Ideas

Pakistani Bloggers Unite

Rai Umair — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 06:37:00 GMT

Quite a few people in Pakistan are blogging thier way today then about a year ago. Some blogs I have come across are mind boggling in the quality and quantity of the content others interesting look like pure out streams of frustrated voices. All are worth a read. I guess blogging is helping each of us learn a lot about us and identity the individual we all know and see in mirror every day.

I have found a need to bring on a Pakistani blogging site, ‘.Text’ is real good blogging tool and it’s available for free. I will soon be bringing out a pure Pakistani Blogging site where all Pakistani blogs will be listed on taxonomy of interests.

I hope blogging will help close on with the intellectual set, in work with hypertext in this 20^th century.

All ideas, website’s name and character are sought and all help will be appreciated.

Content Idea #01 - For The User Group

Rai Umair — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 22:42:00 GMT

I run a INETA/MSDN based .NET User Group called the ‘.NET User Group Karachi’ and the task of moderating the online forum which we have on MSN Groups becomes a bottle neck for other tasks I am involved with namely my BCS degree and my obsession with software architecture. I want all the members to get fresh news and greater content, the reason they signed up for in the first place, but I can not do it manually so I have come up with this little idea, that I would also share here I guess.

Create an email account with a service that gives free forwarding (hotpop.com is really good) and subscribe to all the content (newsletters, flash etc.) and confirm their initial emails, once done with that register the email now with the group and voila instant content. The idea has some drawbacks like forced content and random removal by any one member can leave to no cent for others some times too but fore now on its working.

Another option is to configure a client to forward all messages with the word .NET in them to the group; you can do this in outlooks by using filters easily. I can’t run outlook all the time so I did not go for this better option.

I have tons of more content ideas in my head but as I have not slept in the past two days I will let me wait before i write them up.

Business Idea: Focus Pakistan

Rai Umair — Fri, 05 Mar 2004 10:20:00 GMT

I will post ideas here, which could be ignorant and naive to start with but will help me track back and see if I was right or not. I have been lucky in the past forecasting future trends in the IT industry; let’s see what happens this time around.

To start with here’s a business idea, its sort of a lousy one but hey it's a start:

Get a large scale merchant account and then create in a system and gives out further/sub accounts in Pakistan using say the web service architecture at its core.

This is called an 'acquirer position' that is the ability to give out merchant accounts. There are presently only three services of this kind by Orix, CitiBank and UBL but none of them is online, plus they are too expensive and there conditions are way off the startup's reaches.

Such an action when translated to reality will go a long way in the new wave of e-commerce to come in Pakistan due to rise in plastic money in the country (following the global trend, 53% transactions on plastic).

Let me know if you are interested and I will hand off the details, deal! :-)