UAE Football Website Hacked

Following the match between UAE & Syria Football teams qualifying for the next round of Fifa World Cup qualifications, even though Syria won 3-1 it did not qualify, Syria needed a 3-0 to qualify. Many blamed the technical difficulty in the middle of the game(the Blackout, yes blackout in the stadium), and just now I was told the anger of the Syrian supporters has resulted in hacking the UAE official website, weird stuff!

Now that’s not nice! A Football match is a football match, it’s just a game, accept it. A technical fault would never be on purpose! Not in UAE.

Check out the screenshot.

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CRM Hunt

As a team grows the needs for organized reporting & documenting rises higher than ever before, adding more work and less time in hand it’s a great deal of challenge to find a solution that works in a team environment. Now adding multi-platform workplace with mixture of PCs and Macs, the ad-hoc workflow becomes a disaster.

At dots & lines we’ve been looking for a suiting CRM for about a month now.

Our requirements:

• Contacts Management with E-mail client integration
• Calendars & Event Notes(calls, meetings, etc…)
• Leads, Prospects, and Opportunities Management
• Tasks & Project Handling & Reporting
• File repository

Being a Web Consultancy firm, first thing comes in one’s mind is, well, it has to be online, you know, the religion. But that was to an aim. No IT work, no Storage problems to be handled at our end, and best of all accessible through a Browser, no brainer out there. But we still evaluated that choice. The downsides of online apps are:

• unnecessary traffic & Imagine sharing a file in the same office would require a round trip to a server in the cloud and back
• the limitations in Filesize in uploads(it’s really a headache using another app for file handling and uploads)

But then again, it’s online, so it’s fun and natural to us.

Evaluating our choices, note that we’re looking for a subcription based service where we do not need to install any application nor in office or on our online servers.

So the obvious HighRise came first, since it is in the same circle of our interests, but then it has to be working side by side with BaseCamp for it to form a minimal CRM. It’s 37Signals thingy that made us first think of it, the developer mind.

But then thinking about the users who will be using these apps, not so geeky and not so all jazzed up with whatever the Blogosphere knows, Sales people who want to sell. So we tried out SalesForce, being it the dominant subsription based CRM (Credibility in the Enterprise world). We tested the app for about a month with the demo versions, not so bad, with a few tweaks it could become something that we could customize. Neat! We had options, unlike BaseCamp & Highrise.

While we’re still on the looks, I just remembered Microsoft’s Dynamics; Hosted Solutions, and they’ve got their CRM ported there too, now that’s an important one to check, waiting for the trial version to be enabled to us. Since I looked at the Enterprise Market(don’t get me wrong, these solutions are for SMBs too but by the Enterprise leaders), even SAP has an on-demand CRM service, getting interesting. We’re still in the looks, had a good experience with a CRM of choice?

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Nissan GT R35 in Dubai

Finally I saw that with my own eyes, a GT R35 a Blood Red GT with a 5-digit Dubai Number Plate. It looked nothing like the photos and videos, it’s even better seeing it with your own eyes, the reason I did not take photos of it is because I was just amazed and was just looking at its details while on the run on Jumeriah Road, thing is the driver thought I was looking for a race, guess he felt like smoking a Z for a taste, so he just stepped on it and took off, and it sounded awesome! Me want.

I was told that only Eight GTs made it to Dubai, seen only one on the road, anyone with a price tag details?

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Light in Silver, a New Flash

Microsoft announced the Beta v2 of SilverLight, the upcoming New media plug-in. The first impression on the tool was greatly negative as Flash has dominated the space for a decade now, Java Applets went down, Shockwave went down(the bigger brother), and Flash kept on rising, unbeatable.

Adobe Air vs. XAML & Vista, Flex vs. Visual Studio, and Flash vs. SilverLight, that’s what it is about.

While XAML was introduced by Microsoft, Adobe Air was introduced to shift Rich Internet Applications to Desktop, Visual Studio could not integrate seamlessly with Flash and since it’s non open source Adobe got its own DE; Flex. Now that Visual Studio could not integrate better with Flash although there was an Extension of the Remote Components made for ASPX, but still. So Silver Light was born, a new Multimedia plug-in that integrates with Visual Studio and allows developers to make applications using Visual Studio and Designers using Expression.

One thing though, it’s so obvious, Flash is every where, web multimedia means Flash, how long would take Microsoft to start competing?

If Microsoft was to bundle SilverLight with Vista or whatever the next OS is, this would do nothing but what it did to Flash V5 plug-in, world-wide spread and fast penetration. Would the user base of Windows users dominate the decision based on plug-in penetration then? Quiet simply yes.

But then, the other end of the story are the Content Providers. How fast would they adopt SilverLight development? But then again the user base of Microsoft Development Tools would boost that.

