Yesterday we were talking to each other regarding several things including the Islamabad blasts and he was like “oh! There is not much I can do in my diminished capacity on digg, but that should change in the next few days…. I’ll try and get the word out”

When he got to know about the Czech Ambassador Ivo Zdarek died in Islamabad Blast he said “damn do I have to contact my people in the well U.S. Govt to find out what the real story is?, now I’m trying to tone down the response from the U.S. in a major crisis”

He told me his father died of cancer last year and his mother has Alzheimer and a bad heart; he always tries to please her. At that time I could never have thought he would be banned from digg.

Regarding his ban on digg he contacted Digg support and wrote them “I had linked directly to the pictures of the digg user on her site. However the site owner apparently redirected the site to a spam site after my initial post.”

In his other mail On Sep 19, 2008, at 11:59 AM, R.J. Saddler( Zaibatsu)wrote:

Guys, hey I didn’t know that a picture of a female digger was against the TOS. I didn’t even know that she was selling something on the site. I’ve submitted over 3000 - 4000 articles and I’ve been on Digg since month 1. I definitely didn’t try and promote a site to sell a product. I really have tried to be a good digger.

Is there anyway that you could reinstate my account?

Reg
________________________________________________________
His request was declined by Digg Support saying

Hello R.J.,

Thanks for contacting us at Digg.com. At this time, we are unable to remove the ban on your account.

–Digg Support
__________________________________________________________

I feel bad for him and few thing that go in his favour are:
1. He was such an active and popular digger that out of 3000 - 4000 submissions; a full 1,196 have gone popular making total 40%.
2. He never have deliberately violated the TOS of digg in entire four years.
3. He has explained his position in his email to Digg support too.
4. He is a man with wish to bring change He told me while talking about digg:

“I started with digg … a member from month 1, it was fun, and it still is. I enjoy getting stories that I care about to the masses. It’s so much hard then just a year ago due to digg and other sites changing the algo. But for every cute bunny story, I want to get 1 out about the environment, or politics. Just the stuff I care about. Don’t get me wrong I have to feed the masses, but what makes it for me is the fact that I can make a difference. A change for good”

5. He has been not only a loyal digg user for four years but a mentor for many a user and emerged as an devoted promoter of the site.

6. Digg is just a site; i am sure he has much strength to start his own social media Company as He claimed that,

“I’ll have the largest social media market company on the planet in 1 year”

7. I have solid grounds to say that group can change things a group that has power to influence the mind in making and breaking a story as Reg Saddler told me

We’re a groups of people can influence the media more than a 3 minute blurb on CNN It’s the wisdom of the informed masses. The power of the masses to move a concept, stories or even a cute picture forward so a group of people can enjoy, comment or talk action for good or bad on a topic. The old media just doesn’t get it

However as Digg CEO Jay Adelson “Digg revolt” that took place last night? It wasn’t really a revolt, he says. Several of the top diggers — including Andrew “MrBabyMan” Sorcini, Muhammad “msaleem” Saleem and Reg “Zaibatsu” Saddler, held an emergency chat/podcast to discuss their response to a recent change in the Digg algorithm which made it more difficult for veteran Diggers to get their submissions on the front page. After nearly a couple hours of debate, it was decided that they would boycott the site. They backed down from the plan, though, when Digg founder Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson showed up and talked them down from it.

“Let’s be realistic about what happened yesterday,” Adelson says. “It wasn’t a revolt. To me, a revolt is when a statistically significant group of people cause a disruption. These guys are significant to me personally, but this wasn’t a revolt. I hope that the next time a small group of users voice their concerns, it’s not represented as a ‘mass movement’ or a ‘revolt.’”

If this groups will seriously revolt i am sure he can be unbanned and reinstated. Despite the fact that he would have become the lead story of American press; i would want raise my little voice for him.

