ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s digital horizon is bringing about a revolution in enterprises workings and societal behaviours. Scores of shops of busy markets have started using e-Khata to run their businesses. E-Khata is a flexible plug and play enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. Zain Gohar, project leader of the initiative, says he conceived the idea months ago but its realisation occurred at Abacus Consulting’s APIthon I in January this year. The App manages inventory, sales, ledgers, warehouses, human resources, etc, through few clicks for the businesses. He says APIthon I gave him a lifetime opportunity to implement some strong features and essence of Fintech, which would be impossible for any startup in Pakistan to achieve in mere 48 hours. “Several brilliant ideas remain just ideas because of the lack of collaboration between the industry and application developers, and that’s a great injustice to our talent,” said Abacus Consulting Managing Director Abbas Ali Khan, who shared the success stories of APIthon I. He says the success of APIthon I inspired him to arrange APIthon II being held in National Incubation Centre, Islamabad, on May 5 and 6. He says such fourth technology ventures can tap the potential of startups and entrepreneurs. Besides E-Khata, another application, Repair Wala, was made a reality at APIthon I. Its founder Sohaib Arif says when a mobile phone slips from your hands and shatters into pieces, it gives you sleepless nights. A visit to a local repairer is even another nightmare. A few clicks at Repair Wala, however, resolve problems with the guarantee of the parts and protection of your personal data on the device. Sohaib says they got valuable feedback, API access and multiple investment opportunities from APIithon. Bike It! is yet a remarkable venture that APIthon I came up with. This environment-friendly project is a smart bicycle sharing platform that allows users to find and reserve a bike near them, and then use it to ride till their destination. Zain Haider, App founder, says Bike It! app enables its user to locate the bicycle, in a specific radius, on the map and then reserves it for 10 minutes, so that they could reach bicycle’s location and unlock it for ride. He says APIthon played a major role in completing our product as we were lacking the Mobile Wallet access for payments and biometric verification support for user identification. “All the projects of APIthon I were wonderful, and have the potential to set new trends the world over,” said Abbas Ali Khan, adding that our talent needed to be supported. APIthon II also offers free registration to App developers and a chance to compete for cash prizes, seed money and mentorship by international and national companies. Published in Daily Times, April 18th 2018.