“I absolutely love the idea of DareMyCompany”, says Jennifer Van Grove here on Mashable. She wrote a detailed review of the web app Zigron lately developed after the success of PingMyCompany.
DareMyCompany is a simple tool that lets companies find other companies for different sports and other challenges/competitions. It’s one of it’s kind and has been developed by keeping in mind the importance of entertainment for working people.
Currently the challenges on the site fall under sports category only, but the criteria will be expanded with a lot more locations, and some new features laters.
If you’re also tired of working and or want to show other companies in your area that you’re best at something, just give them a call at DareMyCopmany and prove yourself!
This is the best time to visit Pakistan for tourists, reason being the cool weather and well developed public places. To make the best use of this time, Zigron had planned a Bar-B-Que event in Rawal Lake View Park, on December 25th, 2008. The park is the back side of Rawal Lake that is one of the big artificial water reservoirs [covering an area of about 8.8km] in Pakistan.
Being a public holiday, it was a busiest day at the spot with so many people round, and it was good to see such big crowd there, which has previously been seen only in the metropolitan city Karachi. Other than crowd, the much noticeable thing was Lake View itself, all water and water, and then the delicious Bar-B-Que. How much people enjoyed there, can’t be expressed in words, but definitely in pictures below:
Almost all of us have played a mobile game at least once in lifetime. This fact makes mobile gaming the most active area of mobile content. The question that why people play mobile games may have many answers but a simple answer is simplicity and ease of use of these games, so anyone can play them anywhere. The popularity of mobile games can be analyzed from the fact that, the first question that raised with the launch of iPhone was, “Where are iPhone games?”.
Technology has always revolutionized things, especially the entertainment economy. Innovations like touchscreen have renovated the business economy till yet, but it’s just one half, the other and the big one lies in the entertainment economy. iPhone when launched was an innovation in the mobile handsets and sort of threat for the competitors, but since mobile is the industry with a lot of business models associated with it, it’s now having impact on many other areas of economy, especially the marketing industry with ad-funded games and applications. Particularly in gaming, it’s also considered as Nintendo and Sony PSP’s rival, being richer in experience, and providing same sort of game development environment to the developers. One other reason for the popularity of iPhone is the network gaming experience it gives with simple WiFi connections, that’ll get richer with 3G.
The reason for iPhone to revolutionize the arena of mobile marketing is nothing other than that it’s the best mobile gaming platform as compared to others existing in the market. And, it’s not just the iPhone buzz, instead the facts. According to the stats released by AOL in the mid of 2008, iPhone gamers generate four times of the page views as compared to players with other handsets, i.e. iPhone players have an average session of 21 minutes with 65 page views, while for others an average session is of 11 minutes with 15 page views.
Screen Digest which is a Global Media Market Research firm, reports that by 2012, advertising on mobile will worth $2.79 billion, and ad-funded games download will go upto 60 million per year [Source]. Since it’ll be touchscreen, ruling the mobile gaming world in near future, iPhone sounds to have the major market share. But the reason for iPhone’s lead in the market is not touchscreen only, instead it’s price and it’s popularity among all age groups and from different spheres of life, while other touchscreen handsets are having a target market of business professionals.
All above is my limited research, and m’ sure that iPhone will have lead in mobile gaming in the coming year. I’ll, however, appreciate if I happen to find some twist in this whole scene, with some authentic information.
The world is evolving and the trends changing, making the world faster than ever before and technology more stable. With the invention of first pager in 1959 by Motorola, the world started getting mobile. The launch of first commercial mobile phone by NTT in Japan was the next step to stabilize this mobility.
The innovation in this mobility with SMS happened to be originated in Europe in 1985. SMS was a boom in the later part of 1900s and early 2000s, and still it’s the top cellular activity. There’re above 4 billion mobile phone subscribers, with 74% of them using SMS of which 94% of SMSs are read. Just in UK 1.4 billion text messages now being sent every week.
This is just an overview of mobile phones and SMS, innovations like iPhone, Blackberry, Android and mobile-internet integration are constantly opening the new horizons of excellence for mobile marketing. Web marketing is one of the most cost effective marketing methods with maximum outreach. Since there’re more mobile phone subscribers than that of internet users, so mobile opens broad ways for marketing from small and medium to large businesses.
Mobile-web integrated marketed is still in the process of development, reason being the lack of awareness among most of mobile phone subscribers, i.e. there’re about 10 million users worldwide using GPRS services that makes only about 0.25% of the total subscribers. But, this low percentage doesn’t mean that mobile marketing is not growing. There’re various methods within mobile marketing including SMS Marketing, Ingame Mobile Marketing, Location Based Services etc.
Ingame Mobile Marketing is the fastly growing area and the future of mobile marketing. The reason is that more than 90% of mobile phone subscribers play mobile games. From simple interactive real-time 3D games to massive multi-player and social networking games, mobile gaming is everywhere. This trend is accelerating the growth of mobile 2.0 on one hand and hence the mobile development on other.
