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Vopium is a Danish-Pakistani venture focusing on allowing almost free calls and messaging services irrespective of your location or network. The Denmark-based company was founded in 2006 by Tanveer Sharif, Imran Sadiq and Brian Sussemiehl who had previous experience with development of mobile applications.

As we covered the company in June, it has acquired up to $6.4 million in VC funding and is faring quite well. They started their operations in Lahore, Pakistan in 2003 (all the techy stuff was developed here) and they currently employ 50 persons. Tanveer Sharif recently told me in a conversation that they are planning to double this figure before end of 2009.

Tanveer also said that VC funding is not always a blessing though it does help in building a successful company.

As for the VC funding, let me assure you that it is not always a blessing. We have raised USD 6.8M last year, and we would love to help other Pakistani companies to achieve financial injections. I am a member of a Danish Pakistani group that helps companies establish themselves in Pakistan, and I am helping companies like Getmore, Youpark, Gatefone etc to get the right people as well as finances.

He also added that despite the current financial and political turmoil and also many scary stories of working in this country, which he refused to narrate, he will continue investing in Pakistan.

We just confirmed earlier today that Descon-IT24 is no more, although thankfully this hasnt affected business or jobs as bad as it could have. The unit was closed recently as the owners wanted to focus elsewhere.

The part of the staff that was looking after the IT operations of Descon group has now merged into Descon Engineering.

The rest of the unit- which was focused on business based on BPO services such as document processing - have moved and integrated into another firm CTO24/7, also in Pakistan.

This was part of a planned jointly-agreed transition, we were told, although we couldnt confirm if the unit was officially sold to CTO24/7. From what I understand, CTO24/7 was started by Amin Ansari about a year ago, before which he used to head Descon’s unit. When Descon’s current owners decided to close the unit, an agreement was reached to migrate the business, clients and the related staff to CTO24/7.

We were also told that the transition is now fully complete. From an industrial-perspective then, atleast the business remains within the country and this transition seems to have caused a minimum disruption.

If you are a RentACoder.com client or service provider, you will notice a ’site wide message’ on most of the RAC pages today warning its users about Pakistan and Pakistanis:

Site Wide Message: (current site time 10/24/2008 8:22:02 AM EDT)

Are you working with a Pakistani? If so, you need to know that most parts of Pakistan are experiencing severe electricity rationing, and electricity is unavailable more often than not. Click here for more important information.

While it is totally fair for the company to inform their customers about the potential pitfalls of ‘renting’ Pakistanis, I was disturbed by RAC’s choice of words and the potential negativity (pun intended) that such words usually generate against Pakistan and Pakistanis. IMHO RAC should try to be politically correct and more sensitive towards its service providers. Some would call this nitpicking, but the news is wrong on more than one levels.

First of all, a Pakistani may be a non-resident Pakistani, and lots of people abroad are “working with Pakistanis”, so it is infact the brand perception of Pakistan that is affected here.

Secondly, though we are facing electricity rationing, electricity is still available at least 14 hours a day from the standard providers (the *ESCOs) contrary to the RAC claim of “more often than not”. Now 14 hours a day may seem like hell to a CA resident, but it is plenty of time to get things done (GTD), if scheduled properly.

Thirdly, if a RAC client is already “working with a Pakistani”, I would expect that client to be aware of this constraint already, after all, you can’t fail to notice if your service provider is unavailable more often than not - I think what RAC meant to say was “Are you considering working with a Pakistani?”.

Most importantly though, I think that a “Pakistani” whose primary source of income is RentACoder (and there are hundreds of such Pakistanis) already know about the power crisis through first-hand knowledge, and he how to deal with it! - after all, load shedding is virtually a part of his Pakistani culture by now! The ‘Pakistani’ in question probably owns a Japanese UPS, a desi UPS (A very cheap UPS developed in Pakistan that uses wet batteries originally meant for LTVs) or a gas generator. Our powerless Pakistani has solved this energy crisis one way or another before attempting to earn his bread on RAC!

I don’t know if RAC realizes or cares about the effects that such deterring official messages can have on Pakistani coders earning their income on RAC, but I do sincerely hope that there is a vigilante Ministry of IT somewhere out there who is keeping an eye on the buzz, who realizes the consequences of such irresponsible news, and who works officially with entities like RAC to make sure that Pakistan is being marketed properly, despite it being the “Most dangerous country of the world”.

PS. I do not have a RAC account. Credit goes to Sohail Abid, a “Happy Freelancer”, who shared this news with me on Twitter. The post was written on my laptop, the one that has a functional battery but is still hooked up to my Pakistani UPS, during the 6th load-shedding spell of the day.

