Nasrullah

There is a hot debate in the country about how we can save it from the chaos it’s been dragged into. Some say corruption is the cause and some blame the system. Political forces are calling for a change. Political system seems to be inching towards a breakdown. What is the solution? We Pakistanis unfortunately look for shortcuts. As a matter of fact, there aren’t any.
The plight of Pakistan is not corruption or any other social ill for that matter, rather lack of education. When the Mughals were constructing tombs and palaces in the subcontinent the English were building institutes like Oxford and Cambridge and the result is obvious. To move in the right direction we need to address education as the only solution for the country.
Large number of children do not go to school and there are those who study but could not get through because of the flawed system of education and lack of resources. Waqar Karim was one such student. Here is a glimpse of his struggle with the faulty education system that we have.
Waqar was a 2nd year pre-medical student who dreamed to be doctor. Even with a humble background and limited resources his parents sent him to Lahore for MCAT (Pakistan’s Medical College Entry Examinations). Finally the day came when he appeared for the MCAT examination. He was all geared up to become a medical student. The hope with which he entered the examination hall fell to pieces in a jiffy. It was not what he had prepared for in the last two years. He was misguided. Who could be accounted for a hardworking student’s future thrown to the wolves? He felt miserable and could not believe all this.
As they say the night is the darkest before dawn Waqar Karim got a message, a glimmer of hope, from his friend Mehsim Abid Samir asking him to come to Model Town Library. When he reached there he saw a group of students studying and helping each other. Samir has been using his mobile to SMS MCQs to his friends. Waqar was delighted to see all that. He decided to work with Samir in order to study and guide their fellow students in the right direction.
Waqar and Samir interacted with students preparing MCAT, F. Sc. or any other examination they could help them with. It so happened that the number grew much higher than they imagined. The question was, how could all this be managed? Samir had an idea. He thought that social media could help in this regard. Facebook or other social networking websites could not be the option as they required internet which was not available to majority of students. Samir wished for a social network that could be operated though mobile. Then somebody told him of Pring, a mobile social network. Pring is mobile social networking which functions as good through SMS as on web. Waqar and Samir joined Pring and created an account titled D-study.
They invited their friends and students on Pring and the number kept on growing. Now Waqar and Samir are helping countless students with lectures and MCQs. Many teachers and professors have also joined Waqar and Samir’s team and they are helping students. More than 10,000 students are following D-study including students of MCAT, ECAT, intermediate, A level etc. They have also created separate accounts for separate subjects like D-biology and D-chemistry.
Both Waqar and Samir have become a source of inspiration for young students, to study hard and never to lose hope. The credit goes to the Information technology and the revolution of social media. And Pring is an example how we can count on our own ideas and resources and contribute in the progress of the nation.
Today we live in an era in which developments do not take more than a second to reach from one end of the world to the other. Information technology is all encompassing. Pakistan has not cashed on the promises that IT offers. Just like Samir and Waqar made use of Pring as a launching pad for their ideas Pakistan should invest on social media and information technology to educate the people. Education if integrated with IT can work wonders. The world is changing fast and we have to change in order to survive.

This article was published in Sunday Plus magazine. Follow the link below to see the print version.

http://splus.nation.com.pk/E-Paper/Lahore/2012-01-15/page-28

e-Business will be using Online’s News and Pring‘s Reach to distribute news to millions of Pakistanis. Now Pringers can subscribe to news and customize topics of interest, creating a personalized newspaper.

“Pring enables us access to unprecedented reach in Pakistan and with Online’s extensive coverage; this is a winning combination.” says Mohsin Baig, CEO of Online News International. “At Pring we continually strive to bring Pakistanis closer together by connecting people and communities with news and timely information. This collaboration is another step in this direction”, said Dr Muqtaza Shah CEO of e-Business.

The question whether there should be more provinces in Pakistan or not has been a subject of heated discussions in political circles and the media. We at Pring thought its time to use Pring and conduct polls to gauge public opinion and bring it to the foreground. Pringers could participate in the poll by replying to keywords and answering questions on this issue, e. g. “Kia ap ke khayal mein Pakistan mein mazeed soobay bannein chaheyain?”

We invited more than 20 thousand Pringers to participate and respond to these questions. On the issue of creating a Sirayeki province 51% people voted in favor of the idea whereas 49% people voted against it. Mubashir Luqman on his famous talk show “Khari Baat Luqman ke Saath” on Dunya TV shared the results of the polls with his viewers.

The show starts with a 2 minute segment on Pring Polls

You can also review the survey report:

This year in 2011 Dengue (breakbone) fever hit the headlines in Pakistan. The disease spread rapidly in Lahore and its adjoining areas. The number of reported cases increased every day and created quite a stir because of lack of medical facilities and inadequate preventive measures. Heavy monsoon rains and high temperatures during the summer season are believed to be one of the major reasons of this outbreak. As the virus cannot be cured with vaccination it is extremely important to take preventive measures.

