Live Coverage of P@SHA ICT Awards 2008

The most prestigious awards of the Pakistan ICT Industry P@SHA ICT Awards 2008 are being held today (October 31, 2008). Ideas Hut’s Fariha Akhtar is live-blogging the event right here:

P@SHA ICT Awards 2008

(10/31/2008)
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8:53	Awards ceremony has formally started

8:53	Quranic recitation

8:56	President P@SHA addressing the audience,thanking the sponsors

9:04	Chairman P@SHA telling the audience about the state of Pakistani industry

9:08	Dignitories from both the IT industry and academic sector can be seen here

9:11	Imran Zia says impact of global recession can be dealt with by benefiting from the outsourcing opportunities that have appeared because of it

9:13	Here comes a really optimistic sentence from Imran Zia, he says “Look at the amount of talent present in this room” and consequently think about nurturing and utilizing it

9:14	Imran Zia ends his speech

9:17	JehanAra talking about the recent earthquake in Balouchistan. She has just officially launched the P@SHA relief effort for the earthquake victims

9:18	Sakiya Zaidi will be taking care of the donation collection activity

9:19	Dr. Qasim Shaikh from Natioanl ICT R&D fund addressing the audience

9:20	He says our mandate is to turn Pakistan into a “knowledge economy”

9:22	He shares that research in Pakistan is coming up to international standards and there is an open funding process by National ICT R&D fund to fund research

9:24	He shares his concern that National ICT R&D fund doesn’t get many proposals from industry. Most of the research proposals come from academia

9:25	He shows in interest in funding innovation and according to him in simple terms innovation is “removing bottlenecks from the value chain”

9:28	He shares an example that bottlenecks in mobile video value chain can be thought about

9:29	He presents a concept of “innopedia” based on the concept of wikipedia where people could discuss value chains and the bottle necks in it., a way to use the power of masses to innovate

9:30	Dr. Qasim ends his speech after asking for proposals

9:31	Jehanara being a hard core Mac User finding PC a little difficult to use :)

9:32	Jehanara talking about the objectives of the P@SHA ICT Awards

9:33	One of the most interesting objectives is to create opportunity for winning companies at APICTA

9:33	Judging process being introduced, she says we look at innovation and scalability mainly

9:34	The initial judging process was carried out online with the participation from the customers of the nominated companes

9:36	Benefits include a cool ICT Awards, promotion of winning team’s products at all local and regional events that P@SHA participates in during the year

9:36	CIO plans to present case studies on winning companies’ products/services hence promoting them

9:37	Awards categories being introduced

9:38	Categories to acknowledge service sector achievements have been also added

9:38	Mr. Ashraf Kapadia from Systems Limited and ex-president of P@SHA is on stage

9:40	Last year winners being awarded the shields now as last year they couldn’t be during the ceremony

9:44	Netsol, Kalochi Technologies, PixSense, CDF Software, KalSoft, Amaana, Si3, SecureBytes among last year winners

9:45	Take a deep breath…the announcements for this year’s awards about to be made

9:46	Judges being introduced, Imran Zia, Jehanara, Jawwad Farid etc among the judges

9:47	Jugaari Pvt. Ltd. wins the best communication product award for Jaadu…cool!!! :)

9:48	Jaadu is being sold at the apple store for more than $25 and has been reviewed in a number of international publications

9:49	Since Jehanzeb is in US for his Ph.D so his mother-CEO Jugaari receives the awards

9:49	Merit Award goes to FiveRiversTechnologies for FoneiTell

9:50	Foneitell is a web operated GPRS application

9:52	Media Award goes to PixSense

9:53	The Merit Award goes to Post Amazers for Safeguard Commander

9:54	Best of E-Learning applications: UltraLearn from Softech Worldwide becomes the winner

9:55	Snapshots of winning applications being shown in the presentation and JehanAra says the demo of winning application would be available on p@sha website after the ceremony

9:56	Best of E-Health applications- most difficult competition face in this category

9:56	CureMD EMR for CureMD becomes the winner

9:57	AdamSoft Int’l gets the Merit Award for Doc Comply

9:58	Second merit awards goes to Marriala Consultants for eClinic

9:58	Dr. Zaheer Syed from MITCEF being invited on stage

9:59	He presents the best in e-community category