Unlike all other Traditional Media including Newspapers, Televisions, Magazines, Books and Radio; Social Media is managed and controlled by the common people who are either Information Hunters or involve in social media for financial benefits. SM is a user-oriented approach, it’s crucial to identify and classify these users in accordance with their potential and the market segment they hold. Heaviest aspect of social media is; people are becoming comfortable with social usage of this media. According to the Consumer Internet Barometer produced by the Conference Board and TNS, “Social-interaction platforms, such as top-ranked MySpace and Facebook, have grown dramatically in recent years, with one out of every four people online now visiting social-networking sites.” Bill Martens 43 Year old Novelist and minor league football player who has lived in several countries, speaks seven languages, and currently resides in Japan says “Social Networking allows easy communication for those who might not otherwise communicate in the real world. My friend is deaf and she uses it exclusively for that purpose. It also allows people in the same area to make contact where they might not even know each other exists”, he added that as for the financial benefits, it does allow people to spread the word about web sites for which one is web master. For sites that are advertising driven, social media is a bonus to earn. Bill Marten has marked these sites too addictive and time consuming that few people tend to spend way too much time on it. According to him few people also begin to have all their relationships in the online world and completely forget about the external world, According to him it is a dilemma that social media users are becoming more social online and less social offline.

Very interestingly these extremely easy to join networks keeps the teenagers busy, who lake patience to fill up long complicated forms. They can join just by pushing a button “Add as friend” to expand their network. On these networks identity becomes more important than the person himself, social media marketers use to refer each other either by user names or avatars. This expanding circle helps them in becoming more and more popular within these networks, more the user is popular more his or her submissions are valued. A very popular user on Digg Mr.BabyMan has gained a gigantic fan bank whereas his opponents use to mark him as an exploiter and using his status.

Social media gurus have criticized social media as well and this criticism does hold justification, i.e. quantitative use destroying the quality of content. This is a serious issue and probably a hurdle on the way towards success of SM as well. No doubt these sites have become a major tool not only to interact but to accumulate the information in a single place. A Massive database is available for users and that is for free where content and context are the ruling forces of Internet Marketing. But a criticism is making it place about the weak content. Replying to this criticism, another school of thought is of the opinion that quality still finds its way because the users are people, not bots, and content if not providing what users are looking for or is in old hat, will not be able to gimmick any attention even if made very much popular artificially.

For Florin Nedelcu 23 year’s old, male from Bucharest, Romania says, ”Social Media is quickly redefining the way humans interact with each other online. Whether it is through blogs or social networks, people have easier access to the content they are interested in and can interact with individuals that share their interests. He commented on the negative aspect of social media as “the negative aspect of social media is marketing and branding but lately it becomes quite frustrating to notice social networks flooded with weak content promoted so traffic can be driven to obscure websites that pay for the attention.” While Joe Smith 28 year old male from CA, USA has entirely different opinion about the quality content and he takes the social media as source of socializing he says “Compare social media with grade A, B or even wrong movies these have audience though; similarly social media produces varied type of content; and end user defines the nature of the content”, according to him lots of people from South Asia; of course online; approach social media indifferently. He made another point about the success of these networks saying,”Social Media is very prosper therefore millions of people are joining it every years and companies are investing in the startups”. I would deem it wise to agree because big companies have their eyes on these networks and are being bought for enormous amounts of money; reason is popularity of these sites.

Recently, Bebo, A social networking site, second only to MySpace and Facebook was bought by AOL for $856 million. Several online corporate companies have already realized the huge potential of social networks and started using them in their own interests. Maki from Toronto a top digger has suggested in this regard that big businesses are trying to find a way into a specific target market and since social websites come with an engaged and built-in audience, it makes sense for them to acquire them. He added, “The problem is finding a way to monetize them without spoiling the social experience, and I think if this goes on and power is taken away from the users, social media just won’t be social any more”.

Social Media, being an emerging concept is still undiscovered for most of the individuals associated with web business and having most of the aspects unexplored, the sustainability of SM is still a question mark. Talking with reference to Pakistan social Media is still a concept unknown to millions. A very small number has acquaintance with true soul of social media. While comparing Pakistan with its neighboring countries in Asian Continent e.g. India, Japan, China and Sri Lanka; these networks are almost run by the people from these countries. Hasan Saleem 24 years old Search Engine Optimizer from Pakistan has defined social media as man managed networks that include all those websites where people post, comment, criticize, appraise news, products and services. For him social Media is source to generate huge traffic, sales, exposure, worldwide audience. While he thinks Negative criticism on content and services is unproductive aspect. He presumes a bright future for social news as a medium that will persist indefinitely rather will grow. He thinks Pakistan needs to pay attention towards this emerging industry.

