Got a plan and a product? Pakistan’s Plan X accelerator takes startups to the next level

Tanzila Imran is the co-founder of Startup92, a startup aiming to amplify the startup ecosystem of Pakistan. There’s also a free newsletter.

Plan X is arguably the largest startup accelerator in Pakistan. It was born out of Plan 9, which is the top startup incubator in the country. Plan X launched in early 2014. It has taken in a number of startups, most of which graduated from Plan 9 and have already gained momentum and attracted funding.

Hafsa Shorish is the Plan X program manager. She is not new to the startup world, having previously headed Plan 9’s marketing and PR. “For me it’s the natural step forward. I loved every bit of my stay at Plan 9 and even now I sometimes get that nostalgic feeling every time a new batch of startups comes in. The role here at Plan X is different and challenging in a different way,” Shorish tells Tech in Asia.

But how are the two entities different for the startups in Pakistan’s fledgling startup ecosystem? “The fundamental difference between Plan 9 and Plan X is that the first one is an incubation program where we take idea-level startups and help them build a viable product and business out of it,” Shorish explains. She adds:

Hafsa Shorish from Plan X

Plan X is an accelerator, and startups here already have a product and some customers too. We help them accelerate on that to gain more customers. The push at Plan X is expansion and funding, if it is required, rather than building a solid product. If you don’t have a product and some customers already, Plan X won’t do any good to you. […] Apart from that there is no other criteria. If you can prove those two things we are most likely to let you in.

Plan X – backed by the Punjab IT Board, and headed by Dr. Umar Saif – is different from many other accelerators in that it doesn’t take any equity. During the program, each individual startup is allocated one dedicated startup industry mentor and one business analyst to help them do ground work and give practical advice.

Recently, the Plan X team started collaborating with big companies like Nestle in order to find areas where startups can work with such massive corporations in terms of doing business, offering perks, offering mentorship, or even investing.

These are the startups in the current Plan X batch:

Bookme.pk

Bookme.pk is well known to Tech in Asia readers as the startup that’s looking to be Pakistan’s go-to site for booking cinema, travel and event tickets. Currently it’s operational in three major cities: Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad.

X-Gear

The idea behind X-Gear is that drivers want to know their vehicles better. X-Gear is a little gizmo and an app that, once installed, will give a car’s river useful information about the vehicle to make informed decisions about its maintenance and the way it’s being driven.

The startup is also targeting the fleet industry, which can use the product to better manage their vehicles.

X-Gear was recently selected to participate at TNW’s startup boost event in Europe. While the team didn’t win, it was a chance to gain some traction and attract influencers in the industry.

Travly

Travly is looking to make public transport easy for the citizens of Lahore, Pakistan. The smartphone and web app allows users to plan their commuting better by tracking buses and routes. The app also allows people to calculate trip expenses

The team is planning to roll out an SMS-based subscription service for people who don’t have a smartphone.

Travly managed to win the Challenge X contest in the mobility category, an event arranged by Pakistani startup incubator Invest2Innovate. The startup will now compete at the regional level in Bangalore, India. The final showdown will be in Washington DC in May for a chance to win US$1.5 million in prize money.

Baby Planet

Baby Planet is an online shopping portal that makes shopping easy for new parents. The startup is specifically looking at rural areas as high potential markets where quality baby products are out of reach. The estore offers discounts on products and offers free home delivery with a cash-on-delivery paymentoption.

Baby Planet has already signed well-known brands to its marketplace, such as Little Tikes, Zubaida’s Mother Shop, and RollOver.

Vivid Technologies

Vivid Technologies was part of Plan 9’s third incubation cycle. They made headlines by vowing to get rid of customer service calls and replace them with an app. After graduating from Plan 9, the team also took part in LCE’s first incubation cycle before joining Plan X.

They had quite a journey and were offered investments at numerous stages. They have reached term sheet stage many times but declined offers because they saw the terms as unfavorable. Recently Appography managed to get seed funding from Telefonica. The Vivid team is now looking to build the next generation voice platform for smartphones.

Centsol

Centsol is the most recent addition to Plan X. The startup is working on IT services and software and web development for businesses. Its first product is Verify for You, an anti-counterfeiting solution for manufacturing companies.

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Got a plan and a product? Pakistan’s Plan X accelerator takes startups to the next level

Quartz Weekend Brief—Why Davos matters, McDonald’s requiem, self-destructing e-books, the clue to autism

Does Davos matter? It’s an old and contentious question. But it’s one that has traction as the power brokers at the World Economic Forum meeting this week turn their lofty gazes to the issue of gender parity.

