iShop reincarnates itself….

iShop , despite news that its closed actually hasnt. Its reincarnated itself as myShop. Its just that the management did a lousy job of conveying that, and the old URL doesnt point to the new one…ofcourse i might be wrong, maybe iShop did close down and someone was smart enough to pick up their amazing website interface and use it as a front for their shop…if thats the case beliscity just lost out bigtime on potential sales. If i were a first time customer, i’d rather buy from myshop than any other place..just because of the sensible design that helps me choose the right laptop….and too bad they only do laptops, hopefully they will sell more geek stuff in the future. check out the new site below:

http://myshop.com.pk/

PS a big thanks to Khawar for getting the URL out here on this blog!

CureMD signs contract with Venezuela’s Largest Health Management Organization

This is and other interesting fresh stuff off the news roll on the PASHA website….check it out, alot of good stuff happening nowadays, some ive mentioned on my blog here, some not. For the whole spiel, go here:

 http://www.pasha.org.pk/

2 biiiiiion dooolaar?

According to a recent publication, and several people talking to me have said that the Pakistani IT industry is worth 2 billion dollars a year. This includes all local hardware,software,networking and imported/exported software.

hmmmm. what you do think? do you agree? I personally would not count anything but local technology produced as real value. As they now say, the world is flat. imports: bad. exports : good.
But if someone insists on just piling everything together, (no doubt to make us look good) i’d say the number is closer to 1.2 billion dollars/year. It might be 2, or even 2.5 , next year but not now.

ofcouse,a few months ago pseb said the same thing…that its about 1.35billion dollars.see below:

click here for pseb study 

Below are my annual estimates of market size(note: my personal, educated guesses after 5 years of industry experience.. these are not official in any way, so you’ll have to take my word for it that I know what im talking about)

All PCs : about 700 million dollars a year. shrunk a bit due to GST

all servers: about 100 million USD

MNCs:

Oracle : about 20 million USD

Microsoft: about 12 mil USD

IBM : about 35 mil USD

Intel : about 80 million USD (all hail Pentiums)

cisco : about 35-45 million USD

AMD : negligible

All local software houses combined: about 300 million usd a year (officially our exports are about 70 mil)

PS : the MNCs are ramping up fast, everyone, including IDC apparently says the IT industry locally is growing by 35%+

what are your numbers/estimates? do you agree? disagree? comments comments!

Pakwheels rocks!

I use this site so much but it never occured to me to post it here !

for anything related to cars in pakistan, you can go to

pakwheels.com

Started a few years ago, the site has come a long way, mostly thanks to its users and forums. I was recently looking to buy a car, and this site proved to be invaluable as a source of information. used car prices posted are higher than market average but the forums are very useful and the people on there are always willing to help. Want to logon to the web and find the right mechanic, check car prices, see where the next car club meet is,etc, this is the place to go…

Lahore Expo center selects Cisco…

Just heard today, the still-under-construction Lahore expo center (something like Karachi expo center) has selected Cisco as its network hardware of choice. This is a large project , and will be implemented by Arwen technologies. Arwen tech is one of cisco’s premier partners in the country and mostly does turnkey networking projects. So i assume in this case they will lay the cables and the core routers, switches,etc will come from cisco. Usually a site such as this, with so many points (network ports) with cisco stuff runs into a few hundred thousand dollars….I wonder how much discount cisco gave

So this also begs the question..whats Juniper? Cisco’s latest nemises upto in Pakistan… from what i hear they are getting more partners and training new resources…and give Cisco a tough fight in routers and security products. Routers btw are Juniper’s speciality…but no one really beats Cisco in switches, especially now that they also own Linksys.