Archive for the ‘IT & Telecom’ Category
Registration for Delegates to the 3RD Global Telecommunication Congress 2010 (TeleCON 2010) being held on April 24, 2010 in Lahore has been opened by the organizers. Prospective participants have been advised to visit the website www.shamrockconferences.net and register early.
The theme of the annual conference is “Taking Pakistan to the Next Level of Technology Frontiers” and is endorsed by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) with participation expected from key players in the telecom sector. Registration is open to all industry personnel. Engineering and technical institutions are also welcome to participate.
Three vital sessions covering Investments in Telecom Sector and Today’s Business Model; Corporate Social Responsibility and Good Governance Practices and Technology Choices and Infrastructure will be the highlight of the day-long event. Eminent speakers and chairpersons, from here and abroad, have shown keen interest and will be presenting updated papers in their respective specialties.
“We expect a good turnout of participants from the Telecom and IT of Lahore which has made tremendous inroads and have a great potential to contribute to the future of telecom business in Pakistan,” said Madiha Adnan, Manager Conferences at SHAMROCK Conferences International.
About Shamrock Conferences International:
SHAMROCK Conferences International (SCI) is a division of SHAMROCK Communications (Private) Limited, (www.shamrockcom.net), a full-service marketing and public relations consultancy with offices in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad
Technology is advancing at an exponential rate and along with it, cheaper and better solutions are being made available to the masses. Everything is moving online now, people are ordering Food, Movies, Tickets, Clothing and much more online from the comfort of their own home.
Since the internet knows no boundaries, business opportunities over the internet are also limitless. If you have an idea, you can easily translate it into an online service and start generating revenue. But in order for you to achieve the desired results, you need to keep your operating cost low till you start generating enough revenue to sustain the business. Below I have a list of 5 Top Shared and VPS Hosting sites which are easy to setup, have excellent support and are extremely cost effective.
DreamHost is one of the best hosts I have used. It hosts over 900,000 domains and offers services and support like none other.
- Unlimited Web Hosting Space & Web Traffic
- Unlimited Domains on 1 Account
- Unlimited POP3/IMAP, MySQL, FTP
- Professional 24/7 Support
- 97 Day Money Back & 100% Uptime Guaranteed
HostGator is one of the world’s top 10 largest web hosting companies with more than 1,300,000 hosted domains. We have over 175 employees to provide you around-the-clock superior support.
- Unlimited Web Hosting Space & Web Traffic
- Unlimited Domains on 1 Account
- Unlimited POP3/IMAP, MySQL, FTP
- Professional 24/7 Phone & E-Mail Support
- 45 Day Money Back & 99.9% Uptime Guaranteed
All of HostGator’s shared and reseller servers are powered and cooled by wind power generated in our home state of Texas.
FatCow has focused the entire company on delivering the best value and customer service experience in Web hosting to the small business user.
- Unlimited Disk Space & Traffic
- Free Domain and Instant Setup
- 30 day money back guarantee
- 99.9% Uptime
- cPanel and Fantastico Script Library
- 24/7 security monitoring
FATCOW OATH – “When you have a question or technical issue, you want someone to be there for you, with an enthusiastic can-do attitude. That’s just what you’ll find when you contact our friendly Moo Crew! In fact, if we don’t deliver a positive support experience, we will give you a free month of hosting. It’s that simple”.
Webhostingpad continues to push forward the standard for excellence in Web Hosting. As a worldwide leader in hosting industry, WHP have been accredited with a number of awards and recognition for the continued efforts to provide top quality service to the customers.
WebHostingPad, Inc meets all BBBOnLine Reliability participation and Better Business Bureau membership standards and is authorized to display the BBBOnLine Reliability seal.
- Unlimited Disk Space & Traffic
- Free Domain for LIFE and Instant Setup
- 30 day money back guarantee
- 99.9% Uptime
- Fantastico Script Library
- 24/7 Toll Free Support
- 24/7 security monitoring
InMotion Hosting is one of the best hosts around and is the most popular for businesses.
