It’s Outsourcing! It’s Responsible!! It’s Outsourcing Responsibly!!!

It’s all about cutting costs. Big companies want to downsize and reduce costs by outsourcing departments. Midsized companies usually don’t have the budgets to hire, hence they are always on the lookout for people they can contract out assignments or projects to. The reasons why companies want to outsource are fairly straightforward. But the problem arises when companies want to outsource outside of the traditional model and bring some benefit back to perhaps a struggling ecosystem. Do a bit of social uplifting alongside running the business. Laila Churaayat Jana is the founder and CEO of Samasource. Laila also happens to be a visiting scholar of Stanford University.

Samasource is a social business that is based out of San Francisco, that works towards finding out-sourcing opportunities and employment for the economically marginalized but skillful constituents of the American society. Laila shares some thoughts about social businesses, Samasource and Pakistan. Social Businesses It is generally confusing to put the terms “social” and “business” together. How can a social welfare organization also be a business? Laila clarifies, “a social business is work that benefits or gives back to the society it is part of.” She goes on, “It reinvests money and resources above and beyond the cost of running it into the business and does not need to worry about making shareholders happy.” At its core, a social business is about self sufficiency and sustainability, so that the business can continue to be beneficial to the society. Read more

DataPoints

How much of Pakistan is on Facebook?

It’s always interesting, almost mind-blowing, to find out just how many Pakistanis are logged in anywhere. The number of registered users from Pakistan on one of the world’s largest social networking communities, Facebook, is an eye-opener!
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Making Web 2.0

We all know about the Web 2.0 and the newly created spaces for us. The key takeaways of this 2.0 revolution are connecting, sharing and interacting in a virtual space that sometimes just outlives the physical spaces. Let’s see how that is translated into Marketing and what can be done more to connect, share and interact with the customers.

Connecting with Customers:
The new media not only introduced another media to connect with the customers but also innovative ways to attract the customer attention. TV and Radio as traditional media increased the reach of brands and also provided an opportunity to connect emotionally with the customers. With new media, websites became another way to emotionally bind new and existing customers, provide more information and be accessible when the customer wants. Like TV and radio, it undoubtedly increased the brand reach and allowed the message to be more accessible, as per customer demand, easy to alter to suit the weather, taste or business requirement.

Sharing with the Customers:
In Web 2.0 environments people are used to sharing not only text (basic information, opinions etc.) but share their digital possessions too. People post their favorite songs, videos, movie reviews, their personal photographs or videos and share them with their virtual friends. The growth of 2.0 has been funneled with the ease of generating and sharing content. Mobile phones with built-in cameras and webcams have really made the User Generated Content easy to produce and the 2.0 sites make it possible to share. The same can be done between the brand and the customers. The easiest thing to share is obviously the brand information but sharing digital content both public and proprietary is quite attractive too.

Interactivity with Customers:
Sharing the information can be made more fun and challenging by making the website interactive. There are tools that can make it easier for customers to interact on the website in the form of generating brand related UGC, running competitions for the customers and getting customer feedback at different product development cycles. All ideas should necessarily be not tried at once but different flavors of interactivity increase the ‘hits’ and create emotional value.

Some Bad 2.0 Ideas:
1. Push emails: we all have spam filters and almost all of the unsolicited marketing campaigns are put in spam or junk folders. Those emails in your customer or potential customer’s inbox really have no emotional binding. The take up of these emails and responses tend to be internationally less than 4% of not the target but of the total consumer base. Yes, these days the investment in the email campaign is relatively insignificant but the results are too.

2. Push SMS: SMS campaigns haven’t picked up much in Pakistan and the obnoxious nature of the unsolicited ding-dong is best to be avoided. These SMS like emails do not create any bond between the brand and the customer.

Some ideas worth looking into:

Interactive Campaigns:
Interactive campaigns usually work if they are simple to follow and have instant and / or many rewards. These campaigns can be seasonal or event based. These campaigns also have to step ahead from the ’send in point code’ and involve creative ways to involve customers. It is important that the content of the campaign and the rewards are equally attractive.

