P1 was out, and now P3i rumors

It was just a few days ago when SE P1i was launched in UAE, and a week earlier on the global scale. iPhone was released on June 29th, who can forget that date?(I had it on my calendar). Now imagine an SE P1i in iPhone style? That’s what the upcoming leaked P3i is going to be.

Here’s the leaked photo, note the SE 123, the same label was put on the P1i when it leaked out.

*Source

Let me put it out here again, a fully touchscreen phone with a sliding QWERTY keypad, add UIQ to that, now think what that beast is to be.

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The “O” factor in Online

The “e” era has long gone away, the era where every tom, dick, and harry came up with an electronic solution. The “e” became a suffix to every company that opened to do IT and come up with solutions. But only one name made it out of the “e” mirage, yup, the “e-mail”. Now the “O” factor or better yet put the “Online” era, well, that’s so old to talk about, but the x-point-”O” ,even that’s so old to talk about, but apparently in the M.E and specially in the UAE where we reside, the x-point-o’h and the family is yet to grow.

Using & Abusing the Uninformed

Remember the Over the hype post when I busted an outdated and a misleading article by ACN? It was back then when we fought over the acronyms and semantics. A year after that, we’re actually taking another step behind where actual/formal business announcements include the same scenario.

Well, I promised not to point fingers, so won’t go further on this, but as I said before, “Buzzwords and Acronyms won’t lead the Online industry anywhere but to the Dictionary“!

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And the SE P1i is finally out

Guess I gotta’ break the silence once again. SE P1i is out and available in UAE. Think about making a phone mix, taking the ugly/bulky P990i and fixing its shortcomings and glitches and melting it down in the shape of the cool M600i, that’s when you get the P1i.

What’s there out for you?

A better P-series in the form of M-series of SE mobiles. Better UIQ operating system, yet not the latest Opera 9, I wish they waited for Opera 9 to come out and then launched the product.

Same old UIQ interface, with the dual letter keypad, the same old jog-dial, brighter touch screen, yet lighter.

As for the price it’s relatively over-priced (AED 2,900) comparing it with the new Nokia E-90 that comes with more featues(at the end of the day Nokia works on Symbian, so you won’t get the goodies of UIQ OS).

No GPS, very very disappointing, BlackBerry service support on the e-mail client side, and for sure, a more stable UIQ.

We’ve built an unofficial microsite for the p1 which is in the process of being launched soon, more on that later.

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Privacy out of the window with Arabian Business

Now this is outrageous. You click on a newsletter link and your e-mail address gets recorded along with the article link from the newsletter. Arabian Business does record your personal reading hits, and no not anonymously, you are exposed. Is that the Tracking part you talk about? Because that’s against all the privacy rules and ethical practices in marketing data generation.

Here’s my status-bar while mousing over a link listed in their newsletter

I was gonna get this blog into a silence period but this had to be blogged about, man this is so not right!

Imagine, if that’s what’s happening with the newsletter, then go figure what happens when you actually log-in and browse their website. So turnin’ off! Even though the data is not so important it does expose one’s anonymity while reading, it’s so unethical.

That’s so not right!

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A short silence until mid-august

As you’ve noticed I haven’t been posting regularly for the past month. I’ll continue a complete silence until mid-august when I’ll come back for more posts due to heavy work load and getting busier at dots and lines and the expansion that is in process.

When we come back, we’ll be talking a little about my first presentation to a group of VCs in Abu Dhabi for my first ever web project in a big scale. A lot more stuff related to SonyEricsson P1 and the unofficial website that we’ve built for it. All in the making.

Until then.

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Yet another fake Prospect

A few months ago I posted about a number of Fake Prospect incidents where it was just new market entrants trying to Shop us at dots and lines. Shopping other businesses, well, that’s fine, but really, wasting their time is not. This time the fake prospect took the drill to another level.

The US and the UK

Man how much I hate hearing someone being proud for having served US or UK companies. It’s like a magic word for some people for them to think they’ll get the backstage pass. I would really like it if it was like well, “we helped firms in Seattle or Manchester. Okay not forgetting how the “The US” and the “The UK” are usually accompanied with eye brows up with a cool-wannabe look. Jus’ wanned to say this one more time.

Suckups

“We’ve heard so much about your Mobile Web service and heard good stuff about it, you guys rock”

And I started thinkin’ at that time, we have NDAs with the people we deploy Mobile solutions and for the agencies that we do Mobile Web consultancy, we actually work under their umbrella and private branding. Apart from that, our Mobile Web service has been given as a complementary solution to new websites that we’ve built so far. So where is all this coming from? Well, just a suckup effort.

