Another Pepper.pk app hits the Global #1 on Appworld!

Ok, I’m starting to sound like a broken record here, but when the news is this awesome, I hardly mind! You may remember that a few months ago we covered Lahore-based Pepper.pk’s Photo Editor application which had made it to World #1 on Blackberry Appworld. Well, they’ve done it again, and this time with a different app, called LED Notifier. How awesome is that?

There are a number of companies in our local industry doing excellent application development for mobile platforms. Some of these are gaming outfits like TinTash and GenITeam, while others are more generally focused, such as TkXel. Pepper.pk’s string of hits – which by the way are not restricted just to World #1 on Blackberry Appworld – but include other honours, such as placement on Handango’s Top 10 list, being picked as a Blackberry Regional Selection, producing a World #4 iTunes utility and much else.

This news has been covered widely and you can read about it over at My Pakistan, GadgetGizmodo, P@kBytes, SizzledCore and numerous other places.

Share this:

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.

Share this:

Run Razzle Run is one of TkXel's gaming titles developed in partnership with Sunstorm Interactive

I’m pretty bullish on this move towards product development in the Pakistani software industry. We’ve recently covered a number of up and coming startups that are working on exciting technology, going direct to the end customer and trying to  move beyond the sometimes-boring “software thaykaydaari”…

Just recently, we had Hassan Baig from Islamabad based Facebook app developer, White Rabbit, tell us how he’s building teams and motivating key contributors. We also looked at Lahore based Pepper.pk’s work in mobile app development and their recent appearance in the Handango Top 10 Blackberry Apps list. And of course, we’ve talked about TkXel too, but today we’re going to get to know this company a lot better.

I had the opportunity to chat with their CEO, Umair Javed, about his thoughts on mobile app development, TkXel’s achievements and plans for the future. Interesting stuff. Here goes…

Tell us a little about TkXel. When was the  company founded and what were the founder’s backgrounds?

TkXel is a software development company that is working in Mobile and Web 2.0 domains. TkXel provides software development services to companies across the globe. It also develops its own products and sells these through various channels.

TkXel was founded in 2008 in a small lab of LUMS. I was an adjunct faculty member at the CS department and started working with an initial engineering team comprised of a few highly enthusiastic and skilled graduating students. These remarkable engineers took up some challenging work and helped the company get on its feet.

From this humble beginning, the team started to expand and soon it was clear that LUMS’ small lab would not be able to accommodate the entire team. So in September 2008, the team shifted to its office outside LUMS. TkXel is now a fast growing company and has more than 30 full time engineers, graphic designers and QA resources on its team. While most of TkXel’s engineering team comes from the leading universities like LUMS and FAST-NU, TkXel also picks up raw talent from other places and polish them to be at par with others.

Is the company privately funded or Venture backed? Are you profitable?

The initial funding for the company was privately sourced. TkXel achieved positive cash flow in its first quarter and is currently a profitable entity.

Why did you choose mobile application development? There seem to be a large number of companies in Pakistan these days that are focused on mobile apps. We recently covered another Lahore based startup, Pepper.pk. Are you following a trend or do you bring something unique to this space?

We chose mobile application development for two reasons; technology convergence to mobile platforms, and opportunities available for entrepreneurs.

About two years back the introduction of the iPhone turned the smartphone market on its head and at that moment we thought it was an ideal time to get into the mobile app development market. It gave us direct reach to end users across the globe. At the same time, it helped us offer our services in a spectrum which was not yet saturated like traditional web development.

Over the last year and half we earned decently from our products and services, and now that we have a better understanding of development and marketing in this area we are working on various concepts that have the potential of going big.

From the perspective of a Pakistani company, we offer services and products that are not offered by many Pakistani companies. These services include end to end game development, which is still a very rare skill in the local landscape.

Our readers would be interested to learn more about your distribution strategy. How do you take your apps to market and what approaches have worked for you? Which ones haven’t?

We are primarily distributing our apps through the appstores and marketplaces of handset manufacturers. These appstores have given us direct access to international customers. To enhance our sales we rely on social media channels. Right now we are in the process of establishing a dedicated social media team that can help us in creating visibility about our products and services.

Mobile apps on the consumer side are all about volume. Tell us a little about your pricing strategy to optimize volume – how do you think consumer focued mobile apps should be priced? And also, how do you drive volume? Do you run SEO/SEM activities, or employ other approaches?

There are two distinct categories when it comes to pricing. We feel that games and entertainment apps are about volume as the target market segment is very large. So, low pricing along with decent quality brings a lot of customers to your apps. The key in this category is how successful are you in terms of creating a marketing buzz about your app. Your marketing gives you an initial surge and if the app is of decent quality it will then lift itself up.

The second category includes applications developed for niche areas. Here the market size is small but they are willing to pay high if your app has a utility for them, so price could be high.

We have worked with the above mentioned two strategies and are getting reasonable rewards. We have not yet applied SEO or SEM techniques to our products but we think that right now Social Medial Marketing brought much more benefits than SEO or SEM. The reason is simple; customers are searching your apps on the appstores and not on Google or other search engines. The social media strategies work because customers come to dedicated forums or places where they can find peer reviews and recommendations for apps and games.

What do you believe are the hottest categories within mobile app development? There seems to be a lot of focus on location based apps and augmented reality. Your thoughts on these and other compelling areas?

To answer your first question, the hottest categories within mobile app development are definitely entertainment and games. That is where the largest customer base is.

Though occasionally one hears about applications from other categories, making it big, they are quite few and far between. Talking about location based apps and services, they have been around for some time now but none of them have really made a breakthrough. We believe as  time passes and more location data becomes available, these apps will get more popular. Augmented reality is a relatively new but exciting area. However, there are many technical issues that need to be solved before we will see some really compelling stuff coming out.

Do you principally promote your products in international markets or are you also focused on Pakistan?

We primarily promote our products in the international market. Even our suite of Islamic apps is more popular in the West rather than the Middle East or Asian markets! We believe that this is due to the online buying culture and greater handset penetration in the West.

However, we are now working on some specialized products for local and non US/European markets. We will share more with you when we come close to launch.

What prospects do you see for local software companies wanting to push mobile device software or value added services in Pakistan? Is the market large enough?

We believe that prospects for VAS, local content and Mobile apps are bright in the medium to long run. As smartphone penetration increases, the possibilities become endless. However concerns remain about the customer’s buying power and willingness to buy through Telco channels. One of the key problems that still need to be solved is an easy payment method. Right now there is no universal payment procedure locally that users can use to pay for the service they buy. The result is a mandatory tie up with telecom carriers if one needs to offer VAS. We believe once these kinks are worked out, data plans become cheaper and data rates get faster, mobile apps and the local content market will take off.

Any parting thoughts before we conclude the interview?

We strongly believe that the IT industry in this region can grow at a lightening pace if the gap between the academia and the industry is bridged. This can be done by promoting entrepreneurial incubators in our universities or institutions. All around the world, it’s a common phenomenon that university driven research gives birth to high-tech startups and that contributes to their economy. Despite the recession in the West, startups have not only braved the trying times but are thriving. So it’s a unique time to position our own youth to capture the next big wave and encourage them to create something new through their own initiatives.

Share this: