As i speak, more and more online shops are opening their (virtual) doors. I’l make a shortlist of the .com places you can now use to buy stuff on shortly and post them up here…ive already covered some in previous blogposts
Eid Mubarak to everyone. I ofcourse am on vacation till wednesday 
Si3 recently won and has started work on Dawn Group’s portal project. Seems like after epaper.dawn.com’s success, Dawn is now going on full gear to build a proper portal with several web services in it. The sales cycle for this is rumoured to be almost 2 years with the project being in the 100-300,000 USD range. It will have a intranet as well as a public internet section as far as I understand. Any other details are welcome.
Being built on IBM technologies, it will use Websphere Portal, db2 content manager,etc. Sounds like an IBM/Java geeks dream project but honestly, right now its 2am I am too tired to rave about it, I’ll do it at another time
UBL Bank recently purchased the Mercury suite of tools for its software development practice. Mercury, a fairly expensive set of tools is used to design and test/QA software applications, and is similar to the IBM Rational Suite of Products. LMKR is rumoured to have closed the deal.
Also:
HP last month acquired Mercury in a bid to better compete with IBM. IBM acquired Rational years ago and has since very well integrated that into its offerings. For HP, the Mercury purchase is playing catchup and trying to build an enterprise software and services business with aspirations of becoming today’s IBM.
The cases have finally been withdrawn…but last I checked Faisal was still inside…Hopefully he will be released in a day or two at the most. All in all, this was not possible without the industry getting together, and some key people who have come forward to rally the cause. You can read the whole story here,
On Dec 18th Pixsense announced that they have secured $5.4 million US in series A funding. A truly innovative idea being built right here, the Pixsense solution allows you to directly send pictures from your mobile phone directly onto your flickr-like site on the internet. One of the VCs, Innovacom, also interestingly has invested in Mobilecomplete (both Series A and part of B). Mobilecomplete is another Silicon Valley based company with backoffices in Karachi that is on my watch list, they are doing very well also.
Im truly happy about Pixsense moving forward. Ive been watching them for awhile now, previous coverage is here:
http://mohtashim.wordpress.com/2006/12/01/pixsense-an-awesome-innovation-being-built-in-pakistan/
Details of the funding are here:
http://beta.pixsense.com/htm/pr-Dec_18_2006.ps
Pixsense is also hiring, btw 
PS : Thanks to Farzal for bringing this to my attention!
Yes it was a very horizontal portal ie the strategy was to cover every single topic in the world and then throw banner ads at them (users)….old school,yes..very old school. but what happened to it? it doesnt wotk anymore..the URL is dead?!
if it still works please let me know, i cant seem to get through to it…
is http://www.apnakarachi.net/ the same as apnakarachi.com, just on the .net domain?
The Sirius PDA, which i wrote about a few months ago, was one of the stars of the rural connectivity conference hosted by PASHA recently, and it just got coverage by Jang…big bling bling ! I bet the Fiver rivers site got several hundred hits right after this was published a few days ago…. the link to the article is below
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/dec2006-weekly/cyber-17-12-2006/index.html#1
(not to be vain, but i think i write more interesting articles , lol )
Yes! I finally ordered from beliscity.com , so for all of you who have wondered what its like ordering online from a pakistan e-shop in Karachi, heres my 2 cents:
1. great service..they actually didnt have what i ordered in stock (which the website should have warned me about…so thats one minus but still) but they were able to find me a replacement model. But this means inventory and the website is disconnected. So, if you order something, you wont actually know if its in stock until after you place the order. Good thing there is nothing to pay upfront! (C.O.D model going here)
2. it showed up the day after i ordered it (the item) and they called me and came over, even though it was after office hours and brought along the credit card machine. (cash/credit on delivery). but yes, they charged me the dreaded extra 2.5% for the credit card fee..hmmm
3. since it wasnt what i ordered/wanted, i told them i’ll only buy the item if i liked it, they were ok with that. since the whole thing was a bit desi, i even asked for a discount …and got one! (so ask for one! lol)
overall, great first experience, i will reorder from them again!
Novartis recently completed its SAP deployment in Pakistan and automated its financials and some operations. The team came in from Malaysia and implemented the solution in about 8 months. Novartis now joins a the rank of MNCs like Standard chartered, ICI,etc that are centralizing their global operations into large regional data centers, hosted usually out of places like Singapore , Bangalore (one of the cheaper locations for this sort of work), eastern european countries like Hungary,etc. The formula usually is Lotus notes+SAP for the multinational pharmas. This also helps them cut costs, a move they are prone to doing nowadays because of the beating the local pharma companies are giving the foreign brands.
Ofcourse, its good for them but not good for local software and SI vendors. Business in MNCs generally due to such moves is usually wiped out a year or so after such a system goes live. Besides raising the number of implementations of SAP locally, it doesn’t really help the local SAP vendors since they lose out on the services side of the business. And customers : next time when you a MNC on the list of “successful” SAP implementations by a local vendor , do ask for a clarification as to who actually implemented it and what the motivation was for it. Its a different story automating a head office (say, New york) as opposed to a branch office (say Karachi) of an MNC.
