The Pakistan Technology Forum: startups, technology, hacking, DIY and much more...

After 3 years of being a blog, TechLahore is making the leap to being a little bit more than that… we’re launching the Pakistan Technology Forum today which we hope will serve as the favourite haunt for local techies, hackers, startup studs and tech business belles. The forum launches today at the following URL:

www.techlahore.com/forum

Head on over, make yourself a free account and let’s start the dialogue! At launch, the following forums have been created, though more will probably added along the way.

Sanjannagar Institute's Beena Raza presents at TEDx Lahore (Image credit: TEDx Lahore FB page)

For those who are presently hurtling away from the solar system at light speed in an attempt to validate Einstein’s Twins Paradox, this might be news. But for the rest of us here on earth, it should not be. TED – that wonderful platform for insightful talks – has come to Pakistan. Now, strictly speaking, TEDx is what has come to Pakistan… and the “x” denotes the fact that while the organizers involved have independently planned and organized the event, TED does bless the group and even helps promote their work on the TED.com website.

The first TEDx event was held in Karachi just recently, and now TEDx has debuted in Lahore. The first set of talks were held at the Ali Institute off Ferozepur road, and included subjects as diverse as musicology and philosophy, the psychology of terror, map making and more. The Express Tribune did a good job covering the event. Here’s the link:

TEDx Talking from Lahore

The TEDx effort is being undertaken in Lahore by volunteers, students, professionals and folks wishing to make a difference. Their spirit and intention is commendable. As they said via their Facebook status on Sunday, “We believe in doing, not waiting. We believe in getting things done to start a trend of pro-active behavior. We believe in less talk, more action. If you believe in these things, then you have the TEDxLahore spirit, whether you attended or not.” – Well said, TEDx Lahore team, and well done! We look forward to many more TEDx events in Lahore. It’s not just about listening to intelligent people talk about interesting things, platforms like TEDx can be supremely important in determining the course our country and people take in times to come. Indeed, the battle for the future is being waged in the minds of our countrymen. Whether these minds are won over by an insightful lecture at TEDx that captivates and enthralls, or by less productive, darker forces. That is the central question of our time.

Cisco's Home Energy Controller is a much-needed product. Let's see how it does in the days to come.

One of the most significant challenges facing mankind at a global level is the environmental catastrophe that will surely materialize if we fail to transition towards a more sustainable and environmentally friendly energy infrastructure. The statistics are staggering. With increasing per capita energy consumption in the developing world, a gargantuan overall energy footprint in the developed world and a propensity by all to use dirty sources of energy, we’re certainly heading for trouble.

There are two parts to the equation; cutting consumption -- and that especially applies to the developed world -- and building clean, renewable sources of power. Cisco’s new product addresses the first problem, and I’m super-excited about it!

The somewhat unimaginatively named “Home Energy Controller” is a follow-on to the recently announced Cisco Cius Android tablet. The new device will also run Android, provide a touch interface, access to an app-store, multimedia playback and now ubiquitous web browsing capabilities. However, in addition to the more usual fare, the HEC device will also interface with smart meters, thermostats, switches and power panels using both 802.11n and the low power Zigbee wireless standard. This will allow the HEC to measure energy consumption, lower extra usage in parts of your home which are not presently occupied, and otherwise reduce the energy footprint based on environmental or calendar triggered criteria.

You can view a video that explains the HEC concept here:

For more information, see this Computerworld article, or this Engadget post covering the new device. We’ll be keeping a close watch on how the new Cisco product evolves and whether it is indeed the first in a wave of energy efficiency and management products that can be adopted by end users without requiring governmental or utility company buy in. I certainly hope that’s the case! It’s high time we stopped waiting on others to act and took the initiative ourselves.

Reevolo: An online life coaching startup from Pakistan

This is a guest post from Shahzaib Khan, co-founder of Reevolo. His company was selected for the Echelon 2010 event in Singapore. Reevolo helps people formulate life goals and determine what they want to be. Think of it as a digital life coach! Without further ado, here’s Shahzaib:

How Reevolo came to be

By the time I turned eighteen, I had made a career choice and decision. I wanted to be an investment banker. This decision was based purely on the fact that I had family who had made it big in this career/profession and the thought of having fancy cars, taking exotic holidays and working on multi million dollar deals like them, seemed an obvious career choice.

