Every year, for the past four years, I have been doing something in January, I write to Pakistani banks, via their websites (online) and gauge them on their response and customer service. Whilst for the past four years I was doing it purely out of curiosity, this year I decided to test our online banks and see how responsive (or lack thereof) they are to online customer queries.

The goal is simple:

• I have three questions that I shall be asking them, during different times of the week.
• All three questions are different.
• All the emails will go out from Gmail and Yahoo (so they cannot claim, that they never received it)
• I will gauge the banks on the following:

• Average time to reply
• Was the Question answered (Yes/No)
• Was there the response adequate
• Professionalism in their reply
• and other ancillary information that I will post (but not yet). Don’t want to give the whole thing away.

The report would be placed online, here on my blog as a downloadable PDF. It would be interesting to see how this detailed experiment of mine goes.

Stay tuned.

Many people don’t know who Keith Tentlinger and Malcom Mclean are. Their combined contribution to the 20th century was one of the most important one, that revolutionized trade and commerce around the world, set the pace for globalization, and as an unintended by-product created a new field of living (read: habitats) and revolutionized today computer’s datacenters.

No, they did not invent or formulate any new field in economics or founded a stock exchange etc. Their invention was that of the modern standardized shipping container, better known technically as an intermodal container (a container designed to be moved from one mode of transport to another without unloading and reloading).

It is indeed a big feat to have ‘standardized’ something in as vast as trade & transportation of that trade. If you imagine us not having the shipping container in place, just think how disorganized everything would be today.

Malcom Mclean – Father of the modern shipping container

Keith Tentlinger: Co-Inventor of the modern shipping container

Containers essentially come in two sizes: 20-foot equivalent, and 40-foot equivalent.  In the field, cargo is referred to as TEU (Twenty Foot Equivalents), i.e. how many 20 foot containers were moved. If say 10 x 40-Foot containers were moved, this would equate to 80 TEUs were moved.

A standard 40-foot container

A standard 20-foot container

A detailed overview of the various components of a standard container

A view of the container’s door and its components

 The advent of a standardized shipping container meant that regardless of the system the host country was using, regardless of the geography or ship (vessel) type, there was now a singular unit for shipping cargo. In its true sense, one-size fits all.

Moving cargo before the standardization of the shipping container was messy to say the least. Various charges were levied for load and off-loading and reloading of cargo. All this hassle was wiped out when a standard unit was introduced. Ships could not stack these containers with absolute certainty and ease. A whole new industry spawned out of the container.

Shipping containers stacked-up on M.V. Colombo Express 16 across

The rapid rise of short-cargo handling times, meant, goods could be packed,shipped and offloaded to their destination much faster than was previously possible. Trade increased and the infamous 20-foot or 40-foot container being hauled on at the back of an 18-wheeler could be seen world over.  Before the era of the shipping container, derricks were seen hauling off/on cargo for days. Nowadays a regular sized container ship can be on/off loaded in as little as 24 hours (averaging 18 hours).

The container itself is so robust and well constructed (considering almost every imaginable type of cargo moves in them, that it was only a matter of time, someone would think of alternative usage for these 20/40 foot steel boxes.

The first major usage of shipping containers was that of habitats. Originally used at construction sites around the world as field offices, they would over time evolve to much more than rooms for construction foreman.

Here are some innovative examples:

The above is part of a container city (more like a city-block).

Waiting room of some sorts (perhaps at a golf course, etc).

Something I would like at the far end of my garden.

Now I could sit here and Quora all day!

Student Dormitory in NL.

A mini studio in TX.

Residence in Quebec made entirely from containers.

An office in California (using containers in a warehouse for offices & kitchen).

A house in Wellington (NZ) made from containers.

Freitag Flagship Store made with 17 containers.

In recent years, the computer industry has gone at great lengths to utilize the container as datacenters for servers & networking gear. Here are some examples:

]]> http://www.faisalkhan.com/2011/10/21/keith-tantlinger-malcom-mclean-shipping-container/feed/ 2 http://www.faisalkhan.com/2011/07/21/what-the-best-approach-to-start-a-personal-wind-energy-farm/ http://www.faisalkhan.com/2011/07/21/what-the-best-approach-to-start-a-personal-wind-energy-farm/#comments Thu, 21 Jul 2011 13:12:20 +0000 Faisal Khan http://faisalkhan.com/?p=1075

First of, its not by eating a whole lot of baked beans, though I can see what that would yield to!

