Bolee is a popular online auction portal of Pakistan (or it was?). The portal advertised itself as the first online auction site of Pakistan and did manage to get much hullabaloo. The site was abuzz with activity in its initial days and managed to get significant registered users.

Unfortunately, same is not the case right now. A friend joking told me that “Bolee ki bolti band ho gaye” and when I visited their portal I came to knew what he meant. The Web site looks like a dead horse. Items are lying in the bidding list for more than a year but have got no bids. Even the recent items for sale have failed to get any bidders.

Another issue - the major one - is that one can’t open the details of items for sale as the site is suffering from database engine error. Add to this the overall dull and unfriendly GUI of the portal and the equation is balanced. Bolee has got thousands of items on sale/bidding but I guess the buyers/sellers have moved to other sites like Lootmaar, Nilaam or b4bid due to ‘excellent’ performance of this portal.

I have failed to understand why the management is running this dead horse and from where are they getting their revenues.? Some users are also adding their bids oblivious of the fact that those will not be materialized on that site.

P.S. Next in line in our auction sites reviews is Nilaam. We’re planning to extract some information about their performance and will post it as soon as possible. By the way, the site came under heavy discussion a few months back.

Share This

Mango

They’re announcing that UFONE has agreed to pick up the service and make it into a VAS within its own platform, to be called "UFONE SMS Buddies". I’ve confirmed that this is a standard VAS contract arrangement between Ufone and Confiz Solutions (the company behind Mango) in that the product and IP remains with Confiz and Ufone will just provide the SMS infrastructure and marketing muscle, revenue being shared. Confiz Solutions will have the option to also license the product out to other telecos in other countries, just like PixSense has been doing with their product.

Considering how heavy sms usage is in the country, I believe this app is poised to be an immense success for Ufone considering it gives people the option to save credit by being charged only for one sms for broadcast messages… but then again sms’s are fast becoming free anyway.

As soon as this is launched however, I also suspect other telecos will try to jump in on the wagon, opening up the opportunity for other similar services (*cough*Chopaal*Cough*) to get a good contract too.

Overall I’d call this a pretty good success story for a locally-conceived product that wasn’t backed by gobs of venture money, still becoming incredibly successful for its parent firm. Good job Confiz.

Share This

The Wall Street mayhem seems to have spared tech firms, at least that’s the case with Intel. The company has posted a third-quarter revenue of $10.2 billion - a new record for the company.

According to an Oct. 14 news release, the company reported a pretax net income of $2.01 billion, up from $1.79 billion in the year-ago quarter. The earnings per share (EPS) are reported at 35 cents, up from 30 cents in the year-ago quarter.

“Intel delivered the best third-quarter revenue in its history. We are solidly profitable, with operating income of over $3 billion, reflecting strong across- the-board execution and best-of-class products”, said Paul Otellini, Intel President and CEO.

With total assets of $52.72 billion, the semiconductor giant stands firm and stable while the financial markets are taking a severe beating.

“As we look to Q4, it is hard to know what impact the financial crisis would have on end customer demand. We are confident that our product portfolio, strong cash flow, commitment to deploying new technology and market momentum will allow us to outpace peer companies at at time when business levels are difficult to protect,” Otellini added.

Now let’s see what are the earning trends of other tech companies as they are about to announce their financial results in a few days. We also have to keep in mind that the financial bubble has just burst and its impacts on these firms will be visible in the fourth quarter. The annual reports will portray the real picture.

Share This

“We believe that there’s tremendous opportunity for innovation in tools that increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards”, the company said in a news release.

The browser giant has hired Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, co-founders of Ajaxian, the Ajax Experience to lead its Developer Tools Lab.

The company refrained from divulging any further details.