Within a short span of time we received an overwhelming response and a clearer picture began to emerge of the impact of Dengue. We set our Data Engineers to ‘mine’ this data and they came up with the above visualization. Out of all the reported cases 53.8 percent were reported from Lahore alone. 5.2 percent from Karachi, 4.2 percent from Kasur, 3.0 from Faisalabad and 1.4 percent were reported from Sargodha. With daily reports, we were able to detect  the rate at which this outbreak was spreading. An important aspect of this study was that all this data collection was instant and required no human intervention unlike data gathering.

We have just scratched the surface of what is possible with crowdsourcing and are very excited about putting this technology to use in other areas in Pakistan. We will continue to work with the best minds to come up with innovative ways to leverege the power of Pakistanis with Pring. If you have any suggessions or would like to work with us, please drop us an email at info@ebusiness-pg.com.

Until next time, happy Pringing!

We’ve now become Pakistan’s largest Mobile Social Network with 3 Million Pakistanis connected via Pring. It’s taken us three years to reach this milestone and we continue to improve and make a service that you love. Given that we have so many of you from around every part of Pakistan, we thought we use this power for good. So, recently in July 2011, we took the time to ask some of you what you thought was the future of the country, what are our biggest problems, what should we do about India and who would they vote for. We received some very interesting results which we would like to share with you.

You can find interesting analysis done on corruption and terrorism by Feisal H Naqvi: The Economy, Stupid.

(Click image to enlarge)

Happy Pringing!

by @Nash, graphic by @Kamran, Creative by @Amina and data analysis by @Haseeb

Historically, we’ve kept updates, comments and private messages to 140 characters. This was because an SMS is 160 characters long, your username takes upto 15 characters etc. But things have moved on fast since then; almost all handsets support “SMS concatenation” which means they can send and receive long SMS by stitching single messages together. It works pretty well.

Starting today, you can now send updates as much as 420 characters long! This gives you ample space for those thoughts when 140 just won’t do.

The other main reason we wanted to increase this limit was the answer to the question “what do you do if you have something longer to say?” In the online world, you write a blog post and you share the shortened link. But what about all those users who don’t have access to the Internet or a smartphone? Pring was designed from the ground-up to support SMS and it is important for us that every feature we launch works well over SMS. Short messages work well for sharing links, commenting and chatting; long messages are useful for conveying larger thoughts.

We hope you enjoy our update and that you keep sending us your feedback.

Until next time, Happy Pringing!

by @Nash

Killing Spam

Oh how we hate spam! Everyone hates spam. In the begining of Pring, we were small and spam wasn’t a problem. Eventually as more and more people joined Pring the spammers came. A boy did they came in droves. The result was a lot of spam accounts being created everyday with the sole purpose to create more followers. The problem is that these accounts perform very low-value updates and annoy users terribly. No one likes spam SMS.

We’ve been working to identify common patterns of spamming on Pring such as private message spam, comment spam, update spam and tracking spam. We then build systems to automatically identify and flag these messages. First time offenses are ignored, repeat offenders are warned and eventually suspended.

The result is a much cleaner ecosystem with more useful content and much less spam. From the feedback we’ve been recieveing, you all seem to love it too. Thanks to our spam prevention system, we’re now eliminating more than 2 million spam SMS everyday and have suspended 1300+ accounts since launch.

Improved Tracking

Tracking is a command that advanced users use over SMS to get updates around keywords they track. So, if you were tracking cricket you would receive any updates that contained the word cricket. Unfortunately, this gave rise to a new type of spam: keyword stuffing. A spammer could flood popular keywords with irrelevant spammy messages which would break the usefulness of the tracking command. We’ve changed the tracking functionality after giving it considerable review and thought. You can now only track #hashtags not regular words. So, if you are interested in cricket you can track #cricket. Any updates with the #cricket hastag will then be delivered to you. This allows us to manage keyword stuffing and reduce any spamming that would occur. Your existing track words automatically are now #hashtags.

Here’s an example:

I hope they make #ShahidAfridi the captain #cricket #worldcup

Currently, to reduce spam, we are limiting #hastags to three per update. You can track up to a hundred #hastags at a time.

We hope you like these changes. Happy Pringing!

by @sw & @Nash

A very common question we hear is “Who are my followers?” or “Who’s following me?”. Generally, the broader question is “How do I find new people?”. Ofcourse, you can see who is following you from your web profile but more than 90% of our users are mobile only (SMS) so this question is popped up more often.

One of our core philosophy is that whatever we create for the web, we mirror on the mobile as well. This means that every feature we design for the web, it needs to work well for Mobile. Which can prove to be quite challenging considering the limitations posed by SMS.

After a lot of designing, we finally released features to address these questions. The first is the List command.

Lists, Lists, Lists!