On a serious note, individual investment into a wind farm can often be too costly, and a point of envy for the neighbors. A great was to get started on a personal wind farm is to involve the neighbors. For reasons that would immediately be understood by you, however, let me amplify.
(a) Start with education. You can contact your neighbors and ask them to attend a voluntary educational get together you are doing on ‘alternative’ energy (don’t just stick to Wind farm, just as yet). This is perhaps the hardest part. You will meet resistance, you will have no shows and you will need to shampoo-rinse-repeat many times over. But do not worry. Your delivery pitch will only get better. You will learn revise your presentation and also you will learn to document and research the areas in alternative energy better.
(b). Your education process will be a long one. Do it over a Bar-BQ, or drinks, or a visit to each household on the weekend with your laptop and do a 30 minute presentation. If your presentation invokes an interest (which it should), these neighbors of yours will also be compelled to learn/read about alternative energy.

(c). Your next goal is to make them ‘game’ of “How about we all pitch in and setup something?” A farm of anything (solar, wind etc.) will require permits (perhaps), cooperation from neighbors, and land. The more the merrier, but do not make the project too big. Make a small committee (people love being on a committee, and give assignments and titles). It just makes the whole cause more legit and serious.

(d) When you make an effort on a community level (30-50 houses), you will be taken more seriously by financial institutions and the companies that deliver wind farms, etc. (usually they have a mechanism to fund you as well – depending on the geography you are operating on).

(e) The goal should be ‘small’ to start off with, something where say A porch light in all the houses can be started (bad example, but nothing better is coming to mind right now). You can divide the costs amongst the 20, 30 or 50 households, it will be very much affordable and provide great insight on how to get started with your experimental project (and that is what it should be termed as). An experimental project. So if things don’t work out, everyone is in agreement, its no biggie.

(f) Contact some commercial vendors in this field and ask them to come around and make presentations. The numbers they will throw at you (depending on the salesmen) will vary. It could be horrendously expensive or too cheap-too-good-to-be-true. Either way, you goal is to have many of them visit, do a survey and propose some solution. Let the companies work and find a solution for you.

(g) Once you have a solution in place and financials, see which is the most appropriate one and have your committee vote on it – or make a decision and go with it.

One area I would definitely recommend you research is Vertical Axis Wind Turbines – which is a preferred design for small wind farms and the designs have improved a lot.

Your best approach is to take your neighbors into consideration, as the economies of scale and the sanity of the project will be in your favor. There is guaranteed not to be any NIMBY (Not-In-My-Backyard) people. Green technology everyone loves and promote. It is being taught all around from children to adults and everyone knows this is the right thing to do.

Good luck.

Often the question is asked, how does the processing of credit cards actually work. For example, how does Authorize.net or Card Service International or Bank of America process credit card transactions.

Well, they essentially, use their economies of scale, to process transactions for you. Companies like Authorize.net et. al. setup elaborate system, networks, infrastructure, etc. to connect to all the Card networks like VISA, Mastercard, AMEX, Discover and others. Comply with their very strict security requirements and auditing requirements (fraud management, KYC, AML, SAR, etc.) I’m not sure if they connect to ACHs (in case of Authorize.net) but some payment gateways do connect to them.

They then provide you with their platform to conduct a credit card transaction (online/offline), i.e. when your customer wants to do a transaction they take the card details, connect to the requisite network, validate the transactions and then process it. In doing so, they also do the accounting that is required of it, to make sure if the transaction was successful, to minus the balance, credit the merchant, provide the relevant transaction records to all parties concerned for a successful settlement and in doing so, make money off it.

All this translates to a very economical system for you (the merchant) to use. When you have 10,000s of merchants using a system like this, it become inherently a great B2B model for companies like Authorize.net, etc. to be able to provide you with a service, with low up-front fees, etc.

The transaction fees for every transaction you are processing is distributed amongst various players, the card network, the payment processor, you the merchant (if you have a markup), the issuing bank, etc.

You could in some way some it up, that these payment processors are credit card transaction brokers.

In addition to big sign that says - Save Money! (could not have hammered the point better in my opinion), here are a couple of reasons why we moved from a very highly invested server farm to cloud servers.

Firstly, we had the option of using www.Rightscale.com to manage our cloud infrastructure – the management of it all via Rightscale helped us a lot. Cannot stress this fact (especially if you have a multi-tiered/complex server deployment architecture).

One of the most important point was the ability to ‘transition’ your cloud server from one provider to another (which is a feature though used less, but can save 100s of hours if migrations are to be an issue or something you do frequently). If a Cloud provider X for some reason terminates your server – say due to a DDoS attack or whatever reason, you can easily migrate that virtual server to another Cloud provider Y very easily.

