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These days its hard not to notice the increase in popularity of cloud computing. Amazon can be credited for taking this technical concept to a mainstream level. Now HP and other giants want a slice of this.

Cloud computing can be thought of an extension of software as a service but with an interesting twist that it is within the reach of start-ups and the pricing has dropped to almost nominal levels. All you need is connectivity and the infrastructure is yours. Great thing is that you don’t need to know much technical details - freedom from reliance on system admins using Internet technologies to multiple external customers. Just in case you are not familiar with the concept or want more technical details, see this article. There are plenty of issues associated with clouds - the disruptions to services is the main one and it has happened a few times already. Usability is another one.
For emerging markets such as Pakistan where always-on connectivity is a premium and infrastructure is lousy, can clouds become useful and popular as elsewhere? I doubt it but I will ask the readers to answer this question. I am interested in hearing from any Pakistani start-ups who have considered it. I promise to compile the answers and post an update.

The September edition of the MIT Technology Review has featured the work of Umar Saif, a professor at LUMS, on improving Internet connectivity in the developing-world. The Project, dubbed DonateBandwidth, is a follow-up project of Poor Man’s Broadband work which I wrote about previously. Our congratulations to Dr. Saif and the team.

Umar shared his thoguhts in an e-mail:

With DonateBandwidth, users in the developing-world can help each other by donating their unused bandwidth to those who need it. This project received funding from the US State Department/NAS and HEC and will be further developed in collaboration with UC Berkeley.

It is rare that research in Pakistan catches the attention of a publication like the Technology Review; I am told this is the first time MIT Technology Review has featured a research project in LUMS.

Here is an excerpt of the article “Spare Some Bandwidth?”

nternet access is growing steadily in developing nations, but limited infrastructure means that at times connections can still be painfully slow. A major bottleneck for these countries is the need to force a lot of traffic through international links, which typically have relatively low bandwidth.

Now computer scientists in Pakistan are building a system to boost download speeds in the developing world by letting people effectively share their bandwidth. Software chops up popular pages and media files, allowing users to grab them from each other, building a grassroots Internet cache.

In developed countries, Internet service providers (ISPs) create Web caches–machines that copy and store content locally–to boost their customers’ browsing speeds. When a user wants to view a popular website, the information can be pulled from the cache instead of from the computer hosting the website, which may be on the other side of the planet and busy with requests. Similar services are offered by content distribution companies such as Akamai, based in Cambridge, MA. High-traffic sites pay Akamai to host copies of their content in multiple locations, and users are automatically served up a copy of the site from the cache closest to them.

In countries like Pakistan, Internet connections are generally slow and expensive, and few ISPs offer effective caching services, limiting access to information–one reason why the United Nations has made improving Internet connectivity worldwide one of its Millennium Development Goals. None of Pakistan’s small ISPs cache much data, and traffic is often routed through key Internet infrastructure in other nations.

“In Pakistan, almost all the traffic leaves the country,” says Umar Saif, a computer scientist at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). That’s the case even when a Pakistani user is browsing websites hosted in his or her own country. “The packets can get routed all the way through New York and then back to Pakistan,” Saif says.

So Saif’s team at LUMS is developing DonateBandwidth, a system inspired by the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol that is popular for trading large music, film, and program files. With BitTorrent, people’s computers swap small pieces of a file during download, reducing the strain placed on the original source.

Sometimes, a picture (or a collection of them) is worth more than a thousand words. So instead of boring you with text and bullet points, i’ll just show you!

Click on the image to go to the hosted presentation on slideshare, the best place in the world to share slides. I would’ve embedded it here, but we’re having some technical difficulties in that.

This presentation is featured as “Slideshow of the Day” on slideshare.net, the highest honor on that site. Also, I’ve included it in the World’s Best Presentation Contest under the Business category, so if you like it, don’t forget to vote up for it!

This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who writes on the subject of graphic designer. She invites your feedback at heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.