Just 17% of the attendees of are women, the same level as two years ago. And a WEF report concluded that women won’t have parity in the workforce for another 80 years if we stay on our current path.

But equal opportunity for women is high on the agenda here, with a dozen public and private panels, meals, and other events devoted to the issue, and celebrity champions such as the actor Emma Watson (of Harry Potter fame).

Veteran Davos attendee Rick Goings, CEO of Tupperware, says that gender issues were never mentioned during his first year at the forum, a dozen years ago. This year, at a lunch his company sponsored on the subject, it was standing room only; even former heads of state were turned away.

There is a strong business case for closing the gender gap, Goings says: For instance, many of the company’s superstar saleswomen are in countries where their opportunities outside the home are otherwise limited. This is the kind of clear business message that resonates with the Davos crowd, and one that’s not always apparent amidst the platitudes in the forum’s public sessions.

But will anything come of it, or is women’s equality just the latest Davos fad, to be displaced next year by another equally worthy and intractable cause? No, Goings says. “We discuss what to do after this lunch. I’ve now got a group of people around me who are also all-in on this—we watch what they’re doing and they see what we’re doing.” Those initial connections were made in the Alps. “That’s why Davos matters,” he says.—Kevin Delaney & Jason Karaian

Five things on Quartz we especially liked

The glorious past and ignominious future of maison Morgan. The most important building in American financial history isn’t the New York Stock Exchange, but the nearby home of James Pierpont Morgan—and there are plans to turn it into an entertainment complex complete with bowling alley. Matt Phillips laments its fate with a history lesson.

How The Economist chose its first female editor-in-chief. A.k.a. “How I failed to become editor of The Economist.” Quartz editor and former Economist staffer Gideon Lichfield was one of the 13 candidates, and offers an inside view of how the 171-year-old British magazine—er, “newspaper”—picked someone else.

A semi-eulogy for McDonald’s. Fast-casual restaurants like Chipotle are slowly displacing the golden arches in American consumer consciousness. On the heels of Thursday’s disappointing McDonald’s earnings, Paul Smalera remembers working there as a teenager with mixed emotions.

Should you go lossless? Music has moved in the opposite direction to images and television, in that as the technology has improved, the quality of the medium has gotten worse. John McDuling explores whether new “lossless” formats are a huge leap forward or just a marketing stunt.

The nail-biting reading of the self-destructing e-book. Adam Epstein chose to accept the mission of reading James Patterson’s new thriller, an e-book that self-destructs after 24 hours, and faithfully chronicled the experience. You have been warned.

Five things elsewhere that made us smarter

The ignorance of economists. They would, you might imagine, have a good handle on the important theories of their discipline. But from the Efficient Markets Hypothesis to Ricardian Equivalence, they make a surprising number of repeated errors. Tyler Cowen lists a few of the most common mistakes at his blog, with many more nominated in the comments section.

Why bad spelling messes up healthcare policy. The US government’s Open Payments database is supposed to bring transparency to the murky relationship between drug companies and the doctors they pay to promote products. But as Charles Ornstein and colleagues document at the New York Times, it’s riddled with misspellings and multiple names for different drugs that badly obscure who’s paying whom for what.

Get used to your future as a guinea pig. From websites to fitness trackers, a growing number of the things you use are collecting data on you to be used as part of huge experiments not only on behavior patterns, but behavior modification. And, says Parmy Olson at Forbes, you are probably going to love the results.

Why Kim Kardashian’s butt didn’t break the internet. When Paper magazine published naked pictures of the star in its “Break the Internet” issue, the one thing it didn’t actually want was for a flood of readers to break its website. Paul Ford at Medium has the inside story of how it prepared—a great read for anyone who’s stopped to wonder how a website actually is built.

How the clue to autism was found. A group of researchers have turned the conventional wisdom about the genetics of autism on its head. The genes that cause it, they’ve found, aren’t inherited, but go haywire just at the moment of conception. Stephen Hall in MIT Tech Review on how the mystery was uncovered.

Our best wishes for a relaxing but thought-filled weekend. Please send any news, comments, self-destructing e-books, and spelling corrections to hi@qz.com. You can follow us on Twitter here for updates throughout the day.

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Quartz Weekend Brief—Why Davos matters, McDonald’s requiem, self-destructing e-books, the clue to autism

Beijing undecided on Uber regulations, no timetable for decision

Private taxi apps like Uber have been raising questions for regulators all across Asia. And in China’s capital, one of Uber’s most important potential Asian markets, the future of Uber-style services is still up in the air. A Beijing Transportation Committee spokesman said on Friday that regulators still can’t come to an agreement about how to treat private car services in the city, and that there is currently no timetable for a decision.

