Pakistan sweeps trophies at APICTA 2008

It has been quite a magical evening for Team ICT Pakistan and for P@SHA. As you can see from the smiles, we bagged a few awards.

PixSense PSP won the award for Best in Media and Entertainment Applications. Adnan was apparently not expecting it because he didn’t have a bag large enough to take it home.

TPS Pvt Limited’s IRIS won the Award for Best in Tools & Infrastructure Applications. It’s impressive diverse application wowed the judges and Shahzad Shahid was there to claim the trophy.

If the Kraysis team of Jamil, Khurram and Mustafa looks shell-shocked, it is because they were probably not expecting to win. They knew there was competition and had worked 25 hours at a stretch to revamp their presentation, put in all the missing meat and remove all the fat. They were chosen as the Best in the Startup Category.

Imran Zia and I just had to have a picture taken with the winners. We missed our remaining judges – Jawwad Farid was there to see PixSense, TPS and Kraysis receive their awards but had to leave right afterwards for the airport. Sultan Hamdani and Nadeem Aslam Malik were already on the way home.

All in all, there were 134 applications in the running for awards at APICTA 2008 in Jakarta – from 11 economies in 16 categories. Only 16 trophies were awarded and we bagged 3 of them. Yay!!! But as Stephen Lau, Chairman of APICTA rightly said – anyone who participated in these awards was a winner and should be proud of his or her achievements. P@SHA had 12 submissions at APICTA this year of which 4 of the nominees in the areas of e-Health and e-Learning were not able to participate. Hence there were only 8 applications that were actually in the running. All of them put up very strong submissions. The ones who did not qualify for the trophy were told later by the judges in their categories that they had missed by as little as 0.2 points and .17 points.

More later! Just wanted to break the news. Well done Team P@SHA ICT Pakistan. It was an evening which gladdened our hearts. We are so proud of all of you. Three cheers for all the nominees!

They have all been superb!

This is the schedule for the APICTA event in Jakarta. Quite a full and busy schedule especially for the judges who are flown in by the host country. They have to follow a strict code of ethics and work long hours – from 8:30 am – 6:30 pm after which the data is input into the judging system. They then have to check the entry to see that it is accurate and then sign off on it.

This is usually followed by Networking events – this year there was the Hong Kong reception and the Malaysian reception in addition to an RFID sharing session that was set up by Hong Kong.

Adnan Agboatwalla is at APICTA for the 3rd time. Last time PixSense PSP won the Merit in the Communications category (there was no winner). This year the product has undergone a major change with at least a dozen more new features, several new customers like China Mobile, Vodafone Europe and the Philippine telco. He was seen to be fine tuning his presentation, getting his props together and putting everything in the cache in case the wifi service went crazy. He said as he came out that his presentation went perfectly – but Adnan the question is, what did the judges think? When asked, Adnan said they were thrilled with the Geo-tagging feature. He is eyeing the Winners trophy in the Media & Entertainment Category this year. Will he get it?

Zubair and Sharjeel impressed us all with their zeal and their dedication and the support they gave each other. They took advice, worked hard on their presentations and rehearsed them endlessly so as to put on a good show. Zubair is from FAST NUCES Islamabad. He has come up with an application that detects malware that is a non-executable file – could be a pdf, a jpeg, an excel sheet, a word doc or an mp3. Sharjeel is the CEO of SeenReport – a citizen journalism service that has been used by many to upload news and, as he says, “enact change.” His product was pitched in the e-Community and e-Inclusion category which is a new category. They are both “winners” in my book but how did they do in comparison to the other entries in their categories? We will know tonight.

Are Shahzad Shahid of TPS and Khurram of Kraysis comparing notes on strategy or are they giving each other feedback on how their presentations went.

You know whether they get the APICTA trophy or not, both Shahzad and the Kraysis team (Jamil, Khurram and Mustafa) went through the wringer to get their presentations just right. They re-created them and rehearsed them until they were happy that they got them just right. They learnt how one shoe doesn’t fit all – and that they should have different kinds of presentations for different audiences. Good luck guys!

Omar and Faraz Sherwani blew us all away with their delivery styles and the confidence they exuded. They were in Jakarta to pitch products in two categories for brother Jahanzeb who is completing his PhD at Carnegie Melon – Jaadu VNC in the Communications Category and HealthLine in the R&D category. They put on a good show, answered questions with great confidence. Father Khalid Sherwani – a retired banker, a former President of UBL – was with them. They left last night and have requested that I collect the trophy on their behalf if they win. It will be an honour guys! Well done! You have a great future ahead of you. We look forward to seeing more of you.

