State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Venturebeat – a popular blog about high tech startup companies  – published a post about Help Me, a startup which provides affordable support to mobile app developers. The company behind this is Next Generation Innovations, based in Karachi, Pakistan. CEO of Next Generation Innovations, Farzal Dojki is very active and well know in Pakistani ICT circles. Great work Farzal!

Here are a few excerpts from the post by Saad Fazil.

Mobile app support is currently non existent, and a niche where we can help provide affordable support, says Farzal Dojki.

Currently Apple doesn’t have a very good after-sale support mechanism for the apps in its AppStore: Users click on a “Report a Problem” button, and are then prompted to go to the developers website, where they can directly contact the developer. Developers working with Help Me would link their contact information (email or phone) to Help Me so that Help Me can then take over the support.

Next Generation Innovations is angel funded and profitable since last summer. Help Me, which primarily handles mobile apps support, currently has 5 international customers — 3 in the US, 1 in the UK and 1 in Germany.

I also asked Farzal how he was able to attract current clients and how he would scale his work, given the delicate political climate of Pakistan. He told me that guerrilla activities happening at the border do not impact life in the big cities such as Karachi. Pakistan is one of only 7 countries with an MIT Enterprise Forum chapter, which holds business plan competitions among other activities. The telecom sector in particular is growing at a rapid pace: There are 5 Wi-Max providers, putting Pakistan in the top 3 countries when ranked by number of WiMax deployments. In addition, Motorola, Huawei, Nortel, Ericson, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, and Oracle have a presence in Pakistan.