This week we played our Foosball tournament after a few weeks and our winners are Adnan & Fareed. Adnan is the tournament winner for 3rd time.

• Food: The Kebab
• Finalists: Hassan & Hassan Basharat

We’re looking for someone with strong programming concepts, having a 4-year bachelor’s degree in the field of MIS or computer systems engineering equivalent.

Fresh graduates with an ability to learn quickly are also encouraged to apply.

Compensation: According to experience and skill level.

To see the posting on rozee, click here.

Our this week’s winners are Fawad & Hassan Basharat. Fawad, who played final for three times, but only managed to win for the first time.

• Food: Hot n Spicy / Student Biryani
• Finalists: Adnan & Meraj

We’re looking for someone with business analysis skills along with strong accounting concepts especially related to job processing, order processing, and purchase. This is the kind of person who loves mapping business requirements to development tasks and is able to communicate the language of both: Business users and developers. Prior experience of implementing these ERP modules at medium to large scale organizations would come in really handy.

A can-do attitude with hands on experience, and a good sense of humor is essential.

Compensation: According to experience and skill level.

To see the posting on rozee, click here.

N.B: If you’re good at Foosball, you have a better chance of coming on board.

CeBIT, Hannover, Germany 2008 (4^th March – 10^th March 2008)

Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) recently facilitated the participation of IT companies from Pakistan at the world’s largest IT event CeBIT which is held in Hannover, Germany every year.

GoodCore Software was selected to be one of the companies from Pakistan to be part of this delegation of exhibitors. Apart from GoodCore Software, the other participating companies were Server4Sale and Xorlogics. PSEB not only facilitated the process but also provided a substantial subsidy on the cost of the exhibition stall for the participating companies. We would thank PSEB for its on-going efforts for the promotion of Pakistani IT companies. Participation in exhibitions like these is especially useful for small companies like ours which primarily serve international customers and don’t yet have a physical presence for business development in those countries.

The Pakistan Pavilion

CeBIT 2008 drew about 6,000 exhibitor companies in the areas of Business Solutions, Mobile Solutions and Infrastructure, and nearly half a million attendees. CeBIT’s official website (www.cebit.de) provides comprehensive information about the highlights and statistics of the event.

Companies from Pakistan had their stalls at the combined “Pakistan Pavilion” which PSEB had organized. Right from the morning of day one of the 6-day exhibition, visitors started pouring in at the exhibition plaza (The “Messe”, as they would call it in German), in fairly large numbers. A number of them came to the Pakistan Pavilion too (at-least partly due to the strategic location of Pakistan’s stall). Several visitors were surprised to see Pakistan’s stall. “Pakistan wasn’t present at last year’s CeBIT”, they would tell us. And “Good to see you here, Pakistan should have a bigger presence next year”.

There was genuine interest shown in the services the Pakistani companies had to offer. GoodCore Software received multiple inquiries not just from the German IT companies but also from IT companies based in countries such as Romania, Slovenia, Italy, Finland, Sudan, and South Africa. The interest was in some of the main areas of expertise GoodCore Software offers: open source software development, financial software development (stock trading systems), development services around Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Navision), and custom development services.

Visitors were interested in the learning more about the general state of the IT industry in Pakistan and the overall environment and infrastructure facilities.

The ambassador of Pakistan visits the stall

The ambassador of Pakistan in Germany, Mr. Shahid Kamal, was very kind to visit the Pakistan pavilion and share his thoughts on what further steps PSEB and the Pakistani IT companies could take to achieve a greater presence in the German market.

If it’s on the booth, it’s to be given away

It was probably the 2^nd day of the exhibition when we overheard some people saying that one of the exhibitors from a European country had his PDA stolen from right on top of their booth. It surprised us at the Pakistan stall and, at the same time, created that feeling of thankfulness that one feels when one avoids a major embarrassment: thank God the event was not being held in a city of Pakistan!

While it makes sense, we thought, for a visitor to take away any marketing material that an exhibitor places on the booth, taking away a PDA wasn’t nice. It was only later that we came to know that it was a CeBIT tradition that whatever is kept on top of the booth is understood to be a “give away” for CeBIT visitors. Yeah, that’s right.

Good thing we came to know of it fairly early on in the event and, subsequently, kept everything that we didn’t intend to just give away at safer places. We did however unintentionally give away several writing pens.

Strategic location of the stall

PSEB has surely been making efforts to facilitate the marketing plans of the IT companies and participation at CeBIT was part of the same string of efforts. On a lighter note, we must also commend PSEB’s insight into acquiring strategic location in the exhibition hall: right next to the rest rooms of the hall. It drew a lot of visitors to the Pakistan stall which may otherwise not have visited us. A lot of visitors at-least pretended to have interest in what Pakistani IT companies had to offer so that they could kill the time while their accomplices used the rest rooms. Some of them, after using the rest rooms, stopped by for a glass of water (which, by the way, was exorbitantly expensive at the show) as they claimed to have an incredible belief in the future of Pakistani IT industry. Some genuine visitors may very well have stopped by because they saw a crowd of such “time-killers” at our stall. Now, that was creative. Keep it up, PSEB!

At GoodCore Software, we believe that after working hard for full week, every one needs to relax. So a Foosball tournament is arranged among the GCSian every Friday Evening. Though, the GCSian keeps playing the whole week, when they get time, but on Friday evening it gets more serious.

Our this week’s winners are the defending champions Hassan & Sheheryar. Though, we missed Adnan (two times champion), who didn’t play today.

• Food: Mr. Burger / Biryani centre
• Finalists: Fawad Moon & Hassan Basharat