Another example that is more pragmatic is costs, if costing on Provider A is higher and you want to migrate to Provider B, the migration/transitioning between cloud providers is a god send no less.

By having a large physical server farm, we were wasting lots of CPU cycles, Hard Disk space and memory (RAM). When we moved to the cloud, we start with average or minimal sizes, and looked at the performance metrics of our virtual servers (again something easy to do with all the various cloud tools out there on a single desktop screen). We then adjusted our cloud server sizes to match optimal server size and saved over 45% (vs the physical servers) and this was a cost saving of over 60% (if you believe it).

CPU and Storage are two of the greatest elements that are wasted, and by shrinking it down, the savings were tremendous.

One definitive advantage of the cloud was the ability to quickly deploy more machines as and when required (on-demand) and release them – once the demand subsided (this was true in a very few cases, but important nonetheless). Elastic computing in its truest sense.

Server images are another huge plus. You can take a server image literally by a right click and save it on cloud storage for future use. We also found that building a ‘template’ of a server is a great time saving exercise. For example if you will deploy a Linux Server and then put on Squid Server on it, etc. you can simply do this exercise once and then save it as a template, should you ever want to deploy the same server again, just deploy off the template, and your server + apps are ready to do. Only an IP change is required in the .config files and you are up and running in a jiffy.

Most of the cloud providers provide features like on-demand load-balancers, firewalls, IDS, additional storage, that can be deployed instantaneously. Can’t do that with the physical server world. And all these instantaneous deployments will have little or no impact on your service offering in terms of downtime, etc.

OS reloads is something you will love on cloud servers. Don’t like the OS, or messed up, simple reload again and in a few minutes (15-30 minutes) your new OS is up and running again, again, a huge advantage over traditional server offering.

IaaS/PaaS have achieved an economies of scale, where by every CPU core or memory is sold, as their are mostly likely a buyer for it out there. This results in excellent pricing model and allos you to save up a lot.

3rd party apps for monitoring, server management, quick/rapid deployments, etc are now plenty out there. The image libraries have improved drastically. For example if you were to take a traditional LAMP environment and strap on WordPress on it and then configure it with cPanel, etc. it can take quite a few hours to have this up and running. Many providers (especially Amazon) have an image that will take care of this and you will be up and running with a LAMP server, running cPanel/WordPress in under 30 minutes.

Do not be concerned that the virtual/cloud environment is exclusively for the Linux platform. Windows offering on the cloud is plenty and runs very smoothly. Most Window instances will sometimes even run on a single core, with 1.5GB of RAM – without issues (this all depends on what you run on the server itself).

Now, even providers like Amazon and Softlayer, do not charge you for incoming bandwidth (its free), so you now have additional cost savings. Albeit, the only drawback with Cloud providers is for people who want “unmetered” servers. No such thing as unmetered on cloud servers yet.

As with Aamzon, Rackspace and Softlayer, their cloud offerings tie in seamlessly with their Cloud Storage offering and their CDN (Content Delivery Network) offering.

The questions that everyone wants an answer to. I have been writing to PayPal for 10+ years to solicit a reply from them – as to why they are not here in Pakistan (you can read that correspondence onwww.faisalkhan.com)

PayPal operates in various countries but a few countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, (amongst the larger ones) are missing. When countries like Somalia, Yemen and Rwanda are included in the list of countries where PayPal is available, one begins to wonder why Pakistan is not included.

It is not primarily about market size, I am sure Pakistan’s market size is a whole lot larger than many countries (combined) where PayPayl currently operates in.

The issue is country risk. <- I cannot sum it more accurately.

A financial institution like Paypal does risk assessment in their own way to assess which country it should and should not do business with. PK, whilst a large market size (compared to say Sri Lanka or Yemen or Rwanda) still poses a high-risk due to the factors like:

• KYC (Know Your Customer)
• AML (Anti-Money Laundering)
• OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control)
• SAR (Suspicious Activity Report)
• Beneficiary Information

The above (IMHO) are the major issues that PayPal faces, not being able to accurately gauge the above, is a risk that PayPal does not want to take.

They, PayPal can be penalized by the financial regulator in the country they operate FROM (not To), and the risk of account freezing, etc. All these factors they have to weigh against how much money they can earn (and they have a pretty good estimator for this). The risk vs the income – makes them conclude that PK is a risk country as far as business is concerned.

