It has been quite a magical evening for Team ICT Pakistan and for P@SHA. As you can see from the smiles, we bagged a few awards. PixSense PSP won the award for Best in Media and Entertainment Applications. Adnan was apparently not expecting it because he didn’t have a bag large enough to take it home. TPS Pvt Limited won the Award for Best in Tools & Infrastructure Applications. Shahzad Shahid was there to claim the trophy. If the Kraysis team of Jamil, Khurram and Mustafa look shell-shocked, it is because they were probably not expecting to win. They were chosen as the Best in the Startup Category. Imran Zia and I just had to have a picture taken with the winners. We missed our remaining judges - Jawwad Farid was there to see them receive the awards but had to leave right after for the airport. Sultan Hamdani and Nadeem Aslam Malik were already on the way home. There were 134 applications in the running for awards at APICTA 2008 from 11 economies in 16 categories. Only 16 trophies were awarded and we bagged 3 of them. Yay!!! But as Stephen Lau, Chairman of APICTA rightly said - anyone who participated in these awards was a winner and should be proud of his or her achievements.

More later! Just wanted to break the news. Well done Team ICT Pakistan. It was an evening which gladdened our hearts. We are so proud of all of you. Three cheers for all the nominees!       

Listening to Jahanzeb Sherwani talk at T2F on Saturday made me smile indulgently (yes I am old enough to do that :)). There was a feeling of pride that filled the room. Here was a young man who was from amongst us, had graduated from LUMS with a BS in Computer Science and who is now a Final Year PhD Student at Carnegie Mellon University AND had developed an application that was selling on the Apple iPhone AppStore. He stood there and spoke with a great deal of confidence to a small group of about 20 people who had come to listen to him out of curiosity and because they wanted to share in the thrill of his achievements and know more about his journey. In the group were some young programmers, some slightly older techies, a CIO from a bank, a CTO from a Silicon Valley based company with a development office in Pakistan, as well as some non-techy Apple iPhone fanatics and bloggers. Like most geeks, Jahanzeb had started developing applications soon after completing his BS simply because it was something that interested him although there was one slight difference between him and many others, and that was that he identified a user requirement (or as Jawwad Farid is fond of saying, he identified a pain and found a cure for that pain). As Jahanzeb took us through the history of Jaadu, the product that has brought him fame and hopefully fortune (although he wouldn’t tell us how much - yes i did prod!), he told us how he developed the first version made a rough video-cut of what it could do, put it on YouTube, and was blown away by the amazing response - 100,000 views the first week - it sort of reminded me of how Scrybe got started. JS’s video was the #1 most viewed video on Sci/Tech that week. The website made it to all the top tech blogs overnight - Digg, Engadget, Gizmodo, TUAW, etc. Having always developed on Windows and for the Windows platform, why did he decide to develop an application for the iPhone? Simply because the iPhone is the first truly “converged” device and it has what he terms a “revolutionary” interface. That’s what attracted him to it. Was it difficult to get Jaadu onto the App Store? Apparently for him it really wasn’t. Lucky break perhaps, the right app at the right time, an idea that appealed to iPhone users apparently since Jaadu received wide press coverage and was on the opening page of Apple iTunes in “What’s Hot” and “Staff Favourites” internationally as soon as it was launched. Look at some of the Press Coverage it initially got (it was called Teleport at that stage): Washington Post: “…a winning application…for those who need to really work with remote machines on their iPhone or iPod touch.” Toys and Gadgets: “…could be the best [iPhone pplication] that has been released so far” Boy Genius Report: “Best. iPhone. Application. Ever.” The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW): First Look at Teleport Some of the lessons learnt that he passed on - especially to the other youngsters who were at T2F for his talk (those who weren’t really missed out!) 1. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do something. I did it. Any of you can! 2. Always concentrate on the Interface Design and on the user. Get a non-techie to test it. Make sure you are building the app for the users and not for yourself. The coding is the simplest part of the exercise. 3. Develop it, check it for bugs and put it out there. Get a response to see if it worth much more time into (of course he said the flip side was that if you wait too long, it might not be relevant any longer). 4. Put a value to it. Jahanzeb sold his very first simple app for US$5, then added value to the product and it sold for US$15 and 15 Euros and now Jaadu is selling for US$25 on the App Store. 5. Be sure you can provide Tech Support to users who will call in with all sorts of questions. 6. Make sure the app is easy to instal - with guidelines for the simplest problems that users could have - so that at least 80% of the issues will be taken care of. This is what he has done. 7. If Apple is keeping 30% of the revenue, they are also dealing with a lot of the headache in terms of tech support, sales, returns, etc. Well worth it. And the Apple website is a huge marketplace as the population of iPhone and iPod Touch users increases. Jahanzeb, all I can say is you are a cool dude. You make us  proud. Good luck. And if you haven’t yet made your first million, you will soon! I am willing to place a bet on it. BTW next time you will have to sing. You cannot be let off the hook again.:) Ooops I forgot a very important review of the product.

