Telecom Consumers Registered 33,310 Complaints With PTA During 2012

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has said that it received 33,310 complaints from users against telecom operators during FY2012, out of which 99 percent complaints were addressed and resolved.

PTA said that telecom consumers registered these complains through various channels, i.e., online, email (complaints@pta.gov.pk), hotline (0800-55055), written complaints and faxes sent to PTA headquarter addresses and zonal offices.

These consumer complaints were against cellular operators, fixed line, wireless, broadband, LDIs and other telecom licensed operators.

PTA said that 71% of total received complaints were against cellular operators – with over 120 million subscribers base – while 27 percent out of total 33,310 complaints were against PTCL which has just 3.5 million customers.

Following graphs will give you a glimpse of complaints, their types, and share of complaints against various operators.

Summary of Consumer Complaints FY 2012

Share of Complaints by Category

Cellular Operator Wise Complaints Received and Resolved During 2011-12

Consumer Complaints Against PTCL During 2012

Effective Measure Endorsed as Digital Audience Measurement standard in Pakistan

The Pakistan Advertisers Society (PAS) has officially awarded Effective Measure as the industry endorsed service for digital audience measurement in Pakistan, said a release issued by the firm.

The recognition of the Effective Measure platform will give Pakistan’s advertising, publishing and digital media sectors a new level playing field to accurately assess, measure and develop their valuable digital assets.

PAS is the representative industry body of Pakistan’s advertising industry and its collective membership looks after the interests of 80 percent of the advertising spend of Pakistan.

The endorsement was awarded to Australian founded Effective Measure after a rigorous and thorough review process by the PAS Research Committee. Under PAS’s governing guidelines there will be a yearly independent audit of the service to ensure the reliability and validity of the data to ensure the highest levels of service.

“We have endorsed Effective Measure for their depth in service, technological expertise, global footprint and their guiding principles that will allow them to provide reliable and credible data to the industry” said PAS Executive Director Qamar Abbas.

Under the alliance Effective Measure will be working in collaboration with PAS to establish a world class digital audience measurement service for the Pakistan industry.

“The highest potential for media growth in the MEA region is on the digital platform, given the favourable youth skewed demographics and the strong uptake of smartphones and tablets. Pakistan plays an important role in this swing to digital platforms and advertising spend. We are excited about bringing greater digital transparency and insight into markets in the MEA territories, which we believe will accelerate growth in digital spend and awareness amongst advertisers across the region,” said Effective Measure Regional Managing Director MEA, Brendon Ogilvy.

The Effective Measure solution benefits advertisers and media owners by offering superior access to audience reach and demographic data.

“The alliance gives the dynamic Pakistan media industry, choice and diversity in selecting the best of breed solutions for managing their digital media assets, advertising spend and placement. Additionally it opens the door to a whole new layer of rich data analytics and exploration of audience behaviour across multiple digital platforms,” said Effective Measure Country Manager – Pakistan, Imtiaz N. Mohammad.

PAS members will be instructed on how to take advantage of the new measurement resources that Effective Measure provides and details will follow on how digital publishers can sign‐up with Effective Measure and get their sites tagged free of charge.

Snapdragon 600 based Samsung Galaxy S4 is twice as fast as Galaxy S III and iPhone 5, easily beats HTC One too

Yesterday we got some potentially bad news for Europe – that the Galaxy S4 version in sold in Sweden will use the Snapdragon 600 chipset instead of the Exynos 5 Octa that geeks were hoping for. The same version will be sold in North America. However, then we saw some reassuring benchmarks and now we can add one more.

Primate Labs, makers of the Geekbench app took interest in the Samsung Galaxy S4 performance and made a chart to see how the new Galaxy flagship performs. Using data from a benchmark run by Android Authority, the Primate Labs chart shows that the S4 is over twice as fast as its predecessor.

It also beats the HTC One, which uses the same chipset though at a lower clockspeed (1.7GHz for the HTC, 1.9GHz for the Samsung). As for competition from other platforms, the Apple iPhone 5 scores almost the same as the BlackBerry Z10, both with about half the score of the Galaxy S4.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 used for the benchmark is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600, meaning it uses slightly updated Krait 300 cores compared to the BlackBerry Z10 and the LG Nexus 4. Also note that the Galaxy S4 used for the benchmark has not been running finalized software.

As Primate Labs points out, the iPhone 5 will be updated soon and the iPhone 5S will improve performance and we’ll have to wait and see how it stacks up. But the Z10 is it for BlackBerry, their other model coming this year, the Q10, uses a lower-end chipset.

Shame that we don’t have a score for the Galaxy S4 version with an Exynos 5 Octa – the Cortex-A15 cores are supposed to blow the Kraits out of the water, battery willing.

House of Marley Zion in-ear headphones review

The House of Marley Zion headphones are the young company’s flagship in-ear product. Carrying the heritage of the reggae icon Bob Marley, the earbuds combine earth-friendly, yet premium materials, and eye-catching design, to go with serious sound aspirations and ambition to succeed in today’s ultra-competitive market.

The House of Marley isn’t the typical personal audio brand, endorsed by a music artist. The company’s products support 1Love – the charitable organization of Bob Marley’s family which is dedicated to supporting youth, planet and peace. In a nutshell, the company’s products make you feel good about your purchase well before you have connected them to your device of choice. Let’s find out if they are worth your money by taking a closer look at the Zion earbuds.

Retail package

The House of Marley Zion earbuds come in a compact, cool-looking box, made of recycled paper. Inside it, you will find the headphones, four extra pairs of ear tips, a pouch made of organic cotton, and some booklets.

NVIDIA reveals their Tegra roadmap

At their GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, NVIDIA revealed the roadmap for future Tegra-series processors, among other things. The roadmap highlights NVIDIA’s plans for 2013 and 2014 with two future processors, Logan and its successor, Parker, which continue NVIDIA’s tradition of naming them after the real last names of superheroes.

Logan will be the successor to Wayne, more commonly known as the Tegra 4 chipset, and will be appearing in devices in early 2014. It will feature a quad-core ARM Cortex A15 MPCore alongside a low power companion core. It will also be the first Tegra chip to include CUDA cores, NVIDIA’s solution for parallel computing on the GPU, and will be based on a Kepler architecture, similar to the desktop GPUs that NVIDIA makes.

Logan will also be introducing support for CUDA 5.0, the latest version of CUDA, as well as OpenGL 4.3, which brings new features such as tessellation, computer shaders and geometry shaders over OpenGL ES 3.0.

Next is Parker, which will use the upcoming Denver CPU with 64-bit support and the upcoming Maxwell series of GPU. All the advancements in Logan will be carried forward to Parker. Parker is expected to arrive in devices by 2015.

NVIDIA also showcased an mITX-like board called Kayla, which features a Tegra 3 SoC and a low power Kepler GPU, presumably from Logan. This board is designed primarily for developers to test their applications, specifically for the new CUDA functionality that will be introduced from Logan onwards. Not much details about Kayla are available at the moment.