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Boy to say job boards are a dime a dozen would be an over-statement.

I got to find out about TWO new job boards today, both with decent advertisers (but no indication of traffic / job seekers just yet).

RiteMoves

RiteMoves is a standard job site with job packages similar to Rozee’s - free job listings, hot jobs and "featured employer" which make it to the front page. They are slightly (about 15-20%) cheaper than Rozee. In their free package, although they offer a couple of more tools, they also have some dumb restrictions, such as not being able to download more then 3 times per posting.

Their logo suggests that they also plan to be active in immigration, training and education but I see no indication of it on their site yet - maybe its just an excuse to grab whatever project they can get to keep their civics humming.

The surprising part of their story is that despite being relatively unknown, a number of employers still seemed to have bought their "featured sponsor" package, although if you ask me I could throw a wild guess and say that those employers got the package for free as part of a promotional plan. They are also putting up billboards in Lahore to promote their product

SparkingJobs

SparkingJobs I found out about via spam, which seems to be the mode of choice for "internet marketing" today - they’re offering a free job board and charging for premier services like headhunting. They are apparently headquartered in Sharjah with branch offices in Isb, Lahore and elsewhere.

They have a fairly standard "shrink-wrap an open-source job board" approach to setting something up, and seem to have a number of employers up already. Their spam messages could catch some attention though because the email is designed much like a regular "job alert" from any other site… to the unfortunate unemployed any lead on jobs is a good lead even if its from spam (isnt it "fun" that in Pakistan people can just ignore the principle or ethics of things on such simple logic?)

Problems

To be honest, both sites were exceedingly disappointing. Competing by making their services 5-10k cheaper just to reap part of the bandwagon shows an incredible lack of vision from the leadership.

There are a tonne of problems with the HR / job seeking industry of Pakistan which can easily be solved by proactive leadership - but all of our job boards are content at sitting in 1997 in terms of the breadth of their services.

I’m actually getting kind of sick of job company guys pitching themselve by saying that what sets them apart is the "domain knowledge they have of the HR industry" - heh, yea right if that were true executive searches or freelancer searches wouldnt be so much of a black art, and most of the industry wouldnt be desperate for quality coding staff.

[P.s. thanks Tayyab for the tip]

Update: Note this event isnt organized or managed by Green & White (good of you to think it was though!) We were just asked to relay the invites to protect email addresses.

The TIE Islamabad Launch event that was canceled for security and accessibility reasons is back on - Saturday, June 21st, 7pm, at the Marriott Hotel, Islamabad. As a recap, we’re expecting a gathering of a whos-who of the Isb entrepreneurship / established IT leaders crowd:

• Ms. Sarah Hashwani - Chairman, Hashoo foundation and President, TIE Islamabad,
• Mr. Zohair Khaliq - CEO, Mobilink,
• Ms. Samina Rizwan - Country Manager, Oracle.
• Mr. Amir Matin - Country Manager, CISCO.
• Mr. Shoaib Mansoor - Founder, Shoman Productions
• Mr. Shahid Khaqan Abbasi - Founder, Airblue
• Mr. Yusuf Husain - ex-MD, PSEB.
• Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman - Chairman, HEC
• Mr. Mansoor Malik - NUST, Technology Incubation Center
• Other TIE charter members from Lahore and Karachi
• High-level members of the government

The event is invitation only - the TIE members are looking to connect with emerging entrepreneurs from the field who’ve already jumped into their firms but are still in the inception / incubation / seed stages. They would benefit from the Mentoring opportunities available under the platform.

If you dont have an invite but want to go, email me at osama@greenwhite.org

IdeasHut is a blog where anyone can submit a startup idea and get feedback on it. The thought process seems to be that by getting the community involved, there is a greater chance of finding partners, guesstimating demand, or getting early feedback of competitors.

So far there are some interesting suggestions by community members, such as a cellphone tower auctioning platform that gives everyone a place to offer their property up for rent to cell companies.

The concept of IdeasHut is fair, but the thing to remember here is that ideas are more or less worthless to startups - the value-model is important.

Lets say you write “A site which offers people cheaper air tickets and also gives them relevant travel guides next to it” …. that’s a worthless idea, its been done to death already. But you could still be a millionaire provided you’re able to make the right partnerships or have an incredibly innovative way of reducing ticket costs.

The problem is people wont like to share their secret value-model on a public site like this.

This site just tends to the question “What do we call a startup anyway?” If its something semi-cool with limited novelty value but no business model, then ideas hut is great. If a startup is a serious attempt to make money from an untapped market, then this site isnt useful.

Well this was a surprise - the citizen journalism site SeeNReport that I raved about a few days ago turns out to be a joint venture between Dr. Umar Saif (from BumpIn fame) and Sharjeel Qureshi, Adil Salim and Yasir Awan (from 2’s Complement fame).

Interesting collaboration, and interesting project, but now that the long-march is over lets see how they get people to continue reporting.

