Pakistani IT firm 'on top of the world' in Blackberry apps

Lahore-based Five Rivers said its Photo Editor Suite had hit the top spot across all sectors on Blackberry's AppWorld store.

"This is extremely good news for us and especially for the Pakistani IT industry," Mahe Zehra Husain, the head of operations and product management at Five Rivers Technology, told AFP.

"We feel we are on top of the world. This is incredible."

The application "has been in the top five paid applications for quite a while now and on Sunday made its way to the number one spot," she said.

Photo Editor Suite allows users to crop, rotate, adjust brightness and contrast, recolour and resize photos, Husain added.

Five Rivers, which opened its subsidiary Pepper.pk a year and a half ago, says it has developed and run out more than 100 mobile applications for the Blackberry and iPhone as well as other smartphones.

The company started in 2003 and consists of 50 people and has worked with a number of leading technology firms at home and abroad, Husain said.

According to the State Bank of Pakistan, software and IT-enabled service exports amounted to 204 million dollars in fiscal year 2009-2010 and the industry as a whole is worth around 2.8 billion dollars.

Pakistan, a nuclear-armed conservative Muslim country of 167 million people, is in deep recession, exacerbated by years of Al-Qaeda-linked bombings, an energy crisis, poor foreign investment and this year by catastrophic flooding.

(c) 2010 AFP