Millions of people are joining these networks every year and these have become the talk of time. Every other Article in Newsweek, The Times or Fortune is about these networks. While asking people about their specific goals to be on these social media, a varied range of views were observed e.g. Babychen Methew an entrepreneur Journalist from India and top stumbler revealed why he was in social media? “I am an information addict. And I have a website which once in a while, gets great traffic from the main social news sites such as Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon. These two things work in a complementary manner for me. I believe that it might be possible to become successful in social media even if you are not an information addict, but I have not seen many examples of that yet.” For him to be successful on these networks Active participation (submission and voting on good content) and networking are the crucial components of social media success.

A total sum of Social media and Internet Marketing has possible for web base business to market themselves socially through these networks. Ahmed Soba a 25 year-old guy from Maldives has been among top diggers comments on how social media is useful financially other than making contacts all around the world “Social media is a technology on the internet that allows people to share content and experience with each other online use. It can be used for promotion of websites through social media channels (Digg, Reddit and SutmbleUpon). Promotion on these networks can get massive amounts of traffic for web sites. You can get better searching engine ranking because there is permanent back links from trusted domains and some times online users also blogs it. One of the key advantages of these networks is of being free. No need to pay thousand of dollars to buy many links rather Per Pay Click rewards are enormous”.

People wonder how these sites earn when they provide everything for free to millions of people. Advertising! They bring in revenues by running advertising. These sites are great for advertisers as they can reach millions of people. These networking sites have come up with a targeted ad solution where the advertiser reaches people going by the user profiles and interests. This is what makes social networking sites a haven for advertisers too. If you have a product on “music” you wish to promote, all you need to do is to join one of these social networking sites and promote it to music lovers. Imagine the number of targeted visitors to your website. Another twist to the social networking sites is the “social media” sites, where people can share news, personal experiences, reviews and favorite websites with other people. Digg, which is a social news site, allows people to select interesting news or blog posts. When a news item or blog post is “dugg,” by other users, it gets prominence in terms of placement on the site. It has helped in homogenizing the planet, mixing each other. Contextualizing the phenomenon of globalization; it is reasonable to assume that the internet will be home to more than socialization and information – it will be the home of true artificial intelligence.

Capn_caveman thinks the pros are that social media often finds some more obscure (but interesting) content that is not always picked up by the major news networks…. For him one of the cons is that there is a tendency to have a herd mentality on breaking news stories where people follow each other blindly. According to him the herd mentality has been widely discussed as a possible problem with social news sites in general. Jason Lankow a 27 years old male from California says, “herd mentality isn’t always inherently bad…we do it to stay informed and belong, and sometimes this can be good if we herd around a good idea and act on it (i.e. the popularity of solar energy articles on digg).

Jason Lankow expresses as “Social media gives people the chance to grow their existing network of friends and collectively shape the content of the site and determine what news is. This can be good when quality content is discovered and promoted and bad when poor content is gamed and becomes front page news”. He added that he loves meeting people from around the world and the voting process has made reading the news of the day so much interesting, and has helped him to hold his own content to a higher standard. According to him “everyone seems to think that the future of social media is to create meaning and structure across multiple sites, but so far, most of the aggregators have furthered what people perceive as the main problem - it is one more site to use and try to maintain an active profile in most cases. But there will be a clear winner or two - maybe Google and Digg! it can be fun too (i.e. rick roll, etc.) when so many people embrace an idea that it spills beyond social media into mainstream media probably people’s biggest complaint is that top users have a herd around them that* blindly vote for the person’s content, but for a person to get to that point they typically have to gain a reputation for quality and maintain it. He added that the same negative aspects of a herd mentality that exist outside of the internet can be present in extreme cases (i.e. religious discrimination, propaganda).”

He elaborated further, “don’t think it is that big of a deal that big companies try to market through social media (i.e. youtube, facebook and myspace)…it is inevitable…businesses will always be trying to get in the mind of the consumer, and it gets harder and harder the more sensational stories must become so one other negative that we see is more blurring of reality like the fake story of the kid who used his dad’s credit cards to buy prostitutes that was posted on money.co.uk or the office worker freak-out video that was made by the director of the movie Wanted the good side to this though, is that we don’t have a top-down feeding of the news to the people where the people have no ability to speak out against a fraudulent story. When the people are misled, the phony is exposed almost immediately but some of these fakers don’t care because they still get the publicity for the fake story upfront, and then even more exposure once they are discovered.

