KARACHI ( TAHIR REPORT )
Telenor Pakistan with its products, services and social innovation has been at the forefront when it comes to empowering the Pakistani society. A significant part of that commitment is met by Telenor Apps store that now features thousands of applications, hundreds out of which are purely designed and developed in Pakistan, providing the local talent a robust platform to showcase and cash in on their talent.
One of the latest additions to Telenor Apps includes ‘Taazi’ – a mobile application from Pakistan’s first legal music website Taazi.com – providing Telenor Pakistan customers legal access to quality Pakistani music on their mobile devices. Serving as a platform for Pakistani artists to distribute and sell their songs to fans legally, registered users on the Taazi App and website are over 150,000, making Taazi Pakistan’s no.1 ranked music service and social network. While streaming on Taazi is free for the users, they must pay to download songs and thus support the local artist community as well as the music industry.
Sharing his thoughts on the contribution and potential of Telenor Apps, Irfan Wahab Khan, Deputy CEO and Chief Marketing Officer, Telenor Pakistan said: “For Telenor Apps, we have had a three-pronged direction. What we primarily aimed for Telenor Apps was to offer a sustainable yet growing revenue stream by providing an engaging and relevant data use case along with ease of carrier billing. In addition, we wanted Telenor Apps to reinforce brand equity of Telenor as a serious player in the internet domain. And lastly, we wanted to establish Telenor Pakistan as a preferred partner for developers and content providers alike. Today, we can confidently state that Telenor Apps has succeeded on all three fronts.”
To date, over 1.3 million apps have been downloaded from Telenor Apps, an innovative service which has laid the foundation for development of app ecosystem in Pakistan with an operator assuming the central role. With a diverse range of partners on-board including but not limited to health and education, this platform is in line with Telenor’s vision of “empowering societies”, focused to promote local developers and local use cases by partnering with WeRPlay, Savaree, Rocket Internet (Daraz, FoodPanda, Sparklist) and British Council. Telenor Apps first partnered with Stick Cricket during Cricket World cup in addition to this it paved way for HD content in partnership with Gameloft and launched popular apps like Asphalt, Minion Rush and more.
To promote local talent Telenor Apps participated in all leading major app development events which include P@SHA ICT Awards 2015, Plan9 and NUST SEEC Hackathon. Telenor Apps was also nominated for Best Digital Services in World Communication Awards.