Share This

KARACHI: Telecommunication companies in Pakistan made billions during the three days of Eid-ul-Fitr while choked service lines caused trouble to people with their calls and SMS, leading to deduction in balances without satisfactory communications.As Muslims in the country wished each other through phone calls and SMS for the arrival of the month of Shawwal, many around the nation complained that they faced troubles such as repeated disconnection of phone calls, disruption in line or failure to send messages successfully.The subscribers of various local cellular service providers and landline packages said that they had their balances deducted from their phones despite failing to make a connection with the required destination. The worst hit ones were those who tried to make international calls and had their balances subtracted without succeeding and those who had sent bulk messages and failed to receive the delivered report to even one sent message.Shahzad Anwer, a subscriber of Warid, said that he does not subscribe to any free SMS package and had loaded a Rs200 card just to send messages. However, he was shocked to find out that none of his friends had received a message from him and he had lost all his balance.Aliya Matloob, another subscriber of Mobilink said that she had tried calling her parents who live in Dubai to wish them but faced repeated disconnections which made her lose several hundred rupees.Similarly, Nadeem Akhtar, who arrived in Karachi from the UK, faced trouble in contacting his brothers on the first day of Eid when he waited at the airport for them to receive him and could not get through. He also had his balance deducted from his account.On the other hand, Pakistan Telecommunications Company Limited (PTCL) made millions of rupees by fleecing subscribers off their money during the three-day Eid-ul-Fitr holiday as they stopped their facility of free phone calls from September 30, and failed to inform their subscribers.This resulted in subscribers making several calls during the stipulated ‘free call’ time between 11pm to 6am, unaware that the facility had been withdrawn, which is likely to lead towards higher telephone bills for the current month.Upon contacting PTCL, the company spokesman Ali Kader Gilani informed The News that PTCL had informed the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority of their reversal of the facility through a written notification and also sent out advertisements to various leading newspapers of the country.He added that a release had also been issued in this regard which clearly stated that the free local call promotion was being discontinued to be replaced with another alternative package. He stressed that PTCL had not cheated its subscribers and had in fact introduced a new weekend package which would come into effect on October 5, and would be offering them further improved and reduced rates.

Share This

According to a news release, Mr. Hussain has over thirteen years of telecom experience in Pakistan and led the team that launched countries first Wireless Local Loop Service back in 2002 and GOCDMA consumer service in 2005.

An MBA from NU Los Angles, USA, Aamir joined the organization as a marketing manager and worked his way up to the position of vice president before being promoted to COO.

Share This

Share This

Starz is making waves these days as this portal hosts reviews on almost everything and is a perfect city guide. A sister venture of Techtronix, Starz was launched in February. There are many unique entries like religious organizations, ‘night life’ options and financial services, among others. Anyone can write a review by just going through a simple registration process (sans any charges). You can also upload your picture and give more details though most of the users have preferred to remain semi-anonymous.

The reviewing process is pretty simple as almost all of the famous eateries, hospitals, car dealers, shopping centers and professional services spots have been listed on the site. You just have to select one and write a review. You can also add a picture if you want. Restaurants have got the highest number of reviews and understandably so (Islooites seem to be the most active reviewers as there were 60 such reviews for Islamabad while just 49 for Karachi and 41 for Lahore when I last checked). The thing which distinguish Starz from other such sites is that they are offering ‘dinner for two‘ for the reviewers. Each month five prizes will be given in this connection (During Ramadan, they were offering a maximum of Rs. 750 worth Iftaar dinner for two).

There is one issue though. The quality of reviews ranges from excellent to mediocre and the moderators have failed to maintain a certain standard. The standards can be improved if they set a format for reviews like description, photos, prices and pros and cons of a place. Another issue is the design of the portal. Very small fonts and dull outlook is a major turnoff for me at least. Still, the portal will get a high rating because of its innovative style. Right?Wait a minute.

One of our readers recently pointed out that the Web site is a direct rip-off of Yelp, a popular US-based reveiws site. That’s really an abominable act.

Now a passing mention to Foona, an Islamabad-based eateries review site. The portal is still in developmental stages and just give you the basic pointers about a restaurant ( only limited to Islamabad places currently).

Share This

Share This

BumpIn.com is a service we covered some months ago that lets you have live conversations with people visiting the same webpage as you. Their main product is a pretty sophisticated browser-plugin that lets you discover and connect with people who are visiting the same webpage as you - this can be useful to find people shopping for similar items, reading the same breaking-news story, or even in following offline comments left by others like a discussion board.

I think the best parts of their plugin is the fact that you can not only find people on that site, but people reading other pages on that site and also similar websites from across the net. This gives it a touch of both stumble-upon type discovery service and a me.dium style commenting service.

In addition, once you start to get to know people on their network you can add them to your friends list and have one-on-one conversations with them too, which adds a social element to the service.

Recently they’ve unveiled a web-based chat widget based on the service too - website owners can add the widget to their site to connect all the readers of the site together, no plugin installations required.

I had been a bit skeptical about the service being offered as a browser-plugin, but the thing that a browser-plugin allows is for users to "opt in" to experiencing that type of browsing. Some people may not want to always have a social browsing experience, and so they can always turn off the browser plugin in that case.

BumpIn is one of the startups that Umar Saif is involved with. During their private beta they have been making steady progress by integrating their service with social networking and web2.0 sites. They recently raised an angel round of funding from private investors - some of them are the people behind Aliph’s Jawbone.

This service is something that will benefit from the network effect - becoming more useful as more people use it. If they could integrate some A-list social networks then the service would become really interesting. Good luck to them.

Share This