Qubee is a new and exciting company providing fast, reliable and competitively priced broadband internet services to residential and business customers across Pakistan. We believe that everyone should be able to enjoy trouble-free access to the internet and the world of opportunities that it brings. Our aim is to make a magical internet experience available to everyone, everyday, without exception.

Qubee is the creation of a group of global telecoms professionals who saw that a new technology called WiMAX could really change the internet experience for millions of people worldwide.

The details of the tariff and packages offered is not yet mentioned on their website, www.qubee.com.pk.

They are starting in Karachi, but quickly plan to expand thier network and cover other cities nationwide. The current coverage area for Qubee can be seen on the following link.

Qubee’s launch right after the launch of wi-tribe reminds me of the year 2005 when at the GSM front we saw Warid following Telenor’s launch. Nevertheless Qubee will bring on-air the fourth WiMAX operator of Pakistan, the other three being Wateen, Mobilink Infinity and the recent Wi-tribe. Will this start a price/data-rate war among the WiMAX operators? This will only become clear with time.

Ali Zafar, the renowned brand ambassador of Telenor Talkshawk has left all with a shock with his entry in the Mobilink Jazz latest promotion commercial. Talkshock!

The latest promotion is , if you haven’t used your Jazz Sim from May 20th, simply switch it on, and recharge. You will get instant Rs.30 plus 100 percent free balance on your first recharge.

The best part of the commercial is “Aaj hi join kia hai, dusari company se aye hain”

1. On the device settings, you need to change UserID and AuthID so that 210, the first three digits of the ID are changed to 1001 (four digits). That is, 210-####  changes to 1001-####.
2. Call customer service (2100786 from braintel. 0092-42-2100786 or 0044-1785-800786 otherwise) and make sure that your number is provisioned properly. It may take a while for the change to become effective.
3. Use the call back procedure explained here.

For those who use Linksys PAP2 device, see the setting changes in the screenshot below.

Rates at the time of this post are reasonable - probably the main reason why tens of thousands of customers put up with the service instability and changes!

• Lahore Local: Rs 0.90+Taxes
• Fixed Line and WLL Nation Wide: Rs 2.0+Taxes
• Local and Nation Wide mobile network: Rs 2.75+Taxes

Launches largest wireless broadband Internet service in Pakistan

Doha, June 30, 2009: wi-tribe, a Qtel Group company, today announced the official launch of its wireless broadband service in Pakistan, its largest market to date. The launch phase will include the cities of Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore, and Rawalpindi.

“Today, a new milestone is achieved in the evolution of wi-tribe and the realization of our vision to become one of the top 20 telecom players by 2020,” said Sheikh Abdullah Bin Mohammed Bin Saud Al-Thani, Chairman of The Qtel Group. “Following our launch in Jordan, Pakistan marks a major stepping stone towards our expansion strategy and our intention to leverage the scale and strengths of The Qtel Group in order to deliver the latest technologies to our customers and continue to enhance services across our operations,” added Sheikh Abdullah.”

Dr. Nasser Marafih, CEO of The Qtel Group and Chairman of wi-tribe, commented: “Consumer broadband is at the heart of the Qtel Group strategy and a major pillar of growth. The launch of wi-tribe in Pakistan is a very important moment for all of us at The Qtel Group as it reflects a major stepping stone towards our commitment to bring broadband wireless access to more people, to connect individuals and businesses more easily and to improve access to the internet in all new and emerging markets.

“Broadband penetration levels in new emerging markets are currently very low compared to markets in the region. However, consumer demand for wireless services is growing at a fast pace. So we will continue to focus on this area in the future as we see good business opportunity and significant growth potential,” added Dr. Nasser.

Shaikh Abdulrahman Ali Al Turki, Chairman and CEO of A.A.Turki Group A.A. Turki Group of companies (ATCO), commended on the growth and success achieved by the wi-tribe group stating, “At ATCO we are extremely pleased with wi-tribe’s developments since its establishment in 2007. The addition of Pakistan to our tribe is proof of our firm commitment to bridge the digital divide and bring to emerging markets the best in connectivity and ease of access. It is about time these markets got excellent quality service.”