Mobile development being the next big thing is now the focus of small, medium and large business, and hence it’s becoming a competitive industry. The competition is becoming tougher as the industry leaders Nokia and Google have moved to opensource, and this situation is critical for ISVs.
ZDNet also reports that, it’ll not be the great UI as only challenge instead, things that matter more are ideas and methodologies. Though ISV’s are more under pressure, but companies will have equal pressure and will have to face almost same challenges. It’ll be the race of collective innovation [what I can term it as] or Product Innovation [combination of innovation in methodologies, design, productivity etc] so, innovation in over all performance will win!
This post will be serving as a live broadcast for our Usability Event which is going to be held tomorrow Tuesday, December 2, 2008. So, please, bookmark it for the live updates. It’ll be great, but a lot depends on the wifi availability there.
A detailed overview of the event will be a part of our post event activity, and live updates will help us gather more and more public opinions. Bloggers/web analysts/user experience gurus/usability geeks are welcomed to blog about it on their blogs and or write us their views.
Feedback will be highly appreciated, so stay tuned!
Whether it’s consumer electronics, desktop software or a web application, usability comes first, i.e. the ease with which the user will use that product. The evolving technologies, geographical differences etc though cause a little variation, but standards are almost same everywhere. Usability itself is a standard, and any new, or enhanced product must follow the usability guidelines.
Being a product developer, why should you care about Usability is a single question with hundreds of answers, some known and many hidden. Discussion is the only way to explore all those, and so Zigron Inc. and CDF Software arranged a seminar on Usability in collaboration with NUST Islamabad. Seminar will be held on Tuesday, December 2, 2008 from 5 pm to 8 pm (PST) at NUST Sector H-12, Islamabad Campus.
The seminar will be a sort of discussion on current Usability practices round the world, the difference and similarities, the best and the successful, and the emerging trends. Another interesting part of the seminar will include a documentary on design Helvetica. Panelists of the seminar are people from different software houses of Islamabad and NUST, i.e. Babar Khan (ikonami), Faizan Buzdar (Scrybe), Haris Khan (Zigron), Osama Hashmi (CDF Software), Murad Akhter (Tintash) and Dr. Khalid Latif (NUST).
The purpose of seminar is to discuss the Usability standards with specific reference to modern technologies, to make better use of it within our domains and to create awareness among future entrepreneurs.
After the successful launch of PingMyCompany, Zigron decided to develop a more interactive site where employees of different companies can have real fun. It’s DareMyCompany, whereby one company can dare others to compete in anything. For instance, lately a team of MOHAA players from Zigron had a match with MediaLinkers.
It’s not only about daring companies locally, instead you can dare an overseas company, for instance for design and development contests. So be as innovative as you can to dare companies in the areas where no one has ever dared them.
Each company when registered will have a Dare Profile with all their stats. There’s a ladder also for company’s position, and it gets updated as any two companies have a contest, and post their result.
Soon we will publish the exact rules for using the ladder and how positions are calculated. Till then please enjoy the site and start challenging other firms.
Qurratulain Akhtar
11:18 am on October 14, 2008
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Tags: identity theft, social networking, Web 2.0, web 3.0
Having spent most of the time on Internet, social networking is very obvious. While exploring some profiles of friends and some friends of friends I happened to land on some of the celebrity profiles. Though m’ not a big fan of celebrities, but celebrities are celebrities after all, and it urges sometime to know about them if they’re near to you.
Well, same happened to me, so I got into the celebrity profiles. One profile I’d spent more time on was a very well known local model, so I knew a little about her earlier as well. Profile of her, however, seemed fake to me, and something that came in my mind at first instance was nothing other than “Identity theft”. Discussed it with friends concluded that how come a busiest celebrity can be so active on social network, but it’s mobile world so anything can happen.
Well, this celebrity story was over and out from my mind after a week, but not the Identity theft itself. I kept on finding more about Identity theft and have come up with the fact that “Identity theft is the biggest threat to Web 2.0”.
Identity theft is the biggest threat to Web 2.0 because it’s the biggest and speedily spreading internet crime. According to a research conducted by Gartner, average 28.5 people are becoming victims of identity theft each minute. In 2001, the rate of growth of identity theft was 11% to 20% and it grew upto 80% in 2002 and in 2005 it was 700%. [Source: Identity Theft Resource Center]
The research classifies the identity theft into two types, i.e. true-name identity theft and synthetic identity fraud. The first one is one in which the criminals use credentials of an actual person or business and this stands only 10% to 15% of the total cases while the other one is based on fabricated data and stands 85% to 90% of the internet fraud cases.
Identity theft affects not only individuals but also business and social groups. From Lori Drew’s Myspace case [a 49 years old woman created a false Myspace account in the name of a 16 years old boy, intending to get information from daughter’s friend “MTM” about their relationship. Later the fictitious online relationship got ugly and to end up all this "Josh" broke up with MTM and the girl committed suicide] to online phishing attacks there are hundreds of different situations whereby people suffer. Social Networks are likely to be more vulnerable to identity theft risks, as grabbing user information and creating false accounts on these networks is none too difficult.