Ultimately, Beijing’s ruling is likely to be follow the national Ministry of Transport’s guidance, and the cause for the delay in a local ruling may be that the national Ministry hasn’t been entirely clear. While it has already issued a statement that some have interpreted as a ban, it does not mention Uber (or any similar domestic services) by name, so at the moment it’s not entirely clear what is permitted. Uber says that it is not banned in China, and neither local nor national authorities seem ready to make a clear statement.

A member of Beijing’s transportation committee said that private-car taxi apps like Uber have technology and funding on their site, but that to enter the transportation industry, they also need to understand its unique characteristics and requirements. First and foremost among those, she said, was satisfying the need for basic safety guarantees for passengers.

See: Uber lands in hot water in China as Chongqing police stage office raid

(Source: Techweb)

This post Beijing undecided on Uber regulations, no timetable for decision appeared first on Tech in Asia.

Beijing undecided on Uber regulations, no timetable for decision

The worst-kept secret in global monetary policy was good for European stocks this week

Last week it was the Swiss National Bank bumping European stocks higher, and now it’s the European Central Bank’s turn. President Mario Draghi finally unveiled his €60 billion-per-month bond-buying program a mere two and a half years after the market started pricing it in, totally stealing the Bank of Canada’s monetary thunder (free registration required). Tardy or no, investors like easy money, because it means easy investing. Quartz’s Matt Phillips discussed all the other reasons easy money might cure what ails the euro zone’s economy:

But for my money, the most important channel through which quantitative easing works is the so-called “signaling” channel. Basically, this amounts to the central bank really convincing the markets that it means business.

Quartz is not a certified financial advisor, but if you’re an American reading this because you’ve been shuffling things around in your retirement account, know that all this extra cash floating around in Europe will probably mean you can use some of your winnings— err, returns—to take a vacation over there for cheap.

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The worst-kept secret in global monetary policy was good for European stocks this week

When McDonald’s was America and America was McDonald’s

How do you eulogize a fast food chain that is not quite dead, that is at the root of many ills, personal and public, of our world, and that was also once the glowing sign at the very tip top of president Reagan’s metaphorical shining city on a hill? Imagine a world with no Big Macs. It’s easy if you try: McDonald’s earnings are falling, again, and more changes to previous changes are coming down the line. It’s hard to remember a time when the restaurant defined America, but that time existed, and I remember it well.

I come not to praise McDonald’s, but not, exactly, to bury it either. As for every other American kid growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, McDonald’s was The Special Treat. Especially when the kid was under the age of, say, 10. In the mall (another dying institution), for being good during mom’s race through the department stores, coupons in hand, a Happy Meal. Thru the Drive-Thru, after school, when mom had to go to work the overnight data-processing shift, and hadn’t had time to make a meal for me and my dad, chicken nuggets. For dad, who would be on his way home from his 5am-4pm shift at the machine shop, a Big Mac, though he would complain that it was “too much.” At a rest stop, during the grueling drives to vacation spots, up and down the Eastern Seaboard, in the days before everyone flew everywhere, who knows? Maybe a cheeseburger, maybe an exotic delicacy like McPizza, maybe a deep fried Apple Pie and decaf.

Sure, at times Burger King and even Roy Rogers would sneak into the mix, but the Golden Arches gold standard was McDonald’s. And when, at 15, I applied for a job all over my working-class New Jersey town—the pizza parlor, the bowling alley, the video rental store, appealing to friends whose parents owned small businesses—only to come up empty-handed, it was Al Garcia, a Cuban emigree who drove an aging white BMW and owned two McDonald’s restaurants in the two towns flanking my own, who came through with my first job.

It was 3pm-11pm four nights a week, sometimes a weekend shift, too. No wonder my grades suffered. But the gig was marvelous. Learning French from the Haitians in the kitchen, Spanish from the managers and janitors, even some Arabic from a petite woman, Aisha, from Egypt, I was the white kid who fit in perfectly, needed the job as much as they did, if only to develop my own sense of freedom, responsibility and control. The system for cooking was, as they say, so simple anyone could be trained to do it. I learned everything on my first shift, just by looking at the posters stuck to the walls. The magic was figuring out how to keep up with the rushes. The corporate handbook demanded that batches of the staple menu—hamburgers, cheeseburgers, Quarter Pounders, Big Macs, McChickens, fries, nuggets, and later the ill-fated Arch Deluxe line—be made on a constant basis, and thrown away after a 13-minute hold in a hot tray. It would’ve been the height of insanity to run a business that way in real life. So cooked meats would be held in steam cabinets for hours, and the sandwiches were assembled to order. Which was fine when one customer strolled in. But then would come another, and another, and all at once, a rush would be on. Heaven help the unprepared.

