Just bought Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 for mom for the purpose shown in the picture above. Just makes me think how we perceive technology in a one dimensional and often negative way. Technology itself is not good or bad however its uses are. With a boom in tablets you can replace everything you use in your life with a tablet. Be it books, Quran, notebook, tv, movie player and many more. Its a very powerful tool if used in a right way.
Anyways coming back to topic, just want to shout out about this great app named ” Quran Android” gives you all sorts of functionalities like arabic in an easy to read font, translation in multiple languages including urdu, audio feature with highlighting and many more. The best thing is its free and opensource so everyone can contribute. You can get it here https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.quran.labs.androidquran .

There has been a lot of buzz about Lahore Metro Bus service today and in the past one month. Much has been said in favour and against the project. There are many sane arguments that can be made in favour or against the project however there is more of blind following and arguments being given for the sake of arguments ( read political differences).

What’s right about the project:

• Big cities like lahore need better local transport system. You can end up widening all the roads but there would still be more cars on the road. This has nothing to do with smaller cities as developmental projects are done on constituency level.
• If you try using the current transport system (read buses) they Will make you wait for 15 or more minutes on the bus stop until the next bus arrives (inhumane), not to mention the famous vans stuffed with people.
• Dedicated bus lanes are the way forward. I would go one step further and say that after recent development on canal road there should be a lane dedicated to buses( marked with painted line instead of creating a divider, given the driving people behave and stay in their lanes)

what’s wrong with the project
The over all concept is right however it should have been designed as self sustaining entity. The annual subsidy on the project though not as much as claimed on social media its still is a big amount of tax money.
Although many companies are involved in handling different parts of project including buses, security and cleaning, subsidized projects don’t tend to last longer and there is general carelessness towards running them.
The ticket prices could have been higher given what good for nothing transport mafia already charges and could have helped reduce subsidy.

When pervaiz elahi the former CM punjab started new Traffic warden system and Rescue 1122 services there were many cries over the issue that this is being done to bribe party workers with job for getting votes in elections. The truth is both these initiatives created jobs for people on merit, and contributed towards general improvement in quality of life. I think Rapid Transit System in Lahore will help in creating jobs, improving businesses, contribute to creating a culture of using local transport by middle and upper middle class, reducing number of cars on the roads, improving environment and reducing pollution. Oh and talking about environment and pollution does this not contribute towards health facilities and general quality of life.

PS: for this project to actually last it has to be a feasible business

When I was a young kid I had the opportunity to travel a lot on G.T road with my parents from one city to another and to the village. The long empty road towards the village, the slow trucks on a single lane G.T. Road and great playlist from my dad’s collection of music playing in the background sums up the great childhood memories.
The playlist, from mansoor malangi to Bee Gees, Pathanay khan to Queens, Noor jahan to Ranjeet Kaur left a far more deeper impact on what kind of person I would become. It taught me to celebrate diversity, embrace what is ours, try listening to others, be creative but be tasteful and don’t blindly copy others.
It taught me to be myself but to be open minded and always keep in mind there is room for improvement. Now when i am a father myself i realize that all the little things matter when it comes to parenthood. I hope i am as good as a father as my dad.

Today I got this text from warid that Warid has just introduced Micro Sims. It has been made clear that this move has been made keeping in mind the ever increasing use of iPhone and iPad. Here is the text advertisement I received from warid.
“Discover the new MicroSim from Warid. Compatible with iPhone 4 and iPad. Available at selected business centres.”

This sounds like a good move as there is increased use of tablets and phones with MicroSim slot (particularly Apple’s products). People had to get their sim cut to make it fit inside their devices. This will make things easy as well as there is always a chance of data theft and sim duplication issue when you hand it over to a third party.
The sim is available in selected business centres in following cities.
Lahore
Gujranwala
Faisalabad
Multan
Islamabad
Peshawar
Karachi
Hyderabad

On a side note this would be a great combination with warid unlimited Internet and will boost the sales of iPad’s wifi and 3G models.

