Fresh grads make app to aid prize bond mania

Software automatically sifts through results against user's serial number(s)

KARACHI: Three friends have managed to solve the never-ending problem faced by individuals involved in the business of prize bonds by making a smartphone application.

Wahab Jawed,22, Zainul Abideen, 23, and Zohair Hemani have completed their bachelors in computer studies from the Institute of Business Administration.

Childhood friends Jawed and Abideen had been discussing the idea for a while. In August 2014, a year before graduating from college, they set up a firm, Avialdo, along with their friend Hemani.

Avialdo has developed various websites, applications, customer relationship management systems for schools, banks and other organisations.

The application

In their latest venture, the trio has come up with an invention that eases the burden of those involved in prize bond schemes.

To develop the app, which will be available in Android and IOS supported mobile phones, the team set up an office in Garden and employed seven other software developers to work with them.

"It is a revenue free application and a non-profit idea," said Abideen.

Explaining the idea behind the project, launched four months ago, Abideen said he has experienced first-hand how people who have brought prize bonds await the draws and then follow a complicated procedure of finding their token number. Most of the time, parents ask their children to check on the internet or look through the numbers in the draw sheet to find the results, he said.

"I was the one in our family who had the job of searching for numbers in prize bond sheets," he said, adding that the application he has developed along with his friends will resolve this issue.

The person using the app has to enter the serial number of the bond only once, while the application has options of filling in various serial numbers with different ranges. The application not only saves the serial numbers but also notifies the user when any number has won a prize, he explained.

The app also includes the schedule of the draws for the whole year and one can synchronise it with an email address to save the data..

Whenever the prize bond draw takes place [according to the government schedule], the list of winning bond numbers are available on the State Bank of Pakistan's website and other websites as well. "On all these websites, you have to enter the serial number again and again," said Jawed, adding that their application will send you a notification on your phone if any of the user's serial numbers has made the list. So one does not have to go through the cumbersome process of sifting through numbers manually, he explained.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 5^th, 2016.