A number of competing services are available for providing information and answers to questions on a mobile phone (Telenor Ask in Pakistan, Google’s sms and voice, Microsoft TellMe). ChaCha enters this crowded market with a free, human powered offering. I wonder if the premium service from Telenor Ask is a hit with users in Pakistan?
ChaCha is avaialble in US via SMS (242242) and Voice (800-2chacha). An excerpt from Mossberg’s review:
The service works by routing your questions to one of 10,000 hired “guides” — students, stay-at-home parents, retirees and others — who look up the questions on the Web and reply. They get paid 20 cents per answer.
Naturally, these guides vary as to their speed and accuracy. If you don’t like the answers they give you, or you want related information, you can call back or reply to the text message with a follow-up question. For instance, after learning which pitcher had won for Boston, I asked who lost the game for New York. I was quickly informed it was Phil Hughes.
Overall, I liked ChaCha. In most cases, I received fast, accurate, useful answers. But it has two weaknesses. One is that the low-paid, part-time guides can provide inconsistent service. When I asked for the best Mexican restaurant in D.C., for example, ChaCha came up with a choice that few locals would cite.
The other is that, unlike many other cellphone information services, ChaCha doesn’t automatically know your location. So, unless you include a location in your query, it’s clueless about questions such as “Where’s the nearest drugstore?”
It looks like the Telenor legal department had to work late night to write the disclaimers (below) about their new service TeleDoctor. Telenor, we expect you to show some responsibility on your part when it comes to health matters. Please think twice before making grand claims that “TeleDoctor will revolutionize the medical industry by eliminating any doctor patient barriers that might exist due to language, lack of education, lack of mobility, etc.” This kind of marketing speak is both misleading and dangerous. Here are the disclaimers:
Telenor neither gives secondary medical advice directly nor engages in the practice of medicine.
In all cases Telenor is not accountable for the malpractices, genuineness or authenticity of the advice/information given through this service or for the credentials of the medical experts giving the information/advice
Telenor shall not be liable for any loss or damage caused to any subscriber or any other party as a result thereof.
This service is designed for the subscribers solely for the purpose of providing easy access to doctors in order to obtain secondary medical advice if and when possible.
Hear what Big Blue has to say about the future of mobile phones. This discussion of a IBM mobile learning executive and a Motorola director touches upon some interesting directions such as text to speech and location based technologies. Technology companies realize that this is the time to define their territory and are eager to share their visionary thinking. One of the point worth mentioning from this conversation: phones have to fit well with people’s lives and not the other way around.
Over the coming years, mobile phones are expected to get “smarter”, adjusting to our usage patterns. Innovations such as larger projectable screens and other e-commerce and social networking features will enable the phone to provide much more value to our lives.
Intel has introduce Atom™ processor, a new family of low-power processors designed specifically for mobile Internet devices (MIDs). MIDs are devices which are smaller than a laptop but larger than a cellphone, with cost in the $500 range. Technology analysts and blogs are raving about Atom. About 25 hardware companies have decided to make portable Internet devices using Atom. The gadgets will start appearing in late May and early June on store shelves in China, Japan and South Korea. According to Intel, China was an early focus because of the activity surrounding the Olympics, with Japan and South Korea both logical next candidates because of their wireless broadband services. More information available at Intel Mobility blog and from a report by WSJ.
Intel, which largely missed out on the market for chips used in cellphones, is using a technology conference in Shanghai to talk up gadgets it calls MIDs, for mobile Internet devices. The company hopes to attract consumers who are frustrated with trying to use the Web on their handsets. The new products, Intel says, match personal computers in their ability to play video and handle some other advanced features of Web sites.
Intel is introducing five Atom chips that draw 0.65 watt to 2.4 watts — compared with 35 watts for one of its typical laptop chips — and carry list prices ranging from $45 to $160. Companies expected to show prototype MIDs based on its chips this week include Lenovo Group Ltd., LG Electronics Inc., Clarion Co. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., maker of Panasonic-branded products, Intel said.
Intel won’t lack for competition. Rivals include companies that make chips for handsets called smartphones, such as Qualcomm Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc. They mainly use microprocessor technology developed by ARM Holdings PLC, and are helping to improve the Web capabilities of cellphones and other devices.
While Mr. Chandrasekher estimated the Atom chips have about twice the calculating power of ARM designs, he acknowledged that ARM still has an advantage in low power consumption. Bob Morris, ARM’s director of mobile computing, added that a coming chip design from the company offers a three-fold boost in computing performance.
CTIA Wireless 2008 is one of the largest wireless events in the US. Among its various programs is the Emerging Technology Awards which claims to highlight the most innovative products and applications representing all facets of the mobile lifestyle in wireless”. It is a good place to see some promising gadgets, applications and products.
