State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Spotted this puzzling bit on the Telenor site.

Telenor has introduced a score of industry-first Value Added Services for its customers. Keeping in line with the innovative tradition, Telenor brings you yet another industry first service. In order to facilitate an ever growing population of facebook users, we have successfully integrated with Facebook !

Now upload pictures to your Facebook accounts directly from your mobile phones by simply sending them to mobile@facebook.com via MMS.

Really? See this screen from Facebook mobile. Any user of facebook can register their mobile phone and upload media by sending email to mobile@facebook.com. That email address is not unique to Telenor. I don’t get the “integration” part. Come on Telenor, you owe us some explanation!

Very slick concept from Mozilla labs. I am sure this will get even better with time.
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Over the years I have presented different views and ideas on how to improve the very low number of broadband users in Pakistan (here and here). Here’s another view by Dr Amir Mateen (Cisco) from TeleCON 2008. His presentation looks at the problem in a different way and provides some brutal, honest analysis such as “Not digital divide, just the old divide carried over into the digital world”. His recommendation: Redefine success criteria for broadband in Pakistan.

• “productive usage” vs “# of connections”
• results vs usage of broadband internet (catch the mobility wave)
• Urdu on the web (in normal Urdu script)

Tee Emm attended the event and shared some great commentary on Dr. Mateeen’s presentation which is worth repeating here:

Some presentations were really good and thought provoking like the one given by Dr Amir Mateen of Cisco Systems Pakistan where he talked about how great the broadband vacuum is in Pakistan and how unprepared the local contents are and that in the absence of structured local contents, people will make up their own contents (read social networks) and in doing so, there is a real danger of a whole new generation getting carried away in the roman Urdu flood and how this threatens the Urdu script and the associated heritage.

I share the same concerns about how we are treating Urdu language in Internet and telecommunication age. This is something which needs to be discussed in more detail.

Activists in Pakistan are leveraging technology to organize and support their campaign against the martial law in Pakistan. Using the tools of mobile phones, SMS, Wikis, social networking and blogging, the activists have stepped up to fill the gap left behind by the absence of news and TV channels. I reported about the rising trend of mobile activism in the world in July and I asked a question that if this is something we will see in Pakistan in the short term. The recent turn of events has made mobile activism a sucessful reality in Pakistan. See other posts about mobile activism in Pakistan here and here.

Due to the low number of Internet users and the very limited broadband in Pakistan, blogs and other Internet based tools are not within the reach of the masses. Text messaging on the other hand has been very popular and with the 70 million plus mobile subscribers, this is a medium which is widely spread in Pakistan. Bloggers report that Saturday 3rd November saw the highest ever number of SMS sent with an average of 10 text messages being sent across the networks per subscriber.

Business Week reports about this Bloom of E-Resistance in Pakistan:

Relying on Text Messages
Indeed, for ordinary Pakistanis, the cell-phone text message has proved a saving grace, one not yet withdrawn by Musharraf. Internet penetration in Pakistan is low, but Pakistan is one of the world’s fastest-growing cell-phone markets, with user numbers growing 73% this past year. The country of 160 million currently has 67 million cellular subscribers, and, according to Pakistan watchers, in the past week many Pakistanis have been sending and receiving at least 10 text messages a day from relatives overseas who watch the international news on Pakistan and feed the information back home. A conservative estimate of 500 million text messages a day is a bonanza for cell-phone operators.

Along with writing on blogs and posting on wikis, bloggers are also making use of sms to report updates and send alerts. The blog by Teeth Maestro is using SMS2Blog technology as explained here:

We have enabled LIVE SMS-2-BLOG services allowing citizen reporters in Pakistan to directly update this blog by sending this blog, readers shall now be given live updates from the field as it happens. Join this blog’s Twitter Channel at: twitter.com/teeth

See this report from News which talks about Aurat Foundation’s plans to setup a sms based system for activism:

However, keeping in mind the fact that a majority of the population does not have access to the internet, members at a meeting held at the Aurat Foundation’s office decided to circulate their message of protest through text messages and work towards the restoration of human rights, the judicial system and the removal of the media blackout amongst other issues.

On the other hand, hundreds of people have also been registering their protests at pakvoices.net, gopetition.com and facebook.com

All of this is promising - it shows the resolve of the people and their determination to share information and make the best use of available tools.

I have previously discussed the explosive growth of media captured on mobiles and the need for sharing it, to make it work without putting too much burden on the users. A few interesting trends have emerged in the last few months. PixSense has picked up momentum and their solution was implemented by Telenor - great news for this Pakistani startup. At the same time, Nokia has been on a roll, acquiring soical networking and mobile ad startups such as Enpocket. Nokia has also introduced Ovi, a set of services for mobiles, which needs a post of its own. Twango, a media sharing application, is one of the companies Nokia bought for around $100 million. Naturally that caused headlines and prompted many (including myself) to take a look at Twango’s services.

With so many photo and video sharing sites (photobucket, snapfish, mobango etc) it can be hard to compare and select one. What is it that makes one media sharing site better than others? I believe its a combination of a few factors. Usability and presentation. Features such as online editing, tagging, time lines, subscriptions etc. Ease of sharing with people (without forcing them to register) and at blogs and networking sites.  There’s the reliability and trust element as well; many don’t want their personal stuff uploaded to a random startup with sketchy privacy policies.

TM has posted a detailed analysis of Telenor’s Picshare launch and gave it a 6/10 rating. I recommend read the full review and the related commentary at TGP. In this post I’ll review Twango, its features and how it works. My usage scenario is simple and typical. I want to be able to share my media easily with friends and family anywhere in the world.

Read more »

In the gadget world, camera (mobile) phones are all the rage. The introduction of digital cameras a few years ago provided ordinary people a new level of empowerment as it allowed experimentation and room for errors. Camera phones have taken this activity to yet another level. The decline in prices of camera phones have accelerated the trend. It is common to see people use their phones to take a picture at all kinds of places. This has resulted in plenty of user generated content and many start-ups who are trying to create businesses out of this trend.

Pakistan has a large camera phone user base. In fact I think (can anyone support this assumption?) that Pakistani usage of their phones as cameras is higher than many other comparable countries. Possible reasons which come to mind: people may not afford to buy a separate digital camera, don’t have or care for a pc, they are perfectly happy with keeping and exchanging photos and videos on the phone.

The situations and scenarios for camera phone usage can be endless - and not all are appropriate (technology has always been abused). Being a personal device a phone is always or mostly with the individual so the probability to take a picture of something unexpected or fortuitous is much higher with a camera phone than with a camera. Here I am going to tell a story about a Pakistaniat blog post which would fit a scenario where mobile phone would make it easy to capture something which could be otherwise missed.

This is when the Czech prime minister visited Pakistan in May. Someone confused the Czech flag with the check flag - that is the checkered flag as in racing. Adil Najam took a photo and posted this story at ATP. Interestingly this story was picked up by the Czech media and went viral, resulting in lots of interesting comments and traffic spike for ATP. In the end it turned out as a chance for Czech and Pakistani citizens to exchange stories and some laughs.