Archive for April 13th, 2009

Amaana – Fahad Bangash Interview By Jehan Ara

Published by Babar Bhatti on April 13, 2009 under Business, Competitive Trends, Digital Convergence, Emerging Markets Telecom, Entrepreneurship, ICT, Information Technology, M-Commerce, Mobile Applications, Telecom News, Telecommunications

Jehan Ara posted this story about Amaana and interview with its CEO – the mobile phone based payment solution developed in Pakistan. Kudos to Jehan – she has been producing an excellent series of videos.

In this episode of “In the Line of Wire” Fahd talks candidly about the journey that the young company has been through, the need that they saw and recognized, and how they think Amaana and other such services will change the lives of the majority of people in Pakistan.

Here is a video that Amaana released on Youtube of a public beta trial that they conducted that attracted over 225,000 mobile users from Pakistan who registered, made payments, received payments, bought airtime, performed web checkout and made KASHF micro-finance payments using the amaana payment platform.

Nice background music on this video!

ShopSavvy: Mobile Phone Application For Location-Based Price Comparison

Published by Babar Bhatti on April 13, 2009 under Android, Digital Convergence, Entrepreneurship, GPS, Google, Mobile Applications, Mobile Content, Mobile Phones

What makes a phone application cool and useful? If it helps you find stuff that you like, cheaper.ShopSavvy is a shopping assistant developed for Google’s Android mobile phone platform. Users can scan the bar code of any product using their phone’s built-in camera. ShopSavvy will then search for the best prices online and through the inventories of nearby, local stores using the phone’s built-in GPS.

ShopSavvy won Google’s Android Developer Challenge and it was T-Mobile’s featured application for their US launch of the G1 in October of 2008. It is in use by over a million users.

The ShopSavvy team is based in Dallas and I had a chance to meet with the founder and see their operations – very inspiring!

It would be interesting to extend this idea to products which have no barcodes on them, which is true for most products in emerging markets.