Western Union Waives Off Fee For Money Transfers to Pakistan

In the wake of current flood calamity, Western Union has waived off money transfer fee to Pakistan starting from 12th August 2010 till 12th September 2010. This waiver is applicable if you are sending money from the United Stated, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar. Perhaps, a few more countries in the middle east might be eligible but most of the remittance in Pakistan comes from the above mentioned countries.

Additionally, Western Union has committed $100,000 for the flood relief efforts in the country.

---

[1] Link to the Press Release

Saleem Mirza: Techlogix

Saleem Mirza, Director Professional Services at Techlogix and a graduate of FAST Lahore, demised in the US last week. Perhaps, he was in the US on a business trip. An email from Kewan (CEO Techlogix), dated 16th Aug 2010, to company's employees confirmed his death at West Palm Beach, Florida.

He was a medal holder from the batch of 1991 (student id: 91-0052); joined Techlogix as his first employer. In the words of Kewan, "Saleem joined Techlogix in 1994 and I cannot think of anybody else who has contributed more to the success of this company than he has." Yet, he was a simple, down to earth person.


This is a real tragic news, compounded by the fact that another acquaintance, Aurangzaib Alamgir was murdered last month. The guy was eCommerce head of United Bank Limited (UBL), and successfully launched UBL Omni some time back. Recently married, he went out for shopping with his wife but was kidnapped from the parking area of Naheed Supermarket, Karachi. It's said that there was no ransom demand; rumors say that in his last days he was leading an investigation in an Internet Banking fraud at UBL.

Umair Khan: A Serial Entrepreneur

I picked up the ringing phone; it seemed to be an international call. The person at the other end had a Russian accent. He introduced himself as Vladmir Soskov. If my memory serves me right, he further introduced himself as CTO of Clickmarks. I was immediately reminded that I had applied for a job there, and the call was for a technical interview.

Read the complete post at The Pied Piper blog.

Further PTCL Broadband Blues

PTCL customers are having nightmares these days because of abrupt login to a random user account in various famous sites---including facebook, blogger and several others. It so happens that you give your credentials but you log in as a different user---which directly means that somebody else could possibly be logging in as you!

This is a much serious problem than the DNS failures I wrote about earlier.

Yesterday, I made several attempts to log in to Blogger, and each time I appeared as a new user; mostly logging into some "Top 10 Celebrity Scandals" blog. I could even see the Dashboard and Edit Posts pages! The same is happening on facebook!

It's being said that PTCL is installing some kind of content filter in their infrastructure which is causing these problems. That is, user sessions/ cookies are getting mixed up at PTCL. I believe that only way to safeguard yourself from the stupidity of some morons in PTCL is to avoid logging in to portals and sites where there could be several PTCL registered users trying to login at the same time.

Are you a PTCL Broadband user? Have you been affected?

Rent a Coder from Pakistan

Amongst all the freelance programming projects' sites, Rent a Coder deserves a special mention. It has won more industry acclaim than any other outsourcing site. As of 24th April 2010, there are around 137,000 buyers and 286,000 workers registered on this website. With around 16 working staff, it seems that the owner, Ian Ippolito, himself manages most of the work.

I also have good feelings for this site---perhaps because of the "escrow" system it has or may be because a lot of projects get posted on it everyday. I got interested in Rent a Coder during my education in Sweden where I was interested in freelancing instead of the most common student job---newspaper selling. Partial thanks to Rent a Coder and partially to the tutoring fee I got for teaching Haskell to a Polish student, I could afford to visit the UK in the summer vacations.

Now coming to the topic, Pakistanis are doing quite good on Rent a Coder. In March 2010, 13% of the registered coders belong to Pakistan; for the sake of comparison, 21% belong to India and 11% to Romania. Some detailed statistics are available on The Pulse of Rent a Coder. The All Worker Competition lists several Pakistanis on the first page: Techwisdom at #19; Salman Mughal at #23; Technology Addicted at #30; Lead Concept at #38 and H-World at #43 as of today. This makes 5 in the top 50 coders around the world in terms of revenue earned and quality of deliverables; again to set the perspective, 13 are from India. My back-of-the-envelope estimates are that Techwisdom would have made around $100,000 since 2003 from this site.


