Maktoob Yahoo! bandwagon effect?

First things first, it was a great piece of News to receive after such a long time of flop n’ demeaning News on ME’s tech/Internet scene. Congratulation to Maktoob on the pay off for the 12 years of keeping things running. Is this deal gonna’ get the wheel rolling?

Having Google enrooting in the ME, Microsoft already there although the Live team hasn’t been of an active team here. And now, Yahoo! So what does that mean for the startups in the ME and the Arabia in particular? What would be the Formula for the Content value?

Investors confidence

The best effect of the buy out is the fact that now at least one example is out there to show. One story to showcase the value of Content and online innovation.

Developers motivation

I’ve heard this line countless times before “man it’s hard to sell the idea out here, I’m off to US man”. And those who had no hope for leaving the country they just end up doing their projects for fun and the sense of being a geek/nerd. And if it was very ambitious it’s about selling some ads n’ banners, that’s it.

Now? This has to change. Your side project can become your life if you were a developer. Yes, you can put Google/MS/Yahoo! between your eyes when thinking and polishing your ideas, of course after the solution and identifying the needs.

It’s about patience

Jus’ like any other business n’ investment, patience and lots o’ luck n’ some more innovation. Yes. It pays of in the Internet business, this is highly the way it is going to be received.

Lot’s of mini-examples have been there in the market. Jeeran being one of the earliest mini porjects that were funded twice, other projects that had the same path there too. But! this one is the News that will buzz for a while, indicating the region’s readiness for being the next best thing.

It’s DOABLE

That quite said.

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Nakheel’s Spam II

A couple of days ago I posted about Nakheel’s Spam showing the three times that I was spammed. Two more shots added to that.

Oct 3^rd Shot:

Oct 4^th Shot:

Now the difference, the above shots were not signed by Dubai Moon, and the tracking has been shifted to Double Click.

Five shots to the same e-mail address, the same message, and unsolicited. Stops over here, Evast is reported as spam, the fun is over for me, I wanted to see how far it goes, it seems that it won’t stop until cityscape reaches. Such a Media Plan right there!

And the campaign is now directed to Nakheel’s City Scape Page

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Translate, Rebrand, and that’s another Web Startup

Online Startups, which are rare, putting the fact that they’re mostly not official nor real business entities in the Arabia, most are just an idea that went online with some HTML and JS, no real businesses around them. Rare is the word, but the handful projects are nothing but a projection of other projects that went very popular in English and elsewhere.

Yes there’s hunger for Arabic content, there are a number of initiatives that are encouraging the growth of original Arabic content. But does that mean hijacking other websites content into an Arabized portal?

Video Sharing, Social Networks, Micro-Blogging, and even sites like Techcrunch have been copied. We’re not saying that’s bad, an opportunity call. Why not? Right? So if you write in English anyways, why don’t you write and post to TechCrunch instead? An Example.

What I find disturbing with Arab worlds startups is the fact that they are a projection of the Silicon Valley. Sure some are really valuable, but the fact that 90% are 100% copies, it disturbs and makes up for a market that doesn’t really exist. Reminds me of how back in the late 90s Internet companies made the investors lose faith in Internet ventures in Dubai, it came to a point that companies stopped even believing that websites are good for businesses at all.

You might be in pressure, need to go and get real famous in a record time, follow other people’s success, but for real man, copying the same steps and publicizing upon it? I wish I could name people and companies and still don’t make a chaos. But for real, no one’s hurt but the industry!

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Nokia E71 won over my P1i

Finally did the switch to my first ever Nokia. Slick, Cheque, and Slim. E71. An iSync plugin and I was set with all my contacts and calendar items from my P1. Sony Ericsson is a religion as you know, not just a phone brand, but the delay in their releases kills! Another issue with SEs is that it gets really slow once you have your E-Mail client loaded with e-mails and files all over the directories. Couldn’t wait for the X1 nor the P3 and iPhone is out of question for me (it ain’t my thing).

It’s amazingly/weirdly neat, I’ll leave the review part as Steve Litchfield has written a great one.

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iTunes store in UAE

This is big, finally it happened, just got this through the Emirates Mac User Group, iTunes opened for the UAE and accepts local credit cards, according to Magnus Nystedt of the EMUG.

