In one word, yes. Alltop is one of those technologies that will seamlessly blend into your life, like your cellphone. Our parents used to (still do) read the paper every morning. We’ll read Alltop.

Check out the Pakistan page on Alltop, the relevance should hit home right away. This is like the cute litte buzz.pk but for everything. Alltop has lots of topics, such as Muslim Blogs, Going green, Marketing. A worldwide newsrack, only cleaner and easier to read than the real life version.

A big thanks to Guy and his team and to Atif for making pakistan.alltop.com  happen.

Alltop helps solve the problem of information overload, using a simple elegant UI. I just hope they don’t run out of nice colours for the cool looking Alltop bar!

Popularity: 89% [?]

…lootmaar.com this week. Jawwad is holding an auction for charity - (the auction is for lunch with Jawwad) and its at 50 bids, and its at 75,000 with the reserve price met and theres still 3 days left! . All proceeds go to the SMB Fatima Jinnah Girls school project.

From what I can see, this is also the hottest item on the site right now…  I did’nt know my boss was this popular!

Popularity: 58% [?]

Since the day I bought my iPod touch I’ve become a believer that the iPhone needs to be taken seriously as a mobile platform that competes with RIM and Windows Mobile. While the Palm OS (which still has the best todo list app ever) regresses, and Windows Mobile and RIM take center stage, the new kid on the block is poised to kick some serious behinds in the coming two years.

So, now ITT is available on the iPhone and iPod touch.  Bookmark this link to access the RSS feeds on the iPhone! Let me know if this works….

Popularity: 43% [?]

Orgoo, the innovative startup in ISB is looking for smart software engineers for its web 2.0 all in one email+im product. Look at brightspyre for the openings, it sounds like a very cool job.

Also, I just got my Orgoo beta account (yay), will do a post in a bit on how it fares…

Popularity: 25% [?]

Well….could I ? Dump my Wintel laptop and MS office,  get linux, staroffice, dump Dreamweaver and Visual Studio and stick to just Eclipse and the command prompt? and still do my daily work+play+blog+etc ?

We love to talk open source, linux, openoffice,etc and how cool it is, and how everyone but US should be using it.But really, we DON’T ever think of using it ourselves, or in our companies. We dump everything and run to MS office at the first sign of trouble, while say, opening an excel file or making a chart.

but could you, as a daily user live on just open source tools? Do you really need microsoft? Or will a firefox browser on linux, running Google docs, gmail, facebook and wordpress do just fine?  Its almost a religious conversion. I still don’t think I could. I still believe in a mix of technologies. I know very few techies in Pakistan who actually walk the walk and talk the talk, so to speak. If I get may be enough people asking me through the comments stream (who cares about this anyway, so dont ask ), maybe I’ll take up the challenge.

Popularity: 36% [?]

the buzz.PK site had over 300 unique readers after the post on my blogs, up from 15 or so the first day A big thank you to everyone who took the time to check it out and continues to use the app. Will be adding ( and fixing) some stuff over the next few weeks, will keep posting updates here…if there are any popular blogs that you want to see there let me know,

Popularity: 24% [?]

Startup insiders #8 will happen this Friday, April 4th at Islamabad/Pindi, with NUST and Brightspyre coming in with P@SHA and making it all happen. This time’s SI promises to be a bit different from the others since the “usual” suspects will not be in…but there are some cool companies coming. (Tintash being very intriguing)  .

So, to get there…here is what you need to know :

Date: Friday April 4, 2008
Venue: NIIT Seminar Hall, Chib Plaza , Chaklala Scheme III, Rawalpindi
Time: 5:30 - 9:00 PM

Full details on Jehan’s blog here

On a side note, I’ve been very busy with a few things (like work, heheh) but I’ll be posting some interesting stuff up pretty soon… if you havent seen buzz.PK yet, you should give it a go….

Popularity: 20% [?]

(This was posted on my personal blog, FreeStyleDive a few days ago)

One of the ideas (called buzz.PK) I’ve been spending a few nights and weekends on is finally ready to jump into a public beta…go here to check it out :http://buzz.ittazee.com/

buzz.pk is agrregates lots of rss feeds, all focusing on Pakistan’s tech, news, blog, images and video scene, and puts them all in one clean discovery space. You can scan the news, see what bloggers are upto, and what new images were posted on flickr today. I’m sure it will be alot more encouraging and factual than what we hear on the fox news network , and will go better with your morning chai/coffee

It also made it to the Museum of Modern Betas, a popular project that tracks  Web2.0 apps from around the globe.

Its still got some tweaking to do, but please do check it out, and provide feedback. Would really like to build version 2.0 with direction from the app’s users…

Hope you find it useful as a daily tool!

Popularity: 24% [?]

The next highly anticipated episode of the Startup Insiders saga starts this Saturday (March 22nd) from 3pm to 6pm at the Pixsense offices. 

Good food, great people, and advice every startup could use is part of the menu.  You will learn how to pitch to customers and close deals. You know, that thing that actually brings in the cash and keeps the dream going…

Registration is open, all you need to do is show up, but show up on time, or stand for the duration of the event! In the last 6 events seating ran out in the first few minutes. Don’t miss it!

Popularity: 25% [?]

Kraysis, a startup in Lahore that focuses on Quality Assurance and testing services has signed an agreement with Microsoft to be part of the QA effort for the epic Age of Empires III game. It will also do some R&D, usability and performance testing. This is big news, with kudos going to the team at Kraysis. These guys have in a relatively short while gained a strong customer lineup for its niche area.

Kraysis was incubated at LUMS and started out with 2 people. Recently it has spun out of it shell and moved into its own offices and has a team of 20 professionals, and one awesome business model.

The problem they solve? Most software firms, especially the smaller ones face significant QA challenges. Its easy to write the code, but there is arguably more pain when it comes to QA, validation and performance testing, cycle after cycle. Sound familiar? Kraysis comes to take away that pain from you, gives you quality assurance ability usually found at the Microsofts and SAPs of the world. (Sniff, you had me at hello ) Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 45% [?]