Rushes could hit at any time at all. 10:45pm, when everything was half put away and the kitchen was being mopped. 11am, Sunday, when a woman driving a Mercedes might ask for 10 Egg McMuffins as the crew was switching to the lunch menu. My first day, I was put on the second Drive-Thru window—responsible for assembling orders and getting the cars cleared out. I worked far, far, too hard and efficiently for anyone’s good, especially my own. I showed up the rest of the crew, without meaning to, and started reconfiguring the Drive-Thru station’s supply of napkins, ketchup, soda cups, to match my own thought patterns as I attacked order after blinking order on the green computer screen above the soda fountain. Still, the manager looked on in wonder. I was his new guy, accidentally. It took weeks of lackadaisical effort before I was able to get off that nightmare post, where chaos could hit at any moment and I was dependent on so many other minimum-wage workers to keep the food coming, for assembly and hand-off, even though any backups in the line of cars would be blamed on me, and no one else. Where restocking the station during downtimes felt something like scrounging for ammo belts in a trench, between bouts of fast-food combat.

I also often envisioned, late at night, a man coming with a gun to the window, to rob me and then shoot me when no one was around for what felt like miles in the dark suburban night. That never came to pass, but what did happen late one weird New Jersey night, a few months into my stint, was that the manager took me with him from our McDonald’s to Al’s other restaurant two towns over, to redistribute some boxes of supplies. On the return trip, for some reason, he let me drive his stick-shift Jetta. Me, who did not have a learner’s permit, or even any time behind the wheel. I think he may have been drunk, which is why I got the nod. I do know that the cop who moonlighted as security during the weekends clearly saw my face behind the wheel as I pulled back into our restaurant. He knew my dad would wait to take me home at night, because I was too young to drive. The cop said nothing when I came back inside; neither did I.

My dad, waiting at 11pm in the gray Chevy S-10 Blazer that would later be my first car, expected nothing, the first night of my employment, but to take me home. Instead, I walked out with a huge bag of unsold leftovers—cheeseburgers, chicken nuggets, fries, and more (we did prepare some food in advance, at times, but certainly the age of these sandwiches could not be measured in minutes)—that we scarfed at the kitchen table that night, as my mother watched with something like scorn and pride washed across her face. Her son, making his way.

Soon a half-filled bag of McDonald’s leftovers became a staple in the crisper drawer of our refrigerator. Or two bags did, or three. Lunches would be McDonald’s leftovers. They were free! They tasted good, when reheated, kind of. The reward, the Special Treat food, became the daily, the monotonous. And that’s sort of what happened with America as well, as our obesity levels soared and our vital signs plummeted, and the Drive-Thru lines became ever more packed, forcing my colleagues into the parking lot with wireless order-taking computers.

Despite my steadily increasing pant size, Al had a pat greeting for me whenever he was in the restaurant, usually a couple times a week at the start of my shifts. “Paul, looking good! Have you lost a few pounds?” Nothing could warm the heart of a rapidly-growing—in the horizontal and vertical—teenaged boy more.

My junior prom date was a coworker from a neighboring town, who I would’ve never met without the job, and the type of girl I would’ve never been able to talk to, for all sorts of reasons, most of all her devastating beauty, but whom I could charm and get to know while whiling away hours between in front of the milkshake machine and behind the formica counter, on countless weekday afternoons.

Eventually I was fired, in an answering machine message, by the manager who let me drive his car on a busy four lane road while he lolled in the passenger seat and told me to not to grind the gears. I was a reasonably smart kid, but I was also too precocious. When I explained to him that all the food we sold was a loss leader for the high-margin sodas that were at that time coming in 48-oz. cups, he was fascinated, having never considered the economics of operating the restaurant, beyond daily sales figures, but also threatened. I hadn’t learned the lesson of that first day on the 2nd window; I showed him up.

After that, I quit eating McDonald’s for the most part, though I would occasionally return for sustenance and nostalgia. I had a serious fling with the on-campus Burger King in college, and a decade-long bout with my weight that only ended when I cut out all processed foods and began weighing myself every day to be sure I was losing, or at least maintaining mass, on a 10-day trend line.

