Category: The web
-
Google listens to feedback, changes “Egabat” to “Ejabat”
And they even created a video to celebrate the change.. When I blogged about Google’s new Arabic Q&A service a while ago, I received a comment from Wael Ghonim, Google’s MENA Product and Marketing man, noting with interest the issue I (and others) raised about the service’s name “Egabat”. Now, after surveying the community and…
-
Living without the dish: our family’s video-on-demand experiment
Two months ago, my family moved house. Our satellite dish was left on the roof of the old house. Since the move, we’ve been living without a dish, resulting in a purely video-on-demand lifestyle. So how important is TV for you and your kids? And what happens when conventional satellite TV is absent? Every family…
-
More crazy stuff with an ‘Islamic’ label on it..
It’s Ramadan. Which is always a good time for the fanatics / forces of darkness / narrow-minded crazies, who have been in the driver seat of muslim culture for too long.. its a good time for them to come up with all kinds of stuff.. In Sudan, a woman was jailed, after a judge find…
-
Google’s Arabic Q&A service ‘Egabat’: clever way to sniff the market (and what’s up with the Egyptian influence in its name 😉
Google today announced the launch of a new Arab focused question and answer service under the name Google Egabat (English: Google Answers), not to be confused with the now-defunct English Google Answers service which was shut down a few years ago. For more info about Google Egabat check out StartupArabia’s post. Its definitely exciting to…
-
The Maktoob-Yahoo deal: Shame on the Jordanian press that doesn’t understand!!
After the euphoria of yesterday’s news about Yahoo buying Maktoob for an estimated US$ 85 million, and after seeing the name of this Jordan-made brand on the pages and screens of every major international news outlet, and after the topic “Maktoob” made it to the top 10 topics of Twitter.. I was expecting to see…
-
Yahoo acquires Maktoob: the Jordanians did it!
As all eyes were on Dubai in the past hour to follow the official news of Yahoo’s acquisition of Maktoob.com, my mind wandered to an old stone house near Amman’s 2nd Circle, which, for over a decade was the ‘house of Maktoob’, and the birthplace of what is now the biggest success story of the…
-
SYNTAX scraps its website, replacing it with one lousy web page
At SYNTAX, we’re the kind of people who’d make fun of companies and government departments who don’t update their websites. If you hire us, we’d lecture you for hours about the importance of “staffing your website” with people who can communicate on the web and keep your website fresh and updated. We’d also point out…
-
Follow where your friends are lurking online.. with Folowen.com
In the old days (just a few years ago) people maybe had a blog or a personal homepage (my first home page was on GeoCities!). Today, your friends (or enemies or people you are interested in are talking all over the web. They talk to friends on Facebook. They try to say interesting things to…
-
A video from 2004.. I can’t believe half a decade passed!
While doing some searching on the web, I chanced upon a very low budget (no budget!) video that I created for the Immedia 2004 conference. This is something I even blogged about in the early days of 360east. I watched the video with amusement. A number of familiar faces are featured. It also features a…
-
“Watwittering”, public API and other Watwet updates
Watwet, our homegrown mobile and web microblogging and social networking tool (do they still call this stuff “microblogging” or am I living in a cave?) has made some pretty profound changes to the service over the past few months. I’ve been meaning to write about them for a while, but this did not happen due…
-
Amman is looking for its stories. Now YOU can write them..
I am very excited, as just a few minutes ago, the pre-launch page for the Amman Centennial website has gone live. This is not a ‘coming soon’ page, but an open invitation to all Ammanis (and expatriate Ammanis, of course) to share their stories of THEIR Amman. The last 100 years of Amman’s history, since…
-
Wolfram Alpha: computing history was made last night
It’s almost like the “super computers” we see in science fiction movies. You ask the computer a question and the computer gives an answer. The question can be a request for historical data, a mathematic equation, the current temperature of a city, and so on. The thing is: the computer “understands” the question. But this…