IT Industry is gaining momentum on its events, and so is CodeWeek.

March 20^th came face to face with high profile iPhone Application developers, with CodeWeek as its host.

CodeWeek landed offline with its first event of 2011,

“Get your Apps Straight on iOS4”

iPhone Application Development Seminar

With the success of our first event on iPhone Application Development, we decided to go for another on Android, and on 16^th of April, we welcomed an inquisitive and amazing audience along with remarkable speakers. The seminar lapsed for complete four hours where four speakers presented highly interactive presentations. Speakers belonged to varied companies and came from different backgrounds. As a result of which, different experiences came in the forefront.

Telenor Pakistan launched Djuice’s ‘Apportunity’, a service that allows mobile application developers from Pakistan to create mobile apps and get them published on the Nokia Ovi Store, Apple AppStore, and Android Marketplace for people around the world.

Telenor Pakistan, the country’s second largest cellular company, continued to perform well in the second quarter of 2011 according to the latest figures released by the Telenor Group. It added 914,000 subscriptions during the three-month period ending with a total of 26.7 million subscribers, a growth of 12% over the same period last year.

“I am happy with Telenor Pakistan’s performance in the second quarter of 2011. We have been able to sustain growth and keep our EBITDA margin strong despite operating in a challenging business environment. As with previous quarters, we continue to receive recognition; Telenor Pakistan and Tameer Bank’s easypaisa won the Shaukat Khanum

Social Responsibility Award in recognition of the service’s impact on society of organized philanthropy, an achievement we are proud of, ” said Chief Marketing Officer, Telenor Pakistan Aamir Ibrahim, speaking about the solid second quarter figures, said:

The company’s EBITDA margin has been impressive, growing over three percentage points over the previous quarter, while market share has remained stable at 24%.

Chairman and CEO NetSol Technologies Ltd, Salim Ghauri has said that the Information Technology (IT) institutes across the country are producing quality students but the global image of Pakistan is proving the only impediment to grow for IT industry.

While addressing the students of GIFT University Gujranwala, Mr Ghauri was sharing his success story as a successful IT entrepreneur of Pakistan.

Chairman and CEO NetSol Technologies said the international customers are looking towards Pakistan with a long term perspective but only the negative image of the country was hampering continual growth of IT industry. Especially, he said, the recent incidents have again caused serious setback to the country’s image. However, he expressed the hope that Pakistan would come out of negative image in the long run like it has passed through the incidents as 9/11, London bombing and Mumbai attacks.

He said “Pakistan is not merely an IT service provider country but it is exporting quality products while meeting time deadlines and budget requirements of the customers. Therefore, political and
economic stability is the only issue of Pakistan”. He also said that majority of international clients are interested in having long term business relations with Pakistan’s IT industry in order to take benefit from its brilliant human resource.

Mr Ghauri also mentioned that the global indexes suggest that Pakistan is still the most easiest business doing country therefore, a good number of new IT companies are emerging on the scene one after another in order to cater to the requirements of world community. It is also resulting into a challenging situation on availability of sufficient number of human resource for the industry.

Chairman NetSol urged the government to deploy more and more brains and resources in building up positive image of Pakistan. He said that the foreign missions and embassies of the country are performing a great job on this front. Representatives of international community should be invited to Pakistan in order to remove the negative wrong perceptions about our country.

He said recently a team of World Bank economic experts has visited NetSol Technologies in order to prepare a case study on Netsol’s success story. The purpose of this visit was to discuss challenges and opportunities faced by Pakistan’s IT industry and to understand policy levers that
can further help its growth.

Call for Expression of Interest: IEEE Pakistan Fund. IEEE Lahore Section is seeking proposals from educational and professional institutes as well as other NGOs working in educational and professional development areas.

Major Areas

• Professional Development of Students, Staff, Faculty (affected by floods)
• Infrastructure support (Labs, classrooms, equipment, components etc)
• Scholarship support to students from affected areas.

