TechLahore

A great article in the Business Recorder discloses plans to establish a sophisticated network in rural areas, delivering agricultural decision support systems, data mining and extraction using clustering techniques and other useful – and complex – functionality. Much of the infrastructure that powers these Agri AI systems is developed in Pakistan, particularly the environmental and [...]

One of the things we’ve always loved and cherished about Pakistan is how close families are in our culture. Generally, we’re there for each other regardless of what the occasion or the severity of the problem! We’re also thrilled to see that younger parents are spending an ever increasing amount of time with their children. [...]

Lahore’s University of Engineering & Technology and its student science society are putting together a number of Open Source Workshops on the 22nd of March. If you’re in Lahore, and into Open Source technology, don’t miss out on the opportunity to attend. Registration is free and topics include everything from building scalable web based systems [...]

TechLahore announces a $1,000 prize to any individual or team (of students) in Pakistan who will build a computing device on the lines of Prof. Harry Porter’s remarkable relay computer. If the team is successful in building the device, TechLahore will provide further reimbursements of up to $500 for materials used. That’s $1,500 total. And [...]

Kudos to Hasanat and Farrukh, two sophomore students from the Lahore University of Management Sciences who have placed 5th in an MIT Design Contest that required entrants to design, code and document an electricity consumption monitor that uploads information to a central database. Since the competition was open to contestants from all over the world, [...]

While it is true that Lahore is the coolest city on the planet, this post proves that good work is happening elsewhere as well The University of Sindh at Hyderabad recently unveiled a number of interesting projects developed by its faculty and students. The projects were showcased at an exhibition inaugurated by Dr. Rabia Sheikh, [...]

The OLPC’s XO (or “Sugar”) is really getting flattened. They’ve gone from catastrophe to catastrophe. Initially, they weren’t able to meet the $100 target and ended up being close to $200. Then some key countries that Mr. Negroponte was trying to win over – including Pakistan – decided to abandon the XO since it didn’t [...]

The New Scientist published a story about LUMS‘ PMB (Poor Man’s Broadband) software. This is a peer to peer architecture that is designed to accelerate downloads. It works somewhat like BitTorrent and other P2P applications, but there are some fundamental differences as well. For one, it’s focused on dialup users. For another, it implements pre-fetching [...]

So it’s official. The $100 laptop now costs $200 and that too, in quantities of 10,000 units. It’s really sad to see a great intellect such as Prof. Negroponte’s being wasted on this project. Before his One-Laptop-Per-Child project could even come close to producing units in any real quantity, with a much shorter development effort, [...]

It took me longer to resume posting about the Maker Faire, my apologies for that. What I wanted to focus on in this post is the creative atmosphere that exists at a convention like the Maker Faire and the importance of exposing children to constructive and positive experiences such as this. I know how crucial [...]