In addition to this, a small group with PayPal is trying to convince their management to look into Pakistan, whilst a large portion of members within the PayPal corporate world are literally biased and oblivious towards Pakistan as well (this is not an empty statement, but the ground reality within PayPal). PayPal itself is not entirely ‘clean or fair’ in its efforts. The ruckus that Pakistan is a money laundering country, etc. fails and pales in comparison to the amount of money laundering done in the US, and Latin America. As with every Pakistan/Indian issue, there are bigoted people within PayPal who are still harboring the animosity towards each other, is also another unsaid reason why Pakistan and Bangladesh have not gotten PayPal.

There is absolutely NO written notification and/or official circular from the US Government or Federal Reserve that ‘prevents’ Pakistan from having PayPal or tells organizations PayPal to discourage the Pakistani market. This myopic stance within PayPal is biased and unfair.

As previously speculated on many forums, it has NOTHING to do with SECP, SBP, FBR, etc. – - – that is not the issue (nor ever was).

A lot many forums and discussion boards have proposed that if PayPal cannot come to Pakistan, we should have our own payment system for the world to accept and adopt.

If you track payment systems, there are currently over 250+ payment system, after discounting the top 10-15 payment system, the rest of them COMBINED together probably do not do more than say #14 or #15 on the list. Having a payment system is one thing, having it adopted and be utilized and accepted by others is another matter entirely — and in some cases the key.

Lets talk about inward micro-payment options (barring PayPal) – you have none. No other micro payment system exists currently other than Paypal (sub $1 payments notwithstanding) that is worth mentioning or worth trading or transacting on. Even if you will make one, do you actually think your buyers in the international arena will adopt it? (I dont think so). Even some famous ones are having issues adopting.

The same can be applied for outward settlement. The fees structure for settling payment outside of Pakistan is quite complex. Daily reporting on transactions, along with the KYC and AML needs to be reported to the PRI division of SBP.

Without having any a priori information on the subject matter, people can comment and propose all they want, but seriously ask your self a question, how many hours? days? week? months? or years? have you applied towards the understanding of various payment systems that exist today? Have you ever spoken to them? Understood the back-office and legal issues, met with them in a seminar, etc.

So proposing that Paypal do this or that — is frivolous, (they are way more informed than you and I – combined).

Also – proposing an alternate payment system – how will that fair, if say tomorrow Google checkout becomes a micro-payment system, or the same were to happen with Twitter, or what many consider the inevitable, that Facebook launches either itself or in partnership with someone else, launches an payment/virtual-currency, that allows cross-border settlement and micro-payments? How will you payment system work.

Also remember, Paypal does not allow external payment system to integrate with them.

I do not mean to stomp the idea, but believe me, I have spent many years reading this all and do not make a statement just on heresay, but one that is based on hard statistics, fact and a whole lot of communication.

We may be #3 or #2 on some freelancing project network site, but what are we processing in terms of real-$-value per day? Do we do $30 Million a month – if not – we’re nothing as far as the financial transaction settlement world is concerned – an average ACH in the US transaction more than the $1 Trillion per day (yes, that’s is correct 1 Trillion, and no its not a typo). US ACHs transact more than $30-$45 Trillion per day, depending on the day of the week.

So, swallow your pride and understand and live with what we have. In the fiscal world as far as income – we are NOTHING. Accept that. In the world of RISK, believe me when I say we are almost #1. If people (rather financial institutions are NOT willing to do business here), then there is nothing you can do about it – Government or No-Government Pressure!

Let me give you an analogous example, please bear with me on the humor. The mangoes export of this country is FAR greater in number ($-wise) than say the inward and outward money combined from freelancing. Yet, the US chooses that we cannot export mangoes to the US, and there is NOTHING we can do about it. This has been true for over 25 years. Now – if we cannot export mangoes to the US, then what comical sense do we bring to the table asking Paypal to come here, because we are #2 or #3 on some work portal. [Yes, as an update, I know of the recent mangoes export to the US  -  for the first time.]

At one time, record stores and CDs were plentiful and everywhere. You could not possibly fathom that they would go out of business so fast (actually the CD had a shorter lifespan than the vinyl record). The basic goal of the modern day MP3 player is still the same, for you to listen to music. The experience is no less. Its now all about convenience and portability.

The publishing industry is going to go through the same thing. Very large book chain stores will find it inherently very hard to compete. The profit margins have dwindled, the cost of utilities is going up, real-estate rates are still high, it takes a lot of money to hire people and pay for bills. So Borders though 10 years ago was a phenomenal success, but rightfully so, they should have seen it coming. Somethings are inevitable.

When Borders or the large Barnes and Noble stores came into existence, many small book stores had to close down. Remember the movie You’ve Got Mail!(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You…) – in which the Fox Books drives the small book store out of business. Well the 90s saw a lot of that, and whatever little was left, the early/mid 2000 closes those small shops as well.