Proposal Requirements

Proposals should highlight the following in order to establish a direct link with the IEEE Pakistan Fund vision.

a) Executive Summary

b) Description: Details about the scope of the proposal
i. Describe overall project if this proposal is part of a bigger initiative
ii. Provide details of specific areas in which support is needed (professional
development, infrastructure, scholarship etc).
iii. Provide history (work already done) as well as future roadmap including shortterm
and long‐term impact of the specific project.

c) Direct / Indirect link with Flood situation (2010)

d) Amount of funding required. Categorize the funding requirements into various heads.

e) Utilization Plan. Timeline of how these funds will be utilized.

f) Monitoring / Evaluation Mechanism. Indicate your proposed monitoring and evaluation mechanism during the project execution. You also need to put an undertaking that you will abide by all IEEE rules and regulations including monitoring and audit requirements.

g) Organizational Profile: Provide your organizational profile including its year of formation, registration, previous work in this domain, contact person details etc.

h) Partner Info: In case your organization has other partners in this proposal or in the overall bigger initiative, provide their details.

Submitted to (preferably through Email)
Dr. Shafay Shamail
Chair IEEE Lahore Section
C/O LUMS, DHA, Lahore
Email: sshamail@lums.edu.pk

IEEE Secretariat
Mr. Ishtiaq Bhatti
(042) 3560 8312
ishtiaq@lums.edu.pk

About IEEE

IEEE is the world’s largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity. IEEE and its members inspire a global community through IEEE’s highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities.

Under IEEE Lahore Section, all student branches are actively engaged in the engineering profession and are collaborating with other national professional institutions in arranging symposium, technical lectures and seminars of national importance.

Are you a telecom blogger and waiting for a writing competition?

Well here is your chance then.

Ufone is taking the lead in providing you with an opportunity where you can express your ideas to refine the image of Pakistan via the online medium.

The objective of this activity is to encourage “U” (the telecom bloggers) to use the internet medium in an effective manner which will help highlight the positive side of Pakistan.

Given below is the question that we ask of you along with the guidelines to the competition:

Question: How can you build a better image of Pakistan via the online medium and what do you think is your responsibility towards the country?

Guidelines

All entrants must submit their entries to the Ufone fanpage by Sunday (26^th June 2011).

Ideas which highlight the use of social media and how it can be used to build positive perception of Pakistan. (Ideas that be implemented on social networks)

Start the caption with the campaign name (i.e. THINK PAKISTAN) , following it with a title of your choice.

The entries must NOT exceed the 500 word limit. Any entry above the word limit will automatically be disqualified.

Selection Procedure

The entries will then be uploaded on the Ufone fanpage by the moderator and the voting will begin on Monday (27^th June 2011)

Voting will stop at 12pm, Thursday (30^th June 2011). The winners will be declared depending on the most number of likes on an entry.

Prize

The top 5 entries will be entitled to win Uth Futura handsets. Uth Futura is a dual mode GSM+EVDO handset which gives the user lightning fast 3G internet speed of up to 3.1Mbps and the ability to make calls, socialize and stream online videos.

The time has come for us to stand up and say that we take pride in Pakistan and take an initiative to build a progressive image of OUR country in front of the whole world. We cannot shy away from the fact that we are indeed a nation faced with conflicts, terrorism and denial, however, there is a lot more to PAKISTAN that meets the eye!

Ufone implores you to look deep within your culture and heritage and present ideas which are truly PAKISTANI! Be original, be Pakistan, THINK PAKISTAN!

‘Email is great, except when there’s too much of it’. Priority inbox by Gmail intuitively sifts the incoming e-mails assisting you in focusing on the most important threads; priority inbox saves time and thus proves to be a huge productivity booster, providing you with automatic and organized setting.

As messages come in, Gmail automatically flags some of them as important. Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you email most.