Whenever i meet students who want to start their own business, there is always a very typical barrier which holds them from making the move. If its a techie the question will be, I can produce stuff but i have absolutely no clue how to sell it. If its a business person (most likely MBA, BBA), the confidence for sales and marketing is there but they are totally lost when it comes to building stuff.

Well there are two answers to this issue. Firstly you learn things if you opt to do a startup (and thats the fun) but the second thing is more important that you go out in search of people who complement your skills. Remember the cartoon series “Captain Planet” we used to watch when we were young? Besides the captain there were 5 kids in the cartoon series who had rings having different powers. When their powers were combined Captain Planet came into action but remember what he always said towards the end, “The Power is Yours”. Yes thats true. All the potential Entrepreneurs are like those 5 kids in that series, some have the passion (fire), some have the driving force (wind), some are dominating (water), some are persistent, no matter how hard the situation is they stand tall (earth), some have the real understanding of whats going on (heart) and when all these powers are combined an ideal Startup team is made. So when you are planning to start something of your own and have all these fears, go out in search of co-founders who can complement your skills and always remember, its you who is going to solve your problem and no one else.

From 31st August onwards Twitter is going to wrap all urls that are being tweeted, with its own url shortening  service t.co. the urls will be displayed in a user friendly manner and all those who click will be taken through twitter’s newly introduced security service that will determine if the url is safe enough for you to view (i.e. the site doesn’t have any malware etc.). Twitter has been bashing many url shortening service which had been causing (as per Twitter) enough confusion and security concerns as users couldn’t find what they were clicking on. Although many services like Twitter Gadgets had intriduced features like revealing the url on mouse over but Twitter seems to have some other plans.

This seems like a big set back for many url shortening services as more than 70% of the tweets contain url  (billions of them) and most of them are shortened by one service or the other. Although the third party url shorteners will be hit back by this change,  it seems to have positive effect on users. The change will be rolled out for all users by the end of this year.

Google has been slowly adding a lot of features into its image search, improving it day by day. From advance filters separating line drawings from photos and clip art to recently added image similarity which digs similar images, a lot has been going on. Google just gave image search a brand new fast and sleek interface which lists much more images saving you from the hassle of clicking next page button. The list is loaded on demand when you scroll the page. Also to mention the on mouse larger thumbnails of the images. I think Google just made the image search better and far more fun than it used to be

Google has recently acquired Metaweb and company that indexes and classifies information on the basis of objects or entities. The main focus is the understand the exact meaning behind a user query and give out the best contextual search results. Not exactly a vertical search engine i would say but a different mechanism to understand search queries and indexing data.

However our focus here is to analyze what Google is up to? Ever wondered whats going on with information classification in the past year or so. You give your class or subordinates an assignment to dig information about something and all turn up with wikipedia pages. Search for something on Google and you end up having Wikipedia page about the thing as the first search result. Then why not search on Wikipedia? Wouldn’t that give you reasonable information on what you are looking for in 50% of the search attempts? Who would need Google then?

Now imagine how Google can change that or stop that from happening? Yup you got it right, by understanding what people are searching for in a better way and have something on top of Wikipedia search result which shows you aggregated and conformed information about what you search for.

here is metaweb introduction

I never write about movies and music but the recent buzz around Misha’s Coke Studio performance of famous Reshma’s song Chori Chori has forced me to write few words. To start of, Reshma’s voice is omong the most melodious voices in the history of Pakistani music and to redo any of her song the singer’s voice has to be at par with her.

Where Rohail’s composition is good enough and the song comes together well, Misha’s voice is a total misfit. The song is one of the most melodious and sensitive song i have ever heard and Misha blows it with her raw voice which is not smooth at all and very crude. I’ll give her full credit for her performance in Jugni and thats the kind of song which suits her voice the most. However there is always a good thing about remixes. If its good it refreshes the memory of the old song and if it bad it always brings the old song back in fashion. In this case its the later for me.

oh and to all the guyz who have been drooling all over the places, guyz all that glitters is not gold.

Wrote a fairly lengthy post on the topic but decided to skip and just go with this cartoon