“wi-tribe uses WiMAX technology to provide customers with the advantage of broadband internet access wirelessly, giving them the option of accessing the internet whenever and wherever they choose within the network area,” commented Sami Hinedi, CEO, wi-tribe Group. “We strongly believe in improving the lifestyle of our customers by understanding their needs and offering them the best personalized customer experience. We want to provide solutions that are simple, easy and valued by individuals, businesses and the Government,” he added.

wi-tribe is a focused and dedicated consumer wireless broadband provider and will offer instant connectivity with applications tailor-made and simplified to accommodate the needs of every customer. The wi-tribe service will deliver broadband internet access through the ‘plug in and play’ option offering speeds of 256Kbps, 512 Mbps, and 1 Mbps. The process of becoming a wi-triber is extremely simple and beneficial. The wi-tribe service uses an efficient and highly effective plug and play modem which provides online access on the go. Internet users in Pakistan will experience the best in consumer wireless broadband service and wi-tribe’s unique customer care experience.

The official website has details for packages that wi-tribe is offering in Pakistan.

With this launch the WiMAX competition will definitely boom in Pakistan.

Those who have used the wi-tribe services, do share your experience with us.

[Press release via Zawya.com]

Mobile phones provide new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas.
 

If your mobile phone could talk, it could reveal a great deal. Obviously it would know many of your innermost secrets, being privy to your calls and text messages, and possibly your e-mail and diary, too. It also knows where you have been, how you get to work, where you like to go for lunch, what time you got home, and where you like to go at the weekend. Now imagine being able to aggregate this sort of information from large numbers of phones. It would be possible to determine and analyse how people move around cities, how social groups interact, how quickly traffic is moving and even how diseases might spread. The world’s 4 billion mobile phones could be turned into sensors on a global data-collection network.

They could also be used to gather data in more direct ways. Sensors inside phones, or attached to them, could gather information about temperature, humidity, noise level and so on. More straightforwardly, people can send information from their phones, by voice or text message, to a central repository. This can be a useful way to gather data quickly during a disaster-relief operation, for example, or when tracking the outbreak of a disease. Engineers, biologists, sociologists and aid-workers are now building systems that use handsets to sense, monitor and even predict population movements, environmental hazards and public-health threats.

A good example is InSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters), a non-profit group based in California, which promotes the use of mobile phones to improve developing countries’ ability to respond to disasters. Launched with seed money from Google’s philanthropic arm and the Rockefeller Foundation in late 2007, it has just released a suite of open-source software to share, aggregate and analyse data from mobile phones. Its first test-bed is Cambodia, where health-workers can send text messages, containing observations and diagnoses, to a central number.

The sender’s location is determined for each of the messages, which pop up as conversation threads on an interactive map that can be called up on the web. Clicking on this map allows text messages to be sent back to users in the field from the control centre. InSTEDD says this service, called GeoChat, enables “geospatial ground-truthing, as your mobile team works to confirm, refute, or update data”.

Automating the reporting of titbits from remote clinics has already had a profound impact, says Eric Rasmussen, InSTEDD’s chief executive. Instead of recording information on scraps of paper, which would sometimes take days to reach higher-ups and trigger an alarm, the cycle-time has been reduced to days or even hours. GeoChat has been officially adopted by the six countries which share a border in the Mekong Basin, including Myanmar and Yunnan province in China, establishing a flow of real-time disease data from villages in the region to each country’s health ministry. Authorities can then choose to share this information with international bodies such as America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the World Health Organisation. The aim is to enable a quick response to any outbreak of avian flu, cholera, malaria or dengue fever. InSTEDD is helping aid organisations and government agencies deploy its free tools in other countries, including Bangladesh, Peru and Tanzania.

An alternative approach is to gather information passively from mobile phones, without any user intervention. Alex Pentland, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, dreams of “X-raying entire organisations, cities and countries” by collecting data in two ways. First, some handsets can capture information about individuals, such as their activity levels or even their gait, using built-in motion sensors. (Modern handsets use these sensors to work out whether to display information in landscape or portrait format.) Second, information from mobile-network operators, which keep track of handsets in order to pass them smoothly from one network cell to another, can provide a high-level view of how people move around. Dr Pentland’s algorithms can even cluster information from thousands of phones to divide people into “tribes” of like-minded folk. He calls this “reality mining”.

Following the crowd
Sense Networks, a company co-founded by Dr Pentland, wants to use the predictions derived from tracking mobile phones not only for commercial purposes—to produce real-time maps showing the most popular nightlife venues in a particular city, for example—but also for the public good. The company’s charitable foundation is working with Vodafone, a big mobile operator, the CDC and other collaborators to build an early-warning system for modelling and predicting the spread of tuberculosis in South Africa.
As a first step, Sense plans to collect positional information from a control group of infected patients being treated at Helen Joseph Hospital in Johannesburg who would have to volunteer to participate in the scheme. Dr Pentland and his colleagues will then be able to determine which neighbourhoods these patients frequent, and their commuting patterns between them. They hope this will then enable them to work out the characteristics of typical TB patients, so that they can then spot potentially infected people in the wider population. How public-health officials will use this information has yet to be decided: people who are thought to be infected could be contacted by text message and asked to visit a doctor, for example.