Have you ever seen anyone as excited as Anjum Farooq Chohan of Palmchip? He said the judges thought that GeoTel was a really amazing R&D project. For those who don’t know what it is, what GeoTel does is, it identifies and pinpoints any breakage in the fibre laid by telcos thus saving downtime and a great deal of lost revenue. This is the first year that we have participated in the R&D category, and we are really excited at the new trend in the Pakistan ICT sector to concentrate on R&D in cutting edge areas. Palmchip has a great product – we will know this evening if it won at APICTA against others in this category. Good luck Anjum.

We took this in the Jakarta Convention Centre yesterday – it was quite impromptu so there are a few people missing from our delegation. Yes that is Jawwad Farid in his shariah-compliant shorts (no he did not wear this for the judging – he actually wore a suit on both days). And next to him is Sultan Hamdani in his Shariah-compliant shalwar kurta. Sultan actually made the immigration officer smile when he responded to a question regarding where he was staying, by saying “my hotel” – the Sultan Hotel is what he meant.

It is D-Day today and we will have the judges’ verdict at the APICTA dinner tonight. However, as I have said in an earlier post, our team are all winners and we are very proud of their performance at APICTA 2008. I will end with this picture of the Kraysis team that I took as they were walking into the presentation room – chill guys! It is only a competition.

If there was an Award for commitment & effort …

If an Award was given for commitment & effort, then the Pakistan camp at APICTA would definitely have won it hands down. After the long day I had on the 12th, you would have thought that I would have crashed, as would have the judges and nominees who had just flown in from Karachi and Lahore tired, deprived of sleep and needing so desperately to rest.

But did any of us rest? No way. We are in Jakarta on a mission. To show our award-winning products (they are all award-winning having won the P@SHA ICT Award in Pakistan a few weeks ago)! We had decided that we were going to put on the best performance we could.

And that is just what we did. After a 15 minute break we all met in the meeting room at the Sultan Hotel for initial mock presentations. And we tore them to shreds. We had asked them beforehand if we could be brutal with our comments. All the nominees said we could, so there were no holds barred.

Most of the presentations we make as IT companies are sales presentations – and as such they are probably brilliant. But for APICTA, they are absolute no-nos.

As technologists and researchers, we are prone to putting all the technical jargon into any presentation we make. We want to show in 20 minutes the years of work that we have put into developing our products and our companies. But is that all really relevant when you are presenting to a panel of judges who are looking at a clearly defined judging criteria? Nope. And that is exactly what we had to drum into our brilliant, innovative and talented group of nominees from Pakistan. There was no mincing of words. Each of us took the presentations apart, gave detailed advice on what should remain and what shouldn’t, on what the approach should be if they were going to grab the judges’ attention in the first 5 minutes. The meat, the gist had to be right up front – what was unique about the product, what was innovative, current market size, what was the market potential, what recognition and quality standards had they followed, what technologies had been used, what was their revenue and their future course of action? This had to come out clearly in the first 5 minutes. And for community products/services, what impact had it made on the community?

Of course it took a lot out of the coaches – this picture of P@SHA Chairman Imran Zia is an indication of the state we were in by the time we finished the seesion late at night and finally headed to the restaurant for dinner.

This exercise was repeated on the second night. Each candidate was asked to present, was given advice, was told to fix various parts of his presentation and delivery, and was tested a second time.

What is important to relate here is that the training, coaching and support that was given to kids like Zubair Shafiq of FAST NUCES (he was presenting on Day 1), Islamabad by seasoned judges like Sultan Hamdani the first day was in turn given by Zubair to Sharjeel of See’n'Report with the same commitment (Sharjeel was slotted in to present on Day 2).

As Sharjeel pointed out after he had made his presentation, “I didn’t come here to win … I came here to experience what it was like to present to an international panel, to share our vision for the company and our product and to learn from what others are doing.” Great attitude young man! Isn’t that the attitude that makes us feel proud of all the delegates we have brought to this event year after year? Good luck Team Pakistan. The Awards night is tonight. You have already been recognized as winners – being nominated for APICTA is recognition in itself. If we pick up an Award, that will just be additional gravy