You may have read about the expansion of the iTunes Store to more countries since yesterday but did you try to get an account with a local credit card? Well I just did and it worked just fine. Unfortunately so far you can only access the AppStore. There is no music, no movies, no TV. But I guess it’s a step in the right direction, right?

Check out the whole deal at EmiratesMac Blog.

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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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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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The Right Website for the Right Job

It’s often hard to find a service that’d fulfill your needs and yet has an active business model on the web. Usually it’s either a specialized website that works best or a product of a geeky group who wanted to prove their skills in Web-Development. But finally, in ME, we’re getting some directed, informed, and demanded services right from the businesses that could handle such services.

Of course, some compromises have to be made. Trade some for some. Despite all that, I see a winner in UAE property market Portals. A real winner, in fact not only in the Property corner but everything looked for. Say classifieds.

And that is Gulf News classifieds websites. Now at the first glance their choice of domain names are corny and really old fashioned and not picked wisely or at least picked by geeks, it shows, not business decision out there.

The fact that Gulf News took the initiative to lead and create a dedicated Classifieds website is a joy in itself, it’s happening, the real stuff are coming online in the ME.

If you’re online as much as everybody else then you’d know that so many classifieds websites are out there, so many property portals, so many jobs portals, but I tell ya this, Gulf News is the most picked. And now with it going fully online. Add to that the resources at Gulf News’ disposal, and the number of readers and the offline-online integration of ads display, now that’s a killer, and hey, don’t forget how big the effect of GN is. Check this out

So if you’re smart enough, you already got it, integrate into GN’s portal, if you’ve got a property portal propose an API sharing with GN, share data, mash-up you suckers! Move it! Capitalize on that!

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Feeds and Facebook in one page

Now I get to check out my Facebook and read my feeds all in one page. Neat.

How didn’t I know about this before, darn, that’s because I’ve ditched my feeds and my favorite netvibes page. So now that I’ve upgraded to the new version I get to add the Facebook Widget and get to do all in one place, man, and I was asking myself why didn’t I go with Bloglines or Google Reader, Netvibes foreva!

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Dot AE domain names

In the last 13 months, we had the chance to work on 18 “.ae” domains, in which we registered six of them. At dots & lines, we sometimes take the liberty of deciding domain names, and 90% of the time we’re the hosting mediators too. So that involves us in selecting the best suiting hosting and sometimes the e-mail plans for our clients. With 18 domain names, only 3 domain names out of the 12 worked seamlessly when DNS records needed to change and those were the ones for large corporates who had an Etisalat account-manager in their disposal.

The Experience

While reviewing our work from last year, the “.ae” records kept us skeptical on going with the UAE choice over and over again since “.ae” domains can not be modified by third-parties who are not associated with the person/company who registered the domains.

This is a typical drill, a client has a domain name registered by either a direct domain name registration or a domain name that came free of charge while purchasing a Business-One service from Etisalat. Client needs a website, so we get involved, next, we need to host their website thus, need to update some DNS records which can only be changed by the client or a person who registered it. By either e-mail or fax, and only from the same addresses filled in the registration fields. Our roll has always been preparing the letters sending to clients, and then letting them know who to send the letters to, and god forbid something goes wrong, it has to happen again, that is two more days of delay and that’s if the request was taken care of immediately.

Unlike .com/.net/.org that could be all modified in an online app, “.ae” DNS, A-Records should be changed by either sending e-mails or faxes to UAE-NIC in which lately had been a 10 days work.

Changes that affected UAE NIC

I can’t recall having any issues with “.ae” domains before du was formed and before the formation of TRA which took UAE NIC away from Etisalat’s control and made it into an independent body, causing UAE NIC slowness caused by maybe understaffed team or just a restructuring procedure that is complicating the communications with UAE NIC.

My findings are, NIC is really understaffed, and to be honest, while the NIC clients work from 9 to 6, I can’t understand how NIC gets to wrok from 8 to 3? Hoping for a quick change, soon, “.ae” has finally become popular for UAE businesses and it’s not the right time for a huge mess-up, hope someone would hear us out.

The coming soon story

While seeing the coming soon banners on UAENIC homepage for online-services gives us hope every time we search or check for a domain name availablility it is getting a little out of hand as how clients demand do not match the quality of UAENIC time frames and services.

Please share if you’ve been in our shoes too, it’s important, we can make a change, let us hear you out.

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