Dr. Umar Saif, Professor at LUMS, believes that we need to glamorize Research if we are to achieve excellence in Higher Education. Well, he has started the ball rolling on the path to making research look pretty sexy. What am I talking about? A paper that Dr. Umar Saif co-authored with students and colleagues at MIT has been awarded the Mark Weiser best paper award at IEEE Percom’08! The Mark Weiser Award is the highest award of recognition for a researcher in the field of Pervasive Computing. This is the first time it has been awarded to a paper with a byline of a Pakistani university. Percom is ranked in the A+ category in the CORE list (widely used for ranking conferences in CS); as the premier conference in pervasive computing, percom had an acceptance rate of ~11% this year. An extended version of the paper will appear as an invited paper in the Pervasive and Mobile Computing Journal later this year (PMC). A copy of the paper is posted at: http://www.cag.csail.mit.edu/~umar/publications/percom08-goals-web.pdf The system was featured in several technology magazines, newspapers and blogs. BBC published the most “sensational” story (and Umar believes it is the best picture in popular media): I think the one taken by Jawwad at SI#6 was much nicer (the one above): http://www.pervasive-cmi.csail.mit.edu/news/3583479.stm.html Umar and his team started this work over 4 years ago, when they wrote the first position paper on what we dubbed goal-oriented programming. This paper laid out the early vision of a system that may be programmed with human intent, rather than complicated computer jargon. The system became the center piece of Project Oxygen at MIT ($45Million project) and became a progenitor of several follow on systems in this area. The vision paper: http://cag.csail.mit.edu/~umar/publications/ubisys.pdf You may download the following video to see the system (and Umar Saif) in action: http://cag.csail.mit.edu/~umar/tmpmovies/mov1.mpg Other noteworthy work done by Umar and his team in the area of research in the last 6 months include 1. A project that got funding from Microsoft Research (Poor Man’s broadband) was featured in New Scientist (a first for Pakistan). http://www.cag.csail.mit.edu/~umar/NS-PMB.pdf. This was also the first time a research project in Pakistan was funded by Microsoft Research (LUMS press release: http://web.lums.edu.pk/umar/press/microsoft.asp.html 2. They just got a large collaborative research program funded in collaboration with UC Berkeley (by USAID/HEC). This research program is focused on Developing-world technologies and the work will be jointly carried out with Eric Brewer’s TIER group at Berkeley (http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu). Our side will be led by my team at http://www.dritte.org and http://newt.lums.edu.pk — with participation by PTCL, VU, NADRA, PITB and DSD. 3. They will be running a course with Univ. of Washington (Seattle, UW) on developing-world technologies in a week’s time. The lectures will broadcast live on LUMS campus and Umar Saif will be guest lecturing in a couple of sessions via a video link. There will be other guest lecturers from MIT, CMU, Berkeley and Microsoft. Course website (still evolving): http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/csep590b/CurrentQtr/

Stay a step ahead of consumer demand The emerging energy crisis all over the country especially in the urban areas has adversely affected the commercial, industrial and domestic life for people of Pakistan. This has landed the country in a complete state of flux. As a result of the current political turmoil coupled with the energy crisis, no foreign investment is forthcoming. Despite these prevailing conditions of the country, there are still few committed individuals’ who belief in their capabilities and stay focused towards achieving their goals. One most proud example is of Farrukh Abbas, 25 years old Pakistani who co-founded Mobile Weaver at the age of 22, along with his two European companions Babar Baig and Umar Akram, with a promising hope of making it big one day. These three entrepreneurs started a small venture in 2005 by the name of Mobile Weaver based in Islamabad and Copenhagen. The motivation behind the startup was based on a simple idea that connects the mobile developer community with the mobile consumers by uniting them on one platform. They started up by picking up the best selling applications and games from the world wide developers and selling them to consumers through a content delivery platform. In this whole process the developers were provided with the major share of the earnings. Some big names for developer partners include Spb Software House, Mobifusion, Sunny Soft, Beiks, Mobisystems, Shapes Services and many others. The company’s flagship product, Youpark.com is an online storefront that provides users with an exclusive catalog of interesting mobile applications and games for platforms like Symbian, Windows Mobile (Smartphone and Pocket PC), Palm OS, Java as well as Blackberry. They offer latest mobile software and games for leading mobile manufacturers such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, HTC and many more. In a very short time the company has partnered with the leading mobile distributors such as Bright Point Inc and many clients in Italy, France, United Kingdom and Norway. Mobile Weaver provides solutions to these distributors, so that they can market and sell devices along with their device specific applications and games. Mobile industry in Pakistan is dominated with few big names of mobile distributors such as United Mobile and Mobile Zone. The main challenge for mobile distributors in Pakistan is to come closer to their customers by providing them value in their services. Mobile Weaver possesses the same endeavor of providing innovative solutions to the distributors of Pakistan so that they can offer consumer an easy access to exciting world of mobile content. Pakistan is one of the world’s fastest-growing cell-phone markets, with user numbers growing by 73% as compared to the last year. The country of 160 million currently has 67 million cellular subscribers. Consumer expectations are increasing and their loyalty to service providers is low. They want a lot more than beautiful ringtones on Valentine’s Day or greeting messages on Eid day. This growing awareness in consumers has made them sophisticated enough to know where and how to find the right deal. With the rising maturity in content market, Pakistani people want value added services such as feature rich applications that can fulfill their needs whether they are business, travel, lifestyle or entertainment. As the market shifts from technology-based to consumer-driven, it is essential for the Pakistani mobile players such as telcos and mobile distributors to squarely match the requirements of mobile consumers. To provide consumers with innovative and value added content is exactly the goal Mobile Weaver is pursuing. This objective can only be achieved by accepting the emergence of mobile content at the right time and responding to the increasingly changing demands of mobile consumers. About the Author Sarah Shaukat is a qualified software engineer, presently working with a software house based in Islamabad. She’s an experienced technical writer as well, and possesses in-depth knowledge of cellular industry specializing in the areas of mobile content and mobile application development.