Back in 2008, a controversy arose due to the electricity crisis in Pakistan. The site asked the buyers to be very cautious while giving projects to Pakistanis. And boy, did Pakistanis respond! Finally, Ian Ipolito had to intervene and apologize---the message was finally removed from the site.

The site is now changing its name to vWorker, whereby some Pakistanis have objected on the word, "worker", stating that the word implies "menial jobs." Ian has justified the usage of the name by saying that the usage of "rent a coder" is not limited to programming jobs anymore and a "very few domain names" are available these days, and one has to be content with this. I am surprised at the second claim. There are many websites with "freelance" in their domain name, yet they are not able to gain significant traffic---he could easily buy the domain from them, albeit it wouldn't be as inexpensive as registering a new domain.

Despite the name change, there are many things that make Rent a Coder a nice place to search for a side income.


To balance things, I must say that some people really, utterly hate Rent a Coder and similar sites.

Pixsense Shutting Down?

There are rumors that Pixsense is shutting down its development center in Pakistan; thus laying off several of its engineers. It's weird that the company's career's page still lists down various vacancies as of today.

PTCL Broadband Blues

PTCL Broadband has some serious issues. The most common one for me is DNS failure. I believe it's better switch to Open DNS permanently. The settings are

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

So, if you are a PTCL Broadband user, and your IP based access to systems is working fine but your web browsing is not working, logon to the admin panel of the router and change the DNS settings to the one shown above.

Why FAST?

A batch-mate sent a message on MSN messenger a few days back. It's always nice to hear from old fellows, specially after 9 years :) Below is a snap of the chat; with due respect to FAST and its administration.

Note 1: It's not that I have something personal against FAST rather I am one of the proud alumni. I hold the institute dear to me to the extent that some of the most respected people for me are the teachers at FAST, who made me what I am today. Laster, when I was doing my Masters at Chalmers University of Technology, the coursework at FAST made me shine. But how can I not see the problems? In the words of Iqbal, "nala-e-bulbul sunoon or hamatan gosh rahoon?"

Note 2: I have made some modification to make the conversation a bit more understandable

One Guy says:
salam
jaywalker v4.7.3 says:
Wa alailkum Assalam!
One Guy says:
do you remember what was the policy of gold medal for our batch ?
One Guy says:
or we didn't have any gold medal?
jaywalker v4.7.3 says:
was there a policy? :)
One Guy says:
hehehheheheheheh
jaywalker v4.7.3 says:
well, I, "A" and "B" were given gold medals
jaywalker v4.7.3 says:
we had equal GPA's: 3.78
One Guy says:
why not you?
One Guy says:
actually i seen on nu.edu.pk website
One Guy says:
they listed positions holders for every year
One Guy says:
and now a days...they have 1st , 2nd third postion
One Guy says:
but in our time they have something else....
One Guy says:
so if no person have more then 3.8 then no gold medal
One Guy says:
am i right?
jaywalker v4.7.3 says:
give me the link
jaywalker v4.7.3 says:
yes, you are right...there used to be something like 3.8...but still they have 3 medals to our batch
One Guy says:
http://nu.edu.pk/MedalHolders.aspx
One Guy says:
check this out....
jaywalker v4.7.3 says:
you can see that 3 names are mentioned for gold in year 1998
One Guy says:
we have olympic style medal...silver bronze etc...
One Guy says:
i got Alumunium one
jaywalker v4.7.3 says:
that's great :D
One Guy says:
i remebered may be wrong
One Guy says:
you got more GPA then naveen?
One Guy says:
Sr.# Roll No Name Medal
1 98-0858 Hamid Shahid Gold
2 98-0958 Muhammad Ali Shah Gold
3 98-0976 Muhammad Imran Saeed Gold
4 98-0931 Rizwan Hassan Silver
5 98-0889 Naveen Anwar Bronze
jaywalker v4.7.3 says:
sub bakwas hai bhai...yes, I got more gpa
jaywalker v4.7.3 says:
but you know how they give gpa
jaywalker v4.7.3 says:
there used to be a random number generator
jaywalker v4.7.3 says:
which assigned random gpa's to people
One Guy says:
yes i belived on this otherwise you know
jaywalker v4.7.3 says:
on a serious note, results submitted by external faculty were always manipulated by the trio
jaywalker v4.7.3 says:
why digging this out after 9 years?
One Guy says:
other then me who else can come in top most position
One Guy says:
actually....i saq Mr.Rizwan Rajwani picture on road
One Guy says:
on sign board with NU-FAST Ad
One Guy says:
they put ad on roads....ad different location in city beside tooth paste ads...
jaywalker v4.7.3 says:
acha, ok :)
One Guy says:
then i check website and came to know the positin holders list
One Guy says:
kher leave it...actually we know real things that's enough..........