Who survived? Those who carved a niche. I personally (emphasis supplied) do not know of a single used bookstore that went out of business. Others reinvented themselves, by catering to a very specific vertical (like Old and Rare books), etc. and survived.

With the eminent closing of Border, the book industry has slowly been morphing its business model. As more and more digital devices are sold, electronic books are taking a hold of us. You will see less and less people reading a book on their couches, and see more of them using their iPads. Sign of times (that are evolving).

More and more colleges and universities are preferring to distribute syllabus and reading in digital format, books though recommended (college professors would be without a job if they did not recommend books), are available in digital format now-a-days.

At some point in time, even the physical paper book will be threatened. No one can predict when – but it will happen. The newspaper industry has already seen that happen. 10-12 years ago, no pundit could accurately predict the fall of Borders, and look what happened today. Who knows, a cataclysmic change for the worse could happen to the book/publishing industry, in way we did not fathom (at present)…. only a few years from now.

The amount of physical books published will continue to circulate in and be sold in secondary markets (used book stores, etc.). Bookshelves still look beautiful in any settings and in some ways you are identified by the books you have.

In today’s ever evolving digital economy, carrying 10 books with you in a backpack is just not preferred. Why you could have a 100 books in your Kindle or iPad, and no trees were cut-down. No fuel wasted in transporting them to various book stores, much more cleaner and greener industry.

In the coming years, the physical book would be totally cease of exist (though I find that difficult to come to terms with), however, it could see a very large reversal of fortune for sure (this much I am sure of). Only question is when? To which some may answer – its now – its happening as we read.

The questions about Borders are plentiful. One of the best answers to “Why did Borders fail” is given on Quora. Be sure to go through the answers and comments. Makes a great mini-case study.

After years of writing to PayPal to solicit a reply, which they eventually did (via unofficial channels), I decided to buy a domain called PayPalAlternatives.biz to highlight the alternative payment systems that users can opt for in countries where either PayPal is not available or restricted.

Here is the test of the letter I received:

from ip@ebayenforcement.com reply-to ip@ebayenforcement.com to babushka99@gmail.com date Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 12:30 AM subject Your Domain Registration – paypalalternative.biz [Case #49847] mailed-by ebayenforcement.com

Header Credentials

Now, whilst I really wanted to comment on it, both my US and Pakistani Legal Council has requested I do not do so.

Here was my reply to this email:

Dear Edith,

I intend not to be bullied by eBay / PayPal. Both these organization have a lot of explaining to do, and chose to do so, only when they feel its there time to do so. 1,000s of people suffer by the injustice done to their PayPal account everyday  - it is not even funny. If you visit websites like paypalsucks.com, screwpaypal.com and many others, you will get an idea of what I am talking about.

I have full intentions of publishing a personalized blog that highlights the various payment systems, that pose as an alternative to PayPal. If the domain is ever snatched away from me, believe me, a very befitting reply in the form of a large scale campaign against PayPal would be made by me.

I was (and perhaps still am) an ardent lover/fan of the PayPal money system and keep wondering why they continue to shun Pakistan, but when they stoop down to dirty legal arm-twisting like this – rest assured, I too shall twist their arm in return.

For many years now – I have been writing to the CEO/President of PayPal and their parent company Ebay, asking then why they are not present in Pakistan. Despite all the communication via email, faxes, and letters that I dispatch every year, I have never managed to solicit a reply from them. Not even a squeak.

Today, many campaigns are afoot on the Internet in the hopes of getting PayPal’s attention and getting them to come to Pakistan.

Some people are supposedly even in touch with PayPal through their Far East office, London office or US office. Some have claimed to have met them, each vying to bring PayPal to Pakistan. In some minor cases, some of these elements are just not playing fair and present a fair picture to PayPal. They do so because they want to do business with PayPal and get paid for it (hint: law firms), others want accolades, etc. Just for the record, I want none. I just want them to be here.

Today, people fly to Singapore,Dubai, London and even the US to open a bank account just so that they can have a PayPal account.

Most of the activity that is done on PayPal on behalf of Pakistan is done so by what I call Acquaintance-PayPaling! – i.e. using the PayPal account of your brother, sister, uncle, niece, cousin, friend, relative, associate, etc.

Coming back to topic – the present situation is – we still do not have PayPal in Pakistan. Rumor mills are abound with the reasons why PayPal is not in Pakistan. I will not go there, but perhaps try to address what in my opinion I believe is stopping PayPal from coming to Pakistan.

