pakistantelecomexpo.com

Below is the main page of Persona which is linked from the home page. The flash design is not appropriate for business users. There is no text based information about the different parts of Persona Karobar unless you click on one of the images. I had to click twice (total three clicks from the home page) before I could get to the packages and pricing info. It should have been a single click.

There are other small things missing such as the page title does not spell out the purpose of the page but just says ‘Telenor’.

Thanks to Anam Khan for the post suggestion and information.

Two weeks ago, a quiet Silicon Valley-based voice company named Sabse bought Jaxtr, a “voice-over-internet-protocol” startup that lets you make cheap calls anywhere using your computer instead of a phone. It wasn’t totally clear why. While formative web voice companies like Skype have gone on to make money, many others have struggled. In Jaxtr’s case, it had raised more than $20 million, gained some 10 million users, but wasn’t — apparantly — seeing the sort of traction and revenue it was hoping for. So I talked to Sabse chief executive Yogesh Patel, a serial entrepreneur with a background in the mobile industry, about why he made the purchase.

First, a little about Sabse. Patel describes it as a “telephony-as-a-service platform,” by which he means it offers a suite of audioconferencing services for telecommunications carriers around the world. It’s proving a good fit for emerging markets, he claims, where not everyone has access to a computer. It lets people talk across web voice connections, landlines or mobile phones, convert faxes to emails, and other voice communication services. BT’s Ribbit, for example, also offers telephony as a platform service. Patel praises Ribbit but says his company’s integration of various voice services — as well as local data centers and networks it has built in Asia — have helped it gain more customers in emerging markets. At this point, Sabse is almost profitable through revenue-sharing deals with carriers, like Malaysia’s TM, and is talking to dozens of potential clients around the world, Patel tells me.

Menlo Park, Cali.-based Jaxtr, meanwhile, provides a relatively simple service for making VoIP calls. Give Jaxtr your phone number, either on its home site or on one of its embeddable widgets, then call Jaxtr will give you a new number — call it, and you’ll get a prompt to call the destination number. It’s a more roundabout way of making calls versus just picking up the phone and dialing an international number, but it’s free or very cheap to do. Patel sees Jaxtr as Sabse’s path to get more direct to consumer business. He’ll use it to upsell users into Sabse’s audioconferencing services, and he’s planning to run voice ads within Jaxtr (it doesn’t currently). As Jaxtr has a US userbase, Sabse will hope to get these people using its other services as well.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Sabse’s funding is undisclosed, but comes from its founders, including Patel as well as Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia.

Twilio provides an in-cloud API for voice communications using web technologies. Everything you need in just 5 API building blocks. Reduce the cost of developing, deploying and managing voice apps by paying for capacity when you need it, not before. You can build sales automation systems, order inquiry lines, CRM solutions, call routing apps, phone trees, appointment reminders, custom voicemail apps, and a whole lot more. Twilio can receive calls from or place calls to any phone with a phone number, such as land lines, cell phones, and VoIP phones.

The pricing is 3c/minute for regular inbound/outbound calls and 5c/minute for toll free. This service is only for US, as of now. I am still testing the product so a future post will cover that.

The idea is definitely very good and as the price comes down it will be useful for many applications. Infact I have already observed other upcoming products such as mobile PBX for the cloud and will write about them soon. Just as cloud infrastructure allowed startups to save on time and cost, telephony in the cloud will make integrating telephony services to web apps a snap.

The topics covered in this conference include:

• How can governments best support the creation of self-sustaining rural connectivity initiatives that benefit local people?
• Step-by-step practical guidance on overcoming the most pressing technical challenges
• Developing a world-class telecentre rural development programme
• Progress on delivering the promise of the United Services Obligation Fund
• Realising the benefits of greater rural connectivity though the delivery of E-services
• Mapping the future need for connectivity: Identifying choke points in the delivery network
• Training and empowering rural populations to make full use of the potential inherent in greater connectivity

A few snippets from his review:

Setup: Simple and fast. Since its USB, it self installs and starts to work.
Price : 3000 for the device, and 1200 and up for the service. Yes, home DSL is cheaper and faster, I agree but you do pay dearly for the mobility and to bypass KESC and PTCL all at once!
Speed: We got the speed promised consistently as long as we were in the Karachi metropolitan area.

Imran Zaheer added this comment from his own experience:

QoS varies greatly from area to area and time of day. The first 2 months (where I suppose user base was very low), I consistently used to get 80-140KB/sec (yes that’s a little above the rated speed limit). I suggest people considering this go with the 256 or 512 packages, and if you do a lot of inter city traveling, consider the PTCL EVDO option.

Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd (PTCL) would shift its fixed line numbering plan from 7 to 8 digit series as per the instructions of Pakistan Telecommunication Authority. Initially migration from 7 series to 8 digit series would take place in Lahore and Karachi.

As per details, Digit “3? will be added in all existing 7 digits numbers of Karachi and Lahore except the numbers starting from “9?. Digit “9? will be added in all existing numbers starting from “9?. An important point to remember is the numbers are being added to existing numbers not area codes, with the exemption of army exchanges, which would remain same.

For the customer’s awareness and facilitation, the new series plan will run parallel to old one for a period of three months w.e.f. July 1, 2009 till September 30, 2009. The period from October 1, 2009 till December 30, 2009 will be covered by announcements which would be made in order to facilitate subscribers/ customers.

In recent months the competition for the creation, adoption and stickiness of smart phone applications has escalated. iPhone and Android have emerged as the two top platforms. Recently there were some interesting stats and analysis released by Flurry, a leading provider of mobile analytics solutions for mobile application developers. Tech Crunch notes:

Flurry’s June report harvests data from 1,100 applications running across 4 platforms (iPhone OS, BlackBerry, J2ME, and Android) on over 40 million handsets, and sheds a bit of light on the usage habits (stickiness included) of smart phone users over the past few months. The number of Flurry-enabled J2ME apps has seen an incredible drop over the 3 month period, while the iPhone has seen an equally huge growth.

Here’s where it gets interesting: by taking the two most heavily represented platforms (again, Android and iPhone) and comparing user loyalty on an App-by-app basis, Android wins hands down. As time increases, Android users continue to stick with apps longer.

Flurry has this to say about this trend: one reason we believe retention rates vary is that Android offers far fewer applications compared to iPhone. With applications coming out on iPhone at a faster rate, iPhone users move onto other apps more quickly. For Android users, they make more use of what’s available, with less temptation to move to the next application.