I recently heard from Farrukh Jawed over at LUMS. He wrote to me excitedly about a project that he and his LUMS compadres have been working on for quite some time now. No, it’s not a souped up dialup network for people in developing countries, or a submission to an MIT contest. It’s actually a [...]
Driving around in Lahore the other day, I came across these large Warid banners at several places in the Cantt. area. As you can see from the image, Warid is investing quite a bit in advertising their newest service, wzone.
wzone is a mobile destination you can visit using your cell phone which provides you with [...]
Quite possibly. I started thinking along these lines when a hot-shot American investment banker friend mentioned that “70% of the US’ GDP is consumer driven”. That much, huh?! It’s no secret that THE key point of interaction for consumer businesses is now the web. In fact, most Web 2.0 companies are consumer focused, even as [...]
In one of their latest, “More bars in more places ad”, AT&T shows a basketball fan shooting hoops at an arcade. The fan’s alter-ego – his phone – appears and says, “Chuck can’t answer right now because Chuck’s an idiot. He doesn’t have AT&T.”
This is completely uncalled-for and inappropriate. We’ve gone from subtle enticements, to telling [...]
PTCL (Pakistan Telecommunications Corporation Ltd.) has an uphill battle ahead of it as the number of its landline subscribers continues to shrink by the day. PTCL’s wireless services, Ufone and VPTCL, have been doing well, but the company still needs to offer value added services and widen its wireless subscriber base if it is to [...]
What is up with the extreme media bias against Pakistan? This morning, CNN focused its cover story on Pakistan’s decision to block YouTube due to the presence of content deemed offensive and inciteful. In the past, Brazil, China and Thailand – to name just a few – have blocked YouTube, but CNN has never presented [...]
Now this piece of news was interesting to me at multiple levels. First, since I travel quite a bit I’ve always wondered what the next generation of entertainment and business technologies available in-flight would be. Well, we now have an institution in our own neighbourhood that will be dedicated to improving the travel experience by [...]
Here is a list of our predictions for 2008. While most of these predictions have to do with technology and IT companies in Pakistan, some of them are political. We’ll circle back on Jan 1 2009 to see how accurate our crystal ball was; until then, we’d love to hear your opinions!
After Etisalat’s $2.6BN investment in PTCL, the feeding frenzy appears to be just beginning. OmanTel announced that they are acquiring a majority stake in WordCall, one of Pakistan’s largest multimedia and telecom company. Salman Taseer, as we all know, also runs the Business Plus channel, the Daily Times Newspaper, PACE Pakistan and WordCall Multimedia, WorldCall [...]
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, [...]