PayPal as you know operates in quite a few countries. In our immediate region, i.e. South Asia, large economies like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, etc. do not have PayPal, yet countries like Rwanda, Botswana, Fiji, Panama, Sierra Leone, Tonga and Zambia have access to PayPal.

Even Yemen and Somalia have access to Paypal.

Is this fair? Certainly not!

PayPal’s reluctance to operate in Pakistan is due to Anti-Money Laundering and Terrorist activities.

It is also rumored  (I cannot confirm this), that there  is a strong Indian lobby, that very tactfully yet and with sane reasoning positions Pakistan as a country which PayPal best avoids, despite the numbers that work in favor for PayPal to operate here.

No one – on their own wants to take ownership within PayPal and convince the New Business Development Department and the Legal team that Pakistan holds the potential of a very strong market for PayPal.

Having said this, there are some genuine people in PayPal who are literally fighting a case for Pakistan. I wish them good luck and request that they read on what I have written below.

So to summarize:

1. PayPal wants to do business in Pakistan, but are hesitant due to AML and for it (PayPal services) to possibly be used for terrorist activities.
2. People in Pakistan desperately want PayPal.

There are three concerning bodies in Pakistan that PayPal needs to get in touch with:

1. State Bank of Pakistan (the central bank of Pakistan)
2. Pakistan Remittance Initiative – a semi-autonomous body within SBP that is focused on inward remittances and how to legalize them, and provide better KYC, etc.
3. FMU – Financial Monitoring Unit – the AML arm of SBP.

In an unofficial capacity I can state, that all three are willing to talk to PayPal and pacify and address their concerns which prevents them from operating in Pakistan.

Especially PRI – the folks at PRI are more than willing to sit and listen to PayPal and advice them of our laws that we have in place and to correct any misconceptions that they might have with respect to Pakistan.  They can help you get PayPal services rolled out at a National level – and under a one-window operation for PayPal.

PRI is the most pertinent body that can help PayPal and will guide you if you need a banking license or a money-exchange license, how to get incorporated (if required by SECP) how to get integrated with the two ATM switch operators in Pakistan: 1Link and MNet – I’m very sure PRI will also help PayPal with any Tax related issues / consultation with the Tax Authorities (i.e. FBR).

Sitting in a cubicle in California – things are a whole lot different when Pakistan is viewed as a potential country to do business with. It would be conniving of PayPal not to get in touch with PRI / SBP / FMU – all three which operate under the auspices of Ministry of Finance and have the hurdles addressed.

Sitting in Pakistan, you cannot fathom our disbelief that we are blatantly being ignored by PayPal  -  the silence to all the communication/campaigns is deafening.

10+ years of PayPal and no service in Pakistan is just not fair to the 20 million internet users here. We are NOT a camel country! We don’t have sand dunes and people sitting in huts squatting flies. We are not running around naked in sewers begging for water. We do have almost all the conceivable luxuries and infrastructure that is prevalent out in the West. Especially digital infrastructure.

For god’s sake, stop being obtuse PayPal and open your eyes!

For good order’s sake – study us, and do your homework. We are the largest Non-Nato partner for the US in this war against terror. You really think that terrorist networks are only existing in Pakistan? they are all over the world – including UK, Germany, France, Somalia, Yemen, Rwanda, South Africa, Canada, countries where you operate. And please, do not associate the word terrorist with “Islam” or “Muslim” god knows how many home grown terrorist organizations are out there. Juxtaposing such labels on Pakistan is unfair, uncalled for and plain myopic business attitude. Radical white supremacist are gaining numbers everyday in Germany and Austria and UK, do you not consider them when you do business there? India has its own share of problems as far as terrorist organizations are concenred – including the Indian Maoist movement known as the Naxalites, but that does not stop PayPal from operating there now does it? So please think rationally when it comes to Pakistan and stop generalizing and compartmentalizing us.

Pakistani individuals and small businesses are making great strides on freelancing portals (like Elance, oDesk, RentaCoder, etc.) and other web outsourcing platforms where they deliver fantastic services.

Users here are forced to pay hefty fees associated with bank wire transfers, Western Union, 2Checkout, Liberty Reserve, Moneybookers, etc. to get paid.

The very least PayPal can do – is to get in touch with the right institutions here in Pakistan and work with them to have their issues addressed. Until and unless PayPal will not take the first step, the Government of Pakistan and its institutions are helpless, not to mention the 20 million Internet users and the nearing 100 million cellphone users. We as citizens can only do our digital protest in the hopes we get your attention – the walk you must walk!

