next-gen of web entrepreneurs here.

You can get stated here, read how here, and even follow other collaborators from Pakistan to get going with the community.

[Via Nash]

The Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship is a new initiative at Massachusetts Institute of Technology which aims to serve as a launching pad for a new generation of entrepreneurs who want to launch innovative businesses in developing markets such as Pakistan. I was glad to see that Adnan Shahid, a Pakistani student at MIT is among the fellows of the Center. Below see an excerpt from Adnan’s profile and his plans for the incubation center.

Working as the Director IT Strategy with Mobilink, Pakistan’s largest cellular service provider, I witnessed the success of a single mobile phone turning into a business model. Mobilink started the ‘PCO Self Employment Package’, which included a wireless pay phone to be used as a Public Call Office. This one phone scheme provided employment opportunities to the less privileged households- becoming a financial earning source for the otherwise unemployed. This first-hand experience helped me develop a business idea and professional goal in life: to set-up a mobile technologies incubation center for low-income countries. The goal is to increase the commercialization of communication technologies and incentivize entrepreneurs and innovators.

I am working on getting further details about Adnan’s work and will report more on it as I collect the information. A bit more about the Legatum Center. Funded in Sep 2007 and based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship is founded upon the idea that bottom-up entrepreneurship is the central driver of both economic development and the emergence of good governance. Iqbal Quadir leads the Legatum Center. The Center website has more information on how their approach can “create a path toward poverty alleviation, elimination of corruption, and improvements in health and education.” See this article from Guardian for more background on the center’s financial supporters.

I view the Legatum Center as academia’s contribution to make the concept of social businesses a reality.

Well, surely, thats an impossible task. We might as well give up now and quietly slip away before they get disappointed?

We cant build a mountain in one go - we couldnt even fathom how to do it, nor would we ever find enough time to do it properly.

We could, however, start throwing a pebble into a pile whenever we find one, all the while doing whatever else we were supposed to do.

So we keep doing what we’re doing, but off and on it "occurs to us" to look in different places to find pebbles. When we find one, we throw it in the pile and move on.

The pile is growing - and maybe its disorganized, but we dont pay any heed to it. Its just a pile of pebbles, I’m not bothered with it, I will choose to not care about it. I’ll just do my other stuff, and keep throwing pebbles in.

My friends get curious and involved too - even though they’re also busy in their work, turns out there’s plenty of pebbles around where they’re sitting too. So they agree to help by throwing it in the pile whenever they find one.

I dont even notice, but now everyone in my group is throwing a pebble whenever they find it. I dont notice because I’m not spending any extra energy - I’m just doing my work, and throwing in an occaisional pebble… I dont even look at the pile.

A few months pass, all my other work is done. When I’m handing in my work to "them" they also ask me "where’s my mountain?!". Oh I forgot about that, so I turn to where my pile was.

Except that its not a pile anymore - its actually become quite a mountain in itself - sure it doesnt look like much, but building roads on top might actually be easier now compared to starting from scratch if I had had to.

We’re very often faced with tasks that seem like mountains - they seem so overbearing, useless, hard for a single person to do that we might as well give up or do a poor quality job of it.

But very often, the best way to start building a mountain is one pebble at a time right from the start of the work. That way, we wont even notice - we’re just throwing in a pebble off and an. The mountain appears itself.

Before we could get used to the thought of telepresence emerging into full-scale holograms that you could speak to, Infosys was just awarded two patents for (1) creating 3d holograms from a series of mobile phone pictures and (2) the transmission of holographic data over regular telecom networks without choking them. The company is claiming to bring these technologies to mainstream by 2010.

Combined, the two patents describe an interesting future of 3d holographic capture and projection between mobile devices - if it is done in realtime this could mean 3d video conferencing.

Any buyers?

[Via CNET]

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.