Billion Dollar Baby

It’s less than four years old, something like 40% of new sign-ups to it don’t last longer than a month before wandering away and it hasn’t generated a red cent in revenues. And yet last Friday, venture capitalists invested a reported $100 million into Twitter, effectively valuing the fledgeling company at $1bn – more than General Motors was worth when it went bust.

Another way of looking at it would be to value every single tweet ever tweeted at $1 - Twitter recently went past the billion tweet barrier.

With something like 54 million visitors a month and a goal, according to documents leaked to TechCrunch, of netting a billion users by 2013, Twitter certainly captures a lot of eyeballs. That billion user figure isn't ridiculous, BTW - Twitter's already smashed its own growth targets. And it’s eyeballs that make all the difference in today’s Adword world – Google's annual revenues of $21bn-odd are made up in the vast majority of clicks – each netting a few cents. Those revenues, to put them into perspective, are worth something like a sixth of global annual television advertising revenue and are also equivalent to total US print advertising spending - the latter falling as fast as Internet advertising spend is rising.

With much speculation as to how Twitter is actually going to make any money, some form of advertising is top of most pundits’ agendas. The documents leaked to TechCrunch appear to show that Twitter isn’t really quite sure what to do with the goose it has found itself holding. And despite that goose never having laid an egg, some smart money is betting that when it does, it’ll be gold.

What makes Twitter neat is that its open APIs mean that lots of smart people are dreaming up new ways to use all those eyeballs – there’s a long list of things you can do with Twitter that don’t actually involve Tweeting at all. You can share files, music, pictures, video or links, even make payments - that last link is a service called TwitPay that lets you link your PayPal account with Twitter, which means you can now buy and sell stuff with a Tweet.

So Twitter is becoming a sort of central switch for people who are talking and sharing stuff, a way of flagging up the availability of news, information and content. And, in fact, that's how many of us are now using Twitter - to share information, links and stuff we find interesting.

The stuff itself isn't on Twitter - but Twitter is how we send the signal to go get it.

And that's where Google came out of absolutely nowhere to become a world-straddling colossus. Nothing we want is on Google - it's where we go to find it.

Which is why I think Twitter could be as big as Google and why I think the smart money is being, well, smart...

PS: I know, I know. To be honest, I'm not really a rabid Twitter evangelist. I just look and sound like one. It'll pass.

US Public 'No Confidence' In Media Shock Horror

Image source: Pew Research Center

A poll carried out in the USA and published this week has shown that the US public have no faith in the credibility of media. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press poll found that some 71% of respondents did not feel that media got the facts straight in news reports, 63% felt that information from the media was ‘often off base’. Only 26% of people surveyed believed that the press took care to avoid bias.

71% of people depended on TV as their primary news source. But, this figure really fascinated me, 42% depend on the Internet (people could pick more than one medium, so you’re not going to add up to 100). And only 33% on newspapers. That Web figure compares to the 6% that relied on the Web ten years ago, incidentally.

This all takes place in a year when Google’s Q1 revenues equated to total US print advertising spending – and where newspaper ad sales dropped by some 29% in the first half of 2009. Did the Internet drop ‘em or the recession drop ‘em? It’s academic – Internet revenues went up so, whatever you slice it, print (and, incidentally, television and radio) is being eclipsed by the Internet.

It’s been a slow erosion of confidence, not an overnight one. Back in 1985, 55% of Americans believed their media generally got things right – this year, that’s down to 29%. The report shows a general consensus emerging regardless of political belief, but also highlights an average increase of 16% in people who do not believe the press is professional.

70% of those surveyed believed that news organisations ‘try to cover up their mistakes’. 74% of people believed that the press was biased in favour of big business and powerful people.

So we have a broad and growing distrust of mainstream media that you would have to consider to be close to fundamental and a clear movement to increased reliance on online media. That’s not rocket science, but these is numbers.

It’s always nice to be able to back your beliefs with numbers.

Hotel Internet Charges Are Iniquitous

Image by Moha' Al-Bastaki via Flickr

One thing that has long annoyed me is the widespread practice of charging hotel guests for Internet access. Apparently European hotels are starting to realise that this is not actually funny, clever or mature but here in the Middle East, every hotel I have visited so far has charged guests - typically Dhs100 per day or the equivalent. In Europe it's typically 20 Euro, in the UK £20 and even in the US up to $20.

And this despite the fact that access to the Internet is equivalent to the provision of a utility - some 47% of guests in surveys confirming that free Internet access was an influencer on their choice of hotel.

But it's not just the fact that they charge. It's how MUCH they charge.

At hotel rates, you're paying the equivalent of Dhs3,100 ($850) per month for Internet access. If you apply the common hotel markup of five times cost, you're still looking at Dhs620 ($169) a month.

