State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

I came across an article in New York Times on advances in shopping technologies. The effort to turn people’s mobile phones into information displays and ordering devices is on. Here’s a quick list of the technologies you could see on a cell phone soon:

• Scan and shop (various apps)
• Presence (IBM)
• Mobile Concierge (Cisco)
• Mobile Loyalty Cards

Shoppers will soon be able to stand outside the designer Norma Kamali’s boutique in Manhattan, point a phone at merchandise in the window and buy it — even late at night when the store is closed. How? By using technologies such as ScanLife which allows customers to scan bar codes on merchandise. Other apps allow users to do perform product search and price comparison through barcodes.

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Nokia shared that since the launch of the new version of Ovi Maps with free walk and drive navigation, on 21 January 2010, there have been over 1.2 million downloads with over 20% coming from China. By leveraging its investment in NAVTEQ, Nokia has been able to remove the costs associated with navigation for drivers and pedestrians and is quickly activating a massive user base to which it can offer new location features, content and services. The top five most popular Nokia devices installing the download where: Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia N97 mini, Nokia N97 , Nokia 5230 and E72. From next month all new Nokia GPS-enabled smartphones will include the new version of Ovi Maps, pre-loaded with local country map data, with high-end walk and drive navigation and access to Lonely Planet and Michelin travel guides at no extra cost.

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Let me confess, I never wanted to be a BlackBerry user and ever since I was forced to use my first RIM device, I have always been carrying one, it’s been a few years now. I’m not that forgetful in general but I do forget my BlackBerry at places at times, and am usually not sure where I left it. Was that in my car or at home? Did I drop it somewhere or is it safe or not? Calling a lost phone to ring it, itself is an invitation to a thief if you left it at a public place. Does this happen to you too?

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Nokia has made a huge move in the mobile mapping and navigation area: it now offers free global navigation (for drivers and pedestrians) on Nokia smartphones. These free-of-charge navigation services are intended to boost Nokia’s service offerings and sell more phones. This is the same direction which Google was moving in with its free navigation software. The free turn-by-turn directions by Nokia mean that navigation device makers such as TomTom and Gramin will be impacted.

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Google now support driving directions both on their mobile as well as desktop version of maps. Though it is very interesting to have the feature on your desktop, its more useful when used on your mobile device. The software is free to use and you can download it from their website. Google-maps for mobile is a serious competitor for several other still novice paid navigation solutions in Pakistan. For a detailed walk-through of the new feature, please see my post here.

Wateen and Naksha.pk have partnered to provide an interactive WiMax coverage map at www.naksha.pk/wateen.  You can choose a city and available point of interest (POI) from the drop-downs at the very top right. You may also click on the map to choose the POI. Once you have made these selections, the site will give you coverage info at the top in terms of availability indoor or outdoor. Neat but a few quick fixes are needed.

I have 2 suggestions for improvement. The interactive map page should have links back to the Wateen site. Second, the WiMAX availability information is displayed towards the top without proper context and help text. At first glance, it is hard to tell where the results are and what is their meaning. There should be annotation to explain the meaning of terms listed below.
USB: Available/Unavailable
Ground Floor: Available/Unavailable
1st Floor: Available/Unavailable
Outdoor: Available/Unavailable

Here are two sample views from  www.naksha.pk/wateen, showing coverage in cities of Lahore and Quetta. I’d suggest playing with the site and observing how the WiMAX coverage varies from area to area. You might find some interesting patterns!

For Lahore.

For Quetta.

Cross Post from Teeth Maestro Blog

Its been a long time coming but independent efforts by a group of volunteers have finally paid off to present a fully routable GPS map for Karachi available FREE to the general public. Ali Ahmed and his team of GPS enthusiasts at PKMaps has been doing a remarkable job updating and mapping the entire city of Karachi (& Pakistan) in full detail. Their latest release Karachi Map 0.85 has yet again built upon their great effort. Boasting n impressive stats of 9,500 POI, 36,000 roads (10,500 km), 2,500 addresses, 40 POI with contact numbers.

The zip files available for download on the site are custom made for Garmin GPS units. To install this map on your Garmin device you can either download the Mapsource version or copy the gmapsupp.img directly on your supplemental map file. If you have a non-Garmin device there are a few help files on the forums to help install the same Karachi map on alternate devices.

Generally all Pakistan wide maps are available for free but a more detailed Pro version can be accessed for free if you join the team of contributors helping them to either map or even correct and fix the existing map. The Pro version generally has quite a detailed index of house numbers and an elaborate POI index [Points of Interest].

