Continuing on the series of posts from TeleCON 2008, this one is on Profitability Challenges in a Low ARPU market. This presentation was made by Sajjad Hussain, Director Networks of Ericsson. It has some material which students and researchers will find particularly useful.
Naturally the presentation is tilted towards networks, transmission efficiencies, 3G and NGN. But most importantly it talks about the energy consumption and ways to address the energy demand by considering Green Sites which utilize alternative energy sources such as solar power and battery backup. There are a few slides on mobile commerce as well. Here is the full presentation in pdf.Â
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.
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!
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
PTA has asked for bids for consulting on three important topics (see below). which will have far reaching impact on Information and Communications Technology in Pakistan. Feb 25 is the deadline. some of the industry veterans had been asking for local Internet Exchange peering for a long time and it is good that finally there is some activity. PTA has taken the lead even though some of the topics are not limited to telecommunication. Regardless, if the right groups participate, this should benefit the IT industry in Pakistan as a whole. See complete information at this page on PTA website. Follow the links below for the details ((pdf documents) for each paper.
Article from Taiwan about the potential growth of WiMAX in coming years. Full story here. This is in the context of rapid overall growth of the information and communications technology (ICT) market in the Asia-Pacific region. The spending will reach US$154 billion in 2008, up 10% over 2007, with China and India together contributing about half of the spending, according to a prediction by ICD.
With companies of worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) network to start building related hardware next year, the new network technology is expected to bring huge business potential worth US$25 billion worldwide in next five years, according to Market Intelligence Center (MIC), a market survey institute for the sector making ICT (information and communication technology) products.
Also, Topology Research Institute (TRI) opined that market demand for mobile WiMAX network will start growing in 2008 and sharply increase in 2009. In 2011, registered users of the network are estimated at 30 million persons all around the world.
MIC noted that starting this year through 2010, the U.S. plans to invest US$5 billion, the largest amount in the world, in constructing WiMAX network, with Taiwan and Korea to respectively pour US$1 billion and US$900 million in that. After bidding for WiMAX licenses, bid winners in Japan are also expected to funnel a total of US$3.8 billion into building WiMAX.
In fact, development of WiMAX technology is different among developed and emerging countries, with the U.S. tending to focus on integrated products based on the technology, and India, the Middle East and Pakistan on fixed WiMAX initially to make up their penetration rates of broadband network.
Building on the momentum which started a few months ago the ICT industry in Pakistan is moving ahead, despite the odds. I had written about the launch of Business Acceleration Program in Aug 2007. This month MITCEF of Pakistan has announced the winner and 4 finalists, as reported here. The winner, Sofizar is a very interesting startup which promises to fix one of the major problems with onlines ads: click fraud.
I have been on the mailing list of the  organizers and it is a pleasure to see this event take place and conclude sucessfully in Pakistan. If you want to get a first-hand account of how such events help startups to rise and shine, see this post from Jawwad Farid of Alchemy.
The organizers, sponsors and mentors deserve a pat on the back for making this happen and for creating a precedent of excellent coaching and feedback to emerging entrepreneurs in Pakistan. A special thanks to Ken Morse and Bill Aulet of MIT Entrepreneurship Center for their continued support.
Here’s an exclusive coverage of Korea technology show in Dallas this week. Even though large Korean companies such as Samsung, LG and Hyundai are well-known all over the world there are many small to medium sized Korean companies which are working hard to establish themselves. This exhibition was part of this effort by these electronic and telecom firms to market their products in US.
The event included an exhibition and a Future of Communications Forum in which SK Telecom, Nokia, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon presented. I attended the exhibition and the talk. I was very impressed by the level of innovation, quality of products and the effort to market their work with high quality presentation material and politeness. In this post I’d like to share some of the interesting products I saw there. In later posts I’ll cover other companies and related topics (such as WiBro) in more details. There will be a separate post about the presentation by SK Telecom on the telecom trends.
In the exhibition there were over 50 companies covering telecom (IPTV, VOIP, telecom infrastructure), electronics (home and portable electronics, bluetooth multimedia, PC components) and home/office security monitoring.  There were quite a few medium sized companies and startups in the telecom field; here’s a brief lineup of the prominent telecom companies - please visit their site for more info. You can also contact me for details to know further about my discussions with these company representatives.Â
BlueBird Soft - PDAs for consumer and business use
Of the many challenges that our nation faces, educating and training of our youth is one of the most important. We need to prepare the next generation of information and communication technology professionals who are skilled, knowledgeable and competitive. We need to cultivate leadership from the next generation who can solve problems through research and innovation.
Currently we face a shortage of skilled engineers and researchers. Even if you combine the graduates of all tiers of universities and colleges, the numbers are far below the need. But there’s an even bigger challenge - are we producing the right quality of resources? The answer is a definite NO.
There is work to be done in many areas. Funding the right programs, education policy, quality of existing education, training fresh graduates to transition to a professional life etc. I get plenty of mails and comments from students looking for internship or ideas for projects. It is evident from these interactions that many do not have the training to do fundamental research. They also lack the necessary communication skills which are critical to meet the global workforce standards. The lack of information about what opportunities are available to them further hinders their prospects.
On a positive note there are groups and agencies which are working to make a difference. I recently heard about a promising effort: The National ICT R&D Fund. Here are some excerpts from an email from the General Manager Solicitation and Evaluation, of this Fund.
National ICT R&D Fundwas created in January 2007 by Ministry of IT with the vision to transform Pakistan’s economy into a knowledge based economy by promoting efficient, sustainable and effective ICT (IT and Telecommunications) initiatives through synergy of industrial and academic resources. We have significant funds available for proposals that are geared towards creating ICT related technologies. We have a very positive and nurturing attitude and would like to fund projects that enhance the state of the art and create opportunities by solving industrial problems.
This blog was started by 