Take a look at this report. Do you think these were truly worthy of awards?
Consumer Applications - Messaging (SMS/MMS)/Mobile Marketing
1st place - Cellfire 3.0
2nd place - Reply with Jott for BlackBerry
3rd place - SnapNow Mobile Visual Search
Consumer Applications - Mobile Entertainment/Social Networking
1st place - Ontela’s PicDeck™
2nd place - WidSets
3rd place - Yahoo! Go 3.0
Mobile Widgets - Consumer
1st place - Zumobi
2nd place - Fusion Voicemail Plus by PhoneFusion
3rd place - JACKED Mobile SportsTop
Here’s another sign that ICT industry in Pakistan is maturing. The first Mobile Commerce conference is being held in Karachi on April 2 2008. The event has a star-studded guest list which includes PTA Chief, mobile companies Mobilink, Warid and Telenor (CEOs will attend), mobile commerce companies such as Amaana, Inov8, senior management from banks (both commercial and State Bank) and a few foreign company executives. Full details are available in this pdf brochure. You can also take a quick look at the image to see participating companies.
The sessions are well planned and include topics such as environment for mobile commerce, role of telcos, micro-finance, security and risk management, new trends and challenges. I expect it to be a very interesting and useful event.
I am looking for feedback about this conference and would appreciate if anyone can share observations and thoughts.
Mobile technology blogs have been reporting about the upcoming version 6.1 of Windows Mobile, likely to be unveiled at CTIA conference next week. In true Microsoft fashion, windows mobile has evolved from a flaky OS with frequent crashes and poor user interface to a more widely accepted OS. Microsoft is working hard to improve the interface and features of windows mobile. iPhone is one of the reasons that windows mobile makeover got accelerated.
I see more and more prototypes being developed on Windows Mobile perhaps because integration with development tools such as visual studio makes it easy to work with. As and end user however, the more important are features and usability.
To that point voice recognition technology from Microsoft has finally improved to a point where its actually usable. I recently tested msn voice search and the performance was reasonable. This remains a hot area for research, obviously. As an example of technology convergence, Microsoft has launched voice-activated SYNC technology for cars which allows you to play a song from your mp3 player collection by saying the name of song and singer. You can also make hands-free calls (no big deal by itself).
As far as Windows Mobile 7.0 goes, there are no leaked screen shots as of yet, but big changes are afoot. Microsoft plans to completely redo applications such as Internet Explorer, bringing the mobile browser up to par with Apple’s Mobile Safari. The e-mail and SMS applications are also scheduled for complete rewrites. Microsoft plans to make the user interface even more consumer-friendly.
For those of us who struggle with the continuous competing demands of business and are responsible for design and implementation of technology, there are some great points in this post about Fluid Architecture by Simeon Simeonov. If I were to mention one take-away it would be the 3 things Simeon mentions as the key to success for fluid architecture: good software architecture, continuous process improvement component and a cultural component.
I am glad that Wordpress, the powerful software which enables this blog, gets a well-deserved praise.
Sometimes, trading speed and efficiency now for cost and effort later helps startups reach some form of initial scale which buys them either enough capital or time to fix things before the next stage of growth. Other times, the same repeated trade-off puts them farther and farther behind the 8-ball. Nowhere is this more visible then when a product (or site) has to go through a major re-architecture (re-platforming/redesign).
Have you heard about Amazon’s latest re-platforming project? No? Not surprisingly since Amazon hasn’t had one of those… Great products/sites can evolve and take on best-of-breed capabilities/ technologies in a way that’s almost transparent to their users. Amazon is a great example. The site is constantly being worked upon by lots of people. Wordpress is another great example, showing the power of the open-source community. Good products/sites can be re-architected or re-platformed with relatively benign levels of user disruption. MySpace is a good example. MySpace had to significantly evolve their initial architecture (a web site built on one ColdFusion server) to end up where they are now. Others, say, the first-generation Friendster and many e-commerce sites, make it painfully obvious to their customers that it’s taking them too long to evolve & improve. Some die in the process.
IA common pattern is that many successful technology companies have figured how to use what I like to call fluid architecture to manage the balance of trade-offs between the present and the future. Fluid architecture is not just about software. The core certainly is about good software architecture but there is also a continuous improvement process component and a cultural component. The cultural element has to do with two things: (a) a mindset of ongoing, explicit, open and honest discussion about the trade-offs that are being made and their future implications and (b) a commitment at all levels of the organization (not just inside the product group) to not end up behind the 8-ball. Companies that embrace this broader concept of fluid architecture can rebuild themselves on the go and move at the pace of today’s business.