If anyone in PayPal is reading this, please get in touch with myself, at fk (at) faisalkhan (dot) com and I shall duly put you in touch with the three institutions I mentioned. I do with without any self-servicing agenda or motive. I too like everyone else would like PayPal to be present in Pakistan.

Its been too long for us not to have PayPal and you have it within yourselves, the power, the will and determination to change that for the 20 million Internet users in Pakistan.

"Hope is not a dream but a way of making dreams become reality."

- L. J. Suenens

If you’ve ever run a web designing company – like we have in the past, then this sounds all too familiar.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

We send invoices. Lots of them.

We use a local courier firm to have them delivered all across the country. The invoices themselves reside in digital format, and we use a software to print them out to paper, stuff them into letters. Have the courier company come in the evening and pick them up and give us a receipt for it.

Presumably the courier company will take them to the collection center in Karachi, where these invoices will be sorted out, bagged with other letters / parcels and each bag will find its way on the conveyor belt destined for the cargo hold of the evening flight.

After a few hours (assuming no delays, etc), the flight would land at its destination, the bag collected, and de-sorted. Next morning, courier riders would collect their deliveries and hopefully if all goes well, my invoice is delivered to the customer by mid-day.

Now I could have saved myself the trouble of sending this invoice physically in the first place – by simply emailing it. However, customers who have to pay bills are very clever. They will cite mysterious reasons, email not received, the spam filter ate it, etc. etc.

They will receive all my other emails, except the one that carries the invoice.

So – novel times – call for a novel approach.

What if I simply were to email (or upload) the PDF file (which represents the invoice) to the Courier company’s server. Let us assume I have to send an invoice to a client in Islamabad. I email the invoice before say 1400 Hours, and the office in Islamabad will print it out. Print the delivery label. Stuff it into an envelope and deliver it the same day! And I get what I want – no – not convenience (that much is given), but what I want is the proof of delivery receipt; so now my customer cannot complain that he/she does not have a copy of the invoice.

If this service were to be launched, I am sure, there exists a great market for it. People may cite ‘confidentiality’. Strictly speaking, for our case, there is nothing confidential in the invoice that the courier company or its employees can ‘steal’. For non-confidential correspondence that needs to be delivered ASAP, I think this represents an excellent medium of choice for those who would like to reduce the carbon footprint of their letter (ideally we should just be emailing, but something don’t change).

Sure there are kinks and ifs and buts in this scenario – but nothing that cannot easily be solved if one were to put their mind to it.

I won’t go into debate, most of them are self explanatory.