Zaibatsu top digger comments about social media, “It’s a way for people to interact, basically sharing thoughts and ideas publicly.” While talking about cons he said, “The cons are that people just don’t understand what it is, if you remember “multimedia” in the late 80’s and 90’s everyone wanted to be a part of it, but no one got it. That’s what social media is today, I have to say facebook or Myspace to lay out a framework for the convo. And then try and explain the concept behind sites like digg. We’re a groups of people can influence the media more than a 3 minute blurb on CNN It’s the wisdom of the informed masses. The power of the masses to move a concept, stories or even a cute picture forward so a group of people can enjoy, comment or talk action for good or bad on a topic. The old media just doesn’t get it. He said, “I started with digg … a member from month 1, it was fun, and it still is. I enjoy getting stories that I care about to the masses. It’s so much hard then just a year ago due to digg and other sites changing the algo. But for every cute bunny story, I want to get 1 out about the environment, or politics. Just the stuff I care about. Don’t get me wrong I have to feed the masses, but what makes it for me is the fact that I can make a difference. A change for good”

While talking about the cons he elaborated’ “It sucks, ask Steve Jobs… you have to make something the herd likes and then they’ll follow… I think he did a forbes or fortune article where he said the same thing. He claimed that, “I’ll have the largest social media market company on the planet in 1 year” About the future of social media sites he said, “the future is twitter, plurk, friend feed and mixx.com new community feature. Where people, companies and individuals can interact in real-time online share and collaborating. http://www.mixx.com/groups

Yes, countries like the U.S. are not informed about Pakistan. They don;t understand the nightlife in Lahore, or that you’re not all part of the terrorist fringe. I get it, but the U.S. and Euro population doesn’t. Just getting the word out through blogging, media that Pakistan has loving caring people jsut like we do. It’s the sad truth, but Americans have a hard time dealing with Americans

Benefits of E-commerce
E-commerce enables and facilitates
• Entry of SMEs in global markets
• Reduction in cost of doing business
• Development of new services and goods
• Negotiation and completion of the terms of sale
• Customizing the products
• Inventory and supply chain management

Implementation of E-commerce

Telecommunication technology plays fundamental and vital role in all aspects of e-commerce. E-commerce implements through the following infrastructures.
• Well-developed communication system
• Well-developed web portal
• Development of internet
• Development of new hardware (Pc, modem, phone)

Modes of delivery for telecommunications services
• Via wire
• Via radio (wireless)

Telecommunications via wire or wireless
• Land lines for standard telephony
• Broadband landlines not from telephone companies (cable modem)
Wireless telecommunications deal with national policy of radio spectrum etc
• Cell phones
• Televisions
• Radio

Development of national internet infrastructure:

Internet is growing and a leap medium to maximize the growth of E-commerce:
E-commerce is internet based communication service. Internet disseminate the information (messages) via “packet switching” into discrete packets, those can travel to ultimate destination via different routs for reassembly at the final destination with the speed of light. Packet switching maintains and increases of existing network’s capacity to carry information economically.
Alongside packet switching, the growth if internet switching was accelerated by the enabling of software development
• Easy to use Internet Browser Software
• Search Engines
• Secure payment software

E-commerce services:
Modern telecommunications allow services delivered globally. Areas where services have global competition are:
• Call Centers and “Help desks”
• Accounting
• Translation and Editing
• Entertainment deliverance
• Medical diagnostic services
• Customer ordered merchandise or service “on line” online payments

Banking Sector

A well-developed financial service/ banking sector is essential for the growth of e-commerce. Solutions for the two fundamental issues affecting e-commerce will determine its worldwide growth:
• How customer will make payment
• Ensuring that Goods or Service provider receives payment

Payment mode in E-Commerce

• Credit Cards
• Debit Cards
• Payment to an account owned by the service provider at bank

The use of credit and debit cards to make payment over the internet has raised security concerns.
The need for security has led to new e-commerce services such as secure payment services i.e. pay, Pal etc, which make use of encryption and other security features.

Contributed by Hafiz Muhammad Burhan

The number of Internet users is growing on daily basis; according to the World Internet Stats total world users are 1,407,724,920 out of which 37.6% are Asians, 27.1% are Europeans, 17.5% are North Americans, 9.8% are Latin Americans, 3.6% are Africans, 3.0% are Middle Eastern and 1.4% are Australian and Oceania. In last eight years the usage of internet has increased 1400% all over the world regardless of the population or other strengths. ICANN estimated last year that only 17 percent of the original 4 billion network addresses remained available. And it predicted that it would run out of stock available of new addresses within the next five years. Thus proposed addressing scheme should ease fears that ICANN will run out of addresses.