The very reason for the existence of a business is to make money. Even altruistic set ups like non profit organizations have to make enough money to enable them stay alive so that they can continue to satisfy a social need. The germination, growth and sustenance of any company depend on its business model, which is traditionally a strategy that outlines how a company garners revenue. An initial capital not withstanding, any start up must focus on its business model in order to generate enough money to stay in business year after year.

Any model worth its salt must be based on a significant amount of market research and established data. It’s no use investing in building a shopping complex when the whole city is overrun with them. There has to be a need for the service or product you’re hoping to sell; if not, it’s your responsibility to create one. Canny advertising techniques have been known to induce need where there is none – like the campaigns that target children by tempting them with toys and paraphernalia that they have no actual need for. Marketers are wise to the antics of kids – they hold the buying power in their hands and convince (read throw tantrums) their parents to buy stuff for them just because they don’t want to feel left out when among their friends. Peer pressure is indeed a great USP.

Some businesses must rethink their strategies and reorient their business models to suit local trends and tastes or to avoid offending national and religious sentiments. Businesses that are established as franchises in other countries as part of a globalization venture must devote considerable time and effort to determine what will and what won’t sell in those nations.

A good business model ensures that you both fit in with the environment you’re establishing yourself in and stand out by coming up with new and innovative ways of doing business. In today’s world, where one business model finds a large number of takers, it’s important to find out what makes customers happy and what it takes to keep them coming back to you even when the competition is as good or better.

One aspect of business that is a sure winner in terms of continued patronage from customers is customer service; it’s the differentiating factor between a mediocre business and a good one. Given the choice between two organizations that offer products and services of equal quality, customers are more likely to opt for the one with the better customer service department. A good business model must take this fact into consideration when calculating how to rake in the profits.

The advent of the Internet and other new technologies has spawned new genres of business models that offer companies a wide variety of choices and alternatives to make money. While most businesses still choose to go with the conventional models, there are some that take an offbeat path and end up making history. But no matter what the model, the fact remains that organizations must be ready to tweak and fine tune them as and when customer needs and buyer perspectives change.

The rise in popularity of semi-professional social networks has led to a large number of digital version of paper tigers. Just to be clear, by a paper tiger I refer to someone who artificially inflates his or her online profile to make it appear more impressive than it is in reality.

This is no different than people who exaggerate on their resumes and interviews. However now the digital profiles are the norm and they are ah, so easy to manipulate and inflate. On a similar note, some folks are obsessed with getting connected with every living soul they can find. The whole networking thing is becoming a confused spaghetti of friends, colleagues, people you actually know and folks who are”friends” of acquaintances of someone who has exchanged a few emails with you. A senior executive I know refuses to use linkedin.com because he is afraid that he will offend someone by ignoring their connection request!

Anyway back to the trend of inflated online profiles - I have stopped taking these things seriously because after you meet a few of these people you realize that it can be a lot of hype and marketing. Instead of taking these profiles at face value, just keep in mind that there is some variance and self-promoters will use all tools to their advantage. This is just something which happens as the current networks have very little trust built in the system. You are what you claim to be and that is it.

Warid has recently announced 2 location based services: friend finder and place finder (i.e. local search). These are pay-per-use services (Rs.3+tax). Using SMS or MMS. you can find the location of another warid cell phone customer or do a local search for a point of interest such as bank. Service is limited to major cities.

This is an interesting first step towards location based services (LBS) for the telecom industry. In US and EU, navigation and related data services are growing rapidly and account for a major portion of network operator’s revenue. The rules and privacy norms are quite different in developed countries and sharing of real-time location is subject to a lot of scrutiny. Warid is simply relying on per-request permission to work around the privacy concern. However I do not find this a good approach — it can be quite annoying to get such messages left and right.

In the US, LBS is a hot area with lots of startup acitivty. Companies such as brightkite, loopt and whrrl have received tons of VC money to develop all kinds of fancy mobile and web-based applications. Recent inclusion of GPS in 3G iPhone has created even more buzz!

Warid has taken a different and relatively simple approach where the application is based on back and forth sms or multimedia message (MMS). The SMS solution is pretty much the same which Google offers in the US and which works extremely well for quick searches. The MMS option is for the map display - limited to a few major cities. Since there is no mention of GPS requirement, Warid must be using triangulation algorithms to find the approximate location. See my previous post on Google maps and how it works.