1. 3-years mandatory induction for males into the armed forces upon reaching the age of 18. Same would true hold for women (but for 2 years only). Front-line for 1 year. Saves us massive amounts of money and melts down the different ‘types’ into one – a patriotic Pakistani and not a superficial Pakistani.
2. Identity card would NOT be made for anyone who has not enrolled into the mandatory service. No one gets exempted or buys his/her way out. No one.
3. Reduce Armed forces HR count by 20% – become more efficient. Why we need to be in the Top 5 or Top 10 – when we are burning money every year. We don’t need a bigger Army/Navy/Air-Force, we need a leaner one!
4. Reduce Armed forces budget by 20% (yeah, times are tough, try a little friendly diplomacy).
5. 5% additional tax on cigarettes – goes towards Education. I’d like to see someone bitch about this.
6. 5% additional tax on gasoline – goes towards Education.
7. Don’t ask how – trim other areas you have to – make the education budget at least 85 Billion Rupees (we can CERTAINLY find a way to do this). $1 Billion per year on education is not a bad idea itself. Lets get foreign investment in this sector alone.
8. Let PIA go bankrupt. While we are at it, the Government should only own the post office if they really need to hold on to anything, everything else, put it under the auctioneer’s hammer.
9. Abolish permanent service in the Government (Federal/provincial, state, council, etc.) People need to learn to live in a society that is dynamic. Permanent jobs leads to de-pasteurizing the very institution and decreases efficiency of which there is a serious lack.
10. All school/college graduates (no exceptions) must have taken a course and successfully graduated in a Computer language. Fortran, Machine language, COBOL and BASIC do NOT count.
11. One-day of the week – Wednesday, introduce public transport day only. Private cars must pay the equivalent of a very high-carbon tax to be on the road that day.
12. Reintroduce Foreign Exchange (Non) Bearer Certificates. Whiten your money, 2% tax, no questions asked.
13. Introduce a scheme backed by Gold – in a joint-venture with a Swiss Bank with sovereign guarantee to allow NRPs (Non-Resident Pakistanis) to invest their Dollars, Euros, Pounds, Dirhams and Riyals here in Pakistan for up to 1 year will full repatriation f funds allowed.
14. Remove all forms of Police protection to MNAs, MPAs, Ministers, Judges, Federal Ministers. Only President / Prime Minister can have it. All throughout Pakistan, no person can have any sort of an escort of Police or any other agency. No one. Especially the Police themselves.
15. Reduce the working week for Government down to 5 days.
16. Establish an oversight committee in the National Assembly to question what the Intelligence agencies are doing, include responsible non-parliamentarians in it.
17. Establish an oversight committee – more or less like a People’s Court to find out what your MNA/MPA is doing. Their pay shall be directly proportional to both their attendance in the assembly, availability in their office in their home constituency and their active participation towards the better of Pakistan. They each should have a blog with a ticket order system to lodge complaints and to see the follow up done on those complaints.
18. Introduce land reforms. No person can own more than 200 acres. This includes institutions (Hello Army, Railways and State Life)!
19. Double the Yield-Per-Acreage on your land, and take 0% tax on the increase. However, your existing farming area that you are cultivating cannot be reduced in size.
20. Establish a tax free industry with a maximum of 10% raw material allowed to be imported to innovate solutions in Solar Energy, Water Desalination and Water purification and filtration using the indigenous resources available in Pakistan.
21. Do your Ph.D, publish a paper in an international journal, get Rs. 10 Million worth of tax-free benefits should you decide to stay and work in Pakistan. You are allowed to sell this ‘tax’ deduction to any business after one year.
22. Buy 1 computer and donate to the schools (via a very civilian monitored / NGO monitored program) get tax benefit of Rs. 100,000. Do 2, tax benefit of Rs. 150,000, and for each additional computer you donate, get a tax benefit receipt from FBR worth Rs. 50,000. Computer has to be on the prescribed list (old PIIIs will not do).
23. Hold a Masters/Ph.D from abroad? Teach – and get a tax benefit and a grant. This is directly tied into the funds you will receive from the investors who would like to invest into the education sector in Pakistan.
24. Upgrade the railways and introduce monorail. Not just in one city, but throughout Pakistan. Use steel in construction of over-passes for monorails, fast urban transportation is very much needed.
25. Build more dams. Lots of them. Dams require geologists, physicists, engineers (civil, mechanical, electrical, fluid mechanics, etc.) architects, MBAs, construction workers, blue-collar / white-collar, 10,000s of jobs can be created over the next 2 decades.

Pakistan is always buzzing with the entrepreneurial spirit. Look at kids, college dropouts, college grads, working people, retired folks, middle-aged folks, etc. everyone is thinking about some ‘business’ they would like to get into.

Just the other day, I was listening to one of my favorite Jazz radio stations online, called “Martini in the Morning.com“– I know – weird name for a Jazz radio station, but the more you will listen to it – the more you will agree it is a great name.

Anyhow, it just hit me then, how many online – Internet ONLY radio stations do we have in Pakistan?

I know a few Internet radio stations are being operated from Canada and US, and I would like to stress ‘few’.

The answer to the question asked is None. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Can you believe it? Not ‘one’ single radio station is being operated in Pakistan that is Internet only… not one. How sad is that.

I know people will say, PEMRA this and PEMRA that, but you can create a VPN to your streaming server in the US and then stream, screw PEMRA!

But seriously, imagine what it takes to operate an internet radio station? Let me list it out for you…

1. Computer with a half-way decent sound card
2. DSL (minimum 512Kbps, 1Mbps would be great! and a 2Mbps circuit, awesome!)
3. UPS
4. A half-way decent microphone
5. Music (which I can get for you)
6. Mixer (software), again, 100s of them around.
7. The will to be an RJ!!!

That is it.

Nothing more.

It is very simple.

Don’t believe folks who tell you it takes a lot of money, blah blah blah. They are only there to discourage you.

The cost of streaming to a listener is about US$1 / user / month. Let’s say you’re aiming for a 30 user audience, the cost is mere US$ 30 per month. Try operating a real radio station at that transmission cost.
Never operated a radio station before? Not to worry, 100s of SIGs (Special Interest Groups) exists to help you out. Being an RJ just requires a bit of practice and a bit of innovation and imagination. You can buy 2 streams out pay US$ 2/month and practice.

Have fun. See how it fans out. Try your hand at automated shows, live stream, play-lists, advertising breaks, etc.

Surely in this great nation of 160+ Million – there is someone passionate about owning and operating their own 24/7 internet only radio station?

If anyone would like to have one setup, I’d be willing to help pro-bono. You may contact me at babushka99/at/gmail/dot/com