Based on this career choice, I selected my university major and started to chart a life course along this path. All these choices were based on my limited understanding of what being an investment banker entailed. I was then fortunate enough to intern at a premier investment bank early in my university days, which led me to the timely realization that investment banking was definitely not for me. I was hence able to adjust my career path and eventually took the path of entrepreneurship. I have not looked back since.

Many of my peers were however not so fortunate, and were unable to re-adjust their career paths and ended up in jobs that were not only not suitable for them, but have had to pay a heavy price for their choices. Reevolo has been established to help reduce this error of choice, which is often and primarily taken due to misinformation and incorrect assumptions about choices in career paths.

What does Reevolo do?

Reevolo helps individuals answer the question “What do you want to be?”. This web service allows its users to get a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, and builds on these using expert life coaches to recommend suitable and appropriate career paths. Reevolo users are then able to experience recommended paths by being placed in private communities with other individuals with similar career goals. They work together on tasks that will help them get a better understanding of what that particular career path entails. Along with this, they will also have direct access to experts to guide them in their chosen career path. This service aims to save them from making costly and incorrect career decisions.

Launching Reevolo

Reevolo was the only startup selected from Pakistan to take part in Echelon 2010. This is Asia’s largest startup event, with participants, investors, and mentors coming from all around the world. Reevolo launched it’s alpha product at the event and received an overwhelmingly positive response. We are talking to several strategic investors and mentors who will assist us in taking our startup to the next level.

We’re looking for help!

As a very young company, there are several avenues in which we are looking for support and assistance, to take our service forward. For example:

Beta Users: Currently we have only one career sub track open, this is “PHP programming”. Please select this track if you are interested in experiencing Reevolo and seeing its functionalities and feature sets. We are looking for beta users to register for our other tracks, so please do so at www.reevolo.com or get in touch with us at tracks [at] reevolo.com to add a particular track to the exisiting list.

Experts: Each community is managed by experts who assist in developing tracks. We are looking for individuals with domain expertise of 5 – 7 years in any profession to get in touch with us to explore how we can work together. Please do get in touch with us directly to learn more about this opportunity at tracks [at] reevolo.com

Educational Institutes: If you are part of an educational institute and are interested to learn how Reevolo can bring substantive value to each of your students, please do get in touch with us so that we can come and share our vision and product roadmap with you, as well as discuss how we can potentially collaborate.

Jobs @ Reevolo: We are looking for individuals with experience in finance and marketing to join us. If the concept of Reevolo appeals to you, please do get in touch with us directly at careers [at] reevolo.com

PASHA's Launchpad events in Lahore and Karachi are a great way to put your product idea or business on the map!

I must say, a lot of interesting tech events and forums have been arranged recently. First the Blog Awards, then TEDx Karachi, which by the way deserves another post altogether. Now, Jehan Ara, President of PASHA (Pakistan Software Houses Association) has announced that her organization will be starting a series of events appropriately called “Launchpad”. These events, to be held in Lahore and Karachi, will allow entrepreneurs, students and other budding garage inventors to pitch their ideas, business proposals and product visions to get instant feedback from an expert panel of judges. And what’s more, you can even get your idea funded! Or win an award! Not too shabby.

I wholeheartedly support this kind of activity. It’s very necessary for Pakistani entrepreneurs to connect, mingle and improve each others ideas and skills as a result. Innovation must be part of our cultural fabric going forward… I’ve gotten on that soapbox many a time in the past. Suffice to say, the more events like Launchpad and TEDx we can put together in Pakistan, the better we’ll all be for it. Good work PASHA!

White Rabbit is working on Social Games in Pakistan. We hope they're as successful at it as the folks behind Farmville!

Here is Hassan Baig again with his thoughts on what makes Social Games tick! I thoroughly enjoyed his insight, as I am sure you will. Without further ado, I’m turning it over to Hasan:

This is confessedly a bad time to talk about social gaming – Facebook, the premier social gaming platform, is in the national cross-hair with a ferocity so extreme that any outsider can assume it’s the root of everything that is wrong with Pakistan.

However, we cannot ignore the billion dollar plus opportunity social gaming has been in 2009, we cannot ignore the high double-digit growth this industry is expected to undergo for years to come, we cannot ignore this very real opportunity to establish a Pakistani IP footprint in the global tech-space instead of being content as everyone’s fifth favorite outsource destination.