Note 3: There are actually 8 photos of alumni on such billboards; 3 of them are from my batch: Rizwan Ravjani (now in Standard Chartered Bank), Rehan Abdul Ghaffar (now in Unilever) and Naveed Bajwa (now in Microsoft)---all having nice positions within Pakistan.

Finally, I got hold of the billboard snap. See it below.

Mobilink EDGE Settings for BlackBerry

While playing with my Blackberry Curve 8310 a few weeks back, I somehow deleted some configuration which caused all programs using GPRS/ EDGE Connectivity to stop working. The blackberry effectively got limited to being an email client. The surprising thing is that the web browser kept on working but remain limited to a few sites (mainly Google). If I tried to surf to some other site, I usually got one of these two errors:

• Communication Failure: A communication failure has occurred. The server may be busy, please try again later. If the problem persists contact your service provider.


• HTTP Error 502: Bad Gateway: The gateway received an invalid response from the server when attempting to fulfill your request. Please try loading a different page. Contact your service provider if the problem persists.

Please note that I have a Mobilink Indigo connection. When resetting the "Service Book Entries" and Re-registering the Host names (as suggested on various sites) didn't work out, I finally figured out that I needed to set the APN Name in Options -> Advanced -> TCP Settings to "connect.mobilinkworld.com" without any userid and password. It seems that Mobilink's settings for Jazz are "jazzconnect.mobilinkworld.com". The settings are mentioned on Mobilink's site as well.

Bingo! Everything is back to normal.

Dialup Internet Billing Model is Changing!

About a month ago PTCL announced dial up Internet to be free of cost in Pakistan. Well, it's not actually free---there is an upper cap on the number of free hours but it's more than what most of the ordinary users would need.

Many people thought that this would kill all the ISP's which are not yet into the broadband and Wimax market. An email on Pakgrid mailing list by the CEO of Micronet says that Internet billing is soon going to be change for all dialup users regardless of their ISP. No more scratch cards! And no extra charges except for a local call charge! Every 20 minutes of usage will cost a local call, and customers would get charged in their regular monthly PTCL landline bill.

Pakistan's telecom industry is surely much mature than one would think of.

Safi Sets His Eyes on Netbooks

Netbooks are gaining popularity. Jeff Atwood (of CodingHorror.com) has posted an introduction as well as review of Acer Aspire One netbook.

And now one of the most famous entrepreneurs from Pakistan, Safi Qureshey has set his eyes on Netbooks. Slightly modifying Jeff Atwood's words, "Web browser is the computer."

TRG Tech Mind Games

TRG Tech sometimes posts a "crack this code" challenge along with their job ads in local newspapers. This month the challenge is to tell what the following code does:

z = lambda n:{ x for x in range (2, n+1) if len ([ i for i in range (2, x) if x%i == 0 ]) == 0 }

I am not sure what functional language this is written in but it seems to be definition of a function which returns a set of prime numbers below the given number. However, I think there is a bug as well (not sure about the language, so I can't be 100% confident). The check in the list should be as following, in my opinion:

[i for i in range (2, x-1) if x%i == 0]

About Customer Support of Lootmaar and Scalability

A few days ago, I had the pleasure of bidding at Lootmaar. But before I go into the details of the bidding, let me tell you the pleasant surprise I had during registration.

The registration page on the website asks you for your mobile phone number. Being a regular reader of Lootmaar Blog, I could trust the site completely. So, I ended entering up giving my contact information. I was supposed to receive an activation code via SMS which was required to complete the activation. When I didn't receive the anticipated SMS, I ended up using the contact form on the site to register a complaint.

After a few minutes, I received a phone call from Noman of Lootmaar---I guess he is one of the co-founders with Adnan. He activated my account after a minute of chat on phone.

Now this kind of customer service is unheard of in Pakistan, even when you have a paid subscription to things. I wonder if this level of support will be maintained when the site grows to millions of users. I wish Lootmaar best of luck but my personal experience with scalability has been quite bad.

