After many days of sepculation about continuty or discontinuty of i-mate business, CEO Jim Morrison declared that the business is closed now.  In a telephonic interview to Arabian News, he told that “You could say the company is worth nothing now. At its height, three years ago, it was worth $750m.”

i-mate was a UAE based company that used to sell Smart Phone handsets in UK, Italy, Armenia, Australia, India, the U.S.A and South Africa. The reason behind its failure was financial collapse and Morrison blames a fraud for that. Right now the firm has been closed down and the formal windup process is awaiting for the court ruling.

References:

http://www.itp.net/577768-i-mate-fraud-will-run-to-15m-ceo?tab=article

http://www.itp.net/573861-exclusive-i-mate-shuts-down?tab=article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imate

PTA has recently launched a simple service to check number of SIMs registered against your CNIC. It’s advisable for every Pakistani to use it at least once because thanks to the connection resellers and other small businesses, your CNIC may have been used for others and your own number may not be in your own name. Interesting enough, I found five Mobilink SIMs registered on my name though I have none of those. I’ve an additional Telenor SIM that was not registered on my name. A colleague Raheel had thirteen SIMs on his name (may be enough for the Marriot attacking team). This is dangerous since legally you own the SIM and will be responsible for any criminal activity done via this SIM. So, I suggest everyone should check it using the simple SMS service.

How to Use the Service

From Web

Click here (http://pta.gov.pk/668/) to open the web site of 668 service from PTA. It will open the following web page, where you may enter your CNIC in a field provided and press the Submit button to get required information. Please note that you have to enter your full CNIC with no gap or hyphen (like 6110160645683). Obviously, it’s free of cost.

Using Mobile Phone SMS

It’s simple: just type your CNIC and send it to 668 and it will send you in reply the number of SIM for every operator.

Write 3749127299334 and send it to 668.

You will get a reply with number of connections issued against this CNIC for 6 companies (Mobilink, Warid, Zong, Telenor, SCO and Ufone).

Service won’t tell you cell numbers, instead it will actually tell you count of numbers – for instance, Mobilink 3,    Ufone 3,    Telenor 2,    SCO 0,    Warid 0    Total 8.

Cost of Consuming SMS Service

Initially, it’s set to Rs. 2 + Tax and it’s worth its cost.

What to do for those unwanted SIMs Registered on Your Name

PTA recommends to contact the service provider for correction. Most of the telecom professionals are recommending to go to the service center of the network that has those SIMs and ask them to block those SIMs (since legally you own them).

Service Quality

Though the service is very useful the quality of service is not excellent and many users have reported delayed response or no response at all, some others got response on retry.

Related Links

Check ownership of your (SIM) Mobile Connection

Sharing from a friend’s mail:

Here I am sitting in my office @ night…
Thinking hard about life
How it changed from a maverick collage life to strict professional life……

How tiny pocket money changed to huge monthly paychecks
but then why it gives less happiness….

How a few local denim jeans changed to new branded wardrobe
but then why there are less people to use them

How a single plate of samosa changed to a full Pizza or burger
But then why there is less hunger…..

Here i am sitting in my office @ night…
Thinking hard about life
How it changed…..

How a bike always in reserve changed to car always on
but then why there are less places to go on……

How a small coffee shop changed to cafe coffee day
but then why its feels like shop is far away…..

How a limited prepaid card changed to postpaid package
but then why there are less calls & more messages……

Here i am sitting in my office @ night…
Thinking hard about life
How it changed……

How a general class journey changed to Flight journey
But then why there are less vacations for enjoyment….

How a old assembled desktop changed to new branded laptop
but then why there is less time to put it on……….

How a small bunch of friends changed to office mate
But then why we always feel lonely n miss those old frnz.….

Here i am sitting in my office @ night…
Thinking hard about life
How it changed….. How it changed……..

Thanks to CDMA and now the locked GSM, US is behin Euorope and Asia in GSM. Here is an interesting encounter, CNet is proudly educating US subscribers how they may change SIM cards while travelling abroad to save on call tariff (Swapping SIMs to save big on calls abroad). To make it more interesting, there is a FAQ that tells what a SIM card is and how it is replaced. On a recent visit to home, an expat friend from Amazon.com was astonished to see how much we use our cell phones and text here in Pakistan.

25 million handsets at risk in India due to the Chinse handsets lacking unique IMEI. According to a recent regulation, Indian governemnt is going to block all such handsets. India is estimated to have atleast 25 million chinese handsets majority of which is owned by low end consumers. This may have huge potential effects on many industries including operators, handset manufacturers, taxes and many others.

It may also raise concerns in neighbouring regions like Pakistan who are also a big market of chinese handsets.

For Details, See>> 25 million handsets die as clock strikes midnight in india!

Telenor’s aggressive plan to enter the rich Indian mobile market by taking 60% shares in Unitech (a start-up mobile operator) is facing strong opposition back at home. Telenor is said to finding alternates to complete its plan.