It’s a proven fact that technology and innovations have benefited crimes along with the society for betterment and improved lifestyle. But, since there’s always a room for betterment, so is this in the case of Web 2.0. When we talk about communities, user generated content, direct access to the end user and blah blah, one question that’s of equal importance for everyone is “How to maintain your true identity?”
Moderated content and maintaining online reputation systems can resolve this very issue, but almost every social network is after more and more growth in terms of userbase, and there’re some with million of users, i.e Facebook , Orkut, Myspace etc, and it’s nearly impossible for them to keep a check on each and every activity within their online premises. Maintaining privacy and other policies at social network’s end and realizing social responsibility at users’ end does make a difference, but looking at the number of identity theft cases in each minute, the difference seems greater.
Having internet law may be a solution, but which country’s law t will be, or will one country’s law be acceptable in other? International Internet Law may be….! Well that’s a long debate and the speed with which technologies change is not the speed with which laws get updated….!
Finally I found something of my interest and thought that it might help combating the issue. it’s “Web 3.0”. It’ll hopefully be more efficient than Web 2.0, when we’ll have all OpenID and intelligent web [Semantic Web] based applications and websites. With OpenID when user will have same credentials for many websites, he’ll have better control. But the threat of identity theft remains there, when a normal user can do all this, a cyber criminal can also.
So my question is, “we’re on the way to make the web more intelligent, but how can we make the web that intelligent to identify the cyber crimes like identity theft?”
Qurratulain Akhtar
6:26 pm on July 21, 2008
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Tags: offshore teams, Team Building, Team Management, Teams
We’ve been working in different teams for long, and have known that there are few factors like motivation, communication, flexibility etc that make better performing teams. But, we never knew the extent which we need all these to be. So ZEDCo [Zigron Education Company] organized an event where we could find this extent.
It was basically a game that we played on July 16, 2008 at Zigron office. The game was comprised of 8 analytical and 8 management related questions. In first round everyone had to answer those questions individually [in 20 minutes], and in second round the same questions were answered by groups of randomly selected individuals [in 10 minutes]. On analyzing the both rounds, we found that the team score was higher than that of individual scores for each team. Later the feedback that we collected from participants [letting them rate the importance of flexibility, communication/coordination, decision making, team leading, motivation and entertaining environment] stated that, we think:
The most important factors responsible for the success of a team are: Communication/coordination, decision making and motivation.
And, the next important are flexibility, team leading and entertaining environment.
Highlights from the activity:
Our Co-CEO, Haris Khan accompanied us in the game on conference call, he was also the part of a team, so we’d a live experience of working globally. We also realized that the most important factor for global teams is communication.
Teams were randomly grouped, so no one knew that which team he will be in, or who’s gonna be their team members.
100% of the participants believed that teams work better than individuals.
Planning and organizing this activity itself was a team effort, and it won’t have happened ever if the team wasn’t there.
Well, this activity helped us a lot identifying what we need to make good teams. Here’re the activity questionnaire and the answers, try the game in your organization, and find what you need more to build effective teams.
Qurratulain Akhtar
5:40 am on June 10, 2008
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Tags: 404 error, page not found, permanent redirect
“The page you’re looking for doesn’t exist”, “Page not found”are very familiar terms that most of internet users happen to find everywhere round. In technical terms it’s 404 error. Generally that’s all about this type of error, but getting into a little more details, this 404 page on a site has close connections with traffic retention and bounce rate.
404 page does not only bounce your traffic, but you may also lose a potential client in many cases, so improving these pages is of utmost importance. Doing all this is just fun if you place yourself in shoe of your visitor and:
Apologize for the inconvenience your visitors have faced
Set a permanent redirect if your content has been moved to a new location
This is what you may normally be doing, and so all others will be, so try something different and, customize your 404 page. You may:
Match it’s design with main site’s template
Add an appealing message, mainly offering a search option in it
Create an internal search engine, in case if you’ve a big site with tons of content.
These work fine, but since its all about how innovative you’re, you can come up with something more that helps engaging users as well as offering them what they were exactly looking for. Few more ideas from my side can be to:
Put a proper structured sitemap on your 404 page.
Ask the user to suggest if something is missing.
Get broken links report from users by providing them a simple form on 404 page.
Retaining visitors of your website is as important as it is to gain traffic. This helps reducing your bounce rate and increasing probability of sales along with developing visitors’ trust. The methods of retaining targeted traffic may vary with the niche market, but the above mentioned case is almost same for all sorts of sites. So, be inquisitive to find what’s wrong, and be innovative to take the issue as an opportunity to do something new!
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DareMyCompany is a simple tool that lets companies find other companies for different sports and other challenges/competitions. It’s one of it’s kind and has been developed by keeping in mind the importance of entertainment for working people.
Well, same happened to me, so I got into the celebrity profiles. One profile I’d spent more time on was a very well known local model, so I knew a little about her earlier as well. Profile of her, however, seemed fake to me, and something that came in my mind at first instance was nothing other than “Identity theft”. Discussed it with friends concluded that how come a busiest celebrity can be so active on social network, but it’s mobile world so anything can happen.