Why do you lose leads every day? simply because they are not prioritized, and in case you have lost all your priority emails in the junk then you are probably missing out on your priorities. Google’s priority inbox provides it users the convenience of sorting the priority emails by identifying important emails and ignoring the not-so-important ones.

Gmail official blog says that “Gmail has always been pretty good at filtering junk mail into the “spam” folder. But today, in addition to spam, people get a lot of mail that isn’t outright junk but isn’t very important—bologna, or “bacn.”

With time Gmail has become pretty good at separating “bologna” from the important stuff, and assists you just like your personal assistant would.

Dividing your inbox into three sections Gmail names each category separately. As I said earlier Gmail identifies important emails now I am going to show you how the entire inbox behaves:

‘Important and Unread’

You don’t have to choose which email is important and which is not, instead Gmail itself manages the most important emails through reading your daily habits of opening and reading emails. The ones you open and reply to frequently always land in the priority inbox.

Starred

Starred are usually chosen by yourself. When you check the star option for any email, Gmail throws it in the middle section of your inbox where it stays till the next time you want.

The third section of your priority inbox consists of everything else i.e. Bologna. All the read emails, all the unimportant ones and all the newsletters hic you have subscribed to earlier Gmail sets everything straight in your inbox.

“You can even set up filters to always mark certain things important or unimportant, or rearrange and customize the three inbox sections.”

This is Gmail’s way to fight the inbox terrorist ‘spam’, and time consumption. As they say ”When we tested Priority Inbox at Google, we found that people spent 6 percent less time on e-mail after enabling this feature. This translates to a week’s worth of time saved each year for information workers who typically spend 13 hours per week on e-mail today.”

Whether is it about education, work, entertainment or everyday technology hacks, you sure are missing out a lot if you are not aware of these useful pages on Facebook. So while we were going through our list we thought we should share the best out of these with you.

Become a fan or let others know about it because CodeWeek has chose the best for you.

STEP- Science, Technology, and Education in PakistanSTEP envisions a community collaborating towards a common goal: improving the state of science, technology, and education in Pakistan. It aims to bring together policy-makers, academics, researchers, professionals, and students

With STEP stay up-to-date with the latest in Science and Education in Pakistan. Participate in discussions and contribute your ideas.

IEEE – The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

A non-profit organization, IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for the advancement of technology.
The IEEE name was originally an acronym for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. Today, the organization’s scope of interest has expanded into so many related fields, that it is simply referred to by the letters I-E-E-E (pronounced Eye-triple-E).

ROZEE.PK

Pakistan’s number 1 online job site which connects talent with opportunity. ROZEE provides services to the job seekers and employers by providing them one platform for job searching and hiring, respectively.

But if you want to go global then we suggest

Elance

Elance, the world’s leading platform for online employment, helps businesses hire and manage in the cloud. Elance is the leading site for online work where businesses connect with independent professionals to get work done.
On Elance, businesses find the experts they need plus the tools to manage online work from hiring to collaboration to making payment.

Lifehacker

Lifehacker is an award-winning daily blog that features tips, shortcuts, and downloads that help you work and live smarter and more efficiently.

Mashable

Mashable is the top source for news in social and digital media, technology and web culture. With more than 30 million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the most prolific news site reporting breaking web news, providing analysis of trends, reviewing new websites and services, and offering social media resources and guides.

Ruby on Rails- Web development that doesn’t hurt

Ruby on Rails is an open source framework that’s optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration.

The page keeps its fan updated on latest developments in the usage of this technology.

ROBOTICS IN PAKISTAN

Robotics in Pakistan is here to Promote Interesting and upcoming technologies of the world. People can discuss and share anything related to robotics happening anywhere in the world. Students of Pakistan are encouraged to use it for promotion of their projects and achievements.

IT/Software Development Outsourcing

The page Facilitates discussions on outsourcing and technology in emerging markets. It provides information about sales, business development and marketing services for companies who are in outsourcing business.

