That’s right! the Federal budget for this year is out and from I assume about the future, text messaging will never be the same in Pakistan.

Even though the new Federal budget affects mostly all services offered by the IT sector of Pakistan but the reason why I emphasize on SMS particularly is because it is the only service which is used by almost every person in Pakistan.

So how exactly will Text Messaging be affected? Here’s how.

• 20 Paisa tax will be imposed on each SMS.
• No more bundled SMS packages.

This means that no longer will you able to purchase a bundled unlimited SMS package and not worry about money for the rest of the time till it expires. Rather you will now have to pay for each individual SMS no matter what.

So, is this a good or bad move?

The answer to this is relative. In order to see the pros and cons, let’s look at it through all perspectives:

• Consumers: Mostly bad, everyone used to love free SMS bundles but now they are gone.
• Telecom Companies: Probably good, as it will bring in more revenue and will save the stations from being smoked due to the heavy SMS traffic.
• Government: They are the ones who made the budget so definitely beneficial move for themselves.

The new move can be considered a good one in the sense that it will regenerate the hunger of competition between Telecom companies and now they might introduce tariffs with better options for the customers. And also this move might hinder the consumers in sending those stupid Forward text messages which is a good thing in itself.

Perhaps its time for people to move on to the web and look for alternative, such as Twitter for text-messaging and Skype for phone calls.

What’s your take on this?

A couple of years ago I came to know about blogs, startups and social media but even until then, I was quite unaware of the terminology that mainly defined every part of what I was discovering then, known as ‘Web 2.0′.

Web 2.0, as coined by Darcy Denucci in 1999, is the second-generation of Internet communication media which focuses on tools and services that generate a two-way flow of data and information between the webmaster and the user.

Recently! the word competed against other words such as Jai Ho, Noob and Slumdog to make it into the lexicon of the English Language as the Millionth word and succeeded. The words that competed have the following meaning:

• Jai Ho – May you be victorious.
• Noob – New to any sort of Internet activity.
• Slumdog – Indian slum-dweller.

According to Global Language Monitor, a new word is added to the English Language dictionary once every 98 minutes.

On an interesting note, the English Language has the biggest vocabulary in the world with now over a million words but an average person only has a vocabulary of up to 14,000 or fewer words.