I’m right now in a workshop arranged by PASHA in Lahore and Badar Khushnood obviously is the speaker. The topic is “Marketing your products online”.
I’ll post again and share. My experience after the workshop.
Jehan Ara has announced that she’s taking the workshop to Islamabad too.
Google maps has also enabled turn by turn navigation directions in its already popular Google-Maps-Mobile. Google maps is a free application that you can download on your smart-phone. Only thing you need it to work is a working data-connection on your smart-phone. You can use Google maps on smart-phones with or without GPS. Using this new feature you can give source and destination of your journey and the software will display a suggested path that you should follow.
The software is free to use and poses serious threat to other paid navigation solutions available in the country. Google maps available for Pakistan are based on data provided by its users on Google map-maker and once ample data is available and is reliable to a certain degree, it is ported onto Google maps. Google maps has grown at a high speed both in terms of users as well as contributors on map-maker.
Here is a sample walk through of the app where I requested directions from Main Market to Liberty Market in Lahore.
1. Get Directions
Launch Google maps on your phone and wait for a few seconds so that the application initializes the data connection and GPS. Then select “Get Directions” from the menu.
2. Select Start-Point and End-Point
You can select the start point by:
You can select the End-Point by:
As an example, I entered the address by typing it:
3. Choose a travel mode
You can choose to travel by car, on foot or by public transport. Public transport mode is not not available in Pakistan yet.
4. View Results
You can either view the suggested path on the map or a step by step instruction is given on-screen that you can follow to reach your destination. See following screenshots for the result output:
Turn by turn instructions:
Path shown on map:
This was interesting to see that the software gave different paths for the same source and destination when different mode of travel was selected. Following are two different paths given by Google Maps when traveling mode was different.
It is also interesting to note that the behavior of the application is slightly different on different devices. For example, above walk through does not show any “Favorite Locations” when it comes to Google maps. Some devices like Nokia smart phones support “Favorite Locations” as a native feature and Google Maps also support that list of favorite locations as possible Start or End-Points in a navigation request discussed above.
If your phone has a feature different from the walk through above, please don’t forget to leave a comment.
Last but not least, google maps on your browser obviously has this feature enabled too for Pakistan now. See a sample directions result for a path from Gawalmandi to Kalma chowk in Lahore.
2010
I’ve been posting everything I find interesting but I’ll try to shift my focus to green computing, power saving, environment friendly methods of computing and anything related to the above mentioned topics. I appeal and request you all to adopt methods, buy hardware, use software and equipment that uses less power and stays friendly with the environment.
I wish you all a very happy 2010 and I hope it turns out to be a better year for all.
Peace
I couldn’t help posting this video in which Asher Hussain, CEO Naya Jeevan gives a talk at TED India.
Visit the talk page here for discussion and more detail.
Do you know you can type as long as 32,767 characters long message in your Google Talk’s chat window? That is approximately 7 pages at 12 font size and exactly 32 kilobytes of data. That’s a lot of text for an instant message. Gtalk is Google’s popular chat software that allows you to chat on different platforms including PC, Blackberry, Android, iphone and other mobile platforms. Google chat has kept their interface simple through all times without sacrificing any features.
Google Talk has a large chat window but its not the largest. Skype actually has a virtually unlimited chat window and as long as your system can handle data in that window, you can keep growing it. Try it out yourself.
Google has given $20 million in charity this year and they call it a holidays gift of 2009 for them. Thumbs up Google. See more details here.
Ex-President Pakistan, Ex-Army Chief, Retired Gen. Parvez Musharraf now has a profile on Facebook and is looking forward to connect to all Pakistanis, especially the youth of the country to answer there questions who he believes are very concerned about the situation of the country.
No doubt every Pakistan is worried about the current political and overall situation of the country. He has promised to bi-weekly screen the most asked questions on his Facebook page and answer the top 3 questions. You can watch his Facebook adress video here:
After several other leaders and presidents of the countries in cluding President Obama, now Gen. Retd. Parvez Musharraf has also decided to use social media and The Internet not only to promote himself but to use this medium for a positive change. Lets see where this effort leads him and Pakistan.
To visit his page, go to http://www.facebook.com/pervezmusharraf
Need I say more ? 🙂
Recently, a very dear friend of mine passed away and left us for ever. A very young and a very nice guy. Like most of us, he was an active user of online social networks as well and had an account on Facebook as well. As soon as he died, everyone on his friends’ list started posting content on his profile and soon his wall became a huge memory board and prayer room.
When I’ll die, I’ll leave an online account on Facebook as well?
This is a question that we all have to ask ourselves. No, I’m not telling you to delete your accounts. I’m pointing you to a service by Facebook that lets you report that a person is dead. Once Facebook is sure about this fact, they will mark the person deceased, will disable his account so that nobody gains control of it even if they have his password and only the friends he or she added when alive will be able to view the deceased’s virtual wall. So if you have anyone in your family or friends who is no more with us, please visit this link and report deceased and the account will be memorialized.
Go computing out there on the road with UConnect
Uconnect is probably the most revolutionary VAS that Ufone’s released ever, not only because of its feature set but its relation with the evolution of computing that will altogether transform the way we use computers and information today. The experts claim that all your computer resources that you can conceive today and can predict for tomorrow will all reside on the cloud in not so distant future. Actually we are already there with several tools emerging online.
Uconnect is our telecom sector’s contribution to the evolution. Using Uconnect, you can put all your files on the cloud and can access them anywhere, anytime using your cellphone. You can perform basic file management operations on most popular file types that we use on our PCs. You can view, send, receive emails and can even shut-down your PC remotely.
They say, a picture is better than a thousand words and I say, a video is better than a thousand pictures. So go-ahead, watch this video that shows how UConnect works. And if you decide to sign-up, simply SMS SUB to 292 and start enjoying UConnect.
Following is UConnect’s features list :
To know more about the product, please visit http://uconnect.ufone.com
