NIB to Bring Internet Payment Gateway in Pakistan

It appears that the wait for having an online payment processing platform is over now. NIB Bank has announced that it is is brining Internet Payment Gateway in Pakistan that will allow online businesses to charge their customers through debit or credit card for the stuff they will buy on internet.

Establishment of Internet Payment Gateway in Pakistan is long pending, which was first announced by PTA in 2009. After that Bank Al-falah, along with its sister concern, claimed similar deployments but nothing turned into reality.

Agreement between Mastercard and NIB was signed on 5th April 2013 at NIB Bank’s Head Office, Karachi, by Mr. Khurram Agha, Group Head Operations & Technology – NIB Bank and Aurangzaib Khan, Country Manager, Pakistan and Afghanistan for MasterCard.

Now that NIB has partnered with MasterCard it is likely that MasterCard Internet Gateway Service (MiGS) will finally come to Pakistan.

With this service, merchants will be able to charge internet surfers with their debit/credit card for the services or products they sell on internet.

“Now, NIB Bank merchants will be able to process payments from cardholders on their online Web stores in real-time. As a MasterCard acquirer, NIB Bank will offer merchants world class, secure internet payment processing capabilities”, said a statement issued by NIB Bank.

Cut the Rope: Time Travel [Game Review]

Cut the Rope is now a worldwide sensation. Downloaded hundreds of millions of times, it first appeared on the horizon in 2010. A sequel followed in 2011 in Cut the Rope: Experiments. Now, after a wait of two years, ZeptoLab has released its third instalment of the series: Cut the Rope: Time Travel.

The new game is available on Android and iOS platforms.

Gameplay

If you’re familiar with the series already, then you already know this game. You have to feed your cute, little monster Om Nom shiny candies to complete levels and progress forwards. Your green monster has supposedly gone centuries back this time to meet its ancestors so for the first time ever, there are two monsters in each and every level for you to feed. Once you get on with this formula, it’s mostly similar to any other Cut the Rope game. But does twice the action mean twice the fun?

Unfortunately in this case, the answer is a plain and simple ‘No’, as the game again falls victim to some of the mistakes ZeptoLab made in the last iteration as well. To start off, there are six ‘boxes’, or in simpler terms, stages: The Middle Ages, The Renaissance, Pirate Ship, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and lastly, The Stone Age. All of these boxes include 15 levels each (instead of the usual 25) followed by videos at the end. That sums up to around 90 levels for you to play.

Let’s start with the good news. The game features new items and abilities. There are bombs, blades, ability to stop time, sundials, moveable items & stars, synchronized candies and the list goes on. The game has got good looking visuals. The ancestors of Om Nom are all quite beautiful and interesting, especially the monster you’ll find in The Stone Age levels. They all sound great too. Presentation-wise, Cut the Rope: Time Travel is a great achievement.

All the levels come with their own uniqueness for the most of the part. The Ancient Greece levels, for example, come with switches which swap between the two Om Noms.

But 90 levels doesn’t mean fun all the time. Most of the levels are extremely easy. What’s ironical is that some of them are frustratingly difficult and even boring. It feels weird to be playing a “hair-pullingly” difficult level just after playing an easy level which even a third-grader can pass. And you can literally count the number of those hair-pullingly difficult levels on your fingers. I finished the game in less than 2 hours and wasn’t exactly ‘mad’ for achieving 3 stars in every level but was still able to get 250 out of 270 possible stars. It’s that easy. This is the very thing which I didn’t exactly admire in Cut the Rope: Experiments.

And then it’s the background. As I said the visuals are good but an interactive background certainly wouldn’t have hurt much, especially since we’ve all got so used to those.

Conclusion

That being said though, the old, faithful cult following of the series will still love this game. The game too but as an old fan of the series, I felt disappointed.

The good: Good graphics, easy-to-learn gameplay, two monsters to feed

The bad: Extremely easy, not that many levels, boring at times, nice sounds

Final Score: 6/10

IBM Empowers Pakistan’s first Hydroelectric Project

Tenaga Nasional Bhd (TNB) Remaco, the operator of Pakistan’s first private sector hydroelectric power scheme, has tapped IBM to help meet the business challenges of running the $235 million plant. TNB Remaco chose IBM software to help streamline business operations.

Currently, the total power generation capacity of Pakistan is 23,538 Mega Watt with energy consumption having grown by almost 80 percent in the last 15 years. The Pakistan Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) forecasts the country’s electricity demand will increase to around 40,000 MW by 2020.

TNB Remaco – Operation and Maintenance Contract Partner with builder Laraib Energy Limited – recently completed the 84 MW New Bong Hydroelectric Power Complex on the Jhelum River in Azad Jammu and Kashmir. 

After going live at the end of March 2013, the plant is expected to help meet Pakistan’s growing energy needs by adding an estimated net annual of 540 GWh green energy to the national grid, and enhancing the hydro power generation capacity of Independent Power Producers (IPP) by 40 percent. The addition of this power source will be able to provide cheaper electricity to an estimated 60,000 homes  in Pakistan.