The IT industry of Pakistan bore the brunt of Marriott bombing as Evacuee Trust Complex (better known as Software Technology Park-II or STP II) was severely damaged by the blast. All the soft structure of the building, including the optical fiber links, was blown up and dozens of IT companies had their future at stake.

During that gloomy situation, NayaTel came to the rescue with its state-of-the-art Fiber-to-the-User (FTTU) network. The Islamabad-based company has installed a Gigabits Optical Fiber Metro ring (the first of its kind in South Asia) across Islamabad and parts of Rawalpindi to provide triple play services. This enabled them to act immediately to help the affected companies. Wajid Mehmood of NayaTel gives us some details,

“Instead of waiting for these companies (who were our customers already) to approach us, we adopted a proactive strategy and contacted these companies with offer of emergency help by shifting their accounts to any other location in Islamabad/Rawalpindi on our fiber network. The blast happened on Saturday night and we started working on Sunday for customers shifting. Some of the customers were shifted on Monday and their US customers on Monday evening were pleasantly surprised to see their back offices up and running within just one day.“

He also told me that the company is planning to install the same network in Lahore and Faisalabad, in near future.

The efforts and services of NayaTel during that crisis situation are indeed exemplary. We have such a small IT industry in Pakistan that we have to be each others’ pillars of support during such testing times. As a month has passed since the tragedy, many companies are now back in STP-II as the optical fiber links and basic infrastructure has been restored.

The Wall Street mayhem seems to have spared tech firms, at least that’s the case with Intel. The company has posted a third-quarter revenue of $10.2 billion - a new record for the company.

According to an Oct. 14 news release, the company reported a pretax net income of $2.01 billion, up from $1.79 billion in the year-ago quarter. The earnings per share (EPS) are reported at 35 cents, up from 30 cents in the year-ago quarter.

“Intel delivered the best third-quarter revenue in its history. We are solidly profitable, with operating income of over $3 billion, reflecting strong across- the-board execution and best-of-class products”, said Paul Otellini, Intel President and CEO.

With total assets of $52.72 billion, the semiconductor giant stands firm and stable while the financial markets are taking a severe beating.

“As we look to Q4, it is hard to know what impact the financial crisis would have on end customer demand. We are confident that our product portfolio, strong cash flow, commitment to deploying new technology and market momentum will allow us to outpace peer companies at at time when business levels are difficult to protect,” Otellini added.

Now let’s see what are the earning trends of other tech companies as they are about to announce their financial results in a few days. We also have to keep in mind that the financial bubble has just burst and its impacts on these firms will be visible in the fourth quarter. The annual reports will portray the real picture.

Mozilla will form a new group that will focus on the research and development of developer tools for the open Web.

“We believe that there’s tremendous opportunity for innovation in tools that increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards”, the company said in a news release.

The browser giant has hired Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, co-founders of Ajaxian, the Ajax Experience to lead its Developer Tools Lab.

The company refrained from divulging any further details.

Electronic government or e-Govt as it’s more commonly referred to is still a distant dream in Pakistan. While we have seen an immense growth in the e-governance in the developed countries and many developing countries too, Pakistan is left behind in this race.I would narrate two personal experiences here to solidify my claim. National Savings is a big financial institution of Pakistan under the control of the federal government. The organization has millions of depositors and thousands of employees. If you happen to visit any National Savings center the first thing you would notice is a long queue of customers and a general sense of clutter and mayhem. This is because the organization has not yet computerized its procedures and still employs the age old system of keeping registers or ‘Khatas’ as they are known in Urdu. Now that is a very lengthy procedure of going through the piles of decades old registers and finding the details and takes a lot of time. These centers have got computers? Yes they have but they are not using them because there is no database of customers and they are placed to just give the place a techy look.Now let’s move to our very own district courts or Kutcheries. Everyone has to visit these places for a variety of reasons and they are still using centuries old system of ‘data warehousing’. The record offices often times catch fire and the precious data is lost.The plan for incorporating e-Govt modules in Pakistan was envisaged in 2002 and an Electronic Government Directorate (EGD) was established in October 2002. The directorate, working under the ministry of information technology, is carrying out some projects on a smaller scale. As mentioned earlier, computers have been provided to many government organizations but the employees either don’t know how to use them or can’t utilize them fully due to their limited scope in their jobs.Now instead of lambasting the government for the slow paced modernization, we can improve the situation. We have to start with those organizations where there is an ample IT infrastructure present but there is a dearth of procedures like National Savings. If these organizations involve the IT firms in creating databases and softwares then we can expect some positive changes.As far as digitizing the data of local governments and record offices is concerned, it’s a long and tedious project but we have to start it immediately.The only hindrance in this regard is the lack of availability of funds and more importantly, lack of will. The rampant corruption present in the traditional data keeping is also a major bottleneck as the folks will have to part with huge chunks of ‘extra income’. India is facing the similar issues but they are trying to combat it. We just need to follow suit.

