360east

Month: April 2009

  • Computers to be exempted from sales tax, says Jordan ICT Minister

    It was Déjà vu time. Jordan’s tech and telecom industry had a big lunch meeting with the Minister of ICT Bassem Rousan on Wednesday. All the old faces of the industry where there. It felt like 2000/2001 but minus the excitement and optimistic spirit which characterized Jordan’s IT drive earlier in the decade. Sure enough,…

  • Mayor Omar Maani comments on 360east regarding the Sanaya Amman skyscraper ads

    My post about the Sanaya Amman advertising campaign, has attracted the attention of Mayor Omar Maani himself. Commenting on that post he wrote: I must agree the adverts look like the towers are touching the heavens when no other building dared do this. Although more than sixty stories in height, I assure all that it…

  • Jordan’s islamists have a real problem with women’s rights

    Photo by Al Ghad. A media battle is being waged between Jordanian women’s organizations and islamist forces over the intention of the government to drop some of its reservation to the global agreement on women’s rights CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women). Both Jordan’s largest islamist party, the islamic…

  • Domus Arabia magazine launched, Jordanians all over its pages!

    An Arabic edition of the the famous Italian Arachitecture and Design journal “Domus”. Now that’s interesting. My first encounter with Domus was during the days of my architectural studies in the early 1990’s. So it was a really pleasant surprise when I saw the first issue of Domus in Arabic on a newsstand in Abu…

  • Hey! Journalists! Leave those kids alone!

    I can declare with full pride that I am a normal person. Yes I am! I don’t suffer from “psychological emptiness” nor from “blindly following the ways of the West”. I am free from all these “societal diseases” and I a normal member of the Male/Arab/Jordanian/Eastern society. Isn’t that great? How do I know I…

  • Found in a bathroom of a Lebanese restaurant in Dubai

    I found this in the WC of a Lebanese restaurant in Dubai. I assume that it depicts a scene from old Beirut. Probably from the 1930’s. What jumped at me was the fact that there was an electrical tramway there. The tramway car even has a number. It seems that, in the early 20th century,…

  • Flavored water: H2Oh! vs Masafi

    While a lot of people cringe at the idea of flavored mineral water, I am definitely a member of such products’ target market Yes, a glass of pure water is sometimes the best thing for thirst, but I just find drinking a lot of ‘plain’ water hard and/or boring. That’s why I was looking forward…

  • Objectified: a film on design an its (un)intended consequences

    From Gary Hustwit, the maker of the film Helvetica (yes a film about a typeface, and a really good one at that) comes Objectified, a highly anticipated documentary about design, particularly product design. It features some of the world’s most famous industrial designers such as Karim Rashid, Jonathan Ive (Apple) and David Kelly (Ideo) What’s…

  • This insane skyscraper ad abuses Amman!

    This shocking ad has been running in the media for the past 2 weeks or so. At a time where the real estate developers have stopped advertising because the global financial crisis has brought their business model to a standstill, Dubai’s Limitless is still managing to advertise in Amman, but with a disastrous ad. The…

  • Who is responsible for Jordan’s horrible internet latency?

    Anybody who had the chance to use the internet in Europe, immediately notices that there is something wrong with web browsing in Jordan. Regular readers of 360east probably know that I am an early adopter of Orange Internet’s 8 Mbit line. My various internet speed test have shown that my DSL line is not too…