‘To be a global one-stop service provider for power-related works, we have to continue serving our customers with high-end quality services through transformational use of technology. IBM’s solution will play a vital role in running the systems efficiently and helping pave way for rapid and full scale development of Pakistan’s hydropower potential’ said TNB President Che Khalib.

TNB Remaco selected IBM Maximo asset management software to automate its manual systems in order to optimise efficiencies while helping to scale the business to meet increased resource demands. Previously, finalizing approvals and searching for timely, relevant information was a big task as data was scattered across multiple systems. The IBM software provides TNB Remaco’s power plant with a single, consolidated view of all their energy data as well as asset and service management data, enabling employees to make better informed decisions about the plant’s operations.

The solution will also assist in planning inventory to meet precise maintenance demands, making the correct parts available at the right location whenever needed.

‘The hydropower project operated by TNB Remaco will add a sufficient amount of energy to the region’s current energy production capacity. IBM’s solution not only equips TNB Remaco to automate their business process and better manage resources, it will also create an interconnected system that helps plant operators run a more efficient energy complex’ said Adnan Siddiqui, Country General Manager, IBM Pakistan and Afghanistan.

With global electricity demand expected to grow more than 70 percent by 2035 ⁴, hydropower, along with other renewable energy sources will become critical. By 2035, renewable energy will account for almost one-third of total electricity output.⁵ Helping Pakistan tap into new energy resources underscores IBM’s commitment to helping companies across the globe operate more efficiently as they work to meet rising energy demand.

Fusion-io 1.6 TB ioFX PCI-Express SSD for Workstation Applications

Enterprise storage solution maker Fusion-io has announced the 1.6TB model of its ioFX workstation acceleration platform, which joins the original 420GB model. Based on the firm’s ioMemory platform, the new high-capacity ioFX features improved workstation application performance, making it ideal for video editing, computer assisted design (CAD), 4K and stereoscopic production, as well as digital intermediate (DI) finishing.

The ioFX utilizes MLC NAND flash memory and PCI-Express 2.0 x4 bus interface. Users can expect up to 1.4GB/s read and up to 1.1GB/s write performance. The powerful throughput eliminates data storage bottleneck, allowing maximized CPU and GPU processing. Fusion ioSphere software is included for remote monitoring and mangement.

To be released in Summer, the 1.6TB ioFX will be priced at $1995.

Oracle Cloud Applications: The Right Ingredients Baked In

Eggs, flour, milk, and sugar. The magic happens when you mix these ingredients together. The same goes for the hottest technologies fast changing how IT impacts our organizations today: cloud, social, mobile, and big data. By themselves they’re pretty good; combining them with a great recipe is what unlocks real transformation power.

Choosing the right cloud can be very similar to choosing the right cake. First consider comparing the core ingredients that go into baking a cake and the core design principles in building a cloud-based application. For instance, if flour is the base ingredient of a cake, then rich functionality that spans complete business processes is the base of an enterprise-grade cloud.

Cloud computing is more than just consuming an application as a service, and having someone else manage it for you. Rather, the value of cloud comes from enabling your business to be more agile in the market place, and shortening the time it takes to deliver and adopt new innovation. It’s also about improving not only the efficiency at which we communicate but the actual quality of the information shared as well. Data from different systems, like ingredients in a cake, must also be blended together effectively and evaluated through a consolidated lens. When this doesn’t happen, for instance when data in your sales cloud doesn’t seamlessly connect with your order management and other “back office” applications, the speed and quality of information can decrease drastically. It’s like mixing ingredients in a strainer with a straw — you just can’t bring it all together without losing something.

Mixing ingredients is similar to bringing clouds together, and co-existing cloud applications with traditional on-premise applications. This is where a common platform built on open standards is critical. It’s essentially a cloud recipe that calls for not only great ingredients, but also ingredients you can get locally or most likely already have in your kitchen (or IT shop.)

Open standards is the best way to deliver a cost effective, durable application integration strategy — regardless of where your apps are deployed. It’s also the best way to build your own cloud applications, or extend the ones you consume from a third party. Just like using standard ingredients and tools you already have in your kitchen, a standards based cloud enables your IT resources to ensure a cloud works easily with other systems, while maintaining the ability to deliver enterprise, real-time reporting executives demand today. Your IT staff can also make changes using tools they are already familiar with. Or even more ideal, enable business users to actually tailor their experience and reports without having to call upon IT for help at all. This frees IT resources to focus more on developing new innovative services for the organization vs. run and maintain.

Carrying the cake analogy forward, you need to add all the ingredients in before you bake it. The same is true with a modern cloud. To harness the full power of cloud, you can’t leave out some of the most important ingredients and just layer them on top later. This is what a lot of our niche competitors have done when it comes to social, mobile, big data and analytics, and other key technologies impacting the way we do business. The transformational power of these technology trends comes from having a strategy from the get-go that combines them into a winning recipe, and delivers them in a unified way.

In looking at ways Oracle’s cloud is different from other clouds — not only is there rich functionality that spans functional pillars like CRM, HCM and ERP, but, social, mobile, and business intelligence are already embedded where it makes the most sense across a complete business process. This strategy enables the Oracle Cloud to uniquely deliver on all three of these dimensions to help our customers unlock the full power of these transformational technologies.