Necessity is the mother of invention - and perhaps no one has needed this more than aggravated Wateen Wimax users who are plagued with constant disconnections that require them to manually re-login to the wateen service. From the brief time I’ve had to use the wimax service myself I can tell you nothing is more painful than typing in a long-winded form on a website and as soon as you hit submit you realize the connection had disconnected a while ago.

WateenConnector was made by a few young men who run cyberpk.net and some other sites. The application monitors your Wateen connection, notifies you as soon as the connection is lost or regained, and also has auto-login to reconnect you.

Unfortunately this wouldnt help prevent downloads from breaking off when the connection is lost, but it should be some welcome relief for those of us with Wateen connections.

You can download it here.

I received this email through one of the technology mailing list. A quick check on naqsha.net showed that the maps are there and there are some POIs (points of interest) that you can search. The quality of maps is decent and it covers a handful of major cities. Just don’t expect the overall experience to be comparable to google/yahoo but its a good start. Maps did not work in Firefox.

The Garmin navigation devices which are being sold with Pakistan maps preloaded are quite expensive, compared with their devices being sold in the US. Devices start at $400 and map only for $120. Anyway, at least its a start for GPS, maps and location based services.

In-car GPS navigation is not available in Pakistan. Data Solutions (Pvt) Ltd in partnership with Tracking World (Pvt) Ltd have launched Garmin GPS units loaded with Pakistan map data. Currently only Garmin GPS units are available for purchase. The units range from in-car dash mounted devices to devices for motorbikes. There is also a unit which can be integrated with the vehicle’s DVD/entertainment unit and displays the navigational information on it. Existing Garmin users also have the option to buy the map for their specific unit. You may view the maps and GPS devices at naqsha.net.

The map has street level detail of major Pakistani cities and all major national highways. Streets are labeled and searchable for Islamabad, Lahore and some parts of Karachi. In addition there are close to 40,000 POIs such as fuel/CNG stations, banks, atms, hospitals, restaurants (categorised), hotels, shops, etc. Most POIs have address and phone number information available as well. Units equipped with FM transmitters and Bluetooth allow hands free dialing from the unit and are able to integrate with the vehicles’s audio system as well.

Corporations see in software’s seductive invisibility and seemingly open-ended flexibility a never-ending frontier of promise, where hope triumphs over reality …. And hope, unfortunately, has never been a very effective strategy.

The above quote is taken from a paper “The Trouble With Enterprise Software” by Cynthia Rettig, published by Sloan Management Review. I recommend it to everyone who is involved with software and business. It is especially useful for non-technical executives. If you are in the IT/software field, it is very common to experience the tension between business and IT. This paper debunks many of the common myths and makes an honest assessment of the often messy situation with enterprise software.

A few excerpts from the paper.

As work became more complex and specialized over the 20th century, the use of data — numbers and facts — as fodder for more and more analysis and fact-based decision making intensified. And digital technology “was perfect for this kind of world.” Of course, digital technology not only supported that complexity but also played a large part in actually creating it, weaving a continuous web of unending data.

What do business executives miss?

Business executives, however, simply want to continue to believe that technology will lower costs, improve processes and reduce the size of the workforce. They don’t want to understand IT issues. In part, this is because technology requires special skills and intellectual talents that are quite distinct from those needed to understand and manage business organizations, markets and strategy. But it is also because executives do not like to hear about the downside of technology.

On the difficulty of aligning technical and business sides:

… long-term plan calls for closer and closer communication and collaboration between the IT and business sides of the organization. While much to be desired, this has proved difficult in the past, and with increasing complexity in software systems, it is unlikely to improve by itself in the future. Differing backgrounds and perspectives, goals, even vocabularies — all hamper efforts to improve communication across this internal digital divide. Biases intrude: A recent study by Forrester Research Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts, found that only 28% of CEOs thought their CIOs were proactive or creative in terms of business process improvement

The pdf of the paper is available through Google search.

The Trouble With Enterprise Software
Has enterprise software become too complex to be effective?
Cynthia Retting
Fall 2007 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 21