State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Go computing out there on the road with UConnect

Uconnect is probably the most revolutionary VAS that Ufone’s released ever, not only because of its feature set but its relation with the evolution of computing that will altogether transform the way we use computers and information today. The experts claim that all your computer resources that you can conceive today and can predict for tomorrow will all reside on the cloud in not so distant future. Actually we are already there with several tools emerging online.

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Continuing on the topic of leveraging the cloud computing technologies for telecom, here’s news about a unified mobile PBX in the cloud. The mobile PBX combines cellular fixed mobile convergence software, using open source telephony, and provides low-cost, hardware-Free mobile unified communications

Cellular Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) provider OnRelay announced the General Availability of its complete Mobile PBX solution, Unified MBX. Unified MBX is a software-only IP business communication system built for mobile phones. By pre-integrating OnRelay’s Cellular FMC software with a feature-rich open source IP PBX, Unified MBX provides Unified Communications (UC) without the expense of proprietary telephony hardware or IP PBX licenses.

Unified MBX can be deployed on-premises, or hosted in the cloud (which is the more interesting case of course) to provide mobile business communications as Software as a Service (SaaS). The ease of deployment was evidenced by the Unified MBX trials in Middle East where customers across ten countries self-installed with only remote OnRelay support.

Read more from the press release below.
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Over the last year or so I’ve seen Cloud computing become very popular. Articles about clouds are everywhere: websites, blogs, magazines, twitter. All kinds of new services are being offered in the cloud. Of course Telecom related services are coming too. Lets start with Twilio, which lets web developers integrate telephony services without having to know the telephony related programming or to mess with the telephony infrastructure.

Twilio provides an in-cloud API for voice communications using web technologies. Everything you need in just 5 API building blocks. Reduce the cost of developing, deploying and managing voice apps by paying for capacity when you need it, not before. You can build sales automation systems, order inquiry lines, CRM solutions, call routing apps, phone trees, appointment reminders, custom voicemail apps, and a whole lot more. Twilio can receive calls from or place calls to any phone with a phone number, such as land lines, cell phones, and VoIP phones.

The pricing is 3c/minute for regular inbound/outbound calls and 5c/minute for toll free. This service is only for US, as of now. I am still testing the product so a future post will cover that.

The idea is definitely very good and as the price comes down it will be useful for many applications. Infact I have already observed other upcoming products such as mobile PBX for the cloud and will write about them soon. Just as cloud infrastructure allowed startups to save on time and cost, telephony in the cloud will make integrating telephony services to web apps a snap.

OPEN Forum is widely recognized as the biggest and most distinguished gathering of Pakistan-American business leaders, entrepreneurs and professionals from across the US and Pakistan. OPEN Silicon Valley’s sixth annual conference is on June 13, only 1 week away. Don’t miss this once-a-year opportunity to build your network. Visit opensiliconvalley.org for registration and details. I will be going there too, let me know if you want to meet.

OPEN Forum ‘09 presents the richest program to date in the conference’s six year history. 55 top executives, thought leaders and industry influencers will speak in conference tracks on Technologym Media, Cleantech, Healthcare and Finance.

The event will be headlined by two extraordinary leaders: Tom Campbell, former Dean, Haas School of Business, economic adviser to Gov. Schwarzenegger and a Candidate for California Governor; and Masood Jabbar, former EVP of Global Sales at Sun Microsystems.

Entrepreneurship as a Stabilizing Force: Given the challenges in Pakistan, OPEN Forum ‘09 includes a special emphasis on how entrepreneurship can play a role in stabilizing the region and furthering Pakistan’s socio-economic progress. Join us and engage on how you can play a role.

The problem with mobile phones, says Allan Knies, associate director of Intel Research at Berkeley, is that everyone wants them to perform like a regular computer, despite their relatively paltry hardware. The solution: create a supercharged clone of your smart phone that lives in “the cloud” and let it do all the computational heavy lifting that your phone is too wimpy to handle.

Cloud computing is the in topic these days and I have worked on a few projects where mobile devices rely on the network intelligence. The key here is performance and security – otherwise it remains just another interesting concept.

CloneCloud, invented by Chun and his colleague Petros Maniatis, uses a smart phone’s high-speed connection to the Internet to communicate with a copy of itself that lives in a cloud-computing environment on remote servers. The prototype runs on Google’s Android mobile operating system and seamlessly offloads processor-intensive tasks to its cloud-based double.

Via: Technology Review