There are various indicators that location based services (LBS) are gaining ground in emerging telecom markets. In Pakistan, for example, we see new services, increased activity with user generated location content and overall more devices with either GPS built in or using Google’s location approximation service. Related to all this is the proliferation of search services which give information about points of interest (POI) and ratings and reviews information. All this is happening when broadband (including wireless) choices are growing and prices are falling. Another trend is that social networking is more popular and sharing location based info is in demand.

Of course, for Pakistan this is just the start of services built around location and so the services are quite basic. The challenge for developing countries is the data availability, accuracy and the maintenance of information. GPS navigation in Pakistan is in its early stages as well.

Google map maker is making this better in this respect, allowing user generated content. As TechLahore puts it:Ever since Google opened up Map Maker allowing users to post location information and map data, individuals from Pakistan have outdone all others in volume and quality. This underlines the interest if the opportunity is there and huge potential of such collaborative work. See CIO Pakistan for report on the map convention 2008.

Local map sites with reviews and POI search
A few companies are active in the area of map development and providing map data in Pakistan, for personal navigation devices. We have covered a few of them before such as naqsha.net. Naqsha.net has teamed up with Tracking world to provide Garmin SatNav units preloaded with maps. These units are portable and can be placed in the car and taken out.

As noted before, Naqsha website could use improvements in user interface but its a decent start and provides search and contact info. The hard question for these companies is how to make money when maps are still not common and not affordable for the public in general.

Mobile Companies and LBS
When it comes to value-added services and making money, our mobile companies are eager to try all kinds of services. Location services are no exception. We saw some really basic ones come out and then the driving directions and detailed maps were introduced.

Ufone’s service is one example, Warid has a friend finder and place finder service and MobiTrack is another service by Mobilink World. MobiTrack provides turn-by-turn instructions and it only works on compatible handsets. It seems to be built on an existing third party product which has been customized for Mobilink. At least they have a full manual explaining how the app works. However the Mobilink World site is not very user friendly and it could use some improvements.

I’d be interested in knowing the total number of users who have tried these map/location services on their phone.

Before ending this roundup, I leave you with these interesting views about the state of companies providing location services.

The recent report on trends in location-aware apps from Apple’s App Store, Google’s Android Marketplace, and Blackberry’s App World released by Skyhook Wireless, itself a provider of a patented hybrid system of location awareness, reveals a buoyant market for LBS apps. Indeed, the Apple App Store was found to have the greatest number of location-based applications, at over 2,300, and the highest percentage of paid for location app, at over 75 percent. Sixty seven percent of Blackberry apps are paid and eighty percent of Android Marketplace apps are free.
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This Economist article, titled Sensors and Sensitivity, talks about the various interesting studies of data collection from mobile phones.

Mobile phones provide new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas.
 

If your mobile phone could talk, it could reveal a great deal. Obviously it would know many of your innermost secrets, being privy to your calls and text messages, and possibly your e-mail and diary, too. It also knows where you have been, how you get to work, where you like to go for lunch, what time you got home, and where you like to go at the weekend. Now imagine being able to aggregate this sort of information from large numbers of phones. It would be possible to determine and analyse how people move around cities, how social groups interact, how quickly traffic is moving and even how diseases might spread. The world’s 4 billion mobile phones could be turned into sensors on a global data-collection network.

They could also be used to gather data in more direct ways. Sensors inside phones, or attached to them, could gather information about temperature, humidity, noise level and so on. More straightforwardly, people can send information from their phones, by voice or text message, to a central repository. This can be a useful way to gather data quickly during a disaster-relief operation, for example, or when tracking the outbreak of a disease. Engineers, biologists, sociologists and aid-workers are now building systems that use handsets to sense, monitor and even predict population movements, environmental hazards and public-health threats.

A good example is InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters), a non-profit group based in California, which promotes the use of mobile phones to improve developing countries’ ability to respond to disasters. Launched with seed money from Google’s philanthropic arm and the Rockefeller Foundation in late 2007, it has just released a suite of open-source software to share, aggregate and analyse data from mobile phones. Its first test-bed is Cambodia, where health-workers can send text messages, containing observations and diagnoses, to a central number.

The sender’s location is determined for each of the messages, which pop up as conversation threads on an interactive map that can be called up on the web. Clicking on this map allows text messages to be sent back to users in the field from the control centre. InSTEDD says this service, called GeoChat, enables “geospatial ground-truthing, as your mobile team works to confirm, refute, or update data”.

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This is an introductory post on the topic of Telematics and how it could be used in Pakistan. Telematics refers to the convergence of telecommunications and information processing in the context of automobiles. Services which are enabled by telematics include safety and security (get help after a crash, ask for help with a dead battery, stolen car alert), convenience (traffic alerts, find an address, remotely unlock a door) and other (download content to car, book a hotel room). Telematics used to be offered by expensive car makers but it is now becoming mainstream rapidly.