A startup is very aggressive as the owners are directly involved in every aspect of the business. But as you grow, the distance between the people who carry out the operations and the ones who make up the strategy increases till the time the strategies become unrealistic and the operations team has no visibility of the organization's future.

What could be the do's and dont's of making sure that your organization scales well?

Online Stock Trading for KSE

A number of online stock trading options are available to invest in Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE) these days. While AKD Trade might be the best service in this regard, it requires a deposit of Rs. 200K. If you would like to start with a less demanding provider, ClikTrade.com might be a good fit, albeit with low quality of service. You can open up an account with Rs. 50K.

An interesting related site is Pak Stock Exchange, modeled after FOREX.com; it lets you virtually trade in KSE for free!

AptraXpress Partnership for Avanza Solutions

Avanza Solutions has recently been approved as AptraXpress Gold Partner by NCR. This places Avanza Solutions as the first third party solution provider in the entire subcontinent to develop products for NCR. The partnership has been awarded after a successful audit of the products, processes and software development methodology of Avanza Solutions by NCR Scotland team in Karachi. The main driving force has achieving this partnership has been iSuite line of products which are developed for NCR ATMs by the company in coordination with NCR Pakistan.

Getting Programming/IT Books in Karachi (and Pakistan)

When I tell my folks that I buy books from amazon.com, some of them look very surprised for two reasons: firstly, they are surprised to know that those guys deliver in Pakistan, and secondly, they ask me in wonder, "You spend $30 to $50 for a book?" Well, yes, I do. Most of the books I get from amazon.com are worth more than their cost.

Usually anything related to Computer Science or Logic with more than 4 stars rating is a must have for me. See, for example, My Wishlist on amazon.com. But I do agree that buying this way is not a nice thing to do if I can get the same books from a local vendor, specially considering the low priced Asian editions.

So, I fired up my browser this weekend and thoroughly went through Liberty Books and Paramount Books. By the way, I have never liked the collection at Liberty Books. On the other hand, I was surprised to see that Paramount Books has cataloged their complete collection on the web.

Now, Paramount Books has rented a house near Tariq Road acting as a big bookstore. I went there yesterday and asked if they could arrange books for me. The guy at the reception was happy to oblige. You can also write to them at info AT paramountbooks dot com dot pk if you want some specific book which they don't have; address the email to Mr. Nabeel. I bought the below mentioned books (the table shows the price of the same book at amazon.com, and no, I didn't buy pirated copies):

	Price at amazon.com	Paramount Books
Dynamic Logic (MIT Press)	$59	Rs. 355
Integration Patterns (Patterns and Practices) (MS Press)	$30	Rs. 475
Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution (Penguin Books)	$12	Rs. 395
Unix Application Migration Guide (MS Press)	$50	Rs. 595

Needless to mention that you get 2 days shipping within Pakistan if you buy from Paramount Books. Shipping within Pakistan is free, and of course, you can visit them yourself as well.

On the programming magazines side, its funny that Liberty Books' website says that they deal in MSDN and Dr. Dobbs Journal. I wrote them a few days back but the response was negative. Paramount Books doesn't deal in magazines.

Apart from these, some booksellers (non-IT specific) are covered here and here. Some libraries are covered here.

Alternate Delivery Channel Vendors in Pakistan

Banking started with the concept of "branches" and a "head office." In a centralized database setting, all accounts and related information is stored in the head office. With good infrastructure in place, it's possible to provide some cool services like "online banking" where you can deposit a cheque in any branch to be credited to your account in a different branch. But there is a big restriction on this model, no matter how much you automate it: traditional banking closes at 4pm and a holiday is also observed.

Alternate delivery channels like Internet Banking and ATM (Automated Teller Machines---a term which should be obsolete by now) allow further touch points to the banks' customers, where banking services are available 24x7. These delivery channels are similar to "branches" in some sense, yet different because of non-human interaction and differences in authentication of the customer.

