State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

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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Like I had mentioned in my previous post, the Nokia Bloggers Meet-up was held on 22nd May at The Sports Bar – Karachi. The event wasn’t just a bloggers meet-up but also a sneak-peak of N97.

N97- The new entrant in the Nokia’s flagship N-series is due to launch in Pakistan in first week of June. This time Nokia came different and thus was this pre-launch meet-up with the bloggers.

Mr. Adeel Hashmi, Communication Manager – Nokia Pakistan, started off the event giving an introduction to the idea of meeting the bloggers for the pre-launch and promised more of such meet-ups. The keynote speakers of the evening were Mr. Khurram Pradhan, Product and Portfolio Manager and Ms. Shabana Shahzad, Program Manager.

Khurram Pradhan gave his presentation on the main theme of N97 – Personal Internet. In his presentation he also focused on what’s driving the transformation of converged devices. He discussed that Nokia has been working on converging mobile phone with internet from last decade to enhance the personal internet experience.

At present out of the 1.3 billion internet users 520 million use it on mobile device and research has indicated this figure will go up to 1.5 billion by the year 2012. Nokia being consumer centric is on the move to make the mobile broadband dream a reality.

Not only this Nokia also plans to attract the market where we have 93 million users using the social network services like facebook, my space and twitter on their mobile devices, 82 million downloading maps on their devices, 22.3 million access the internet on devices daily for news and information and where we also have 184 million blogs among which 77%  are actively read and commented. In efforts of enriching the networking experience, the N97 comes with third party widgets, which are standalone programs on your mobile home screen.

Nokia’s customer care is a two dimensional strategy, one, devices for connecting people and second devices for connecting places which it achieves along with Ovi Maps.

Foreseeing the future in application development Nokia has acquired all of the rights to the Symbian operating system (OS) and open sourced it under the Eclipse license.

Khurram’s part ended with a Q and A session and then came the most interesting and most awaited SNEAK PEAK at the N97. Ms. Shabana Shahzad conducted it. Bloggers were also given the feel-it experience of N97.

Some of the N97 features are:

- Easy and fast connections to internet services
- Easy text input with QWERTY keyboard and touch screen
- 3.5 inch sliding tilt display
- Live personalized home screen with widgets
- Up-to-date information via RSS feed
- Fully compatible with Oviservices
- Browse real web pages
- Take pictures and videos and share them immediately
- Watch high-quality video on the large 3.5 inch 16:9 widescreen
- Video playback at 30 fps, for a wide array of formats
- Play videos, music and pictures on TV using TV-out
- Access internet video feeds through Nokia Video Center
- Enjoy great audio through standard 3.5 mm jack headphones, built-in stereo speakers or Bluetooth technology
- Digital music player with support for play list editing, equalizer and categorized access to your music collection
- Search, browse and purchase songs online in Nokia Music Store (for availability, please visit www.music.nokia.com)
- Nokia Maps with integrated compass and A-GPS receiver
- Multimedia city guides and navigation services. Drive: voice guided car navigation, or Walk: pedestrian-optimized turn-by-turn guidance. (Navigation may need to be purchased separately.)
- World-class game titles with N-Gage
- Make you home-screen private any time you want

N97 Tech Profile:

System:        WCDMA 900/1900/2100 (HSDPA), EGSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
User Interface:    S60 5th Edition
Dimensions:    117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9 mm*mm (L x W x H) *18.25 mm at camera area
Weight:        Approx. 150 g
Display:        3.5 inch TFT with up to 16 million colorsnHD16:9 widescreen (640×360 pixels)
Battery:         Nokia Battery BP-4L, 1500 mAh
Memory:        Up to 48GB (32 GB on-board memory, plus 16GB expansion via micro SD memory card slot)
Video playback:    MPEG-4 / SP and MPEG-4 AVC/H.264,up to 30 fps, up to VGA resolution Real Video up to QCIF @ 30 fps Windows Media (WMV9) up to CIF @ 30 fps Flash Lite 3.0 / Flash Video in internet browser
Music playback:    MP3, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+, WMA
Lens:        Carl Zeiss Tessar™
Image capture:    Up to 5 mega pixels (2584 x 1938) JPEG/EXIF (16.7 million/24-bit color)
Video capture:    MPEG-4 VGA (640 x 480) at up to 30 fps
Aperture:        F2.8
Focal length:    5.4 mm
Flash:        Dual LED camera flash and video light
Talk time:        Up to 320 min (3G), 400 min (GSM)
Standby time:    Up to 400 hrs (3G), 430 hrs (GSM)
Video playback:    Up to 4,5 hours (offline mode)
Music playback:    Up to 37 hours (offline mode)

The device shall be availabe here in second week of june at an expected retail price of Rs. 60,000.

Editor’s Note: Please join me to welcome Omar Aijaz. Omar is an undergraduate business student who has a keen interest in technology and telecommunication and he will be contributing to this blog on a regular basis.

The trend of open mobile Internet on mobile phones is relatively recent, even more so in Pakistan. However the growth, fueled by better browser software and falling data prices, is noticeable. All mobile companies want to offer more reasons for people to use data services, which results in higher ARPU. Mobile Internet is most popular among business persons and innovative people like students, technology enthusiasts etc, who want quick access to Internet right from their cell phone any where. Opera mini is one of the popular mobile web browsers.

Opera Mini powered by Telenor is a good business move by Telenor to encourage more people towards using mobile web services. Opera mini is fast and compresses the data to about 95% so its very easy to download music, visit blogs, check your emails etc. Telenor GPRS (more about GPRS technology toward the end) and EDGE technology (2.5G) was introduced in late 2006. EDGE provides decent speed and performance and offered by others (Mobilink, Zong, Ufone) as we don’t have 3G yet. Online forums are full of discussions about which service has the best speeds etc.

As a reader pointed out in comments, Telenor has planned its market strategy from the beginning around mobile Internet (all their SIMs are preactivated for data). Opera mini service is an extension of Telenor’s push for more data usage.

Note that you should be able to use Opera with other mobile network operators as well — its just that Telenor makes it a bit easy to get it through SMS.

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I believe these kind of hardware+software mashups to be very relevant to next generation of location based services and telecom industry. Here’s a video from 2008 O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference, the meeting place for upcoming location based services. This talks about a set of open-source hardware modules which can be connected together and programmed to interact as desired – for example to create a proximity-based to-do list. There is more information available at conference proceedings page.

Recently a few readers and friends have asked about the google maps feature on mobile phones called find me (aka blue dot). This is a feature from google maps for mobile phones which shows your approximiate location on a web enabled mobile phone. GPS is not required. People love it! See this official google page for details on how it works, including a video.

The question was: how does google know my location in Pakistan? There are 2 pieces of local information needed: the tower location data and other is the map data. There are companies which sell such kind of data so expect this feature to be available at more and more places. Rest of the algorithm uses the signal information and the application is able to locate you within a certain degree of accuracy, therefore the term blue dot.

So go ahead, use your web-enabled phone and download google maps in case you don’t have it. And if you use this feature often please share where and how or better yet, send us pictures.