Path Intelligence, a British firm, is applying a similar approach to answer more commercial questions. Its FootPath system aggregates and analyses signals picked up from mobile phones as people move through a particular area. The results can be used by planners to optimise the flow of pedestrians through railway stations and airports or to guide the layout of shopping centres. It can determine, for example, whether customers who visit a given shop also visit a rival shop. The same passive method can be used to figure out where best to locate emergency exits, and even to locate clusters of survivors after a disaster.

But some people find the idea of having their movements tracked in this way unsettling, even when the data are anonymised and aggregated. And knowing someone’s position is not enough on its own to determine whether they carry a disease or would be interested in going to a particular nightclub. So the best approach may be to combine voluntary (but potentially unreliable) contributions that are submitted manually with automated data capture that does not require user intervention, but may not capture the whole picture. A good example is the study of well-water contamination in Bangladesh conducted by Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University. His project combined readings from remote water-sensors with queries and data which villagers keyed into their mobile phones.

On a grander scale, InSTEDD’s Dr Rasmussen is trying to stitch together a global network, tentatively dubbed Archangel, to combine all manner of data sources, from satellite imagery and seismic sensors to field-workers texting from refugee camps. A first glimpse of what such a network would look like is pachube.com, an experimental web-service launched in 2007 by Usman Haque, an architect based in London. He aims to patch together sensors and people into a “conversant ecosystem” of devices, buildings and environments.

Path Intelligence

Watching while you shop
Some computer scientists look forward to the day when mobile phones and sensors can provide a central nervous system for the entire planet. An abundance of sensors, they believe, will lead to two things. First, the amount of data will increase, allowing scientists to build more realistic models. Alessandro Vespignani of Indiana University compares the current state of affairs to weather forecasting a century ago, before satellites had provided meteorologists with the data to build and optimise mathematical models. When it comes to problems such as tracking and predicting the spread of diseases and other environmental hazards, he argues, scientists can never get enough data.

The human touch
Second, once people are able to contribute data to research projects from their mobile phones, it could provide an ideal way to broaden public involvement in scientific activities. This would be the next logical step after the popularity of web-based participation in scientific research, from folding proteins to categorising photographs of galaxies. Eric Paulos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, predicts the rise of “citizen scientists” able to measure and sample their surroundings wherever they go. When people can report mundane variables such as the level of traffic noise in their street or the degree of air pollution at the bus stop, he argues, their outlook on science changes. “People develop a relationship with and a sense of ownership over the data,” he says. He foresees amateur experts being driven by a new sense of volunteerism, the 21st-century equivalent of cleaning up the neighbourhood park. Nokia has even designed a prototype handset with environmental sensors (see article).

Dr Paulos has already equipped street sweepers in San Francisco and taxis in Accra, the capital of Ghana, with sensors to measure pollution levels, which he then used to create a map of each city’s environmental landscape. He plans to do the same with cyclists in Pittsburgh. Graduate students in his newly created Living Environments Lab have loaded households with sensors to sample tap water and indoor-air quality. Results are uploaded to a website where participants can compare them with other people’s contributions.

The technology is probably the easy part, however. For global networks of mobile sensors to provide useful insights, technology firms, governments, aid organisations and individuals will have to find ways to address concerns over privacy, accuracy, ownership and sovereignty. Only if they do so will it be possible to tap the gold mine of information inside the world’s billions of mobile phones.

Jehan Ara and team have proved that it is possible to inspire, even in difficult times like these. There’s an art to the interviews - finding interesting people, asking the right questions, making them comfortable and then allowing the interviewees to talk about their passion.

Such candid interviews present a picture of progress and accomplishments which is extremely important to share with the world. Sharing information and inspiration can result in unexpected side benefits as well. Moreover, these interviews have also connected people and some have resulted in business inquiries and joint venture opportunities.

In case you have missed some of the recent interviews, here are links to a few of the many:

• Azhar Rizvi - MITEF Pakistan, Tech Angels Network - Post, Interview
• Zafar Khan - Sofizar. Post, Interview
• Dr Arshad Ali - EECS - Post, Interview
• Farzal Dojki -  Post, Video
• Asharaf Kapadia - Post, Interview
• Shahzad Shahid - Post, Video

What motivates you to do all this, I asked Jehan Ara.

I am just so excited by all the innovation and growth that is taking place in this industry and I want to talk about it. If I make my guests comfortable enough so that they share information about themselves, their struggles, their successes, what motivates them, then I have been successful. I strive to ensure that their voices are heard.

