360east

Category: 2003-2014 Archive

  • Amman the FFilm: a font, a city, and a piece of my life..

    From a message I sent Yanone, the designer of the FF Amman typeface after watching a preview of this film he created. “Ok.. I just watched the entire film. On my iPad.. The film had a strange effect on me. Somehow it encapsulated my career and life for the last 10 years. It’s not just…

  • Jo’preneurs: capturing Jordan’s new wave of entrepreneurs

    A postive post for a change Shadi Eideh, IT guru turned photographer, was on a journey to capture the spirit of the new wave of entrepreneurship with his camera the last few months. It’s a photographic exploration turned documentary. Now, Shadi and his partner Lara Al Safadi are starting to tease us with clips from…

  • Elections 2010: political bankruptcy of Jordanian society?

    Cartoon by Omar Abdallat / 3alarasi.com (Candidate before and after Photoshop) Take a quick drive through Amman’s 3rd electoral district, spanning from the extremely affluent Abdoun to the poor neighborhoods around Amman downtown, and supposedly the most “urban” part of the Kingdom. Just a couple of days after the deadline for candidacy for the next…

  • Arabic children books (again): force feeding your kids trash

    Back to one of my favorite things to rant about. Arabic children books. I’ve been helping out a little with teaching my 2nd grade kid with Arabic reading. Now don’t get me started about the official curriculum for Jordanian second graders. But I will say this much: the design is horrible. And I’ve been comparing…

  • Apps from Arabia

    The iPhone and iPad are fundamentally changing the software business. One of the most remarkable things is how easily these iDevices are making us slip from one software universe to another one: from computers dominated by software from Microsoft, Adobe and Apple to portable devices dominated by, well, no one in particular. I am finding…

  • The fall and rise of 360east

    I was checking the statistics of 360east.com this morning and saw this interesting graph that I thought is worth sharing. Those who follow this blog might have noticed that it was down from 11-15 September. I had a problem with the domain name, which required a few days to be solved. That’s where you see…

  • Jordan’s Universities: watching as we destroy our future

    I am the product of the Jordanian educational system in the late 1970s, 80’s and early 1990s. Not everything I learned came from the schools I attended, of course. There is family, friends, private reading and travel. But I can still can confidently say that I got an adequate education, with moments of great education.…

  • 10.10.10 One Day On Earth!

    One Day on Earth Participant Trailer from One Day On Earth on Vimeo. On 10/10/10, the entire world is being documented as part of an ambitious project called One Day on Earth (www.onedayonearth.org). Through their website, filmmakers, students, teachers and everyday inspired citizens representing EVERY country in the world have all coming together to film…

  • Wamda: it started with a spark, now in beta!

    For the past seven months, our company duo, SYNTAX and Spring has been working on their most revolutionary web project to date. What was just a sketchy idea by early 2010, has become a groundbreaking, living, breathing web venture: Wamda.com, a hub that, for the first time, creates a focal point for the Middle East’s…

  • Is Nokia trying to attract app developers or scare them away?

    Be warned. It’s time for another long Nokia post on 360east! Last week ago I was in Beirut to attend the first Nokia Levant Developers Forum. The fact that Nokia actually holds such local events and goes through the trouble and cost of flying people to Beirut shows you how hard the company is trying…

  • Rescue downtown Amman from the “Bab Al-7ara” attack!

    King Faisal Square in 1958. From Getty Images: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/3378711/Hulton-Archive Does the Amman Municipality and do Ammanis want that Amman’s downtown is turned into a a cheap-looking touristic area? Because that’s EXACTLY what is happening at an alarming speed. I had breakfast at Hashem, the famous Hummous and Fuul restaurant yesterday and then went for a…

  • This Tuesday: Come to Al-Balad Theater and meet the new (type)face of Amman

    SYNTAX and Al-Balad Theater present: “The New (Type)face of Amman” German type-design rising star Yanone will be telling the story of his Amman typeface, created for the Amman Municipality’s “Amman Brand” project in collaboration with SYNTAX. The result of this project is now “FF Amman”, a professional typeface marketed worldwide by FontShop, as one of…