Lahore's almost-complete Software Park tower

After many delays and much hemming and hawing the much awaited Lahore Technology Park is almost complete. The building has now been topped off and work on the facade and interior has been moving forward full steam for a few months now. The parking lot structure, which will also contain some additional commercial space, is also pretty much done. Much remains to be done in the immediate vicinity though… vendors running small shops and stalls need to be moved, the power line distribution infrastructure needs to be re-worked, specially on the Ferozepur Road side, and the park grounds need to be beautified. But, in due time, that too will happen. For now, it’s nice to see the completed structure of a much delayed building!

It’s important to point out that with the delays affecting the CDGK’s (City District Government of Karachi) call center tower, this will be the country’s largest single structure devoted to technology – mostly software – businesses. The PITB (Punjab IT Board) is the agency responsible for the construction and maintenance of this complex.

Stay tuned for more as work progresses…

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.

Jawwad Farid’s Avicena, a Karachi-based e-education company, has recently launched a new Corporate Finance portal. This is an online resource for those interested in learning more about Corporate Finance – an incredibly important subject as the business environment in Pakistan matures and is layered with complexity and sophistication. I asked Jawwad about his targeted audience, and here is what he had to say:

“The suggested audience is really anyone who is looking for a quick refresher or ready reference in Finance without opening that storage box to locate their Corporate Finance text book.”

Jawwad also explained how the portal came to be:

“This is the second re-birth of Avicena, our e-education adventure. Someone who read the book asked me if I still had the content around and if I could get around to uploading it.  What took 4 people, 18 months and just under 250,000 dollars to put together a decade ago, took less than week in Wordpress in February. Since then the site has done well.In addition to the courses we wrote at Avicena I now upload a new course almost every month and its gotten reasonably exotic very very quickly (as you will see with the progression in the course inventory)”

So head on over to the http://finance.oilinsights.net/ and get yourself a quick CF refresher!

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.

Indian politicians holding a supposed $35 tablet

Here comes another announcement heralding the arrival of an inexpensive computer made in India. Is it the Sakshit? No. Is it the Simputer? No. This time it’s a new red herring… an as-yet unnamed tablet unveiled by an Indian politician, Kapil Sibal, who is currently the head honcho at the Indian Human Resources Ministry. It would seem that what is really behind these proclamations are not technological advances, but in fact bureaucrats and politicians who are desperately trying to best each other with impossible to believe price points. The fact that these prices turn out to be, well, impossible, is apparently a minor detail that we are not supposed to pay attention to.

For the historically inclined, we’ve covered this cheap computer fetish in the past. Here’s coverage from when the Indian press was going wild about the launch of a $10 computer, the Sakshat, which turned out to be a complete lemon.

To summarize, the Indian HR ministry would have us believe that they have chanced upon a secret formula that will deliver a touchscreen tablet capable of running Linux (or Android… Open Office is specifically referred to as a supported application), with 2GB of RAM, a battery and plenty of other features, for the low price of $35. Never mind that India doesn’t build processors and will have to import them at costs set, not by the HR Ministry, but by international suppliers. Never mind that India doesn’t build these touchscreens and that they would consume almost the entire $35 budget at current international prices. Never mind that RAM has a globally-set commodity price which is as closely tracked as precious metals or other commodities, and 2GB of RAM will *not* be available to the Indian HR Ministry for a cost that would be consistent with the $35 price target of the device. When you’re pulling numbers from the air (or from somewhere else) what does reality have to do with it?

But you know what’s even better? “In volume”, says Mr. Kapil Sibal, this tablet will cost $10. Mmmhmm.

When will this product be available? No news. What processor does it have? No news. What kind of touchscreen does it use? No news. How are all these components being sourced from a global supply chain for only $35? No news.