- Fast email with SPAM blocking
- Different levels of hosting so you can grow
- 90 day money back guarantee (best we know of)
- Very reliable with 99.9% Uptime
- Easy to use control panel and a premium web site builder
- Unlimited disk space and Unlimited monthly traffic ($8.95 plan)
- Very helpful, probably best known for top technical support
The popularity of Wordpress has surpassed all expectations and has been the CMS of choice for many. I prefer working on Wordpress more often than on Joomla or any other CMS out there. But in order to get the best out of your WP blog, having the right plugins is extremely important. I’ve been running blogs and working on blogs for a while now. I’ve tried a lot of plugins and finally settled down on a few bare essentials.
Akismet – It checks the comments made on yours posts against the Akismet web services to see if they look like spam or not. It is an absolute essential plugin to have. But you will need a Wordpress API Key to use it.
All in One SEO Pack - An excellent SEO plugin for Wordpress. It brings to the WP what is missing in WP like Keywords, Titles, Descriptions, Post Title, Blog Title etc. It allows users to generate META tags automatically and its just super easy to install for both novice and advanced users.
Contact Form 7 – Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
NextGEN Gallery - NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. Before I start writing the plugin I study all photo and picture plugins for WordPress, I figure out that some of them are really good and well designed, but I missed a simple and easy administration back end to handle multiple photos, galleries and albums. You can see an example of the NextGEN Gallery being used on this post.
TinyMCE Advanced – This plugin adds 15 plugins to TinyMCE: Advanced HR, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras. Some of the other features that it adds are 1)Imports all CSS classes from the main theme stylesheet and add them to a drop-down list. 2) Support for making and editing tables. 3) In-line css styles. 4) Advanced link and image dialogs that offer a lot of options. 5) Search and Replace while editing. 6) Support for XHTML specific tags and for (div based) layers.
TweetMeme ReTweet Button – The TweetMeme Follow button is a new way to gain extra Twitter Followers, it allows your blog visitors to instantly know if they are already following your Twitter account or not, if not then it allows the visitor to follow you without leaving your site. The button has been designed for simplicity and comes in three styles compact, standard and square.
TweetMem Button – The TweetMeme Retweet button is the defacto standard in retweeting – used by some of the biggest websites in the world including Techcrunch.com, PerezHilton.com, Break.com, CNET.com, Wired, Time Magazine and hundreds of other massive brands, in total it is installed on over 100,000 websites around the globe. It has features like live tweet counter and modifying the source to say whatever your want instead of “RT @tweetmeme”
WP-Google Buzz – Beautiful Google buzz integration to wordpress + admin options + 14 different button images + mouse over effects. Automatically displays Google Buzz button for every post and page. Google Buzz is shaping up to be an interesting new way to share content with your Gmail friends, so why not have a button for sharing blog posts/pages to the service? To make it work, you’ll need to make sure you’ve set up Google Reader and included that in your Connected Sites on Buzz
WP-Super Cache – This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
WPtouch iPhone theme – A plugin which formats your site with a mobile theme for the Apple iPhone / iPod touch, Google Android and other touch-based smartphones.
WP-DB Backup – Most people who have experience of Wordpress can understand the delicacy and dependency of connecting databases. Vital data is stored there, fetched every time a post or page is loaded in a web browser. If your databases crash, data closely connected to your website’s content will be gone forever. Backup is important for any site and so even for a Wordpress blog. With WP-DB-Backup you can make database backups to just some or all variables directly from the admin. You can then choose to store the backup on the server or on your own computer.
Telenor has been a pioneer in bringing innovative technology to the telecom sector in Pakistan. Telenor Pakistan has come up with a new service which has revolutionized the way financial services reach the masses. Telenor Pakistan has partnered with Tameer Micro Finance Bank to offer branchless banking for the first time ever in Pakistan.