Although there are many limitations of Warid’s LBS this still matters because this is the first attempt for location based service. I can assure you that this is just the start and we will soon plenty of other implementations around the buddy finder concept and LBS in general. There are so many creative ways to use this service, especially when combined with a personalized website and higher resolution maps.

So far, a very good indicator for the industry. Pakistani IT exports have been growing steadily for the last five years at 50% and even this year has not been behind in any aspect, growing from $116M to $175M (66%) this year.

I’ve been quite involved in the software industry here and the figures do justice to what i’ve been seeing. Last month, i was giving a course to SQA engineers from three organizations. Participants from two of those companies couldn’t give me their contact addresses after the course, promising to deliver them later. Why? Because both of them were moving to bigger premises that week! One to their own campus, a three story building they had acquired, while the other to their own ‘towers’. The fact that these companies were relatively new entities, except for one, and already had dedicated SQA departments was another positive sign.

What are your thoughts? Why are we growing and which areas should we be growing in the future?

This is a guest post by Kamran Niazi - Kamran is a regular commenter on G&W and works as a Financial Analyst at the Agribusiness Support Fund. The views in this article are his own.

The other day, I went to CTC (Coffee, Tea & Company, Lahore) to buy a cake. Over there, I mentioned that I was taking the cake to Islamabad by road. The person serving me (I later on found out, that he the owner), immediately asked me, where I was going & how much travel time. He then recommended that, I buy Chocolate Fudge Cake. He said that, ONLY that cake would stay ok for 8-10 hours travel time (by the way, that particular cake stays nice for 2-3 days in a fridge. All other cakes would spoil due to lack of refrigeration during the expected travel time. The Chocolate Fudge Cake is among the cheaper items in CTC. The guy could have sold me a more expensive item, but wanted a long term relationship through better customer services.

Usually in our Country, however, we believe that Customer Services are the pits and CSRs enjoy the status of pariahs in their organizations (whatever that Organization maybe). How often have you met a CSR (in any setting) and when he mentions that, he is a CSR, you have mentally considered him to be moron and left him there & then.

This is particularly true in Telecom Companies, where most cuts are made in the CSR Departments, whenever there is a need for cost cuttings. Now, as a consumer, you actually pay for the privilege of calling customer services (well, one must be charitable, that is the first thing, the recording tells you. Its not like that, you were uninformed). I might be wrong, but isn’t good customer services a competitive advantage? Isn’t it something, which distinguishes you from the rest of the pack? It makes you wonder, what the marketing guys were smoking. They spend a fortune on advertising & promotion, especially competing in the Dance-a-thon. The aim of these Dance-a-thon is, what I have understood so far is, "How Many Dancing Guys & Gals Can We Include in One Commercial". About the message, I have no idea, but the dance-a-thons are nice and you learn some really nice dance steps, which one can then use to impress family & friends at functions.

Some examples of CSR:

a. Staying online for about 45 Minutes hearing MUZAK & being told that, the call was important, while waiting for a CSR to pick up phone (reason for call: GPRS Service was not working. reason for CSR not picking up phone: he was busy serving other customers). Well, the waiting was not that bad, as managed to watch the entire episode of "Numbers" on TV.

b. Spending 75 Minutes calling the Customer Services Line and not being able to get through. Then being told that, you have reached the max number of phone calls and should try after 24 hours.

c. Spending 2 days trying to get GPRS activated and hearing that, the complaint has been forwarded and you would hear from us. After 48 hours, giving up hope and calling an acquaintance and telling him the problem. Result, problem solved in 60 minutes.

Result:

a. One connection bought, SIM lying somewhere for the past 15 Months.
b. One Connection to be bought cancelled just before purchase.

Marketing Guys, I don’t know about you. But as a marketing professional, for me Customer Services are highly important. Good Customer Services can make or break a relationship. Would paying 30K a Month to 100 CSRs for a year (36 Million Rs) be that high an expense? It might be actually cheaper than running Dancing Ads after ever over / every wicket in one Match of the IPL.

