A Little Birdie Told Me…

ACTIVISM Cyber activism through Twitter has provided a new forum in cyberspace to draw attention to a cause or event. The most recent case in point relating to Pakistan was the Twenty20 World Cup Finals when Pakistan Cricket made it to the trending topics on  Twitter, the term used to describe the ten most talked about topics on the network. Read more

Pakistan is the 6th most populated country. Facebook could be the Fifth

If there is anyone on the planet left wondering if Facebook is still a fad or simply something weaved into the fabric of our everyday lives, that’s a statistic that will blow your mind! According to UN estimates available on Wikipedia.org that puts the population of Pakistan at 166 million. Use this as a benchmark to compare the population online at Facebook.com and the figure is startling. According to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post dated the 8th of April, 2009, the social networking community welcomed its 200 millionth active user. Based on stats available on Facebook, there are more than 200 million active users, more than 100 million users log on to community at least once each day, more than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college and the fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older!

Another interesting stat is that there are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. In fact, Facebook mobile users are almost 50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users and there are more than 150 mobile operators in 50 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products. The community is more quoted on television and seems to host more anchor fan pages than any other site. With conventional media integration, even from Pakistan, is there really anyone out there who doesn’t know about how valuable online properties can be? You might be as popular as you are on television, but Facebook simply enables you to quantify the figures.

With this kind of engagement, surely the online population is comparable (and aggressively competing) like the new utopia we’ve always wanted!

Is Facebook the New Faithbook?

Granted we’ve got more than one entry about the world’s largest online social community but this simply had to be reported! And yes, it IS a trend! Read more

Businesses that Accelerated their Growth

MIT Entrepreneur Forum, led by Ken Morse and Bill Aulet of MIT Entrepreneurship Center, has been gaining momentum in Pakistan over the past two years. When the MIT Club of Pakistan Enterprise Forum (MITEF) was formed, it formalized activities driven by and people such as Dr. Zahir Ali Syed, an entrepreneur and educationist, Farrokh Captain, Chairman Captain Industry and others who joined the effort. The success story of the day has been their program, BAP or Business Acceleration Program, which has enabled a tremendous amount of professional networking, bringing the entrepreneurial spirit to the surface.
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Pakistani Web Tops Google Mapmaker Stats!!

We all remember Lalit Katragadda, creator of the Google Map Maker, from the 2008 World Usability Day conference held in Lahore last year. But “Lalit” and “Pakistan” made the headlines again because Pakistani online users have posted the most localized data on Google’s Map Maker! According to a news report, Pakistan actually ended up posting more than any of the 160 countries simultaneously in the map making experiment initiated last year in June.
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Dial a Cloud By Zia Khan

There is so much hype about Cloud Computing with little understanding of what its real potential is. What perhaps added to the confusion was the recently released McKinsey report that headlined there was more hype than reality in the Cloud. For the enterprise sector, perhaps, but the SME and the organizations that are already strapped for cash, they really have no option other than the Cloud.
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Online Political Activism

Political Parties Battle
Website Popularity!
A recent survey conducted by online political website, Pkpolitics.com, attempted to determine the popularity and strength of the political party websites. More than 1,300 votes were cast  in a short time span of 8 hours. The results were then telecast in Dawn News Television’s weekly program, Wired and Active.

At the close of the survey, the political party websites ranked as the following: PTI ranked first with 704 votes; PML-N ranked in second place with 347 votes; the MQM website ranked in 3rd place with 110 votes and PP and other party websites ranked towards the bottom of the list. Considering the Web is a relatively new space for most large organizations, political parties still have a great deal to learn when it comes to managing their online web presence. Certain party websites have not yet made the transition from first generation web development to Web2.0.
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Wind Energy is Clean, Green and Really Happening!

The first wind power project was inaugurated by Pakistan’s top government officials at Jhimpir. This is the first of 24 projects which are in the works, said to be capable of producing 50 Megawatts of energy. The strain on the country’s infrastructure has taken its toll with the bulk of the industrial zones generating their own electricity and the rest of the sectors are wondering how to invest into development of new technological-intensive platforms when the basic power generation needs haven’t been fulfilled by the utility companies.
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Meets & Greets

The Blogger Meetup series that was activated by Google Pakistan and CIO Pakistan seems to have inspired quite a flurry. The Sindh IT Ministry organized the first Bloggers National Conference which attracted quite a crowd. In addition to the bloggers and tweeters, some champions of Pakistan’s new media sphere were also present at the event. Support from the Sindh IT Ministry helped in  motivating the young audience to continue using the online media to promote a better, truer image of Pakistan. Read more

Pakistan’s Long March goes live

A feature of life in Pakistan, as in many other Third World countries is that there has been a wide take up of mobile communication technology. Getting a telephone landline requires too money and too many bureaucratic hurdles so mobile phone services have seized the opening with relatively lower entry prices. One byproduct of this is that a mass demonstration like the latest Long March led by the militant lawyers’ movement is being reported by participants minute by minute through Twitter and through various designated protest blogs and websites such as http://longmarch.seenreport.com/ and http://teeth.com.pk/blog/. Read more

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