Contrary to other mobile banking services, the user is not limited to the bank that is providing them this service. This service is available to anyone and everyone with a mobile handset. For now, the services being offered on this platform are Utility Bill Payments, Money Transfer and a Mobile Bank Account.
This service offers users the convenience to pay their bills, transfer money and bank through their mobile phones anytime, anywhere which is what the need of the day is these days. People are always on the move in the major metropolitan cities and those living in rural areas or small towns do not have to travel to the nearest bank which may be an hour or two away from where they are to pay their bills or receive money. During the presentation by Mr. Ali Abbas Sikander, Executive Director of Operations & Technology Tameer Micro Finance Bank, he explained the penetration of financial services available to the common man in Pakistan was very low and their aim as a Micro Finance bank was to provide those services to those who do not have it yet.
Mr. Omar Moin Malik, Business Manager Easypaisa said “Our mobile phones are no longer a convenience good, they are a necessity. If I forget my wallet at home, I can still spend the day without it, but if I forget my mobile phone, I will turn back and get it”. Stressing on the fact that mobile services are the way into the future with complete peace of mind and security.
Representatives from Telenor and Tameer Micro Finance bank stressed on the fact that these were the initial stages of the service and there are plans in the pipeline to further enhance the capabilities. Many members of the blogger community were present representing their respective blogs and there was an excellent exchange of ideas and questions regarding the pricing strategy and the future of the service.
Telenor has been quite active in engaging the Pakistani blogger community. They have been constantly using the digital medium to get opinions, suggestions etc. from the masses to further enhance their service offerings. I throughly enjoyed myself and it was a very informative and well organized event, got to meet some fellow bloggers and interact with the Telenor & Tameer Bank reps.
Here are some pictures from the event, sadly, I only had my camera phone on me so the quality is not that great.
About the Service
The service offering for Easypaisa is extremely simple. It is all done through USSD which secure GSM standard for data transfer and unlike other mobile banking services, there are no GSM costs.
- easypaisa bill payment service allows a user to pay their telephone, gas and electricity bill through over 5500 easypaisa merchants in 500+ cities all over Pakistan.
- easypaisa money transfer service can be used to send money to friends and family from any easypaisa merchant in Pakistan. This service is not limited to mobile phone subscribers and anyone can use it without going through any registration process.
- easypaisa mobile account is a virtual bank account and works like any other bank account. This is a new service that is offered after the phenomenal success of the bill payment and money transfer service but it is currently only available to new and old Telenor subscribers.
For a complete list of service charges click here
Its finally happened! Apple iTunes has broken the 10 billion song download barrier. The iTunes song download counter hit 10 billion and it was a milestone that Apple had been counting down to for the last two weeks.
This isn’t the only barrier broken by Apple in the last few weeks, the App Store reached 3 billion downloads also. Apple has surpassed all other services offering the same service and made a huge chunk of cash while doing it. I wonder what will be next in their quest to reach some major milestones.
It’s finally happened, Twitter has partnered with Yahoo as part of a content sharing deal. So now the Yahoo-Twitter partnership details are in which were as of yet still vague.
- Access to the Yahoo-Twitter feed on Yahoo! pages: like Yahoo mail, Yahoo homepage etc and other Yahoo pages that are linked to the portal
- Tweet from Yahoo: Now users will be able to update their Twitter status directly from Yahoo. It is still unclear as to how it is going to happen though. Will there be a widget or will it be custom application.
- Search Integration: Twitter feeds will be integrated into Yahoo search engine and other media across the site
This is really great as Yahoo search will now be more interactive and driver deeper user engagement. As with Google search, Yahoo will now be showing live Twitter feeds through their search results which will increase the relevancy and other aspects of the search. Users will be able to build unique Twitter clients into the Yahoo properties making it easier for them to tweet whenever from within the Yahoo! network.