So, ladies and gentlemen, we now have Chapter 3 in the fascinating saga of Indian politicans and their love for cheap, albeit, nonexistent ethereal computers. I am sure this is not what the industry meant when it said we’re all migrating to “computing in the cloud”, Mr. Sibal. You can can extract your head from the stratosphere now. Thank you.

Pakistan's Thar Desert holds beneath it trillions of dollars of proven - and untapped - coal reserves (Image credit: Travelpod)

Pakistan is an incredibly rich country when it comes to mineral wealth. There are numerous estimates of how significant our reserves of oil, gas, coal, metals, gold, marble and salt might be but one has to keep in mind that all such estimates are the result of limited surveys. Just the Thar coal reserves are known to pack more energy than the combined oil reserves of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Our Khewra salt mines are the world’s second largest, next to Canada’s gigantic Goderich mines. The amount of marble and onyx that is recovered from the mines in our northern areas is absolutely staggering. If only we had finer cutting and polishing industries our marble exports alone could generate a significantly higher level of foreign exchange.

In the past, there has been a great hesitance on the part of Pakistani governments to truly explore the country’s vast and untapped reserve of natural resources. Lately, however, I have been hearing at least the right sort of noises. For example, several power plants based on Thar coal extraction are about to come on line in the next couple of years. The investments in these facilities is in the $3.7B neighbourhood. They will tap a minutely small percentage of what the Thar reserves are capable of producing. Similarly, there has been a very promising development in Baluchistan, with the Army including 70,000 local Baluchi workers in a program to mine the mineral deposits at Chamalang and share the vast majority of the earnings with the local people, and to invest it in their development. Similarly, just a day or so ago, Salman Siddique, the Federal secretary of finance, announced that two companies – Chillian Tethyan Copper and Canada’s Barricks Gold - have agreed to invest $3.2B in the Baluchistan Rekodiq mines and develop infrastructure there.

This is encouraging! What must be ensured is complete transparency, which will hopefully reduce the chances of inefficiencies or graft creeping into the system. Here is a report from the Daily Times with more on the story:

Barricks, Tethyan to invest $3.2bn in copper, gold project

By Sajid Chaudhry

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s potential copper and gold deposit Reko Diq (Balochistan) has been able to attract a fresh investment to the tune of $3.2 billion by a joint venture comprising the world’s largest mining company Barricks Gold Corporation of Canada and Chillian Tethyan Copper Company.

Federal Secretary Finance Salman Siddique hosted a reception in honour of the President and Chief Executive of Barricks Gold Corporation of Canada, Aaron Regent which was attended by Federal Minister for Finance Dr Hafeez Shaikh, diplomats and senior government officials.

President and CEO of Barricks Gold Corporation of Canada, Aaron Regent speaking on the occasion said that the joint venture to develop the Riko Diq into a world class mine with transfer of technology and human resource development for the benefit of the province as well as for the economy of Pakistan.

He informed that development of Reko Diq would create around 11,000 job opportunities and the project operations would provide jobs to some 25, 000 to mainly locals as well as technical human resource.

TO continue reading, please visit The Daily Times

The brand new Islamabad Stock Exchange building (Photo credit: NNI)

The KSE’s experienced some ups and downs lately. Perhaps not as extreme as the Dow rollercoaster, but ups and downs nonetheless. It’s good to see there’s some positive movement now and there’s been a consistent recovery from the dip we saw a couple of months ago. The run-up has allowed the index to comfortably cross the 10,000 mark. The index stands at 10,187 pts on July 14th, 2010. The last time we covered the index was at this level was back in April when the market had breached the 10,500 pt barrier.

So where does the index go from here? This is a tough one to call because there’s just way too many variables in play these days. My personal opinion is that the index will remain rangebound in the 9,600-10,800 point range for a while. There will need to be some exceptionally good news to move it beyond this level. There has been a flurry of good economic news recently, for example, the export targets being met, the forex remittances hitting an all-time high, reserves hitting an all-time high and power generation projects coming on line. There’s no doubt that an alleviation of the power crisis will definitely spur industry and there’s a very good chance that these effects will become visible in the next 9-18 months given the maturation of projects currently in play.