The first alternate delivery channel for a bank is usually ATM. Banks who are careful with their investment in IT commission the ATM channel in two phases:

1. Issuer
2. Acquirer

Being only an issuer means that the bank issues ATM cards (also called debit cards) to its customers which they have to use at other banks' ATMs. This requires the following products to be purchased by a bank:

• Card Printer
• Card Production Software (which not only produces cards but builds up a mapping of cards with accounts as well)
• A dot matrix printer to act as a PIN Mailer alongwith specialized stationary for the job
• A piece of software that is used to build connectivity between a country switch (such as 1Link or MNET) and the core banking system

The second phase for the bank is to buy ATMs and an ATM Controller and re-certify with the country switch as an acquirer (that is, allowing other banks' customer to use its ATMs).

Two (and perhaps the only two) vendors in this domain in Pakistan are Avanza Solutions and TPS, with their flagship products named Phoenix and Nimbus.

The next most common delivery channels are Internet Banking and IVR + Call Center. Again, both the companies mentioned above, provide indigenous products ("Prism" and "Ambit" for Internet Banking) as well as provide integration capabilities for third party solutions. However, there is an important difference: Avanza Solutions has two different products for "ATM controlling" and "integration" while TPS markets its ATM controller as a middleware as well. There are very few sites, if any, where TPS' Phoenix is running as an integration provider without acquiring any transactions.

There is good competition in IVR (Interactive Voice Response) market where 2B Technologies, ZRG (though not strictly a local vendor) and NCR compete with each other. Same goes for call center or a mobile banking solutions.

With the growing automation happening in the local banking industry, I find it impending that IT courses related to alternate delivery channels will soon be offered at the graduation level.

Core Banking Vendors in Middle East & Pakistan

Over the years, I have realized that you don't need to have a best of the bread product in order to succeed in a product + service oriented market. What's equally or (perhaps) more important is your local presence to provide efficient support to your customers. I'll write about this and my other professional experience in future posts.

I have been involved in some integration solutions for the banking industry in the Middle East and Pakistan in the last few years. I am providing a few links for the core banking solutions which are quiet famous in the mentioned region. You can follow a more comprehensive list here.

Flexcube by i-flex Solutions is one of the most famous core banking solutions. As of now, Oracle has acquired more than 80% of the company. Some of the banks which I know are running Flexcube include Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank (ADCB), Barclays UAE and Dubai Islamic Bank (Pakistan).

SYMBOLS by SunGard System Access is another major player. MCB (Muslim Commercial Bank) recently tried to shift to this system but I have heard that the migration project has failed; there are further rumors that MCB contacted LMKR to provide consultancy for this migration but it didn't work out as planned. These days, UBL (United Bank Limited) is working on a similar migration.

Equation by MiSys is another offering. Some of the banks that I know running this system include International Bank of Qatar (IBQ) and Ahli United Bank (Bahrain). MCB was previously using Equation (perhaps it still does). Locally, IBM is providing support for this core banking product (which runs on AS400 machines).

Lastly, another famous solution is TEMENOS T24 by TEMENOS. I have frequently heard of the product trainings being offered in Karachi though I don't have any personal integration experience with this one.

The local solutions in this domain include Banksmart from Codebase Technologies and PIBAS host by PIBAS. However, the local solutions have started to show off their age, and they are fast disappearing. Some small banks started with these solutions but they soon realize that the products and their support are not scalable enough to keep pace with the growth of the bank.

I'll write about Alternate Delivery Channels in a future post.

Startups

There is some interesting discussion going on nowadays at these blogs related to startups in Pakistan: Lootmaar, Green & White and Jawwad Farid.

Pakistan's software industry is maturing up. It started with the old software outsourcing model; quickly moved to product development in mid 2001, and now finally we are seeing some very focussed microISVs.

Scrybe is one of the best examples from the new startups. Read the rave reviews of the webapp and the accompanying demo.

Alchemy is another example, started by Jawwad Farid. Then, we have Umair Khan (Chowk.com, Clickmarks and now Folio3) who is the founding member of OPEN (Organization of Pakistani Entrepreneurs of North America) Silicon Valley as well. You can read an interview of this guy here.

Kraysis is another one, and the list also includes PixSense.

Enterprise DB, though not strictly a Pakistani company, raised $20 million in funding last year. It has a development center in Islamabad, Pakistan.

With all this happening around me, I feel inclined to quit my job and make some bucks!

Here Comes a New Blogger!

The great Salman Kasbati of FAST 2000 has started bloggin! Check out his web log here.

I'll be back in a while.