Month: September 2009
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Grendizer creator Go Nagai coming to Amman!
A flying robot.. An his creator.. ..are coming to Amman!! Go Nagai, the man behind Grendizer is coming to Amman and giving two lectures. 7 October at 11 am at the Princess Sumaya University 8 October at the Royal Film Commission. This is fantastic. Details here. When I blogged about Grendizer five years ago, the…
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How disagreeing with the Jordan Times on Twitter will get you BLOCKED from their service!!
UPDATED: I had a very friendly chat with the Jordan Times Editor in Chief (who was totally unhappy about what happened with me on Twitter). Obviously, The Jordan Times does not condone the blocking of users from their service nor the style of the communication that was used by the person working on their Twitter…
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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…
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“Migrating to the Mac feels like immigrating to a first world nation”
A Facebook update by my friend Bilal Hijjawi inspired this “360east imitation” Click to enlarge a little bit
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Amman’s new brand starts making an appearance
Earlier this year, SYNTAX delivered the brand guidelines of the new Amman Brand to the Greater Municipality of Amman, which was the final delivery of a project that kept us totally immersed in Amman, its history, its people and its character for well over year. It was an intensive process of discovery, research, conceptualization, writing,…
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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…
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Suddenly, public transport is ‘cool’ for Arabs. Thank you Dubai.
Dubai Metro by Gulf News Arabs are car crazed. This is one generalization that is safe to make. And Arab elites, are big car crazed. That’s another generalization safe to make. No wonder that public transport systems across the Arab world have not really evolved since the 1960s. Increasingly fueled by easy oil money, and…
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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…
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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…
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Video: From Amman to Zarqa, by train!
Ikbis.com’s very own video master Mohammad Jaradat took a ride on the ancient train from Amman to Zarqa, and came back with an FANTASTIC video report. The video speaks for itself. The train, the stations, the reaction of the people and the areas it passes through together tell a tough story. Mohammad does it in…
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The Huffington Post on the Maktoob-Yahoo! deal: Giving hope.
Faisal Ghori did an excellent story for the Huffington Post on the Maktoob-Yahoo deal. The story’s focus is on how this deal gives hope to entrepreneurs in the region where hope is in short supply. The story also highlights Jordan as the region’s leading tech startup base. I am happy that this notion is becoming…
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The Nokia N900 phone/tablet: very promising departure from Symbian
Check out the really new video of the new Nokia N900. It’s officially an internet tablet, but its also a phone. Important fact: it’s not Symbian-based at all (which phones like the N97 and Xpressmusic 5800 use). No, this is Nokia’s “secret weapon” Maemo operating system (pronounced “My Mo”), which used to run on Nokia’s…