Want to know more about Loyalty System? Log online on ciopakistan.com/cmo and read the rest of what Sophia has to say!•

Pakistan Wins THREE Awards at APICTA

For those you following the story of the P@SHA ICT Awards, the winners traveled to Jakarta where the APICTA award winners were announced about an hour ago. Thanks to photographs taken courtesy Chairman P@SHA Imran Zia and P@SHA President, along with Jehan Ara’s blog, Pakistan bagged 3 of the 16 awards!

PixSense PSP won the award for Best in Media and Entertainment Applications, TPS Pvt Limited won the Award for Best in Tools & Infrastructure Applications and Kraysis won in the Best Startup Category. Kraysis has done some phenomenal work in Software Quality Assurance and has landed some mega contracts! According to the post made by Jehan Ara, there were 134 applications competing from 11 different countries in the region. Pakistan competed in all 16 categories and came out with 3. What a win! What an accomplishment! Read more

TPS Pakistan

Winner: TPS Pakistan
CEO: Mohammad Sohail
Name of Application or Product: Iris
Website: tpsonline.com
Email: sohail@tpsonline.com

A switch allows the banks to offer its services on electronic delivery channels, which is essential for banks to survive and grow in today’s ferociously fast paced world. With TPS Pakistan’s IRIS as the enterprise switch, that gives the driving of ATMs/PO, integrates the delivery channels as well as provides back-office functions like Dispute Resolution, Monitoring and Settlement/Reconciliation. This consolidated approach of a switch is unique and it significantly improves the operational efficiency of the banks, gives 360 degree view of its customers and provides strong MIS important for decision making and knowing the trends. IRIS supports industry standard interfaces and protocols (ISO8583, XML, Web Services, ODBC, OCCI, etc.) to integrate to external systems and networks.
IRIS has evolved from Phoenix which has an install base of 55 institutions across 15 countries. A migration plan is currently being developed to migrate banks running on Phoenix to IRIS. Phoenix is driving the alternate distribution program of 22 banks, including 1Link, and is responsible for processing of over 80% of all transactions initiated by alternate delivery channels. Even before the formal launch of IRIS, it has been implemented in Atlas Bank and DIBL in Pakistan as well as in CBK in Kuwait.

PalmChip Pakistan

Winner: PalmChip Pakistan

Name of Product or Application: GeoTel

CEO: Jauher A. Zaidi

Website: palmchip.com

Email: anjum@palmchip.com

When infrastructure cables get damaged, the demand for solutions like GeoTel goes through the roof! While GIS systems can be used to document outside plant assets, they have no intrinsic capability to interact with the live network which makes the reporting of active faults not visible in a geographical context. On the other hand, while a network management system (NMS) provides live monitoring and management capabilities, it does not document the physical network in sufficient detail to help pinpoint the precise location of faults.

Rapid fault localization is particularly critical in the case of optical fiber outside plant, which can span a wide geographical area and run for thousands of kilometers. Faults could be localized rapidly by, receiving an alarm, remotely instructing pre-deployed OTDRs to identify the location of the faults and display the precise locations using GIS.

GeoTel provides outside plant asset documentation for copper, fiber optic, cellular, WiMAX and cable networks. It has a network management module that can act as a Manager of Managers (MoM) or interface with an existing MoM for getting network fault information. This fault information is made visible on in a GIS context. Network asset information in the GIS can be synchronized with the configuration information in network management systems. OTDR integration helps rapidly locate faults in fiber optic networks.

The product can facilitate any industry to allow operators to stream line operations, efficiently detect and managing faults, monitor performance, predict demand for a service or using a GIS based Customer Resource Management system; GeoTel has impact on a very large amount of users. As the number of users on the operators with GeoTel deployed scales so does its capability to address the needs of population at large.