Strategic Advisory Outsourcing services to IT/Software Development executives looking for outsourcing providers. We can help you to find the right outsourcing solution provider for FREE! Pre-qualified recommendations based on your specific requirements.

Android Pakistan

AndroidPakistan.com will be covering everything related to the Android OS in Pakistan. Android phone launch, events, crash courses, meetups etc. It’s all there!

So stayed tuned to the updates, because we have an emerging mobile market in Pakistan.

Bramerz

In one simple word, they’re DIGITAL, known to be the best in creating powerful footprints online for the brands we work for. They claim to be serious about business and tend t cover it 360 degrees from creating a brand’s online presence to transforming it into a digital phenomenon.
Stay tuned to their latest updates as they have a lot going on within their remarkable setup.

CodeWeek

Latest but not the least, we strive to bring the in technology in front of you, so become a fan on Facebook and signup to our weekly newsletter.

By Yasir Ameen

More than 200 bloggers from across Pakistan gathered at two-day Pakistan’s first-ever international social media summit held on June 10-11 along with special appearance of their fellows from Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt, USA and Netherlands.

The event began with a panel discussion on ‘Education and Good Governance, Women and Social Activism in New Era of Media’, and ‘Monetizing Your Social Media Space’. These discussions were followed by 20 different breakout sessions with five sessions underway simultaneously on different aspects of social media.

The bloggers also interacted via Skype with WordPress and Twitter representatives.

“I am thrilled to be here today and see so many people here who actively blog and use social media for bringing about a positive change. Pakistan has a lively and active blogging community, where over three million citizen journalists can freely report on and discuss any topic,” stated US Consul General William Martin in his keynote address.

Express Tribune Editor Kamal Siddiqi and Intel Pakistan Country Manager Naveed Siraj welcomed the participants and expressed the hope that the summit would become an annual event.

The daylong interactive summit was sponsored jointly by PC World, Google, Intel, Raffles (Pakistan’s Authorized Apple Distributor) and media partners, including Newsweek Pakistan, Express Media Group, City 89 FM and the US Consulate General in Karachi.

International participants included Mohamed El Dahshan (Egypt), Hanny Kusumawati and Anandita Puspitasari (Indonesia), Rebecca Chiao (Egypt), Ong Hock Chuan (Malaysia), Claire Diaz Ortiz (US) and Karim Osman (Netherlands). Prominent bloggers from Pakistan included Raza Rumi, Awab Alvi, Sana Saleem, Naveen Naqvi, AJ Shirazi, Imtiaz Muhammad, Ali Abbas Zaidi, Shehrbano Taseer and Yasser Latif Hamdani. Showcasing Pakistan’s active social media community, bloggers traveled from Lahore, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Hala, Gujranwala, Wah Cantt and Quetta for the summit.

By Staff Reporter

Google Pakistan has organized a training workshop for mapmakers for encouraging youngsters to develop digital maps of their residential villages, towns and cities for providing vast socio-economic benefits to society.

55 participants attended at FAST on Monday.

The event was supervised by Badar Khushnood, Google Country Consultant. Google mappers and advocates include Jabran Rafique, Faraz Ahmed & Omer Sheikh trained participants over digitalization of areas mapping.

The purpose of this event was to teach the usage of Google MapMaker to map your neighborhood, village or city.

Google Maps, amongst commercial uses & benefits, have played a pivotal role in disaster rescue & relief activities in Pakistan.

What is Google Map Maker?

Google Map Maker allows you to add and update geographic information for millions of users to see in Google Maps and Google Earth. By sharing information about the places you know, like businesses in your town or places on your school campus, you can ensure the map accurately reflects the world around you. Your updates are reviewed, once approved, will appear online for people from all over the world to see.

Google Map Maker is available for over 187 countries and regions around the world.

Series of such events are being held at different universities of Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. The next event will be on June 10 at IBA Karachi.