Integral in the quest for IP development in the Facebook gaming niche is to understand that social game design is going to take much more than mere software engineering skills. This is more of an artform than a technical skill. What follows is a set of guidelines a software engineer can utilize in the bid to become a social game designer:

1) Creative use of the Facebook API: Knowing the Facebook API’s technical usage, and knowing how to utilize its viral potential through creative wizardry are two completely different things. That is to say, internet documentation of the APIs features can only take you so far – to really understand the possibilities you will need to see the API in action. And how does one do that? Research as many games on Facebook as you can – that entails playing through their different levels and understanding how the various API calls are used for maximal viral effect. Remember, good game design always starts from good research. Some of the best game designers out there are avid game players too.

2) Game play that engages social graph of the user creatively: Tapping into a user’s social graph is different from multiplayer mechanics – the former is all about interacting with friends and acquaintances – the latter’s about playing with strangers. What’s the difference then? Human psychology plays out differently when interacting with friends and strangers. Peer pressure, honor and revenge are mechanics one can more readily engender among groups of friends than strangers – so social game developers have to understand these nuances before they get into designing games that tap into users’ social graphs.

3) Identifying popular genres: Social networks are not gaming portals. They never will be. Why? Users on social networks do not primarily log in to play games – no, the prime directive is to network with friends and gaming is the secondary reason. The kind of genres hot in social networking can more easily be understood if seen within the context of this fact. So for instance, games with hardcore mechanics are not suitable for these distribution platforms  whereas games with casual, ’soft’ mechanics which enable users to engage their social graphs in fun ways are the right fit.

4) Know thy target demographic: The target audience in social gaming is not males between the ages of 16-24. Far from it. So therefore, game content is going to be very specialized. A starting point to find out what your target demographic is can be found here. Caveat: This is not to say that there’s no room for niches to exist.

5) How to enhance stickiness: Social gaming content is usually very shallow – for example, a typical social game may be a farm world where users increase the size of their farms and decorate it through various means. And that’s it. So how does such a game’s designer ensure that the users keep coming back? By fragmenting their experience into appointments. Appointment-gaming is a delayed gratification mechanic where users accomplish a task in the present but get a delayed reward in the future. This ensures that users would have an incentive to return to the game – thus enhancing stickiness. There are other ways to achieve this effect too – minigames, novelty gameplay, social hooks etc. Usually they’re mixed in with appointment gaming for maximal effect.

6) Effectively monetizing: Just setting up a virtual cash shop won’t guarantee big ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) numbers. Instead, effective monetization is a product of understanding user psychology and their emotional needs. No monetization strategy is complete without additive hooks which take advantage of peer pressure, revenge,  lottery and the desire to show off. So for example, users will not pay much for mere convenience items – on the other hand things which improve their image in front of their friends will sell much better. A good starting point to understand the psychology of effective monetization can be found here.

7) How to incentivize users to invite more friends: The game designer needs to engender ‘positive network effects’ in their game for users to invite more of their kind. Just like the real-life invention of the telephone – where the utility of the device was directly correlated to the number of people using it – the game mechanics should be such that users’ experience becomes richer if more of their friends are playing the game. For instance, one can have a game about a virtual hotel where each user earns more cash the more people from their social graph visit the hotel. This example illustrates a very natural, very organic way of engendering positive network effects. Game designers should pay particular attention to this mechanic in the bid to enhance their games’ virality.

Pepper.pk's Cricket World Championship 20 for the iPhone is a great way to enjoy a fast-paced 20-20 match on your iPhone!

Back in October last year, we covered Mindstorm Studio’s exciting new cricket game for the PC. It is clearly “best in class” when it comes to a cricketing experience on the PC. Well, another Pakistani mobile gaming company just jumped into the fray! Pepper.pk has come out with a fun-to-play cricket game for the iPhone. What is it with Pakistani software companies and Cricket games?!

Pepper launched Cricket World Championship in the last week of April 2010, and from what I’ve heard, it’s doing pretty well thus-far on the Appstore. In talking to their development team, I learned that the developers thought long and hard about how a Cricket experience should be delivered to a smaller platform like the iPhone. In the end, they went for the “Simpler is Better” approach. On an iPhone, you just want to have a simple, fun gaming experience. You don’t necessarily want to tweak fifty variables and ten controls before you even get to play a shot. And in that spirit, Cricket World Championship 20 just lets you swing away and have fun from the very get-go! There aren’t any lengthy learning curves to contend with.