Kraysis

Winner: Kraysis
CEO: Muhammad Jamil A. Goheer
Website: kraysis.com
Email: jamil@kraysis.com

Kraysis is Pakistan’s leading provider of third party software quality assurance services to both domestic and international clients. As the first provider of specialized testing services, Kraysis leads the market. The company first educates the software development companies on the savings they achieve through outsourced test and QA and then help them achieve the ROI through a multidimensional and experienced pool of professionals at Kraysis. The team provides services at different stages of the entire Software Quality Assurance (SQA) lifecycle that moves in parallel to the software development lifecycle.
Kraysis has in-house professionals that provide various types of testing including but not limited to functional, performance, security and usability. Moreover, the young team also provides the complete test planning, test case development, execution, reporting and documentation required in any typical QA model.

Plexus Pvt. Limited

Merit: Plexus Pvt. Limited
Name of Product or Application: Investment Management System
COO: Abdul Rahman
Website: plexuspk.com
Email: abdul.rahman@plexuspk.com

The Investment Management System caters to the the requirement of different users with the following features: Money Market Transactions, Capital Market Transaction which supports ready, future, CFS and Open End Funds, Credit Transaction, Lease Transaction, and Finance & Accounts. The system adheres to statutory as well as business rules requirements The solution developed by Plexus also enables Risk Management and Middle Office requirements.

Lumensoft

Winner: Lumensoft
Name of Product or Application: Candela Retail Chain Management System
CEO: Abdul Aziz
Website: lumensoft.com
Email: aziz@lumensoft.biz

Lumensoft’s flagship product, Candela, has been around for more than 7 years. Designed to satisfy the needs of both single location retail stores as well as multi-location retail chain stores.
The solution is a complete supply chain solution for managing the affairs of small to mid-sized retail businesses. System issues POs to vendors, tracks GRNs in warehouses, moves the stocks to retail outlets, and makes invoices against sales. CRM module is includes in this solution. Scalable and flexible, the solution can meet its market requirements as they grow. Developed using VB6 and SQL Server 2000, the company is migrating its product to .Net and SQL Server 2005. With additional features, the product will be available in the markets in the first quarter of 2009.

HealthLine

Merit: HealthLine
Name of Product or Application: HealthLine
CEO: Jahanzeb Sherwani
Website: www.cs.cmu.edu/~jsherwan/
Email: jahanzeb+pasha@gmail.com

Research and Development is one of the key areas where excellence needs to be achieved and consistent initiatives need to be taken in order to achieve potential water shed moments in technology innovation. PASHA also recognizes quality RnD ventures in order to encourage further quality investments into looking for new frontiers in technology development.
In this category PASHA recognizes the Healthline system, which is trying to develop a platform for Speech recognition, speech synthesis, dialog management, for Pakistani languages.  Currently, no commercial system for speech recognition in Urdu or Sindhi exists – Healthline has  developed a method that allows the use of a speech recognition engine created for one language (e.g. US English) to be used for another language (e.g. Sindhi) and in recent experiments, the application has shown a very accurate recognition rate (greater than 90%).  Results of this experiment are pending publication.
The company has also tested prototypes with low literate users in various parts of Sindh: in Memon Goth outside Karachi, in Wahi Pandi near Dadu, and in Umarkot, all in collaboration with a Karachi-based NGO (HANDS) that has been managing public health programs in the region for more than 10 years.  Through these prototype tests, the company has created a system that works very well for illiterate users and allows them to access information even if they have never been to school. Tests comparing the speech system to an equivalent touch-tone system showed that the speech system was preferred by users, and also enabled them to complete a set of information access tasks more accurately than the touch-tone system.
For a country largely made of people where Education is a challenge, verbal communications becomes vital. With telephony access rapidly rising, speech recognition can certainly be the next frontier. With this award, PASHA hopes to encourage the spread of knowledge and enhance mutually beneficial initiatives for the large community.

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