Texting LIST to your shortcode helps you retrieving a summary of your social network and tells you the actions you’ve done or you want to do on your fellow Pringers. By simply replying to the LIST menu, it may tell you your followers, or the people you follow or the people who you have blocked. Sending LIST to your short-code return you the following menu.

Ap kia dekhna chahtay hain. Matlooba number bhaijain:

1. Apke followers
2. Wo jinhain aap follow kar rahay hain
3. Wo jinhain ap nai block kar rakha hai

Once you have this menu in front of you replying with 1,2, or 3 would simply get what you are looking for. If a Pringer Ali is looking for the people who he’s following he replies with 1. Likewise for people he is following he can reply with 2 and 3 for those he wants to block. This is the search results page. In response to choice no 1 or 2 for example he’d get:

Matlooba number bhaijain:

1. Amir
2. Ghafoor

Here again Pring expects you to reply with a number. So if Ali wants to know more about Shaheen he can reply with 3 where he’s be returned with a menu that asks him what exactly does he want to know about Shaheen. This is the actions menu

Matlooba number bhaijain:

1. Whois Shaheen
2. Stats Shaheen
3. Block Shaheen
4. Unfollow Shaheen
5. Pichle Results

The WHOIS command tells you a short description about Shaheen. Likewise replying with 2, 3 or 4 would use the STATS, BLOCK & UNFOLLOW commands respectively on the user Shaheen. And in the end it asks you whether you want to return to the “actions menu” (Replying with 1) or the “search-page results” (Replying with 2).

So if you want to scan your friends on Pring and then take specific actions, LIST is the command that would help you in doing that. It helps in making things for you much more visible at Pring. Ofcourse, all of these menus are in English if your interface is set to English.

Search for Pringers

Finding your friends on Pring is easy now. All you have to do is use the SEARCH command. Send SEARCH name to your shortcode and you are returned with all the Pringer IDs containing your required search. For example if a Pring user Ali wants to search for a friend of his going by the alias Goofy, he’d type in SEARCH Goofy. In return he’s given the list of all the people that have the word “Goofy” in their aliases.

Reply with no#:

1. Goofy
2. Ali_Goofy
3. goofy_007

On replying with the number the user is taken to the actions menu. For example the reply 1 would return:

Matlooba number bhaijain:

1. Whois Goofy
2. Stats Goofy
3. Block Goofy
4. Follow Goofy

Easy enough to find someone on pring now? Get started then!

by Arslan Burney

Helping You Better

Here at e-Business, we’re always working on making your SMS experience over Pring nothing short of amazing. We do a lot of feedback calls to our users to understand in what way can we improve their experience. One of the issue we constantly hear from our SMS-only users is that it is hard for new users to understand what can Pring do.

If you use text you can always send HELP to your shortcode and you’ll receive help on pretty much anything you can do with/on Pring. Since launching Pring, the amount of things you can do on Pring has grown and so have the number of commands. There are now more than 40 various commands and hundreds of content menus inside Pring. Knowing what you want can become a daunting task over SMS.

Boy! We’ve Got a Tip for You!

For this reason, we’ve come up with Tips. If you use Pring, you’ve probably seen our help tips. They appear at the bottom of messages where we tell you how to use a certain command or functionality. Previously, everyone received the same tips over and over again. After collecting feedback, we’ve overhauled the system to make it much more useful for you.

Tips are now personalized. This means that the tips you see were specifically selected for you. For example, if you have not performed a certain command like FOLLOW; we will recommend that you do with a simple tip such as “You can get updates from any Pringer by sending FOLLOW Pringer_name”. Once you act on this tip and send the FOLLOW command, we will no longer send this tip to you. This gives us tremendous flexibility and accuracy in explaining Pring to you bit-by-bit. We’re working on a whole host of tips that will make it easy for you to understand Pring at the right moment and knowledge level.

Another small but significant step we’ve taken is the ability to have multi-lingual tips. So, if your language is set to urdu, you will receive tips in Urdu. If your language is set to English, you will recieve tips in English. We translate tips into each supported language.

Great People To Follow, Seriously!

But perhaps the most important feature we’ve launched is personalized recommendations. Searching for new users is hard over SMS. It would be cumbersome to see a list of followers of a particular friend over SMS. A simple solution we’ve come up with is that we examine all the people you follow and then we examine who do they follow. We then look at the people who who we think are good/fun accounts which you do not follow but are followed by your friends. These accounts are then recommended to you. You will see a tip at the bottom of your SMS such as “Nash, Umar and 3 more of your friends follow Nomy, you can follow them as well by sending FOLLOW NOMY”.

There’s a lot more that we’re working on to make our minimalist interface more meaningful, relevant and fun. We hope you enjoy these changes and give us feedback for improvements!

We’ve come a long way with Pring. From an early vision of connecting every Pakistani with SMS to the full-blown product Pring has become today. It has been a tough journey and we have a longer way to go to make Pring a communications platform.