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I met the Managing Partner of Zeropoint.it - Jelle Mattelaer - at SI3 in LMKR - and two things stood out right off the bat.

The first is their business niche. Although what they’re doing still falls under custom software development or customization, but they have atleast one slightly distinguishing aspect. They specialize in customizing and enhancing open-source systems - e.g. a client might be trying to implement, say, a CRM system wanting a special feature. But this open-source focus also extends to open-source companies who want a dedicated team to build out some key features on their own products.

Lets say I have a product X that I’m building using an open-source process, and making money off of using premium support and services. Since I have a business and clientele I would still be responsible for delivering features against a specific roadmap. Some community owners are really good are rallying together support for a set feature roadmap (e.g. the firefox community) but other communities often tend to work more or less on their own schedule and terms. If thats the case and you have pressing demands for features against a schedule, hiring a dedicated team to work on your open-source product may not be a bad idea.

The second thing that really stood out from that meeting was just how Green their management seems to be - despite having Belgian origins, their firm seem to be rather ununsually pro-pakistan. Their blog highlights some interesting pro-green facts, and even in our meeting Jelle had mentioned the advantages they’ve seen from being here.

The third interesting thing that I saw researching this story is this PingMyCompany thread about them, which seems to suggest an interesting completely open working model. Jelle, would you like to share some details of it?

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.

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]

Jaffer makes an interesting observation that while the entire world is trying to set a world record of software downloads in a day when Firefox3 officially launches, Pakistan has very few pledges to also be a part of the action. Says Jaffer:

So far there have only been 1971 pledges from Pakistan. That puts us in the same category as countries like Ecuador, Belarus, Sri Lanka, Algeria and Egypt. Iran has a whopping 8684 pledges! And they’re right next door to us. (there’s no point in drawing comparisons with India)

Wasn’t Pakistan supposed to have one of the fastest growing tech industries? I thought our software industry and our ‘techies’ in general were a lot more enthusiastic about technology and generally well informed.

Jaffer - if I had to guess, I’d just say we dont generally try to be a part of fun things like this. When Gmail did their "Why gmail" video series we had only ONE video submission from the entire country.

The 2008-2009 budget for pakistan was unveiled recently in parliament. Whether it is people-friendly, or rich friendly or even ultra-rich friendly remains to be seen. From an IT and Telecom point of view however, some of the propositions are a huge cause for alarm.

Lets take IT first. I’ve combed the entire speech of our dear Finance Minister for a single mention of IT, and here’s what i get… nothing! Nada! Absolutely zero. As with everything else, there are good and bad points to this story.

The first point, infact the only point, even being talked about by our local community is the increase of 1% in GST. While the GST issue has been on the cards for quite sometime and seen as the major hinderance to the mass adoption of IT in the country, i’m not really sure it has that much of an impact. IT is here to stay, and people will find ways and means to acquire technology if there is sufficient reason to do so. So while another one % increase may take the price of a desktop computer up rs. 200 to 400, that one reason alone will not be sufficient to discourage adoption of IT. There are much larger underlying reasons for this which need to be addressed first.

So far, the good thing for IT services is that the Services Tax has remained constant at 6%. This comes as good tidings to companies involved in ITeS such as BPOs and Call Centers, so atleast we have one more year before our profits start biting the dust. The same holds true for training companies, so atleast you wont be seeing an immediate increase in training fees.

Apart from this, no extra tax has been levied on the imports of computing or communication equipment which is again a positive sign.

One interesting thing however, is the inclusion in the financial bill for information technology and its related ammendments in various other bills. Essentially, i think we’ll be seeing a lot more private and governmental business for the local IT industry if these ammendments are approved. That in itself could allow companies to expand their product lines and consumer base within the country as well. For more information, go through the proposed ammendments to the finance bill.

Coming to the telecom market, things are not quite as rosy. Infact, its quite dreadful. The first levy which comes to mind is the standard Rs. 500 levied on each imported handset. While it may be argued that leving a standard amount on sets which vary in price from under Rs. 2000 to Rs. 30000+ is unfair, given how our country operates in terms of corruption, a single rate atleast has a much lessor chance of being misused.

The next item on the agenda, woud be the increase of 15% withholding tax on calls to 21%, whic basically means that for each Rs. 100 card you now put into your credit line, you’ll be paying Rs. 30 as taxes instead of Rs. 24 as we did previously. The one thing it will not hurt is cell phone companies, since they already advertise their charges as rate+tax.

And lastly, an additional tax of Rs. 100 on all phone bills exceeding Rs. 1500 is a major blow. I’m pretty sure this is applicable only on landlines but please correct me if im wrong. Essentially, this means that if you have a landline and manage to accumulate a bill of > Rs. 1500 e.g. by having PTCL DSL on the line, then you pay an additional Rs. 100 each month to the government.

So that’s pretty much it. A mixed budget of sorts. While the IT and ITeS sectors escaped relatively unscatched in this budget and business will continue as normal, the telecom, mobile handset importers and consumers of the telecom industry will be the ones suffering the most.

Please let me know if i’ve missed out on anything, or misquoted anything, and i’ll be happy to correct it.

I just virtually-walked around the Bayt virtual job fair, and although it might still be early in the 2-day affair to really measure success, early signs arent looking very good.

As a sidenote first, I did initially think this might be a cool second-life-esque affair but it turned out to be more like a chat + video chat service buit on top of an interface resembling booths and halls from a job fair.

Anyway, here’s the good, bad, and ugly.

Read the rest …

Is quality a function of Project Management? or a separate entity in its own right? Theory and practice tell us different things on this subject, which is why i’m finding it very interesting. Take PMBOK and you will find that managing quality comes under the perview of the project manager. Afterall, they are responsible for everything which happens during the project. However, it constitutes a big conflict of interest.

A project manager’s job is essentially to deliver the project a)on time, b)within budget and c)with agreed functionality. The emphasis has gone so much on delivering it that quite a few pm’s have forgone any thoughts on ‘what’ they are delivering. Requirements get misunderstood, developers introduce their own ‘features’ or try to implement the ‘next best thing’ and bugs run rampant. However, as long as the project gets delivered, who cares right? And often, it is quality (reviews, testing and process) that get axed to make up for poor estimation processes, scope creep and the hundreds of other commitments on the project team’s time.

Read the rest …

Bayt.com is doing a pretty remarkable virtual job-fair that ties together companies and candidates from the entire middle east and I think parts of Asia into a virtual job fair. Participants will be able to use video cameras to converse with each other over the web.

They’ve got me intrigued for sure - so will be logging in to hang out and bug employers about employment practice. If you’re also logging in make sure to catch me near the virtual coffee machines drinking lots of virtual java.

Update: See Comments for more facts and clarifications. Original story below.

About a month ago, Vodafone acquired Zyb for about US $50Million. Zyb is a mobile phone applications company that started with a simple contacts-backup system, and then later integrated social networking and sharing components into their massive social graph of users. Think about it as a mix between Facebook, LinkedIn and mobile phones as a service that creates a social contacts system.

Whats little known about this story is that a part of their development staff was based in Pakistan, incubated by the Pi Sigma group and managed by some of top technical guys on mobile development from companies like MobileWeaver (who created YouPark and supported Vopium).

Interesting case study that shows that if you know you’re really good at something, there’s nothing to stop you from big success.