Developers, here’s your chance to EARN a million rupees. Nokia’s 2010 Calling All Innovators contest has a special prize for developers who submit locally relevant applications (in Urdu or English) and content for use on Nokia devices by consumers living in Pakistan. Pakistan is one of the 11 countries where Nokia is offering the award for local content/apps.
The best entry by a developer based in Pakistan will receive a special prize of 1,000,000/- PKR in cash.
Additionally, two runners-up will get 500,000/- PKR in cash and 300,000/- PKR in cash respectively.
This is an additional incentive – you could still be a global winner in one of the four categories!
Click below to read more about what you need to do for a chance to win the special prize in Pakistan.
A recent article in Technology Review provides an interesting account of a wireless network that uses reflected infrared light instead of radio waves. This wireless network has transmitted data through the air at a speed of one gigabit per second–six to 14 times faster than the fastest Wi-Fi network.
Such optical networks could provide faster, more secure communications and would be especially suitable for use in hospitals, aircraft, and factories, where radio-frequency transmission can interfere with navigation equipment, medical devices, or control systems. Another possible application is wireless networking for home theaters; a system that transmits data at 1.6 gigabits per second could broadcast two separate high-definition TV channels across a room, a capacity that exceeds the bandwidth of any existing radio system. Read more »
Guess what is the background of the event shown below? Other than prayes, are we doing the right things to make Pakistan an “Information Based Society”? Talking about local content is fine but I have been hearing about that for many years. What about local peering and IX?
The news release which accompanied this picture tells us that PTA will hold an exclusive conference on ‘Promoting ICT Sector’ on February 25, 2010. This conference is being organized in view of the importance of local content and applications for future promotion of ICT industry and infrastructure.
I hope there is some action from this other than plain talk.
An Indian telecom company is deploying simple cell phone base stations that need as little as 50 watts of solar-provided power. It will soon announce plans to sell the equipment in Africa, expanding cell phone access to new ranks of rural villagers who live far from electricity supplies.
Over the past year, VNL, based in Haryana, India, has reengineered the traditional technology of the dominant cellular standard, called GSM, in order to create base stations that only require between 50 and 150 watts of power, supplied by a solar-charged battery. The components can be assembled and booted up by two people and mounted on a rooftop in six hours.
One such station–dubbed a “village station”–can handle hundreds of users. Groups of such village stations feed signals to a required larger VNL base station within five kilometers. In turn that larger station, which is also solar-powered, relays signals to the main network. The village station can turn a profit even if customers spend on average only $2 a month on the service, instead of the $6 required to make traditional systems cost-effective, the company says.
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!
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.
“You can’t build a country if you’re not thinking beyond your own lifetime,” Syed Babar Ali said. Pakistan’s biggest problem, he believes, is one of leadership. This post is a humble mention of an icon in Pakistan leadership: Syed Babar Ali. His interview (and the photo shown here) recently appeared in New York Times.
I have met many leaders who have worked closely with Syed Babar Ali and many of them were personally persuaded by Babar Ali to come to Pakistan and work on projects which were important to Pakistan. I had the honor of meeting him once as well. Only if we had a few more personalities like him, we would be in a much better shape. Read below from the NYT article where Babar Ali talks about the need for education, justice and leadership. His straight talk is balanced by pragmatic actions and the results show that determination and resolve can achieve. I consider him among the top 10 greatest Pakistanis in its short history. Kudos to Syed Babar Ali for a life full of dedication to noble causes and for bringing about a change in the life for many generations of Pakistanis.
Seth Godin has put together a remarkable group of more than 70 people who each contributed a one-page essay with a one-word title to create a free ebook: What Matter Now. I highly recommend reading it. Here’s a simple yet effective quote in the book from Michael Hyatt about leadership which I liked very much. I’m sure you will have you own favorites as you go through this book.
Leadership is more than influence. It is about reminding people of what it is we are trying to build—and why it matters. It is about painting a picture of a better future. It comes down to pointing the way and saying, “C’mon. We can do this!”
Are there leaders and visionaries in the telecom/IT industry that have inspired you?
The mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.
Entrepreneurship looks so glamorous and noble when you are about to start on that great idea. With all the excitement of creating something big, failure is not something that a lot of entrepreneurs want to think about. If you are a typical entrepreneur you make a lifestyle choice: you live from hand to mouth, spend all/most of your savings, work hard for many years and sacrifice your relationships with friends and family. So what is an entrepreneur supposed to do when all of that effort ends up as being a grand failure? Well, if you are Jawwad Farid, you write a book about the lesson learned AND start another venture.
The recent MIT Conference on Corporate Innovation Entrepreneurship was an excellent proof that entrepreneurship activities in Pakistan continue to thrive. There are a number of dedicated and talented people who have taken the initiative and shown that given the right people and processes, an ecosystem of entrepreneurs can be nurtured.
Read Jawwad Farid’s latest blog post and see the pictures of this impressive event. Congratulations and Kudos to the MIT CEF BAP 2009 team for their work.
Students are desirable customers for telcos (and most businesses). It is generally believed that youth spend more on mobile voice and data. Zong has created Student Entrepreneur Program for driving incentive driven word-of-mouth sales through students who are called ‘Zong ambassadors’. Here’s how the program is described by Zong.
ZONG has established a concrete earning opportunity for students. Selected ambassadors will be trained and briefed by Zong representatives at Customer Service Centers. These ambassadors will create awareness among the students by not only offering them to migrate to Zong’s network but also by offering different products like New Activation or recharging a currently owned Zong connection. These Ambassadors will become a part of the Zong Family with only a small deposit of Rs. 1000. In return of which they will get one free gold number, a telesales Sim through which they will perform Zong Sales, 5 Zong Sims and a Mini load worth Rs. 600 (The stated items are worth Rs.1500). In addition, this ambassadorship will add great value to their Resume as this would give them hands on sales experience.
Most educational institutes in Pakistan would be a part of this program through the appointment of ZONG’s Ambassadors, specifically in cities where Customer Service Centers are operational.
I have been looking for a good product for creating mockups for a long time. I tried a few expensive and cumbersome tools but gave up. Then someone sent me a link to Balsamiq’s Mockups product. It is based on Adobe AIR and provides an easy, intuitive way to create wireframes on your desktop. The installation was smooth and in a few minutes I was up and running.
Whether you are an entrepreneur or you work for a large corporation, if you work with new applications, products or websites then a tool like Mockups is essential. I prefer visual tools to communicate with my team and especially with those who are not easily reached by phone. Think about communication with clients during the early phases of any project and the mockup approach is a life-saver. Since I started using Mockups last week, I have already created a few rich wireframes and used it to get great feedback. The thing that I like is that most of the commonly needed components are included – all you have to do is to drag and drop. There are some iPhone user interface components as well. Mokcups has good image editing tools built in so you can import an image file and work on them within the application. I will write another review after a month or so. Here’s a video to get you introduced to this awesome product!
Disclosure: I received a copy of the software gratis in exchange of writing a review.
Venturebeat
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