“iPakistan” is a web site and a concept committed to changing Pakistan’s image globally. Headed by Rehman Ilyas (University of Hong Kong), we are a group of university students and young professionals who are done whining about Pakistan’s image and want to do something about it. Most of us are studying in foreign universities and so have first hand experience of various kinds of stereotypes. ‘Terrorism’ and ‘extremism’ go synonymous with Pakistan. Such strong is propaganda by international media against Pakistan that there was this one time when a Rehman was asked as a serious question by a Chinese student: “Is your family any Taliban?” IMAGINE!
So ‘iPakistan’ is about changing this wrongly propagated image of Pakistan, and even if we are able to neutralize one person’s opinion, we would be happy.
Apart from changing Pakistan’s image globally, we have two other major objectives. We plan to serve as a platform for young talent from Pakistan to showcase their creations, be it photographs, articles, illustrations, songs, jokes, ideas-basically anything.
Thirdly, the web site is to act as an information portal for outsourcing to Pakistan. Recently there has been a global surge for Social digital marketing, and Pakistan has been doing really well in this field, with several highly creative local start-ups such as “Bramerz” handling multinationals clients like Samsung and McDonalds. Seeing this trend and the immense outsourcing potential in Pakistan, we plan to make iPakistan as a one-stop guide to social media related outsourcing to Pakistan. Our outsourcing focus will also majorly include web site hosting, web site developing, animation, illustrations and Apple/ Android/Windows application developments.
Various Sections of our web site.
We started off with a survey about Pakistan. Rehman Ilyas(Founder, iPakistan) conducted a simple survey from around the world to find out what people are saying about Pakistan. It had two simple questions; 1) “What is the first thing which comes to your mind when you think of Pakistan?”, 2) “ What do you think of Pakistan/ Pakistanis?”. The survey was conducted in a highly unbiased fashion as to get honest opinions. As a result the answers we got very quite interesting and can be viewed at http://ilahore.net/landing/. We put the results initially as a pre launch survey to get people interested in our cause. The response was quite awesome and many, including some academics, lauded the idea.
Originally, like the web site domain name still says, our name was “iLahore”, since in our original plan we were to be a Lahore based SME focused Social media Marketing consultancy portal, on top of acting as an agent to change Pakistan’s image. But considering the awesome response from all over the world, we decided to rename it to “iPakistan” and widen the scope of our web site. So the full web site will be launched on the domain name www.i-pakistan.net.
With the pre trial survey on line, we created our trial Facebook page as well, and eventually in December the 5th, the trial web site came out, http://www.ilahore.net/. Even though it had limited content and was a test run the response was totally overwhelming. Several wrote to us and appreciated our efforts. Several more showed interest in helping us and are now part of our team.
Our team has expanded majorly in just a few weeks. Our core team comprised of editors of different sections of the web site and our valued mentors- Mr. Khalid Malik (Visiting Professor Business Studies in various schools of Lahore) and Mr. Ali Murtaza( Professor Design and Illustration at BNU). Additionally, we have campus & city ambassadors from all over the world including top tier institutions such as Princeton, McGill, British Columbia, HKU, Sheffield and LUMS.
With an incredibly talented and highly motivated team we are working towards a launch in Mid January. Hopefully, the response to the actually web site will be in line with the feedback we have been receiving so far.
Stay tuned for iPakistan then!
Website : www.ilahore.net
Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/iPakistan.net
YouTube: Videosilahore
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/RehmanIlyas