No matter whether one is a business executive or a technology expert, personal face-to-face networking is an important aspect of professional development. In Pakistan we are beginning to warm up to this approach. Warid recently arranged a CIO forum in Lahore, which seems to be limited to Warid’s executives and business partners (details are below). It will take a while to build the trust which brings competitive companies together to discuss solutions to common issues. I hope that in near future CIOs from all major telecom companies in Pakistan can come together and promote indigenous solutions.
From a press release sent to me by Warid’s public relations team.
Wateen Telecom and Warid Telecom under the Warid Telecom International umbrella are quickly evolving as major players in the emerging markets of South Asia, Africa and now Eastern Europe. The exponential growth and addition of complex set of services also poses CIOs with a number of challenges. Effective use of technology, alignment with business goals, standardization and recognition of emerging trends are just some of these challenges.
WTI CIO Forum has been created to address these challenges. The main objective of this forum is to bring together the IT management from across the group to share their experiences, discuss the technology roadmap, talk about various emerging industry trends and try to leverage a synergy that exists in various projects and operations.
Along with other top-level industry executives from major companies, Mr. Marwan Zawaydeh, Board of Director and CEO of Warid Telecom, Mr. Salman Khurram, Head of IT at Wateen Telecom, and Mr. Mohammad Ali, GM IT Warid Telecom, spoke at the forum. The forum partners included International Turnkey Systems, TechAccess, and Cisco.
PTA has announced a competition for Telecom/ CT professionals and students, asking them to write papers on the topic of “Connecting People With Disabilities, ICT Opportunities for All“. This is related to the World Telecom Day on May 17. First prize is Rs 25,000. See the details on how to enter by clicking on the image on the right.
I commend PTA on encouraging ICT folks to tackle this much needed problem. I hope that this will result in plenty of actionable ideas which are suitable for Pakistan’s conditions. I’ll be glad to help any students out there who want to compete. Hurry, the deadline is March 31!
As if Pakistan needed one more issue, we have the botched YouTube blockage attempt which caused anger and frustration in Pakistan, plenty of confusion and some conflicting emotions, and possibly a YouTube outage. This BBC report alleges that YouTube went down for 2 hours because of the technical misunderstanding by PCCW, an Asian ISP. But the outage itself, if any, is less interesting to me. My take is that now that global media is paying attention to this lets use this opportunity to deal with this persistent Internet blcoking issue in Pakistan and turn things around. Enough has been written already so I will point out some of the items of interest here and invite you to share your thoughts.
The persistent problem (of Internet censorship done the wrong way) is not being intermittently flashed to us any more - instead, this event throws it right into our faces.
That Internet censorship is bad and useless is an established fact but that it happens worldwide in both developing and developed worlds is even more established fact. In the absence of compelling Internet applications in Pakistan, Internet remains the sole killer application for the broadband mass uptake the government appears to be so concerned about.
The general opinion is that th ban is more “political” than “cultural”. A large number of videos with actual footages of electoral rigging were placed on YouTube and the view is that the “ban” or the “technical difficulties” that have come up are really a way to distract attention in Pakistan away from these videos, at least for the time being.
The ban may already be over but the repercussions will be there for a while. The technical angle to the Internet censorship and limitations of the Internet infrastructure in Pakistan is important as well. I am sure Google is looking into this as well. Since I don’t live in Pakistan and can’t experience it first hand I’ll refer back to Tee Emm’s post:
Now is the time stop using Cisco ACLs and use layer 4 solutions where the filtering must happen.
I believe this will force the PTA and the government (and the trigger happy PTCL’s PIE) to upgrade their infrastructures so that the delicate balance between civil liberties and our societal sensitivities is well kept.
It is always pleasant to write about a trend, revisit that topic a few months later and report progress. A few months ago I wrote about how views about entrepreneurship are changing in Pakistan. I mentioned some success stories. with the emphasis that the successes are neither incidental nor anomalies. The Startup insider series is a solid evidence of the positive momentum and shows the resilience and determination of a small group of dedicated leaders such as Jawwad, Jehan and Osama. See the list below and look up some of them on the web.
You can read all about it at Green & White, where Osama Hashmi has blogged about all the events, starting from Karachi to Islamabad to Lahore. These events, first of their kind, have drawn tremendous crowds and sparked the entrepreneurial spirit of many. Here’s the description of upcoming event, on Feb 24 in Lahore. Theme is: Who is my customer?
Startup Insiders is coming to Lahore again on the 24th of February. This time the event is supported by LUMS and will be held at the LUMS Campus itself.
An incredible panel is aggregating together again, and this times fans of Jawwad wont be disappointed:
Faisal Qureshi, CEO, Kolachi Advanced Technolgies
Zia Imran, CEO, VahZay Pvt Limited
Jawwad Farid, CEO, Alchemy Technologies
Salim Ghauri, President & CEO, Netsol Technologies
CTIA Wireless 2008 is one of the largest wireless events in the US. Among its various programs is the 
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