Karachi's beautiful Sheraton hotel was the venue for P@SHA's 2011 Information Technology Awards

A big shout out to Jehanara, President of the Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA), and her management team for organizing a brilliant event last night at Karachi’s gorgeous Sheraton Hotel.

The 8th Annual P@SHA’s ICT (Information and Communication Technology) awards were wonderfully organized, fairly judged and brilliantly presented. The tremendous momentum and growth of Pakistan’s IT industry is plain for all to see and this Awards ceremony is a great showcase. Each year, the entries have been getting more and more sophisticated and wide ranging. A fair number of new companies have been recognized in the 2011 Awards which bodes well for the industry’s future.

If you’d like to check out the list of winners and learn more about the awards, you should click on over to the official P@SHA Awards website.

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Pepper.pk's highly popular Photo Editing suite for Blackberry devices is a global hit!

Stop the presses, ’cause here’s a piece of mind blowingly awesome news. Pepper.pk, a Lahore-based software company we’ve covered in the past, has hit it out of the park with their latest Photo Editor suite for Blackberry devices. Photo Editor has made it to #5 on the list of Top Paid Blackberry Applications ON THE PLANET! Yes, and across ALL categories. This is a monumental achievement and represents probably the most successful consumer software application ever developed in Pakistan. To see Photo Editor listed right next to apps like Facebook, and realizing that every last line of code for it was written in good old Lahore, is just plain thrilling!

When I spoke to the Pepper.pk folks, they told me that this isn’t the first victory for their image editing suite. Just last month they were also a Regional Selection for the Blackberry Super App Challenge!

Here’s the Blackberry AppWorld front page as of a few minutes ago:

Photo Editor for Blackberry, conceived, designed and coded in Pakistan breaks into the Global Blackberry Top 5 Paid Apps list.

What’s more, the app is getting excellent reviews at the Appworld webstore. You can visit the storefront by clicking here. There are comments like:

Review: Does everything it says + does it very well. Crop b4 rotate – it’s quicker. Love this app. I am very pleased =] Thank You xx

Review: Easy-to-use, simple, and effective. Takes a normal picture and turns it into epic shots that you’ll want to share with everyone.

Review: Ok, this is a fantastic app! If you use you blackberry to take lots of pictures, this is the perfect app to quickly edit the pics on the fly.

And there’s tons more showering praise on the app for being simple to use, having a clean interface and doing exactly what the developer claims it will do.

If you support the Pakistan software industry and are happy to see young Pakistani software developers making such a great impact at a global scale, whip out your blackberry, head on over to Appworld and download Photo Editor.

Good going Pepper.pk team! We hope to see many more successes from you.

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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!

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PASHA's Jehanara deserves a lot of praise for her efforts

Jehanara is not unknown to anyone familiar with the Pakistani IT scene. She has laboured and toiled for years to promote IT in Pakistan, in both her official capacity as the President of the Pakistan Association of Software Houses (P@SHA) as well as in her individual capacity as blogger, journalist and interviewer.

One of her most recent endeavours, the ITLoW project, or “In the Line of Wire”, is fast becoming a wonderful resource for entrepreneurs, students and technologists in Pakistan. I particularly enjoy her interviews focused on promoting entrepreneurship in Pakistan. Here’s a selection of some interesting interviews:

Interview with Jawwad Farid, CEO of Alchemy:

Jehanara's interview with Jawwad Farid

Interview with Amir Husain, CEO of VDIworks:

Interview with Amir Husain, CEO of VDIworks

Interview with Umar Saif, CS Professor at LUMS:

Jehanara's Interview with Dr. Umar Saif (CIO Pakistan - ITLoW)

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