These days, a friend tells me his wife informs their toddler that McDonald’s is “poison food” and the company’s claim on our national and even global stomachs continues to erode. Even a video where McDonald’s, in a grasp at transparency, explains the bulk of the 19 ingredients in their french fries are actually chemical agents present in two cooking oils falls flat. The potatoes I fry at home don’t require a defoaming agent in the oil, or a chemical “to keep them from going gray.” Our standards for freshness, quality and taste, mercifully, may have risen beyond the thousand-link logistical supply chain required to keep a place like McDonald’s perfectly homogenous around the country and the world. But, there was a time.

Al, when he heard how the manager had treated me, called to offer me my job back, with a raise, but I had just been nominated for Boys State by my high school, which is a kind of civics sleep away camp run by the American Legion veterans association. Instead of returning to my post, my new girth and I schlepped down to a college campus in South Jersey, where I learned how talk about fake politics, and was two petition signatures away from getting to run for Boys State governor, after having started the week as a di Blasio-style operative, lurking in the shadows and side conversations of our fictitious “town.”

When I last saw Al, I brought him my two teal uniform shirts, my hat, and also my collection of pins—those enameled pieces of flair advertising products, characters, positive attitudes, can-do willingness and bon-homie—that had been pinned neatly on my shirt, and my name badge.

As seems to be happening with McDonald’s across America today, in our fast-casual Chipotlified world, my era of McDonald’s was over, and I wanted to forget the whole business, that I had ever been there at all. Al asked me once more if I would consider returning to the job, but I declined. “No, no, one thing,” he said, as I walked toward the back door of the store for the last time. “The pins, the name tag. Those are yours to keep, forever.” I still have them.

We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

 

When McDonald’s was America and America was McDonald’s

The lone voice in the room: A union man in Davos

The World Economic Forum in Davos gets plenty of stick from critics outside the exclusive gathering—and one or two of them even break through the security cordons to (briefly) bring attention to their pet causes.

But some of the harshest words for the aloof global elite come from a delegate who’s been a fixture at the annual meeting for 20 years. Philip Jennings (pictured above) is the general secretary of UNI Global Union, an umbrella group that represents more than 900 trade unions around the world.

He might be considered an unlikely figure to be a veteran of the Davos scene. Indeed, “I was with 50 bankers this morning, and I was the only union guy in the room,” he told Quartz.

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The share of unionized workers in the developed world has been falling for decades. That’s not fast enough for some of the corporate bigwigs here. “If I want to fire somebody, I have to go to a judge and ask him,” an exasperated European CEO told Quartz earlier in the week.

“That they blame their business failure on the fact that you can’t sack someone is lazy thinking,” Jennings told Quartz. “When you take a hammer to wages, job security, and people’s confidence then the ramifications are bad for business.” Two reports published ahead of the Davos confab—Oxfam on rising income equality and the UN on persistent unemployment—show why the relevance of his message “has never been higher,” Jennings says. “We have a role to play, and something to say.”

But do corporate bosses want to hear it? He has no trouble setting up a packed slate of 20-minute meetings with them in Davos, he says. And that’s not because he and his team pulls any punches in his defense of organized labor. “It’s brief and sometimes argumentative, but we are respectful and expect to have mature conversations,” he says. “It’s wrong of people here to imply that the labor movement is on it’s knees.”

Jennings says his annual hops to Davos—UNI itself is based elsewhere in Switzerland—has led to “a deeper and more profound dialog with business than we have ever had before.” And that “creates a climate” amenable to unions on the ground, he adds.

The secret to preparing and surviving the hyperactive schedule his team arranges for each forum is simple, and fitting for the line of work he’s in: “We’re organized.”

The lone voice in the room: A union man in Davos

Scientists now know how to make robots less creepy looking

It melts your heart when puppies do it.

And robots, too, apparently.

Yes, the simple head tilt just might be the breakthrough gesture that makes humanoid robots less creepy to deal with. A paper published in Computers in Human Behavior shows that people are much more amenable to the presence of androids when the robot heads are tilted, rather than ramrod straight.

“Compared to an upright head posture, we found higher scores for attributed human likeness, cuteness, and spine-tinglingness when the identical robots conveyed a head tilt,” wrote the study’s authors, Martina Mara and  Markus Appel, who based their findings on a survey of 402 US residents.

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There’s well-established literature about the fact that people find human-like robots unsettling, starting work by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, who in 1970 introduced the idea of the “uncanny valley,” to describe the eerie sensibility of human-like robots.

The authors of the new study postulate a number of reasons why the lateral tilt of a head may mitigate the issue. At the heart of their theories is the assumption that “head tilting is associated with submission, appeasement, ingratiation, or a request for protection. This meaning might have developed because head tilts expose a highly vulnerable part of the human body (the carotid artery) and reduce the overall height of a person.”

Scientists now know how to make robots less creepy looking