PS If you need an authority to convince the Management about the importance of Customer Services. Check out Seth Godin’s Post here (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/learning-from-f.html)

Update: The name of the product is Mango - Manoparty is just the domain name

Confiz Systems recently unveiled their second product targeting the PK Market. Mango is a "SMS based social network" for the masses. It is somewhat similar to Twitter, but not focused on micro-blogging - rather they let people mass-send SMSes to their friends or to special groups.

A number of our readers are already aware of this startup, and some were quick to point out that this is very similar to Chopaal.pk. Both Confiz and Chopaal were incubated out of LUMS but there is no clear indication to imply that the idea was shared.

I’m not a big SMS user, but I can see this application taking off in this market. First of all they’ve designed it so that the app will spread virally because people can sign up and sign their friends in with just an SMS. The value to heavy SMS-users is the money they save from sending fewer messages to reach most of their friends, added privacy via number protection, and a more streamlined way to communicate with each other because you can just set up a "anyone for lunch" group rather than sending out a number of sms’s to different people. Groups based on different topics of discussion just seems to make sense.

For local Twitter users, Mango and Chopaal both offer a similar system (create a group and communicate) but with a local number instead of the UK number to sms to.

An example that is very similar in a nearly identical context is SMS Gup Shup based in India - although initially called a Twitter clone, they allowed people to join networks quickly and virally through sms alone (and without going through a website registration) which has led them to gain 7-times the userbase of Twitter. SMS Gup Shup recently raised $10M in funding from Charles Rivers Ventures and Helion Venture Partners

Good luck guys and keep us posted on user uptake.

Rozee / Naseeb networks just received Rs.12.19 Million from the ICT R&D Fund to launch a career and alumni management software application that will be offered to universities free of charge.

The web application will contain different modules to allow university career centers to liaison with the industry, track their alumni and more. Based on the vague set of marketing jargon I could find on the web, these are the modules that should be available to each university:

• Job postings by industry HR managers for students, alumni etc
• Lets students … er.. create CVs (honestly you had to wade through 2 paragraphs of marketing-speak to find that) - including a brief “graduate synopsis” summary
• Employers can search for particular skills, or create a graduation book dynamically
• Alumnis can also … er.. create CVs and update their info (employer details etc).
• A professional network interface to connect people together
• Faculty Profiles, Research interests and papers.
• Internship Portal

So in other words, Rozee just received Rs.12.19M to pretty much take their existing set of tools and tweak them to make a white-labelled hosted solution out of it to offer to 85+ universities in the next 18 months. As you can imagine, white-labeling an existing product is a fairly straightforward task taking no more than a few months.

This also represents growing confusion in the hiring market now because of a sudden abundance of platforms for job placements - from 2-3 to 30+ - which is likely to segment and confuse job seekers as well as complicate life for recruiters.

Brightspyre’s early foray into university-specific job boards is already showing signs of employers being confused about having to manage multiple job boards - add those to PSEB’s recent Internship Portal (also created by Brightspyre) and we can see type of disintegrated and fragmented online future we’re heading towards in the recruitment space.

For more information about this, read the ATP story linked below — though I have to warn you, that story is written by the Marketing Manager at ROZEE and is chock full of sickening marketing jargon — seriously, this jargon is actually worse than the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator - some brilliant quotes from it below.

“…a first-of-its-kind web-based technology has been developed to create a Campus Career Portal.”

The Magic of Technology

As Arthur C. Clarke said,

“any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,”

very effectively empower universities to achieve economy of scale that lowers the cost of higher education for the common man, through effective and revenue-generating linkage between industry and academia. The use of technology consequently enables better placement of jobs for graduates as well as a greater ability to showcase faculty talents to sponsoring industry members.

*GROAN*… how can someone let them butcher Arthur C. Clarke’s vision by linking it to a job portal!?

I’m deeply disappointed at ATP for letting a marketer corrupt their real-estate’s high standard with B.S.