While opening his briefcase, I noticed a folder with Mobile Web title on the cover, seemed like a research folder to me.

So he offers and talks about synergy and partnership, and straight away he’s like:

“How do you do it, I mean how do you manage the workflow? I mean we might be working together, can you tell me how you start a project and how you finish it, and could you please briefly tell me about how you charge and how much you charge?”

You know, you really know it when you can work with someone or not from the first five minutes of talk, and he/his business wasn’t our style. Now add the fact that you can actually catch the Fake Prospect in the first five minutes.

He gets fed up of me going round and round about it, so he decided to just ask his magic question: How profitable is it? How much resources does it take to get a Mobile Web department on in a company?

Some people give wrong answers in such situations, I just preferred not answering at all. Actually I did answer this one with “I’m still outlining a book I’m writing about it, when it’s done I’ll send you a copy, that’s if it was published, but wait, I don’t think I could actually include a market study in it, just technical stuff”. That’s the time he got fedup of me giving answers to unasked questions, I enjoyed that moment. The look on his face said “What a moron snob”.

It’s so easy to gather such information, if the person you meet is honest and doesn’t pretend to be a friend while shopping you. If he was honest and actually telling the truth, chances were that we’d like to really have people to work with and give some of our work to, for us to lift some overhead. It ain’t about not sharing, it’s about the way of approaching and making a business relation.

What usually happens is the fact that we at dots and lines are all young people so in most cases we’d be the youngest guys in the room, and that deceives the approachers who wanna easily shop us.

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Understanding the Context, Common Sense

Visual Design in general is all about common sense and solving a communication problem, simply, communicating and getting the message home. Some do it in extraordinary ways, some keep it simple, and it all depends on the subject and the audience. But wait! Designing websites that are to be serving points and an interface to a worldly organization can’t be done with having the home page full of flashy animation fading photos chosen(not taken) from a photo stock CD/Website. It’s about serving the visitor with information.

Having my design hat on, looking at Saudi’s World Trade Centre, to my amazement, a multi level menu system for you to find your way, instead of using the homepage as your index to the whole site. In short: no IA design.

Okay, hold on, that’s a rip alarm screaming!

We strive, your business thrives

Rings the bells?

It’s not about showing how good you can pickup photos, or how good you can rip slogans. It’s about communicating a purpose and that purpose is not “Showing that you can design”, it’s “Getting the message home!”.

Enough ranting for today.

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Huge, yet lacking a Marketing department

Groups n’ Groups of companies under the same belt, 12 and more hours of work time for employees, everyone does everything, everyone has three to four business cards with different designations and representing different companies. And at the end of the day, when the word marketing gets flipped all that gets mentioned are Brochures, Booklets, and yet some more Cards.

Of course, we need a website too, nowadays everybody’s got one and we should too.

So you get enquiries and you and your agency have no clue what is needed, why? That’s because you have no brief sent to you but just a sentence mentioning a website or an online presence, either form an IT executive or some-do-everything guy.

From the first impression, you know that they want everything on a silver plate with zero effort/input. So you come up with all the possibilities that they could benefit from, flexin’ your muscles and stretching horizons for them. And once they’re happy, it’s all good and happening.

And when it’s done, all the creative, development, and planning goes out the window, why? The work flow, the people who have to follow up with the results can’t give it time, and they believe if it’s out there, it should just work, like that.

No Marketing department to follow up, let’s say at least one Marketing Executive or just whoever to see the results. Zip!

What’s sad is the fact that after months of work the work is just put aside and taken as a “we have that” kindda’ asset. Which is fine in most cases since we’ve done our part to the extent of our knowledge and experience and have been blessed with great profitability, but still.

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How lucky?

When Hotmail gets blocked in a country, there’s nothing to say more about censorship! Syria has been having Hotmail blocked for over 20 days now, and we were unhappy when we had Flickr blocked in UAE. Such an Irony right?

E-mail provider Hotmail has also been blocked since 17 July 2006, according to the National Organisation for Human Rights.

Check the real deal at AMEInfo.

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It’s 777777

Okay, I’ll click on “Publish” when it’s seventh minute of the seventh hour of the seventh day of the seventh month of the seventh year of this millennium.

Know I’ve been quiet for a bit, it’s a busy month for me out here in Abu Dhabi, between traveling and painting pretty pictures to doing accounts and client servicing, even though I don’t buy superstitious myths, but, well, it’s been kindda’ lucky for me this month.

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