Check what others have said on the same, it’s interesting, check’em out here.

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Navigate or Search?

Menus or Inputs? Keyboard or Mouse? Whether to use a horizontal or vertical navigation or just the easiest question that pops, why not just search?

While designing interfaces for websites, there’s a pay-per-view kind of fight of Search vs. Navigation whether to use a bigger Search box or keep more space for the Navigation. Every website is different. How do we decide that?

Simple websites would have the generic about, services/products, contact us, kind of navigation with straight forward content structure, usually the corporate websites that could be categorized under Business Card Websites or Company Profile online. Bigger ones would have more pages to show, more information to show thus more navigational links whether horizontal or vertical or even including search.

Interactive websites and the ones with dynamic updates and an active team behind the content of the Website usually tend to get its navigation working all around; inline with content, horizontal, vertical, search, tag clouds, end-links, and some even interactively hand over links based on user behavior.

Now the question again, Search vs. Navigation, which, when, and how dominant each should be?

There are three factors that decide that:

1. Type of Users(searching users, navigating users)
2. Type of Content
3. Website Size in terms of content & pages

Type of Users

How are the users using the website? The reasons we’re using the present tense is the fact that mostly this gets asked after the design finalization and website launches, and of course for not being able to find out the user segments. So how do we find out the user/visitor segments?

Logging the visitors and segmenting them by those who land in the homepage and start using the Search and those who land and start using the Navigation. This could be a dynamic blend of people who are used to search vs. those who are used to clicking links. Based on this we could decide how big a search box be, or how to utilize the Navigation space and its visibility, it’s all relative to the results.

There’s an exception to this case, and that’s the rereness of the content of a website which forces users to use the website based on the websites design, this is where we toss the Behavior Injection term where the users get adopted to a series of interactivity habits forced by the rare and yet needed websites. A perfect example in the Arabia would be the forums, users have become accustomed to the use and the navigational structures of the Forums that they would want every other website to be made like a Forum, Categories and endless Threats all in a vertical form where the Global Navigation gets unnoticed most of the times.

Type of Content & Size

Content is King, Navigation is the Messenger. User is the Conqueror?

Based on the type of the content, whether an e-commerce website, or a socially interactive or just static informational content, it has to be navigated, after all it’s the Markup model. This can be again related to Users, but not the user type, but the user’s anticipation and use of the website. A corporate profile website would have simple linear information that is often easy to grasp and understand, copy/information, easy, it doesn’t make one think. For those websites, a set of links(navigation) whether inline, horizontal/vertical, search wouldn’t be as important, obvious.

For those complex content models with dynamically changing items/articles the decision is often hard to make. Content is there to please the user/reader. So how do we make’em happy? We could say well, again, based on the user segmentation we could decide how to make’em navigate or find information?

The problem, content is often driven by a business model that makes either a product/service/ad spaces sold, so some part of the work is done on Semi Injecting the content navigation and structure. Some would sell keywords on Search queries, some would sell a category sponsorship, so both models of navigation could come in handy in generating revenue. For that reason, depending on how important is the Business Model’s effect on the content and website’s/business performance the Navigation/Search could be combined relative to that.

Size of the content and its variety is another important element in this game, how many levels of categorization/sections/tagging could be done? Given that mostly old websites with unspecialized content go through such a stiff problem(simple solution, make smaller websites under one bigger umbrella) which is usually hard to do when the theme of a website is a niche that if broken down loses its wealth. So that’s where search becomes a secondary tool for the needle to be found in the hay stack.

An argument in such cases is, well, how about the Homepage as a visual Sitemap or simply a linear sitemap that would map the content. In our processes and analysis we call homepage as the “Grand” navigation, we could tell that when a homepage is structured in a planned manner with a good understanding of the business model and the users segments, it’s usually a Navigation initiator, where the homepage makes the user familiar with how items get organized in a website and how they are categorized. Our analysis have proved one major point, website that have bad navigation or minimal search functionality create a “Click Back” button actions to reach the homepage to start over the navigation process.

To sum this up, it’s an interestingly debatable topic whether to enlarge the Search box or make room for more Navigation Tabs or avoiding some of each. It’s all user & content related, steered by the business model and the point of Sales of a website.

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Finally some real content

A blog in Arabic, once you read you find out how much you’ve missed in the online space in Arabia, lots of projects have been launched, lots of activities including start-up fund raising events and News, it’s Ajabni a blog authored by Tariq Al Aseeri.

Following this talk, guys at SpinBits have done a great job putting together an extension of the DemoCamp in Dubai, it’s called DemoCampDubai, I attended the second event, and I was really impressed and jealous not to be part of such an initiative. Overall a good start and wishing you guys luck in the coming ones, I’ll be proud of you guys when you have reached to a point where you short-list and filter the projects that participate. Way to go!

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