I got one!!

The Steve Jobs and  Steve Wozniak Lego  set designed by a company called “PodBrix” was announced august 27th on the net. With only a one time run of 300 examples to be sold on August 29th , 9pm eastern time, they were sold out by 9:03pm. And thanks to Umair’s lighting fast typing speed and flash memory (that lets him store all his logins ids, credit card numbers and names of all his ex-girlfriends’ cats’ kittens) we were able to get our hands on one!

Guess whose the latest Scrybe beta tester!

me!! thats who!! If Scrybe is ok with it, I’ll post my thoughts after Ive used the application for a bit. Initial views are….hmm quite nice. Now..will it actually be useful?!!

Scrybe is a much talked about start up in Islamabad funded by , among others, Adobe systems. Their claim to fame is a new age , web 2.0 , flash-based organizer application.

http://iscrybe.com/main/index.php

Daily Times website hacked!

11:52am PST, Monday August 27th.

Heres something interesting on a monday morning: The Daily times, a major english daily just had its website hacked (and hence its security protocols handed over to it on a silver plate ) . Its been hacked for atleast an hour…In case its (hopefully) fixed by the time you read this, here is the screenshot:

 

and in case its actually still messed up (i think it will be fixed pretty soon though):

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/

Thanks to Sameer for telling me about the hack, I was just thinking about what to post for today and voila! I should ask for something more today…like a million dollars!

IBM builds a Linux competency center in Rawalpindi

Microsoft did one thing right when they came to Pakistan several years ago : They established good links with the education sector, gave away free software to the teachers and the students, offered 80% discounts on everything if you had a university ID card and made sure that kids graduating from college knew more about MS technologies (VC++, Windows server, SQL server) than the more traditional Unix, Java, Oracle and DB2 stuff. Then they built a Microsoft excellency center, ie a lab where companies can come and play with MS solutions and software. Read on to see how the other players are responding.

More studies taking place on local software industry

PSEB is working with Gartner to develop a report on the local software market, expected this fall. PASHA is also working with Athar Osama to update the last study (circa a few years ago) done on the software industry. Expect updated industry information + employee compensation, revenue numbers (maybe) and market penetration facts to be published late this year/early next year.

(And here is my shameless self-marketing plugin line) -Till then, or even after, keep checking back here. And remember, if its IT/software/hardware news it gets posted here first

DSL service in Karachi: Mohtashim’s verdict

For the last 3 weeks, I have run the following three services in parallel at the office:

• Cybernet DSL 256k (I got a max 28-32kb/sec down) – 14,000 PKR/month
• PTCL DSL 1 Mbit/sec (I got a max 68-72 kb/sec down) – 5,000 PKR/month
• Maxcom DSL 512 K/sec (I got a max 51-53kb/sec down)- 7,500 PKR/month

After several download tests, usage testing, and measurement of bandwidth, (I dont have the upload bandwidth numbers with me yet..sorry!) I’ve come up with the following conclusion:

Its that time of year again….

ITCN is around the corner! Yes, in 2 days the most visited local exhibition of vendors, technologies, companies ,etc starts at the expo center. Lets hope its worthwhile this year , last year it looked more like just a telecom conference/show than an IT show

Look for some possible signings/deals and annoucements to happen here.

Adobe invests in Islamabad based Scrybe

Scrybe announced today that is has closed a Series A round of financing from Adobe and LMKR. Basically that means they got a bunch of cash to keep working on their fresh and innovative calendering product that has taken the online-world by storm over the last year. I suspect that the LMKR round happened much earlier, but the announcement for both came together. LMKR is a well established IT services company based out of Islamabad.

Orkut getting run over by Facebook?

If it isnt official, it will be soon. The Pakistani online flock seems to be migrating en masse to Facebook from orkut. Scraps have become less, friends are being added less and the facebook invitations are growing. Social Apps, especially in reserved cultures like ours become very popular very fast as much needed outlets for, well, alot of things. Reminds me of the time when everyone slowly but surely moved away from ICQ to MSN.