So, net-net, good news for now! We’ll probably stay under 11K pts for the next couple of months and beyond that there’s a good chance that positive movement continues as long as the news stays good and there isn’t a recurrence of the global meltdown. That last piece, by the way, is far from an unlikely event given the recent indications that the US economic recovery is stuttering now that the bailout monies are dissipating.

We’ll watch the KSE here and see how things progress. Stay tuned!

Throw in an inexpensive 4-port SATA RAID controller to boost PC performance

If you want to give your PC a quick and inexpensive upgrade, you might consider doing what I just did: upgrade the storage subsystem. With 6.0Gbps SATA III cards now under $30, and RAID cards for SATA drives available on the cheap, there’s no reason to live in the old days and run your OS off a slow drive! Typically, a modern PC is most constrained in two departments; graphics performance, and disk I/O. If you can afford an upgrade of both, you’re sure to give your PC a nice life extension while giving yourself an enjoyable, smooth computing experience.

One of my secondary machines in my home office was starting to feel quite slow. I’m sure it was the usual Windows registry bloat coupled with the fact that it never had a blazing fast disk to begin with. A 5400RPM SATA drive was all. And that was hosting both the OS and some data. The processor on the machine is a dual core Pentium running at 3.0Ghz and the graphics card is an Nvidia 9400GT with 512MB RAM. Not otherworldly, but no slouches either. The poorest performer was certainly that old HDD.

I had recently purchased an el-cheapo $20 SIG 4-port SATA RAID Controller and happened to have some old 160GB Quantum 5400RPM hard drives lying around. Luckily I had 4, and they were the exact same size! You could probably pick drives like these up for $10-$15 bucks. I decided to do a fresh OS install so copying data and backing up apps etc. wasn’t really much of a concern. I moved my important data off to a USB drive and could now safely nuke the rest of the drive contents.

After completing the hardware install – which was a little bit tricky because I had to use one of the 3.5 inch floppy/card reader drive bays to install the 4th HDD, I was ready to create the RAID array. I was looking for performance, so striping was really going to be the ticket. I basically had two options a) Create a RAID 0 array with 640GB of capacity or b) a RAID 10 array with striping and mirroring, giving me 320GB. Did I really need the extra data security? Naaah, I thought. This was a secondary PC and I was going to store all my data to my Cisco home NAS anyway. So what if the OS tanks in case a drive croaks. I wouldn’t be losing much.

So, RAID 0 with 640GB it was.

The SIG RAID BIOS makes it particularly easy to create the array. It’s really just a couple of key presses and you’re done. Next, I booted using a Windows 7 (Original!) installation CD. I had to use the SIG RAID driver CD to initialize the RAID array and cause the Windows setup program to detect the drives… that went over quite well, even though the SIG driver disk had Windows 2003, XP and Vista drivers – nothing specific for Windows 7.

From there on, it was a piece of cake. I quickly wrapped up the Windows install and there I was. A Fresh PC which felt pretty snappy. I used the excellent Ninite installer to silently install my favourite apps – a good 15 or 20 of them – and I was in business.

Performance felt pretty good, but I wanted to measure it and see what the numbers said. I used the nifty little free tool, DiskBench to measure performance. Here’s what it said:

File Read/Write performance with the RAID card installed

If you find that hard to read, let me help. Read performance is 578.3MB/sec (that MegaBYTES!) or 4.6Gbps! And write performance was clocked at 131.15MB/sec or 1Gbps! That was good enough to get a 5.9 Windows Experience Index rating from the Windows Experience benchmarking tool.

So, for well under $100, I’ve given my system a pretty impressive boost in performance. If you’ve got a system with a free PCIe slot and you can find a cheap RAID card, give it a shot. You won’t regret it.

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