Dependence on internet for news and information, number of internet users is continuously growing. This is the result of enhanced usage of Internet that people are striving to have their private or personal webpages. With ascent of simple content management systems e.g. Wordpress etc a new era of Blogging has started; where people can easily upload their personal information including experiences, photographs and videos. One step ahead there are social media networking site like Facebook, MySpace and so many have emerged providing people and opportunity to access required information within the time of clicking fingers; furthermore communication is redefining itself through these social media networking sites. With rising ratio of blogs and websites to find a domain name has become a hassle. Every other Webmaster vis-à-vis common man who wants to start new website for personal or professional reasons is perturbed by the situation. Due to this very reason domain names selling and buying has become an established business in cyber world by cyber squatters. Bidding on old registered domains can bring millions of dollars in pocket provided that domain has some worth.

What is in Domain name? A search Engine Optimizer recognizes the value of a search engine friendly domain names with searchable keywords. Thus Titans, Giants, small or medium entrepreneurs into web based businesses strive hard to attain domain names. Recent announcement is anticipated to bring major shake-ups in this regard because web regulators have voted to allow creation of thousands of new domain names with unusual suffixes ranging from .paris to .pepsi. previously world wide web addresses have been falling under the a set number of Top-Level Domain names. According to the statistics there are 240 country or territory domains, and some 21 generic ones from .com. .net, .org. gov, .edu that are familiar and have defined associations e.g. most of government websites fall under the .gov and .org is for more organization based websites. Thus people are familiar with the domains and their suffixes. These web addresses have easily been recognized due to small number of generic division. But with a huge and wide range of domains available it would be little difficult to recognize or brand specific websites.

A counter comment in this regard is, new domain names would be more community or audience oriented as to travel industry would preferably go for generic name travel similarly a car manufacturing company will opt to have name with suffixes .cars or car. Thus it would be easy for the companies or individual to reach their targeted audiences. Further more it has also been discussed that these domains names will give more liberty to the people to select an appropriate self satisfying domain name rather than .coms or .nets. This comment is more appropriate to believe in.

The reliance for information on internet has paved way for a strong search engine industry and Goggle, Microsoft and Yahoo. Inc are already are serving people in this regard. Branding with relevance will help in people to access their required content more easily. For small and medium companies it will be easier with tags like travel, cars etc even city names to be more marketable. However these search engines will have to slightly restructure their search mechanism. Paul Twomey, president of ICANN has said that technical issues would manageable, he said “We’ve taken advice from security experts who say there’s no technical reason for not having lots of generic domains.”

It is also anticipated that companies can register new domains names and use them abusively; in this regard ICANN has also adopted a motion designed to limit this abuse. Concerns about security, or abuse of the system by people like cyber-squatters, would be mitigated by factors including the cost of creating and registering new domains, and the technical know-how to run and maintain registries, with the application fees expected to start from $US100,000 ($A104,000). Paul Twomey, president and chief executive of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) said,” Our principle is we don’t decide what TLDs people apply for. People are free to apply for any domain name, but they will have to be able to show they have a business background and the technical ability to run a registry” This check will help in dealing with cyber squatters the fees will no doubt be prohibitive, in the hundreds of thousands of US dollars, thus these new names, won’t come cheap. As a result, it’s unlikely that individuals will be able to take advantage of the new naming conventions to create more personalized Web sites. Even trademarks will not be automatically reserved. But there will be an objection-based mechanism for trademark owners where their arguments for protection will be considered.

President ICANN has revealed that first time Non English Languages will also figure into the new generation of domain names, with TLDs in Cyrillic or containing Roman alphabet characters. Furthermore all the languages of the world can be domain names; interestingly ICANN is in pilot project of testing Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia.