Health in Software Industry

By Halima Khan

Looking after your health — both mental and physical — is one of the best ways to stay sane in these crazy times, especially in the continuous stress giving professionals like the software industry. So how does a person keep their wits about them when everyone around them is losing theirs?

Stress Reduction. If the speed of life is making you stressed look for the “peaceful place we all have within us,” advices Princeton Centre for Yoga & Health. We keep seeing the stressed out software development team and the customers, blaming and pointing fingers at each other day in and day out. There are several reasons which cause stress in the team. Some reasons include poor top leadership, unskilled team, unsupportive customer and poor project planning to name a few.

IT work culture in most countries is totally messed up. Working 12+ hours a day and 6 or even 7 days a week is more the rule than the exception. A majority of IT people suffer from health problems. As most of the IT workforce is still very young, the problem isn’t very obvious today but it will hit with unbearable ferocity when these youngsters get to their 40s. Stress levels are unbelievable high. Stress management is a cover topic in magazines and newspapers and workshops on the subject are regularly overbooked.  Most IT people have hardly any social / family life to talk of. They love their work but collapse due to pressure.

In an anxiety ravaged atmosphere like the one prevalent most commonly in software industry some of the problems faced are:

High Physical Stress:

It is common for employees working 14 hours a day, and many individuals suffer from Computer Related Injuries (CRI). Early symptoms of CRI include pain, numbness, burning eyes, regular need to stretch or massage arms, tingling fingers or arms, or excessive fatigue while working.

Excessive Office Politics:

There is an unusually high office politics, passing the blame around, taking credit of others, back biting and overall a very high level of office politics. Competition and often insecurity at work can boost stress.

No Family life:

It is very common that by the time software professionals come home, family members have already slept or too exhausted themselves. A feeling of loneliness is very common. Depression is fairly common in software industry. Due to the nature of work, even in office you may have no or minimum contact with other people.

Traffic Jams:

Traffic is really bad and unpredictable, it can take 30 minutes to 90 minutes to travel just 15 kilometers. This is unnecessary stress that professionals are exposed to almost every day going and coming back from work.

Lost identity:

Go to any good school in a city, more than half of the students will tell “I want to become a software engineer”. The pride that you are software professional has been lost long time back.

When all this office stress is getting on your nerves, there are healthy and not-so-healthy ways to react. Experts offer seven tips on how to let it all roll over without rolling out your fists:

Stay Calm
The average person faces around 30 frustrations every day, and a high proportion of those frustrations occur at work, says a psychologist. But overreacting to a defective copy machine or an abusive colleague by going into high-drama mode and losing your rage will end up hurting far more than it helps.

Have Some Empathy
Keep in mind, those 30 daily frustrations aren’t just happening to you, but to every person you come across during your workday, from the bad-mannered customer to your inconsistent boss. Be hard on the problem that you are facing, but soft on the people you come across.

Tune Out
Another method for managing stress is to merely border your contact to office drama. “Close your door if you have a door, or close your mind if you have a mind,” says a development consultant.

Perfect the Art of the Blow Off
Don’t get sucked into conversations with irritating coworkers. If someone walks up to you to purposely get a kick out of annoying you, a good response is to walk off.

Break the Bad Mood Cycle
Good moods at work are transmittable, but so are bad moods. Either physically move away to break the negative energy, or else get immersed in your work because negativity is infectious.

Look for Humor
“Don’t take yourself and everyone else so seriously, pretend it’s a sitcom.” That is one advice that is advisable to take seriously and remember.

Close the Door at the End of the Day
Don’t leave issues unsettled at the end of your workday. “If you’ve made a mistake or gotten into a hassle, take the time to apologize in a non-obsequious way.”

Don’t fight the natural order of things

First and foremost, acknowledging that there are forces of nature and we as human beings are controlled by these forces, every second. This is not the other way around. Managing one’s stress depends on choosing whether to cooperate and plan to work with forces of nature OR to drive against it. Finally you might drive against the forces and win, but at what cost?