Well it was bound to happen eventually - Vibe.pk is a local Digg clone that was created and (I assume) managed by Radical Solutions. Actually its just an installation of Pligg - an open-souce digg-style CMS. They didnt even change the UI, so I’m assuming the total cost of developing this is about 4-5 hours on a lazy sunday.

Development time doesnt make successful projects though - the real question is will it take off as a source of interesting niche news the way Digg has become?

My take - maybe. Digg is effective in much the same way as del.icio.us - its a social filtering service which uses its community to make sense out of the massive amounts of junk or noise on the web to identify really interesting or useful content (for the community). The digging effect stems from a social desire to say “OMG check that out!”

If you restrict a model like that to only a specific region, you’ve basically also reduced the amount of noise there is to filter. News media in PK is based on limited parameters, a limited set of press releases, a limited set of “important news” that happens on any particular day, so if I can get the same information from 10 different sources (e.g. some of the political stories currently up on the site) there’s no need or point really to look for that info on vibe.pk. Even if that story exists, there’s no social incentive to say “OMG!” because, well, everyone would probably know about it already.

Politics and current affairs, then, is definitely not, not, not the right content strategy to go with this.

Having said that, there are still bound to be interesting “news” stories for niche audiences that could be useful on vibe (provided people share those stories ofcourse) - news from within college campuses, e.g. (like Students’ Blogs), or from within the blogosphere; localized news (metro news e.g.) would also be interesting.

On the other side - a service like this would only be useful if the community adopts it - I dont think any amount of SEO would create a community of active diggers within the local netizens.

Orgoo is a webmail product that recently came out of beta, and already integrates email (all your email accounts), IM and video messaging in one interface.

They’ve just released a white-labeled version of their email service that they are going to be marketing as a product to social networks who want to improve their built-in messaging component.

Facebook email is very limited as far as email goes, but yet a lot of people are beginning to use Facebook email and apps as part of their regular workday to get connected with everyone around them.

For competitors like MySpace, building useful messaging components would mean many development cycles - cycles that can now be saved by just integrating Orgoo into their products. The benefit claimed is that a rapid increase in pageviews (which unfortunately remains the yardstick for advertisers) and time spent on the site, although the former is only true if the Orgoo sourcecode is hosted on the social network servers itself.

For those who dont know still - Orgoo has a development shop in Isb with some top-quality web2.0 engrs - its quite impressive the sheer amount of features they’ve put together into a pretty interface in a short time. Well done

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.

TIE Islamabad has delayed its launch event until further notice, citing "security reasons". Thats ok though, because most of the rest of the city is closed these two days and the weekend anyway because of the horde of people converging here.

A future event date and time will be announced later.

Vopium is a company started by a Pak Entrepreneur Tanveer Sharif. The company is offering mobile VoIP solutions that enable people to make cheaper international calls and SMS. This is the same space as Skype or Fring, and like any startup are competing as a small team based out of Copenhagen and Lahore.

The way it works is you download the Vopium application on your phone, and then buy a Vopium long-distance cards for calls. The software will then automatically detect when you are trying to make an international call and route that call over a VOIP / data connection, and pays the operator only for the local leg of the connection. The revenue model is (naturally) margins per minute on the call.

They are claiming 90% savings in international calls and SMS using their method compared to regular methods, but I imagine that would be based on a comparison to other European operators.

They seem to be doing pretty well, considering they recently raised EUR4.2 Million from the Luxembourg‐based investment company Enex Group SA to expand across Europe.

If anyone has tried it and can compare it to Fring for us, please do share your experience.

The TIE Islamabad Chapter has been in the works for a few months, but they are finally having their launch event this Friday, June 13. The Islamabad Chapter aims to help entrepreneurs in the city via networking, connecting them to experienced mentors, helping with entrepreneurship policy formation, and to try to take entrepreneurs to the next level.

The launch event on Friday is invite-only, but is expected to host over 200 of the whos-who of Islamabad’s veteran and young entrepreneurs, including:

• Ms. Sarah Hashwani - Chairman, Hashoo foundation and President, TIE Islamabad,
• Mr. Zohair Khaliq - CEO, Mobilink,
• Ms. Samina Rizwan - Country Manager, Oracle.
• Mr. Amir Matin - Country Manager, CISCO.
• Mr. Shoaib Mansoor - Founder, Shoman Productions
• Mr. Shahid Khaqan Abbasi - Founder, Airblue
• Mr. Yusuf Husain - ex-MD, PSEB.
• Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman - Chairman, HEC
• Mr. Mansoor Malik - NUST, Technology Incubation Center
• Other TIE charter members from Lahore and Karachi
• High-level members of the government

The Keynote Speaker would be Mr. Rajasekhar Ramaraj, a TIE Global Board Representative.

Sounds interesting - so lets see how this plays out. I hope this chapter focuses on supporting emerging entrepreneurs.