Pakistan falls at 10th number in list of top ten Asian countries who use internet, India is on third number, China on first number and Japan on second number. India has gigantically improves its Information technology Industry and its Internet Users are increasing though Pakistan is far behind but still hopes are not diminishing. This is right time for Pakistan to take quick strides to get into the global pace of progress. Next rising industry is Web base, unfortunately from Pakistan a very small number is engaged in this business. But with emergence of new world wide web era we Pakistanis expect our government and specially Information technology Industry to come forward to help Pakistanis grow in this very field. With new educational institutions where short course for modern SEO and web base business could be taught would be helpful as to prepare a lot of need base technological experts.

Whatever the pros and cons of this proposal that will be implemented finally in second quarter of 2009 after the approval of the ICANN Board, it is expected to bring more and more opportunities and choices for internet users and it will have impact on the Asian, Eastern Europe, African, Russian and Middle Eastern Countries.

On Feb 1, 2008 the world went into frenzy when it was reported that Microsoft had offered to buy Yahoo at $44.6 billion. Well that was close to $31 a share. There was an uproar on the internet, with digs, sphinns, stumbles and bloggers working over night to report it to their readers.

Well obviously it was a big news, what would happen? Will Microsoft’s long standing dream of dominating the Internet finally be accomplished? What will happen to Google? They are the Internet Leaders at this stage. What will happen to the employees? Will there be a job cut? What will happen to MSN? Live Search? WOW…

We didn’t have to wait long as on 4th of Feb Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang told his employees that he might consider selling the company to Microsoft. Ok..here we go again…diggs and stumbles and bloggers.. were at it again..

As days turned into weeks and weeks into months. Yahoo kept on rejecting Microsoft’s bid and Microsoft kept on relentlessly…well… rebidding…Yahoo’s claimed that offer by Microsoft was way below the company’s worth. And so finally on 3rd May 2008 after yet another rejection from Yahoo which to make the total buyout to $31 a share, Microsoft withdrew the offer.

Winner of the battle of Yahoo Vs Microsoft……well obviously GOOGLE. Google will surely be having the last laugh today. They stood by Yahoo during their testing times and made Yahoo realize that they were worth much more. Microsoft could only sit and watch as Yahoo kept on rejecting their plea after plea.

Microsoft is the most powerful player in the Operating System domain. But the fact that they are not the leaders in the Internet domain has always bitten them. Google on the other hand has been brilliant competitors and appeared in last couple of years as internet giant. Not only Google search is the most widely used search engine but apart from that people are fast realizing the power of Gmail (GTalk including), Google Docs, Groups and other Google product features… Google’s AdSense is a brilliant strategy which millions of bloggers around the globe getting benefit out of it. And Google Maps, for promotion of blogging blogger.com; internet users realize that Google is offering a complete package. Not only is that it being offered for free. And this is how when everything is slowly moving away from the desktop to the internet. Google has brilliantly captured the market.

While Microsoft seems far behind in this regard. It did come up with a Live Search, Maps etc. People still know Microsoft that Google is sitting way beyond its reach in the bid to Internet dominance. And it was this reason that made Microsoft put a $31 a share bid in front of Yahoo… And after final rejection….Yahoo doesn’t win or lose…Microsoft doesn’t win or lose…only Google THE BOSS wins…as it sees its best competitor go another step back in an effort to reach them.

According to a report, Personal Computer density in Pakistan is 1.5, which compares unfavorably with other countries of Asia-Pacific Region. Despite the fact that the importance of the industry has always been acknowledged at official level and the government has also expressed strong resolve to take steps for the promotion of the industry but the ground realities are depicting the picture otherwise.

Private sector is contributing as the main driver for growth in this industry from last so many years but that alone is not enough to compete with these countries and what need to be done is to enhance computer-density-density as the computer density co-relates to several other parameters of development. It is necessary to take steps to improve the PC penetration and thereby bridge the digital divide.

A recent report is quite alarming in regard with Pakistan’s PC/Server market as it shows that the market has experienced a slowdown in 2007 with its annual growth rate declining to 9.6% from the 16.4% recorded during the previous year. The latest data in this regard released by Springboard Research, a leading innovator in the IT market industry says that Pakistan registered 629,836 unit shipments of PCs and servers in 2007. For the last reported period, Q4 2007, the market grew 11% YTY with 148,613 PC and server unit shipments.