The game setting is pretty simple. You are leading your team’s run chase in a Twenty-Twenty international. You select your team, then pick an opponent country and are in to bat! Facing a bowler who can bowl a variety of deliveries, straight-up, on the off, or on the leg, with variable speed, you get to pick which shot to play with a single touch. And if you time it  right, you score singles, doubles, triples, a boundary or knock the cover off the ball, all the way into the stands for a MAXIMUM!

Pepper's iPhone cricket game is connected to Facebook

The game is also socially connected, so you can post score updates and victory records on your Facebook profile right from the iPhone. Pepper’s Cricket website also has a global score board that tracks player achievements. Pepper has many frequent updates planned for this game. I hear the next version will make it to the Appstore later this month and will include a new animation sequences and other features. Updates, of course, will be free to folks that buy any version of the game once. Get it now, and forever be kept up to date!

This is an interesting little app, so when I hear more from Pepper, I’ll certainly pass the news along. For now, good luck to their game development team. We hope Pepper and other Pakistani software startups do really well in the months ahead.

To play Cricket World Championship 20, hop on over to the Appstore via iTunes, or your iPhone, and get yourself a copy. And in the meanwhile, I’m going to chase down that daunting total South Africa have put up for me… till next time!

Pakistan has produced a lot of computer science talent that is powering not only our local industry but also academia and research. As they are incredibly interesting and important areas, distributed systems, parallelism and supercomputing have attracted the attention of many of our brightest stars. These areas have almost been fused together lately, with commodity processors being used in large parallel clusters tied together with high speed interconnects; supercomputing has really become synonymous with distributed computing.

Prof. Shahid Bokhari of Lahore’s UET did seminal work in distributed systems and has a large number of noteworthy publications. Our very own Prof. Asad Abidi, former researcher at Bell Labs, long time chaired Professor at UCLA, winner of the IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid State Circuits and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal and former Dean of the SSE at LUMS, has many significant achievements in the related area of VLSI design. Beyond these individuals, groups such as the Khwarizmic science society in Lahore have been building clusters for over 15 years.

We can now proudly add to this list, the name of Basit Riaz, a Pakistani researcher who has won the Best Paper Award at an international Supercomputing conference recently held in France. Well done Basit! Now we’re hoping we will see you soon in Pakistan so that you can enrich local academia and industry. Good luck to you!

More from The News:

Pakistani gets coveted award for groundbreaking computer reseach

ISLAMABAD, May 7 (APP) – Basit Riaz Sheikh, a Pakistani Ph.D candidate at the Cornell University, the United States has become the first Pakistani to win the “Supercomputer Design Award” at Global Scientific Conference-2010 held in Grenoble, France. Basit has won the coveted ‘best paper award’ for his groundbreaking research work in the state-of-the-art computer design, according to the information reaching here on Friday.

[..]

Basit, a AVLSI Lab student at the prestigious Cornell University, has fully implemented transistor-level design that not only performed at 3.2 times higher speed, but also consumed six times less energy. [..]

Associated Press Of Pakistan

The Palm Campus (Image credit: Palm Corp.)

This news doesn’t make me particularly happy, because a great, innovative company that pioneered the handheld market has been gobbled up today for a paltry sum that may be less than the value of its patents alone. But I have to say, I did see this one coming. Almost two years ago I predicted that Palm would launch a Hail Mary piece of technology at CES and would expect its fortunes to turn… but that this hope would not materialize. About 5 months ago I predicted that Palm would lose out to the smartphone competition and would meet some form of doom in 2010. Lo and behold, both predictions came true. Palm didn’t shut down and go bankrupt, but then companies of its size that don’t have massive debt exposure seldom do. What did happen is that Palm was effectively picked up arguably for less than the price of its assets and it is now part of the HP behemoth. To put things in perspective, HP’s annual revenue (not market cap!) is about 100 times greater than what it paid to buy Palm. How’s that for scale…

So the question is now that Palm is part of HP, what will HP do? Will HP continue its partnership with Microsoft when it comes to mobile devices and phones? Will we continue to see Windows Mobile powered HP iPaqs? With the new HP tablet around the corner, will that run Windows, Windows Mobile 7 or Palm’s Web OS?