The day Telenor unvieled its plans to buy 60% shares in Unitech India, its share price fell by 26%. Then, the shareholders have put forward a strong opposition to its plans of a Rights Issue of $1.8bn. There was a political pressure as well on the 54% share holder, the Norwegian Government. During one year, the Telenor has faced a 70% decline in its share prices which is under pressure due to the global financial crisis effecting its sales and revenues. The share holders have very strong concerns on a rights issue under these conditions. Telenor’s CEO told Financial Times that they are considering on alternates to collect funds for Unitech investment like selling assets, cutting dividends or reducing capital spending.

See Also:

Telenor Forced to rethink its move to India

Going may be tough for Telenor

During development of a distributed messaging based application, I felt that developers still bring the fallacies about distributed programming when coming from a conventional programming background. There are somethings different in distributed programming, for example, Network unreliability, latency and bandwidth limitations. Since I have been working on distributed applications from the age of tightly coupled synchronous calls to loosely coupled, asynchronous messaging which is hot these days; I had an understanding of the challenges of distribution but this resource was much more formulated collection of these challenges. You may check a brief summary on Wikipedia or get a more detailed article here.

Martin Fowler’s First Law of Distribution (“Don’t Distribute”) is another good advice for distribution which advises Don’t distribute until it’s required because of the inherent issues of distribution.

Novel has released Mono Development Tool, part of its Mono Project which delivers an open and portable framework compatible to Microsoft .Net framework. It provides an option to develop and run .Net applications on a variety of platforms like Linux and Mac OS X. Instead of competing with leading .Net IDEs, they are concentrating to provide a cross platform tool. With this release, they are also shipping Mono 2.0 Beta parallel to .Net 2.0. Though I don’t know much of business success stories of Mono, but it definitely has a potential.

Links:
eWeeks Article
Project Mono Home Page

That was a little bottom-side news on a local news paper but enough to shock me: Australian cricketer Michael Clarke left a potential deal with IPL that may earn a million dollar or more for him. The major reason behind was that he wanted to give more time to his father who is suffering from cancer.

Thanks a million, son

Clarke ignores IPL to spend time with sick father — Crick Info

Clarke has captained Australian Twenty20 team and was among the highest profile Australian to leave the lucrative chance that might pay him $1.47million for 44 days’ work in India for April and May.  “Dad and I talked about it (IPL). I told him what it was – the money they were offering and things like that. But Lara, mum, dad, my sister and I had dinner and I told them then that I wasn’t going to go. They asked why, but they were very supportive of my decision,” Clarke was quoted as saying by ‘Sydney Morning Herald’ .

In this materialistic age when the money matters much more than the human feelings and relations, when sacrifice means to leave something to get another worldly thing, when we really love just our own material desires; a busy professional sacrifices a huge benefit just to care for his father. Oh my God! We may argue rudely that the pity cricketer had a more cheap and efficient solution of hiring a team of medical professionals to care for his father and should opt the deal to earn more money for his father and family. Come on! even one billion dollars would  not give more than this sacrifice and the ’silly’ fishing hours to his ailing father who melted his life for his kids and family.

Such sacrifices were common in East for centuries and, here, people used to give much higher priorities to human issues over materialistic gains BUTTTTT, alas, now the ‘fast moving’ life style (rather the fast-decaying life style) is going to swallow all these old-fashioned stuff. This is making the lives more and more difficult everyday — everyone is alone to face the hardships of life. We are running so fast behind money that we don’t have enough time for our families, our kids, our elders and even ourselves. My physician may be warning me to spare some time for my health and a work-life balance but I would rather prefer to have some multi vitamin pills and some easier cholesterol reduction treatment because the new life style and the sky-high targets that I have set for myself/family are pushing me hard.

Many people feel that Microsoft is stepping back from mobile web development tooling. This feeling has got fuel from the stunning fact that Microsoft has taken off the designer support from its new Visual Studio 2008. The MSDN documentation for .Net 3.5/Visual Studio 2008 (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b73×06dt.aspx ) asks to create mobile web project in Visual Studio 2005. Most of the pages on ASP.Net mobile development on MSDN are outdated and not updated for a year or many years. The official ASP.Net portal asp.net has a mobile web roadmap that ends in a desert after .Net 2 (http://www.asp.net/mobile/road-map/) and it seems not been updated for many years. The device support is silent for any progress after 2003 http://www.asp.net/mobile/tested-devices/). In his blog, Omar Khan, the Group Program Manager of Visual Web Developer, gave his custom templates to leverage Studio 2008 for mobile web development and people bombarded him with questions about Microsoft stepping back from mobile web tooling and he couldn’t answer them(http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2007/09/17/tip-trick-asp-net-mobile-development-with-visual-studio-2008.aspx).

This has created a threat among us, the people involved in technology selection about our selection of ASP.Net for mobile development. We were already concerned about narrow device support for Non-Windows based phones.

Can anyone from Microsoft may comment on this?