Unless you are a masochist, do not go to Naheed Superstore on a weekend, specially if you are planning to get less than 20 items. It’s not worth the trouble.

‘Nuff said.

Fairly recently, ive come across quite a few buidings that label themselves as “Mobile Malls”. The prime objective of such establishments is to facilitate the sale of mobile phone accesories at competitive pricing considering they have a captive audience base.

What intrgues me is the factor of how important or how critical is the impact of mobile phones and their accesories to warrant the creation of a separate mall culture. Must be a huge revenue driver I guess.

Also, the “family mobile mall” concept is now catching on. Considering I’d never want to take a female to the mobile market in Saddar, its an interesting concept. Here comes the critical question. How many families shop for cellphones together?

Considering the energy crisis the country is going through, the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Resources has issued a No Objection Certificate for the establishment of a floating Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) terminal at Port Qasim.

The NOC has been issued to the Associated Group, which will invest almost USD 340 million in the project.

LNG is essentially the same as the Natural Gas we currently use. It is fairly low cost as compared to LPG and petrol. It can be pumped through our standard gas lines for supply to power plants, fertilizer units and even CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) pumps, cutting down the impact of the rising natural gas and CNG prices.

The strategy is to help meet immediate national needs, hence the establishment of a floating terminal. A dedicated, fixed terminal can cost a lot more, not to mention take over 3-4 years in planning and construction processes. The floating terminal can be fully functional in under 12 months.

The floating terminal is essentially a huge ship that wil be equipped to offload the cargo of other LNG tankers, store it, and re-pump it through supply lines that the SSGC will set up for this process.

Aside from all the bridge building and road breaking in progress, here is Karachis latest corporate landmark that joins the line of many who we know by name.

This thing is located at the Regent Plaza turning towards Jinnah Hospitan. NICVD etc etc.

Karachi is playing host to the 5th National Blind Cricket Chamiponships from September 11th to 15th at the UBL Sports Complex.

The games will be played from 9 am to 8 pm and entry is free for all.

Time to lend some support friends.

If anyone has any info on the number of teams participating and other facets of the tournament, do let us know via a comment to this post.

For the last 2 days, traffic signals on a major part of Shahrah e faisal (from Rashid Minhas Road upto Metropole) have been out of order.

Whats interesting here, is that the traffic is now smoother and more free flowing. I left home a little late today and was dreading a wild jam on every intersection as the case was with past experiences, but rather surprisingly, it was all free and great!

Even before the signal-off scenario, I personally feel that traffic cops do a better job considering they obtain real time feedback on the situation at hand as opposed to time managed signals. One example which I see everyday is a group of 4 traffic cops managing the Millenium Mall intersection and though the jam is often pretty long, It would be longer if it were managed by signals as opposed to traffic cops who keep an eye on traffic volumes coming from Gulistan e Jauhar.

On another note: Traffic cops here dont follow the official hand signal patterns (please refer to the highway code book thats supposed to be in your car at all times), my input on it, is that the many drivers are hardly aware of what different hand signals mean!

On August 22, 2006, the police conducted a raid at Radio City, Park Towers on information of violation of Intellectual Property Rights laws and the owner, Mr. Arif Ghani was taken into custody on charges of possession and sale of the movie “Fast and the Furious – Tokyo Drift”. An FIR in this regard has also been lodged.

The raid took place because the movie was being officially released in Pakistan, and hence had legal representation, which allowed such action to be taken. It seems that this might be the way things will go for a while until piracy itself gets curtailed.

Question is, does this open the door to international media labels coming into Pakistan?

Walls has introduced a new rich and creamy dairy ice cream in a pack of 400 ML to Karachi. Priced a bit high at Rs.125, the Mini Tub is available in two yummy flavors, Fudge Fantasy (with swirls of Chocolate fudge sauce and chocolate coated peanuts) and Strawberry Passion (with real strawberry pulp and swirls of strawberry sauce).

Thats right folks..At the ITCN, visitors at the Telenor stall will discover that they have just launched EDGE, bringing in a newer, faster internet experience to the mobile phone user.

For the layman, EDGE stands for Enhanced Data rates for Gsm Evolution and enables data transfer at speeds of upto 236.8 kilobits per second (with a theoretical upward limit of 473.6 kilobits per second), whereas GPRS High Speed Circuit Switched Data rates end at 57.6 kilobits per second.

Mobilink did launch EDGE first, but lets not forget, from the very day of their launch, they have not moved beyond a 5 sq. km operating radius in Islamabad.

Telenors Edge network is spread across over 200 cell sites across the country and many more are being enabled continuously. Most of metropolitan Karachi is already covered and while we wait for WiMax and the likes of those really high-speed connections, I think it might be worth it to give it a shot.

Existing Telenor GPRS subscribers will see an “E” on their EDGE enabled phones when they are within the service region. Prices remain static at Rs. 15+tax per MB of data transfer.

An EDGE PCMCIA card for standard laptops costs approx 8-12k and is freely available in the markets.

This info is not currently available on the Telenor website, but visitors to ITCN will be briefed by Telenor staff in Hall 4.

On another note, they are also testing out PTT functions.

While Naheed Store was really Crowded, D-Mart looked Deserted, and the reason is the Price difference between both the stores. Yeah! everything is expensive at D-Mart so if you are planning to shop, do your shopping at Naheed Store and go To DMart for COSTA Coffee Only.