See n Report & Jaroka Tele-healthcare win mBillionth Awards

When Osama Manzar first contacted me (through Shahzad Ahmad of BytesforAll) and asked that I encourage mobile application developers from Pakistan to send in their nominations for the mBillionth Awards 2010, I thought why not. We have young companies developing some great applications and it is always good to try and benchmark your products against those being developed elsewhere.

So I put up a blog post, put up links on Facebook and Twitter and sent out emails to all the mobile application development companies that I knew. People are generally so caught up in work that only 5 companies nominated their products. I told Osama that it was at least a beginning – and maybe next year we would start promoting the event a lot earlier so that there would be more entries.

The mBillionth secretariat at Digital Empowerment Foundation (http://defindia.net/), New Delhi reached out to all of South Asia region to solicit nominations across 10 categories: Business, Culture & Heritage, Education, Entertainment, Government, Health, Inclusion, Environment, News and Travel & Tourism.

More than 200 entries were received and after rigorous scrutiny 175 nominations were successfully accepted and presented to the 14 Jury members of which there were 5 from Pakistan.

The Grand Jury of the mBillionth South Asia Award 2010 comprised of 14 experts including Zaheer Alam Kidvai from Pakistan. They struggled for 3 days in Colombo from June 9 – 13 to find 24 best practices across 10 categories hailing from 8 South Asian countries.

The winners for the mBillionth were announced at at the South Asia Mobile Congress, Exhibition & Award Gala yesterday July 23, 2010 in New Delhi. The Indian Minister for Rural Development was one of the VIPs at the event.

The great news is that of all the 200 entries that were submitted 2 of the 24 winners are from Pakistan:

See N Report won in the m-News & Journalism Category,

Jaroka TeleHealth won in the m-Health Category

Congratulations to Sharjeel Ahmed Qureshi, Adil Saleem, Yaser Awan and Dr. Umar Saif of See N Report and to Atif Mumtaz of UM Healthcare Trust and Dr. Arshad Ali DG of SEECS who are collaborating on the Jaroka project.

I think it is extremely important for our companies to continue to benchmark what we create against ICT products being developed within Pakistan by participating in the P@SHA ICT Awards and other such activities, in South Asia through programs like the mBillionth Award and in the Asia Pacific through the APICTA Awards. The recognition is important as is the sharing.