Telecom denies Blackberry to ProPakistani blog
By Shalini Singh

Telenor Pakistan also operates in Thailand, Malaysia and Bangladesh.  A leading telecom operator with investments exceeding $2 billion, Telenor Pakistan is one of the fastest growing mobile networks in that country. It has 165 million customers world wide. But Telenor has angered the Pakistani techie bloggers by changing rules of its blog contest.

The rules of the Telenor blogging competition were simple. Bloggers had to review the new Telenor Weblounge service and link their blog article to Telenor Weblounge page. The blog that directed the most readers to the Telenor Weblounge homepage would win a Blackberry phone.  Competition was valid from Aug 10 – Sept 10.

The winner would get a Blackberry Bold.

Respected Pakistani blog ProPakistani.Pk which reports on Pakistan’s Telecom and IT Industry gets 250 thousand unique visitors per month. ProPakistani blog readers also went to the Telenor Weblounge site making the popular blog the leading contender to win the Blackberry.

The last date (Sept 10) of the competition came and went.  Telenor was in silent mode and refused to announce the winner.  When the blogging community enquired about the results and when the winner would be declared, they were told that the rules had changed.

Even though Propakistani was the leading candidate and so should have won the Blackberry, Telenor announced new rules. Telenor told the bloggers

“
Kindly note that we haven’t received any good numbers in blogging competition, seems like our esteemed bloggers are a bit busy in other work. Therefore we are extending the competition date up till 31st October and putting in the limit of 1000 visitors at least referred to our weblounge page.

However in order to encourage and appreciate the efforts we are gifting gift hampers to bloggers, kindly send reply with your postal addresses thanks.
“

Propakistani was not amused.  It blogged about how Telenor was running a ‘total scam’ and that the Telecom company thought ‘bloggers are kids whom they can manage with gifts’.

The Pakistani blogging community was also disappointed.  Telenor has now realized its mistake and dropped its clause of a minimum of 1000 visitors from each competing blog.  But the competition end date is still the revised Oct 31.

This is one way to antagonize the powerful tech blogging community of a country.