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Ok, this isnt something heard from industry insiders, but based on some basic analysis.

SingTel just secured iPhone distribution deals in Singapore, India, Australia and Phillipines. The latter three are via partly-owned subsidiaries.

SingTel also owns 30% of Warid Telecom now. It makes pretty reasonable sense for SingTel to push iPhone distribution in Pakistan and even Bangladesh via Warid as well, since for a hardware product like the iPhone and aggressive vendors like Apple, the margins for SingTel would depend so much on scale.

That doesn’t close the market for others - e.g. Vodacom is also using its massive global footprint to plan distribution in India alongside SingTel.

That theoretically leaves Orascom Telecom, Telenor, and China Mobile still in the game… but again it wouldnt make sense for any of these to make iphone distribution deals just for the Pakistani market (sorry.. not scale enough for the Apple beast). So they are likely to only enter if their global footprint is interested.

Orascom Telecom? Hmm.. probably not so much right away. Telenor? Already lost some key markets to Vodacom. China Mobile? Hmm… controversial economics may make Apple think twice about jumping in right away.

So that comes back to Warid being the most likely company to start iPhone distribution in Pakistan, or atleast do it with the highest margins anyway.

There’s been quite some talk in various circles about the viability of telco’s being a medium for payment services. The idea has largely been along the following assumptions.

1. Telco’s are trusted with money.
2. Putting money into your account is easy via scratch card, easy load and so on
3. Mobile balance is somehow more secure than credit cards

Therefore, it should be easier to allow telcos to become ‘mini banks’ allowing people to deposit their money and then be able to spend it on things other than just talking.

TCS being the pioneering firm it has been in the country, has just taken that step by partnering with mobilink. TCS Sentiments Express, itself a novel idea of its time, allows a customer to mark special occasions with gifts without spending a lot of time looking for them. They were the first ones to introduce this concept via the web (barring other online gift sites which focused on expats) and also one of the first ones to embrace credit card transactions for pakistanis. However, given our nation’s propensity against credit card transactions, I doubt if their website was utilized on a mass scale rather I believe it is used more as a catalog with people going to TCS centers to place orders and give payments

Read the rest …

The first droplet on whats next is something I have wanted to do for some time and I’m thrilled to finally get it going.

Back in the summer of 2007, there were a number of posts about Corporate Social Responsibility which attracted a lot of interest among the readers.

Ever since then, I have wanted to really give this subject some dedicated focus on G&W, and explore whats happening in our economy for CSR - what companies are truly making significant inroads on being a responsible part of our society, and which of them are just this as marketing buzzwords? Find out what Social Innovation is, and what its not. Raising questions and awareness about these issues is just as important and "hands-on" as doing social activities themselves - we all have an important role to play, and I’ve really wanted G&W to play a deeper part in societal development.

I’ve spent a long long time finding people who would actually want to have this discussion in the same way we wanted to - an open, democratic, exploratory discussion between all parts of our society - consumers, students, professionals, academics, researchers, government people, NGOs and corporations… we wanted everyone who’s closely involved in CSR thinking or decision making to be a part of this nation-wide discussion.

And I am very very happy that now I have finally been able the find good community members, mentors and panelists, and have also able to find support for this initiative from Telenor, Mishal and a number of other companies behind the scenes to make it happen.

So ladies and gentleman, we’re happy to announce our second major blog under the Green & White umbrella: Social Bridges. I hope it will become just as passionate a discussion and community looking at social responsibility and social innovation as Green & white is for innovation.

Check out my first post there.

I also want to announce the newest member of our team of editors, Waqas Sadiq, who will be leading that initiative along with Ramla Akhtar from the NEXT> and G&W fame. Here is Waqas’s thoughts on the need for Social Bridges.

I hope you will all follow us there and be as participatory to that cause as you have been for Green & White.

If you feel very passionate about SR and want to write on it - Social Bridges is an open blog - anyone can register and start writing today.

Let us know what you all think, and do excuse any initial kinks or hiccups you find on the community.

The other day, an office colleague got sick. A severe case of food poisoning left the poor guy in a very weakened state. He was asking around for what medicines should one take for curing his symptoms when I remembered telenor’s new service. Thinking this would be a good time to test out just how well the service operates, I suggested he call it up and ask. My reasoning was, their advice on medicine’s would at least be better than what any one us could offer. My colleague also had a telenor number with quite a bit of balance as well, so that wasn’t an issue.

I wasn’t surprised when i heard the first traces of reluctance in his voice. Even though he was feeling very sick, and asking everyone not even remotely qualified in medicine for help, the very thought of calling up an unknown doctor wasn’t even acceptable. He started making excuses like, how would they know what i’m going through, they wont be able to test me and the most stressed upon reason, they wont know which medicines suit me.

All of his objections made sense, and so i let the matter drop. After another half hour of discomfort though, he got up and asked a fellow office worker to take him to the E.R. at PIMS. After an hour of waiting around in the line, his condition finally got the better of him and he went directly home to sleep it off, without medical supervision.

All of this got me thinking, just why doesn’t a service, which sounds helpful, is backed by a team of registered and experienced medical professional seem to appeal to the masses. Here’s my take on it…

Read the rest …

The Telenor Teledoctor service has certainly sparked a lot of interesting discussion on the web, some of it has some valid points but others are just emotional rants or coming from lack of information. Time to put some balance and analysis on this.

For starters, the Teledoctor service is a value-added service created and managed by E-Health, whose CEO is Dr. Zakiuddin Ahmed. All Telenor is doing is providing their pipes… this is much like Telenor Picshare, which is a service by PixSense over Telenor’s pipes.

