Is Cryptocurrency illegal or banned in Pakistan? – an opinion While I withdrew my coins and cash from www.urdubit.com with a heavy heart, I felt sorry for the exchange that happened to be Pakistan’s first bitcoin exchange. For me, it was not just an exchange but a major event in Pakistan’s startup history. Urdubit was a sign of embracement of new technologies by Pakistanis and representation of intellectual repository in the … Read More
The Rise of Digital Payments in Pakistan Albeit a slow growth on adoption of digital banking and payment services, the pakistani market is on the right track. The latest report released by State Bank of Pakistan shows positive indicators across all categories and is worth having a look at. The report shows numbers starting from first quarter of 2017 to projected figures of 1st quarter of 2018. … Read More
ZapBuddy – This Melbourne/Islamabad based communication app is offering much more than just chat With so many chat apps being around its hard to imagine what new features one can expect from the new entrants. Especially, with big giants like WhatsApp establishing themselves well in respective markets, it becomes difficult to launch a chat app and entice users to try it out. VEON is a recent example that made a big launch and successfully … Read More
Chatbots – The future of Customer Engagement What is a Chat Bot? A Chat Bot is a software program that interacts with humans through textual or audio chat apps. While interacting, the human side of the app does not really feel the difference since the Chat Bot has almost all the answers to questions asked by the person related to service. This simulation of humans by the chat … Read More
Simple.pk – Why do we need our own freelancers marketplace? When I found out about Simple.pk in a competition, held this year by karandaaz, I was not very impressed. I was aware of global freelancing platform and the fact that Pakistan has world’s 4th largest freelancing community on these platforms. Why do we need such a platform when we have the likes of Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer and many others? Why … Read More
Digital Lending game in Pakistan is about to heat up Looked like an impossibility when someone told me few years back about extending loans to strangers by just looking at their online presence or by just analyzing their smartphone usage. How can you trust someone with your money without having met them? How can you match the due diligence level of banks? No reference check? nothing? That was my initial … Read More
Careem offers Rs.500 discount when you shop from Daraz Black Friday is talk of the town and when I got email from Careem offering Black Friday discount of Rs. 500, it got my attention. Careem giving discount? How? Where? So, I got into contact with Careem team to find out how does it work and here are the steps: If you are a Careem user, you must have got … Read More
Achieving financial inclusion through Fintechs in Pakistan There are 1,500 registered IT companies in Pakistan with 10k IT graduates entering the market every year and technology services exported to other countries amount to $1.6B of total sales. 92% of the our land has cellular network coverage, making flow of information possible. Out of 47 Million Active Internet Users 42 Million access social media through mobile devices. These … Read More
5 Things I look forward to in 021Disrupt Conference Embrace yourself for year 2017’s one of the biggest event that is going to take place in Karachi on 4th November. Organized by NEST I/O, a well known Incubation center by PASHA, the event 021Disrupt Conference is all about startups, crypto-currency, fund raising and networking. Excited to participate in the event, here are 5 things that I’m looking forward to … Read More
Certify.pk – Using blockchain to verify educational degrees The team at Certify.pk is onto something big. They aim to change how educational degrees are verified in Pakistan for good. No more lining up in queues. No more delays. If you are from HR department of a company and want to hire a candidate you have now a solution to verify their degrees. And, if you are from an … Read More
Why do you need experienced professionals in your startup? This year, one of the biggest incubation centers of Pakistan, launched its cohort especially for corporate employees. The thought behind this program was a very high failure rate of startups launched by youngsters. I think, the step is very much in the right direction and will definitely bring good results. With more digital inclusion in Pakistan, the country has now … Read More
Amazon’s Billion Dollar payment patent ‘1-Click’ expires soon! What future holds For people not in the know, the 1-click checkout process available at Amazon online store is actually a patented check-out technology that is going to expire in September, 2017. As basic as it seems, the retail giant fought for its patent for almost 2 years when it was eventually awarded in September 1999 in US. Request to patent this … Read More