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.

Dr. Muqtaza Shah, CEO of e-Business with Mohsin J Baig, Editor in Chief Online Int'l News Network

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:

If you recall the online/offline debates 5-6 years back when SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) was the buzzword around Silicon Valley, at least I were of the opinion that SOA was more of a marketing gimmick than a technology leap. Most of the money marketing SOA was put by tech giants like IBM, Microsoft, TIBCO, Amazon etc. Though I still believe that SOA classifies as a philosophy of Software Architecturing, am I becoming a fan every passing day. I remember the first lesson of programming I had twelve years back ‘not to re-invent the wheel’. SOA is a perfect example of why ‘reusing the wheel’ is a great idea, engineering-wise and business-wise.

We were recently challenged at work to design and develop a next generation multi-media messaging system for a fortune corporate. The requirements were very interesting. Starting with cross platform support i.e. iPhone, Andriod, BB, WP7 and Web, the system was also required to record live audio and video and send as real-time attachments. The diaspora of media support in different mobile platforms is quite big thus the need of inter-format media encoding. Additional features were PUSH notifications upon message receive, and coupling with client’s proprietary LDAP. We planned a stage-wise release that is starting from a group of hundred users to acceptance-test the system, we targetted a 2nd release to 10K users and then eventually to full scale i.e. 30K users. the anticipated load on the system was 30 TPS resulting from 4-5 new message check calls from every user per second.

During the design phase of the system, we faced the question of choosing between non-SOA approach (do-it-yourself) versus a services based architecture for features like media encoding, PUSH messages and file storage. Though the decision of not doing-it-yourself means lesser control, lesser customization, dependency on a third company but thanks to SOA buzz created many years ago, plenty of smart people have founded SAAS companies that cater to most users needs of media encoding, storage and notifications. So our engineering team and client decided smartly and chose the SOA approach. We evaluated different options and settled with Encoding.com for media encoding, UrbanAship for notifications and S3 for media storage. One of the reason of choosing Encoding.com was its capability of solid integration with S3 storage.

The decision of following an SOA approach helped us in many ways. First and far-most we saved so much time. Rather setting up our own server for solutions like ffmpeg and then handling scaling and reliability, we shipped all the media encoding burden on encoding.com’s shoulders. Although they do have some scalability and video rotation issues but overall they have solid services to offer. PUSH notifications are generally not fully relied upon, but UrbanAship has been pretty solid delivering notifications. As I think of the time and effort we have saved in building our next generation messaging system by choosing an SOA architecture, its quite amazing. Not tp mention the savings in cost of development for the client!

As we move forward and add new interesting features to our system, we want to build upon the already ‘handy’ SOA architecture. Our next targets are addition of great Analytics for system usage. We have boiled down the list of available services to Google Analytics and Flurry. The range of analysis provided by both are quite interesting and we are inclined to use one of these SAAS providers than building our own analytics solution.

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

Another major milestone for yellO was it’s magazine which had been in the making for almost 2 years and with our Government’s permission in place to finally publish, we launched our first issue in February 2011.

The magazine which is a reflection of the website contains blogs, user comments, reviews, business listings and classified ads. The Content section is further divided into Spotlight, where we focus on a business or person, which is doing good for the society. Finally there’s a Celebrity Q&A section, which features a celebrity interview and events section.

However, my most favourite part is the yellO Map associated with the business listings. Its like a game; you find a business you like, check the coordinates given with it and then find those coordinates on the map to know exactly where that business is situated in that area. The business listings contain the business address and phone number.

Although, after distributing 10,000 copies in Phase 1, 2, 4, 5 and 7 of DHA, we can safely say that the FREE classifieds are the highlight of the magazine. It has never been done before that anyone lets you post classified ads in their magazine for free of charge, but yellO does it.

Here’s something a fan said about the magazine on yellO’s facebook page

Kanwal Tariq: i got a copy too n i keep it on my bedside 4 quick reference. Thanx. Looking 4wd 4 march’s issue ?

And just in case you didn’t get our first issue, you can read it online.

yellO is about to cross a milestone today with its magazine launch just around the corner. Along with the magazine several major changes are coming on the website as well.

For starters, we have made the website very light on the eyes, removed all the heavy images and bright colours and just made the website very clean as you would see on our “Home” page. The only colour and design are in the search bar here. While each of the interior pages like “Events”, “Business” and “Classifieds” are themed on colour basis like Events is red and Blogs are green etc.

This neat and clean look is also a result of removing the overwhelming map from the page so that the focus remains on the content. The map has been moved at the bottom of each page as a sticky bar which moves along the page as you scroll up or down.

We always felt that our users found the map very complicated to use and therefore we have build up a functionality where you can just type the location/restaurant/business you want to search and the pointer will point you to that place directly.

Simply say where you want to reach and click “GO”. The map will zoom to that location and place the pointer for you.

These are all the UI changes that have been brought this time. The major functionality that has been integrated in to the website is the SMS functionality. As our magazine is an extension of the website, it contains several links and codes that help communicate with the website.

There is a code with each event, through which a reminder can be set for one day and also for one hour before the event. All the user has to do is send a “reminder E22222″ to 9355.

Same is the case for classified ads. One can buy and sell things without giving out their identity or phone number. The code can be SMSed to 9355 with an offer. If the seller accepts, only then the contact details are exchanged.

The magazine is going for print today inshallah and our website has gone live too today, and we are hoping for a positive response from our users as we have tried our best to make the site even more user-friendly.

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

The functionality of “Popular blogs” on the blogs page may seem pretty simple on the face, but a peek inside would reveal what an extensive algorithm is put in place to make the most popular blogs more visible.

Making a blog show up in the “Popular Blogs” category requires a balanced weight-age of “likes”, “reads” and “comments”. The right balance of the three factors was required to make that particular blog a popular one. However, initially our algorithm was for overall blogs, i.e. most popular blogs of all time. The only problem with this kind of system was that recently popular blogs were not highlighted.

Well not anymore! Now our popular blogs will show your blogs which have been most liked and commented upon during a week. This will give more visibility to you and your blogs as well as let you know what others are recently reading or are interested in.