Their services’ core market is people out on the edge - in rural communities - who have limited access even to basic healthcare / preventive medicine knowledge or support. I dont think anyone really expects this service to help in the diagnosis of complex diseases anyway, so the most we can expect these doctors to do is either help in cases where they can immediately recommend some off-the-shelf medicine (lets say for high fever etc.) or recommend that the person calling see a specialists for tests.

Therein lies the problem though - because the people out on the fringe need to also have access to those medicines or specialists to be able to see TeleDoctor as a valid first step.

But the service aside, it is interesting to see why the service has sparked such emotional discussion on the topic. My guess is it all started because of the hyperbole-ridden way in which Telenor chose to describe the service (see below). Consumers / Communities / Bloggers hate hyperbole, because they prefer a person-to-person conversation:

Telenor TeleDoctor will revolutionize the medical industry by eliminating any doctor patient barriers that might exist due to language, lack of education, lack of mobility, etc.

"Revolutionize the medical industry" Hah, yea right. Lets see what discussion sparked on this.

Read the rest …

Around a decade ago, GSM was the latest ‘in’ thing in the world. It promised superior quality and strength over traditional TDMA/CDMA systems and a host of other benefits. It became so popular, that over 3 quarters of the world embraced it! SMS’ing became a curiosity, then a fashion statement and then a need. So much so, that it started representing the lifeblood of communication among many.

Today, its 3G. Promising a high speed data bandwidth and a multitude of benefits, 3G is poised to take over as the dominant mobile technology. The only thing is, it is being sidelined by the incumbents, especially in Pakistan! They’ve invested way too much and do not want anything to take over their revenue stream. The situation is not so different as it was in the US when GSM was launched. The incumbents were too rigid to allow a new technology to come in, and as a result, the US telecom market is shaped very differently from the rest of the world.

The thing is, with the advent of a 3G spectrum, two things can happen. Read the rest …

Via The Post:

ISLAMABAD: Etisalat Co authorities of United Arab Emirates having the majority shares of PTCL have ordered investigation on matters relating to the wastage of the huge amount of money on publication of wrong advertisement from PTCL.

A few days ago an advertisement was issued to the newspapers with reference to its new packages from Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited that was prepared by an advertising company, Interflow. The aforesaid advertisement was prepared for newspapers of both Urdu and English languages. Yet during the preparation of Urdu version, the details of basic plus package, value plus and value plus details were registered in the part of basic plus as a result of which tens of thousands of readers became victim to misunderstanding and got misguided instead of any help or facility for the advertisement.

This is interesting to note that PTCL authorities accorded approval to the aforesaid advertisement prepared by the advertising company and the same was exactly published in the newspapers due to which a heavy amount of money was wasted. According to sources, Etisalat authorities on knowing the real situation have ordered investigation while PTCL authorities after the indication of the matter have started negotiations with the advertising company for republishing amended/corrected advertisement.

Telenor adds another jewel in its impressive array of value added services called TeleDoctor. The basic premise is simple, whenever you need a doctor’s advice, you just pick up the phone and thats it.

They have doctors onstaff who can communicate with patients in Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, Balochi, Siraiki, Brahwi, Hindko and Hazarvi, and female doctors for female patients as well.

This project is an solution by E-Health, a company run by Dr. Zakiuddin Ahmed.

But… (yes, there’s always a but!).. does it deliver any value?

Read the rest …

Something a bit odd in the works since Thursday (or maybe earlier). Apparently PTCL billing systems that are responsible for reactivation of disconnected phone lines were down or at fault and hence have now accrued a very large backlog of people who have paid their bills but their phone lines were still disconnected on schedule because no one notified them.

Today I’m hearing the same thing about ufone post-paid, and experienced it myself - I paid my balance in the morning at around 10am but instead of being charged immediately it was credited a few hours later.

This is a minor thing - and I’m sure every company faces internal system downtime, and arguably yes their systems seem to be coming back up now, but I wonder if someone else saw or heard reports of this too?

Are PTCL and UFONE sharing the same billing / customer care system?

The GSMA anticipates that 2008 will be a seminal year for mobile payments and that by 2015, 1.4 billion people will benefit from mobile financial services.  

A partnership with Western Union has seen the GSMA spearheading the deployment of mobile money transfer services with the likes of Bharti Airtel in India and Globe and Smart in the Philippines.   Mobile payment provider Mi-Pay sees the mobile phone operators in recipient countries as being the potential key to enabling mobile-driven money transfers on a truly global basis.  The critical factor here is that unlike almost any other service, mobile operators and their distributors have outlets everywhere selling pre-pay phone vouchers.  These outlets take cash from consumers and feed it back up a well-established supply chain to the operator.

Mi-Pay can enable this pre-pay network to seamlessly distribute cash - the only payment means that is known and trusted by a large percentage of emerging markets - whilst at the same time putting mobile operators in control.    It is relatively simple to enable the mobile operator or their distributor to also act as a cash remittance service. The operator can offset the local balance of pre-pay top-ups held on their behalf by vendors and distributors against their actual foreign exchange market requirements and keep the balance offshore in a hard currency account.  The distributor and vendor can double their commission income and the consumer can retrieve their remittance from their local vendor at their convenience without having to travel.   Operators can therefore, unlike Western Union, transfer cash autonomously whilst reducing transaction costs to consumers.  What is more, because these networks are privately owned, they are not always subject to the same regulation that threatens the success of other mobile remittance techniques.  

Mobile operators are already recognisable and trusted brands in each of their respective countries (more so than many banks), which makes the transition to financial services a great deal easier.

By becoming a trusted financial partner, mobile operators have the potential to dramatically increase their profitability whilst at the same time creating a platform that can be used to introduce all kinds of financial services to their subscribers. It’s a situation where everyone benefits.

By M. Bilal Khalid  via Telecom-Grid-Pakistan