While we make comparison with the growth of IT and computer industry in the other countries of the region, a serious question arises that why we are not at par with them when the private sector is striving hard to promote this vital sector of the economy and government has also declared the promotion of the sector as one of its top most priority. To answer this question we need to have a comparative look at the state of affairs and the actual role and incentives provided by concerned governments to their IT industry. Turkey has exempted its Computer industry from GST, import duty and corporate income tax while allowed personal income tax for 10 years. Vietnam has given the industry exemption of GST and import duty besides 4 years exemption of corporate income tax and relaxation in personal income tax ranging from 3 to 35 per cent. Thailand and Malaysia have also offered similar sort of incentives to their industry which is being translated into steady growth of this sector in above mention countries.

Despite the poor computer density in Pakistan, the private sector has made huge efforts to streamline the sector which is a backbone of the national economy as well all other sectors of the economy. As a result of this hard work Pakistan has achieved a certain level of success over the years but the sudden slowdown has created a panic in the market which needs to be addressed any further delay and government ought to come forward and rescue this ailing sector and to reinitiate the progress and growth of the sector.

The Competitiveness Support Fund (CSF), a partner institute of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Pakistan has recently issued “WEF Global Information Technology Report 2007-2008″, which ranks Pakistan 89th out of 127 countries in terms of nation’s preparedness to effectively promote business, improve investment climate and develop infrastructure. Pakistan was ranked as 84 on previous year and report shows five-point decline just in one year. The report also suggested that a coherent government vision on information and communication technologies, coupled with an early focus on education are keys to spur network readiness and to lay the foundations for sustainable growth. The contents of the report ought to be an eye-opener for the decision makers especially in regard with policies related to IT and computer industry.

While revisiting to the report of Springboard Research, we find some interesting comments regarding computer industry of Pakistan. The reports says that Pakistan’s IT market is in between a “growth” and “decline” stage, where the country’s political stability will play a major role in overall market performance. The report also says that before the imposition of the 15% GST in June 2006, Pakistan’s PC/Server market was a “diamond in the rough”, but since then, a downward trend in the IT market has been noticed. The government’s recent decision to not withdraw or reduce the GST has weakened the growing IT market in the country, as well as decreased the confidence of the private investor.

The reports and data available suggest that the introduction of the 15% Sales Tax in the financial year 2006-07 increased the price of computers which increased the cost of doing business. The average price of PC reported by local assemblers and retailers increased up to 20%. This is one of the factors which have negatively impacted the growth of the IT sector as evident by export figures for the first six months of the financial year 2007-08. If the value of exports for the first six months is extrapolated to the full year it would be 149.37 Million, which is a growth of 28.7% over the previous year. This is well below the growth registered in previous years.

Though, the previous governments could not comprehend the affects of slowdown of computer industry in Pakistan, its heartening that the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) of the Cabinet considered the Ministry of Information Technology Summary sent in February last recommends that certain relief steps ought to be taken to save the computer industry of the country. Its worth to mention here that in the IT policy approved by the Cabinet in the year 2000 was comprised upon various incentives to promote the IT Sector of the country.

Initially these steps mad a positive impact on the domestic growth as well as IT exports, but the derailing and reversing of the policy has resulted as huge damage for the industry as well as the interests computer literate community in the country, which needs to be strengthen instead of discouragement. The computer industry is still optimistic that sanity will finally prevail at decision-making level and Pakistan will again on the path of growth and progress of this vital sector.

Top online businessmen, webmasters and professionals from all around the globe attended the four-day conference that begun on December 4. Hassan’s participation in the highly competitive atmosphere is a matter of honour for the country as there are only few people who are involved in Online business in Pakistan as compared to neighbouring India which have a saturated online business market.

His participation in the conference is not only recognition to Pakistan in international online community but it will also pave way for promoting the upcoming webmasters in the country. The sponsors of this conference are Yahoo, MSN live and Demand media, Speakers from Google also Participated.

Besides discussions, training sessions and conference meetings, one exhibition was organized putting on display the new tools and strategies to the webmasters. Several courses were designed to help the participating webmasters including Major PPC Engines, Vendor Panel, Monetizing Social Media Traffic, Optimizing Your Site for Contextual Ads, CSS and HTML Coding,Search and Blogging Reporters Forum, Video Search Engine Listings and Optimization, Effective Affiliate Strategies and Page Rank.

PubConference is renowned platform for gathering and meeting people who are read in online news stories, The series of conference stretched back to the late 80’s when user group meetings around the then-called Power Elite BBS. After passing several years it has transformed on modernized lines.