Keep up the good work!

Example,
The PTCL number 466-xxxx will become 3466-xxxx and NTC number 912-xxxx becomes 9912-xxxx.

More at Fixed Line Numbers Going 8 Digits.

Lets take a look at what components and technologies are involved in building a telematics solution.

• Hardware - TCU (Telematics Control Unit) - a box which is placed in the car and has GPS
• Connectivity for voice (call center) and data (GSM or CDMA for sms and TCP/IP data)
• Software (server-side platform which manages the entire solution)
• Services and applications (e.g. speech recognition, POI data, call center)

Overall building a telematics solution is very much like a systems integration work. From connecting the hardware to data centers, managing the wireless data and voice, providing the information to a specialized call center and coordinating the response with different types of providers (emergency, police, roadside assistance, insurance etc). Protocols are defined to communicate between different components and to handle messages in SMS format or to handle packet data.

Most common scenario of telematics is when a car is in accident. Modern TCUs can sense the crash and send the data automatically to the system, alerting a call center about the crash severity and the location. Emergency help can thus be sent. Other scenario is when a person gets stranded on a road and needs help, then the SOS button in the car is pushed and a call is initiated to the call center from the car. Of course a wireless signal is needed for the TCU to dial out. Similarly a call center can call back the car.

Fleet tracking (commercial vehicles - taxis, buses, company vans, trucks etc) is another big area where the cost of telematics is justified because of business advantages.

In developing countries, services such as stolen vehicle alert and location could be useful. Since a vast majority of the cars do not come with the hardware, retrofitting of cars with TCU/GPS units will be most common. Once there is connectivity and a way to send data over the air, many different solutions can be built. You can have a geo-fence application which can alert you if your car moves out of a certain radius. Parents can track the movement of the car when their kids are driving. Of course the modern cars have many sensor built into the car so one can imagine all kinds of automobile data being sent over the air. Vehicle data can be used for troubleshooting, diagnostics and maintenance alerts.

In Pakistan there are a few companies and groups working on telematics (perhaps as distributors of foreign hardware makers) but the market is not ready for massive adoption - most probably due to hardware cost, complexity of building solutions and the limited number of people who are willing to pay for such service. It usually takes the car makers a few years to plan out a complete telematics solution so we might see something in the next 2-3 years in limited models. At least a good and affrodable telecom and wirless infrastructure is in place in Pakistan to support the telematics services. There is plenty of activity in this area in India.

More info: here’s link from Wipro and a description at HowStuffWorks.

Let’s start with research at the Next Generation Intelligent Networks Research Center of FAST University, Islamabad. Their work on Remote Patient Monitoring System with Focus on Antenatal Care (see past post) is funded by the National ICT R&D fund, Government of Pakistan, over the period of 3 years (2008-2010). The primary objective of this project is to develop a reliable, efficient and easily deployable remote patient monitoring system that can play a vital role in providing basic health services to the remote village population of Pakistan at their door step.

There’s more innovative work in this area by other groups as well. In this interview, Jehan Ara talks with a Pakistani researcher Jahanzeb Sherwani (prior coverage here) who has done doctoral level research at CMU about using speech recognition with local languages to collect information regarding rural health care. In this interview he talks about expanding the work out of the labs and to include more local languages. Excerpt from a post by Jehan Ara.

Jahanzeb has been more excited about the HealthLine PhD project that he has been working on with Hands, an NGO. Speech recognition is, he believes, the equalizer, the ultimate enabler. It doesn’t matter if you are illiterate or if you speak a different language.

LIRNEAsia also publishes work on m-health topic quite often. Much of their work looks at running surveys and working with local communities to gather data and to test out the technologies. They also work with Carnegie Mellon university on Bio-surveillance work.

Of course when it comes to developed countries there’s a lot of emphasis on reducing cost and for providing connected services whereby automation and intelligence can make devices and testing smart. Here’s ATT vision for medical remote monitoring (source: Fast Company). A number of other companies are active in this area. There’s also interest in providing monitoring and emergency services for senior citizens.

Lirneasia also publishes work on m-health topic quite often. Much of their work looks at running surveys and working with local communities to gather data and to test out the technologies. They also work with Carnegie Mellon university on Bio-surveillance work.

Please suggest any other sources which you think should be covered. Here’s another report from Africa about health care improvement.

Cell phones may have changed the way people communicate in the developed world, but in developing countries they’re going far beyond simple communication to bring new opportunities to areas that sorely need them. Case in point: FrontlineSMS:Medic, a new initiative to improve health care in poor, rural villages.