Clearly, HP has strengthened its position viz Apple with this buy. An HP tablet or phone with WebOS probably has a better chance of success given the accolades WebOS has received for usability. The biggest challenge that Palm was unable to surmount was simply attracting developers to the Palm ecosystem and getting WebOS apps developed to deliver the kind of variety of options the iPhone, and to a lesser extent Android, does. Perhaps with HP’s deep pockets – over $15B in cash on hand – and a massive partner base, this can change. If there’s on thing HP should focus on post acquisition, it is the developer eco-system.

Where this acquisition does become somewhat challenging for HP is that HP has never been a software company. Yes, they’ve built software, but it’s always been “that other thing we do”. Never the focus. With the Palm acquisition, the battle is not going to be fought so much over the device as it is over software. Unless HP changes its way of thinking and positions itself to truly leverage the software assets it is picking up, WebOS will go to waste, and with it the potential of a new mobile application eco system.

The future of HP/Palm is going to be interesting. First, let’s see how quickly HP is able to integrate this acquisition to enrich its current product line. There is talk of the HP tablet being equipped with the WebOS, and personally, I’m keen to see it in action!

And with that, a final salute to the great pioneer, Palm Computing. The King is dead. Long live the King!

Pepper.pk's location based Blackberry app, BerrySnooper

The New York Times published an interesting article on the state of IT innovation in India. In a nutshell, the Times found that while India continues to be a low-cost offshoring destination, Indian companies are not being able to truly innovate and create compelling new products. Within India, there appears to be an overwhelming focus on being a low cost body shop for western businesses while the environment remains unfriendly to innovation and risk.

Years ago, as India’s offshoring market was picking up, many analysts wondered whether India would eventually “learn the business” sufficiently to start producing innovating product focused companies that could scale. It appears that despite over 20 years of providing low-cost development services, the answer is still no.

Nadathur S. Ranghavan of Infosys, as quoted by the New York Times, explains:

“The same idea, if it’s born in Silicon Valley it goes the distance,” said Nadathur S. Raghavan, a investor in start-ups and a founder of Infosys, one of India’s most successful technology companies. “If it’s born in India it does not go the distance.”

Mr. Raghavan and others say India is held back by a financial system that is reluctant to invest in unproven ideas, an education system that emphasizes rote learning over problem solving, and a culture that looks down on failure and unconventional career choices.

Why is this? Personally, I think this phenomenon has taken hold because the skills necessary to create contract software at a low cost are completely different to what you need to dream up and create compelling and innovative products. When you’re implementing someone else’s vision, you really never have to think about Product Marketing questions, or exercise your imagination concerning new and unique capabilities you can deliver to users. You are instead focused on simply implementing a product definition as quickly and cheaply as you possibly can. Software product development requires a lot of creativity and it appears from the Indian experience, that this creativity is never allowed to develop or flourish in a body-shop environment.

So, how is Pakistan’s smaller but vigorous IT industry doing in comparison? Have we learnt any lessons from the Indian experience. It might be too early to tell, but it appears so. In recent times, I have hardly spoken to an IT entrepreneur in Pakistan whose goal is to build a services company. Everyone is talking products. And interesting, innovative ones at that. Now that enterprise software is not as hot as it used to be back in the early 2000s, thanks to open source alternatives and a resistance amongst F500 companies to freely spend on multi-million dollar licenses, applications with a more broad consumer appeal are back in the limelight. This is precisely where the Pakistani software industry appears to be focused.

Powering this significant shift within the Pakistani software industry are young and innovative companies like FiveRivers, TkXel, White Rabbit, Naseeb Networks, iScrybe, Pepper.pk, MindStorm Studios, GenITeam and others. iScrybe, for example, developed a marvelous personal organizer that attracted funding from Adobe. Naseeb Networks built one of the region’s largest job boards (Rozee.pk) and  has raised multiple rounds of funding from US investors including Silicon Valley based ePlanet Ventures, which is managed by one of the top 10 VCs in the world. Pepper.pk, TkXel and GenITeam are developing mobile products and an application developed by Pepper recently made it to the Handango Top 10 mobile apps list. White Rabbit just launched a promising Facebook game which has a good shot at catching on. And Mindstorm’s excellent Cricket Revolution 3D game has reportedly been signed up for distribution by a world-renowned gaming company.

These are all very promising and positive signs, but there is a long road to travel still. In the coming years it will become clear if the Pakistani software industry’s new focus on products and innovation is able to deliver dividends and create fast-growing, globally competitive software businesses.