Lets take a look at what components and technologies are involved in building a telematics solution.

• Hardware – TCU (Telematics Control Unit) – a box which is placed in the car and has GPS
• Connectivity for voice (call center) and data (GSM or CDMA for sms and TCP/IP data)
• Software (server-side platform which manages the entire solution)
• Services and applications (e.g. speech recognition, POI data, call center)

Overall building a telematics solution is very much like a systems integration work. From connecting the hardware to data centers, managing the wireless data and voice, providing the information to a specialized call center and coordinating the response with different types of providers (emergency, police, roadside assistance, insurance etc). Protocols are defined to communicate between different components and to handle messages in SMS format or to handle packet data.

Most common scenario of telematics is when a car is in accident. Modern TCUs can sense the crash and send the data automatically to the system, alerting a call center about the crash severity and the location. Emergency help can thus be sent. Other scenario is when a person gets stranded on a road and needs help, then the SOS button in the car is pushed and a call is initiated to the call center from the car. Of course a wireless signal is needed for the TCU to dial out. Similarly a call center can call back the car.

Fleet tracking (commercial vehicles – taxis, buses, company vans, trucks etc) is another big area where the cost of telematics is justified because of business advantages.

In developing countries, services such as stolen vehicle alert and location could be useful. Since a vast majority of the cars do not come with the hardware, retrofitting of cars with TCU/GPS units will be most common. Once there is connectivity and a way to send data over the air, many different solutions can be built. You can have a geo-fence application which can alert you if your car moves out of a certain radius. Parents can track the movement of the car when their kids are driving. Of course the modern cars have many sensor built into the car so one can imagine all kinds of automobile data being sent over the air. Vehicle data can be used for troubleshooting, diagnostics and maintenance alerts.

In Pakistan there are a few companies and groups working on telematics (perhaps as distributors of foreign hardware makers) but the market is not ready for massive adoption – most probably due to hardware cost, complexity of building solutions and the limited number of people who are willing to pay for such service. It usually takes the car makers a few years to plan out a complete telematics solution so we might see something in the next 2-3 years in limited models. At least a good and affrodable telecom and wirless infrastructure is in place in Pakistan to support the telematics services. There is plenty of activity in this area in India.

More info: here’s link from Wipro and a description at HowStuffWorks.

Cross post from Basit’s Blog

Ufone has jumped into the location based services with their navigation system named UTrack Maps. This is a welcome addition to the available location based services in the local market. This launch is pretty much in time because other mobile based navigation services, in which Google Maps is one of the popular ones, are still in their infancy and Ufone has a chance to take over the market. From its description, it looks like a wap-only solution, though I yet have to try out the system. If you get a chance to try it out, do give us your feedback.

The main features of the service as described by the service web-site are:

1. Locate a position (Point of interest) on map.
2. Radius search (Search nearby)
3. Routing and Distance

Please note, that routing and distance services (point 3 above) is not part of the Google-Maps-Mobile’s local offerings as yet which can be Ufone’s unique selling point here. On the other hand, the use of this service will be very heavy on the user’s pocket. As opposed to Google-Maps-Mobile’s free search and location information, Ufone will charge you Re. 1 to view a location on map, Rs. 2 to view a route, Rs. 1 for searching for a location nearby and if you want to view a large image that will again charge you Re. 1. Standard GPRS charges will also apply in addition to all above. This is really expensive, is’nt it?

The details of the package are available on Ufone website. You can simply start off by visiting http://wap.ufone.com from your mobile phone (obviously using ufone).

I will try out the service and will possibly post a review.

Cross post from Basit Ali’s blog

Two more simple but useful add-ons to google maps + latitude are available now. Google latitude allows its users to share their current location from their mobile devices with his/her friends. So far, it was only possible to share your location with other latitude users. Latitude has gone beyond that point now.

Recently, Google has launched two add-ons to latitude service that allow users to:

1. Share their current location on their google talk (Google Talk Location Status (beta))
2. Share their current location with the whole world in form of an embeddable tag that users can use on blogs, discussion groups or put on their websites etc.(Google Public Location Badge)

Google Talk Location Status (Beta)

The simple tool changes your Google talk status to your current location. For that you have to:

1. Install and run Google Maps and Latitude on your mobile.
2. Login using your google account on latitude on your mobile
3. Go to the add-in’s site.
4. Enable sharing

That’s it, you are done.
Following video shows you exactly how to do that…

Google Public Location Badge