Due to a global shortage of some 4.4 million healthcare professionals, as estimated by the World Health Organization, many rural health centers in poor regions depend largely on community health workers who travel among clinics and villages. Such health workers typically record patient interactions on paper and then bring those records to a central clinic for further instruction. Many travel on foot, however, and—because they serve such large areas—often don’t get back to the clinic more than once a month. The result: some patients remain untreated for far too long.

Launched in February, FrontlineSMS:Medic aims to improve matters using FrontlineSMS, a free, open-source software program that enables large-scale, two-way text messaging using only a laptop, a GSM modem and cell phones. Working with donations collected through Hope Phones, the initiative places a laptop running FrontlineSMS in a central clinic and then distributes cell phones to community health workers. Workers are trained in sending text messages to hospital staff to request drug dosing information or treatment instruction, for example, or provide status updates on a particular patient. Modified camera phones, meanwhile, can be used to analyze blood and sputum samples and perform critical diagnostics for conditions including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. In a recent, 6-month pilot test of the system at a hospital in Malawi, 150 patients received emergency care, community health workers saved 1,000 hours of travel time—allowing them to visit more patients—the number of people being treated for tuberculosis doubled, and the hospital saved USD 3,500 worth of fuel, freeing up funds to purchase more medication. Operating the system, meanwhile, requires an investment of just USD 500, according to an article in the Guardian.

Since the Malawi pilot, California-based FrontlineSMS:Medic has launched numerous other projects throughout Africa and beyond through partnerships with global health organizations.

All Facebook users who also carry a BlackBerry must rejoice and should try out version 1.6.0.17 that is out now and is available to download. Simply go to the existing Facebook application and select to upgrade. If you don’t have the app on your BlackBerry phone already, you can download it from here. I have been using the Facebook app on my BlackBerry for a while now but it always lacked many features and the wap site m.facebook.com was always better. I’ve also been trying some third party tools like shozu and snaptu for Facebook access but none of them have been as simple, comprehensive and convenient as the wap site. This time, the development team has done the job very well and has given a feature boost to the application and now I don’t use the wap site anymore.

The new features include:

• A new and improved home screen that shows status updates.
• You can comment on these statuses
• A new “View Highlights” screen that shows photos posted by users, status updates, wall posts, photo comments, relationship status changes, phone number changes and a bundle of other updates.
• Capability of commenting from the above mentioned “View Highlights” screen.
• An improved Notification page

Photo gallery — View Highlights

• An improved Friend’s list that allows, not only to poke and message friends, but lets you call them, view their profile.
• The user profile screen that lets you view updates from a friend and yes, my favorite, browse and view the albums and photos
• An amazing album and photo gallery? Watching photos from Facebook friends’ albums is a charm on this app. Did I mention that already?
• Photo gallery allows you to browse and scroll through the photos, zoom into the photos and set photos as the BB home screen.

View Profile —– Upload and Tag Photos

All existing features including poke, message, write on wall, invite friends, tag and upload photos etc are also there and are complemented by the new features and they complement the new features too.

The app also allows you to sync your Facebook and Blackberry contacts. You can connect Facebook profiles with existin entries on your Blackberry contacts, you can request phone numbers of Facebook friends and you can also search for people in your Blakcberry contacts on Facebook and add them up.

Following wizard came up on my web-based Facebook when I logged in just after installing the new Facebook app on my Blackberry.

You can watch the usage video posted below to get an idea of the new feature’s working.

Note, I carry a non-wifi Blackberry, so the application looks a bit slow in the video.

Summary
Overall, the application is a hit. I don’t find many drawbacks in the app.

The good:

• View albums: Its smooth, shows album name, preview photo and number of photos in it. Nice side-wise scrolling transitions.
• View photos: Amazing full screen photo viewing with photo title/info and swapping between photos in an album is a charm. Side wise scrolling thumbnails make it look so good.
• View profiles: A new feature with great options like view photos, poke, message and profile activity of the user.
• Great contact sync: Allows you to sync your Facebook contacts with Blackberry contacts and vise-versa.
• Request phone number: You can request a Facebook user’s phone number and can sync it with the phone so that you can use it for calling. I got to talk to a few very old friends just because of this feature.

The Bad

• The earlier Facebook notification system worked great with the Blackberry holster. (Facebook notification rings, you pull out the phone and notification is right on the screen). Things are not that good with this version. Notification system doesn’t work. Doesn’t work at all. But this is a very small glitch and I’m sure things will be fixed in next version.
• Facebook experience on Blackberry is still behind Facbook experience on an iPhone.