To put that into perspective, Etisalat's most expensive BusinessOne Internet package, a 4Mbps access speed and unlimited usage, comes in cheaper at Dhs2795. And for one sixth of a hotel's charges for a month's worth of Internet, Etisalat will give you 4Mbps domestic Internet, telephone and television.

So here's a friendly hint for the UAE's hoteliers and, in fact, hoteliers the world over. Chaps, when Etisalat looks good in comparison to your business, it's time to rethink your business.

Weird Phish

Everyone’s favourite telco sent me an email. PHISHING WARNING! Hollered the subject line.

Lovely. I opened it. I mean, at least it wasn't a blasted text at midnight...

Phishing emails are them what pretends to be from a bank or someone and that get you to give up personal information so that the evil phishers can steal your identity, children, things and money.

“Etisalat will never email links” said the mail in reassuring green as it warned me of the dangers of phishing emails in stentorian, warning tones.

There then followed a series of six pointers for those wishing to improve their internet security.

You guessed it – item six contained... a link.

UAE Unblocks flikr?

Image via Wikipedia

There has been much confusion over this one: www.flickr.com remains blocked by the TRA, but you can access the site (well, you could at the time of writing) by using this link (thanks to Nagham!).

However, any attempt to click through to an image results in a block. I used 'trees' as my test subject, as I thought I might as well kick off with something subversive - and got the usual cheery message.

So flickr remains blocked, our little burst of optimism has petered out and life goes on as usual, without the ability to effectively do Yahoo! Image Searches.

Somehow, someone, somewhere (in a very big, secure, server farm in the States, I rather think) has missed a link. But they got the rest of it down pat, thank you very much.

Go home people. There's nothing to see here. Move along, move along...

Webcam

A Webcam over Gaza.

You can go here and get a tiny little idea of what it must to be like to sit in your building and look out over a city that is slowly being blown back to the dark ages.

A normal looking city. Pretty Jordanian, really, no?

Full of ordinary people. Families. Decent people. Good people. Bad people. Smart people. Dumb people.

You know, people.

They've been living in blockade for 18 months. A blockade, effectively sanctions, that has been more tightly applied than those of Iran or, back in the day, Iraq. A blockade that has been so absolute, it has even included banning media and cutting off supplies of fuel to the only power station. Food is scarce and fuel to cook it on even scarcer. Now the water shortage is starting to bite deep.

So they can only sit by (because there is no work) and watch the black plumes of smoke rising over the buildings, watch the occasional streak of silver in the sky, the rumble and the little puff before the sound wave of the explosion hits. And then watch as the puff turns into black, roiling clouds of smoke that will rise up into the dirty air and smear across the skyline.

Now you can join them. Leave the camera on in a tab so that you can listen to the traffic noise, the honks of lorries and then the crump of high explosive and the sirens that follow it.

Now you, too, can be in Gaza.

Geekdom

For such a smart company, Google can be incredibly daft at times. Do you ever get an Arabic interface on www.google.com because you've been redirected to www.google.ae which automatically decides you're an Arabic speaker?

Yes?

Then prepare to wire me Dhs 100 for I have the answer to your woes. Go here. Now click on the third link down (Google: no country redirect) and click OK. A plug-in will be installed that fixes the Google "I assume you're an Arabic speaker because you're browsing from the Middle East's biggest international jet-set hot spot, tourist hub and international community" tomfoolery.

No, no, don't thank me. Just wire the cash or go to Authonomy and read Space. Did I mention it was now at number 9? Oh, OK. Sorry...

Search

As you may be aware, I (like many other people with blogs) do like to occasionally amuse myself by taking a peek at the strange searches that led various people to swing by this dank and cobwebby corner of the Internet.

People do search for such very strange things. Thanks to the arcane and mysterious illuminati of Google, some of the strangest searches rank this silly little blog as a world leading authority on some very random things indeed. But then people are looking for some wacky things, too...

Fake windscreen crack
There really are some pranksters out there, aren’t there? What a hoot, eh? Just add this simple plastic crack decal to your friend’s windshield and then watch his horrified face as he contemplates the $500 bill to replace it! Good grief. Not available here...

The Stranglers in Dubai
Yayyy! October 3rd! Not a strange search, but certainly a result!

Twisted chicken
This was a picture search. Strange people! I do like ‘twisted chicken’, though – a chicken rendered cynical and vengeful by a lifetime of failure and frustration or a fowl smashed on an insane cocktail of Bacardi Breezers, amyl nitrate and veterinary strength Quaaludes?

Fakhreddine restaurant Amman
I remain amazed that searches for this most revered and excellent of Arabic restaurants, famed throughout Jordan and, indeed, the whole region still lead to Mr Daft’s Blog. Damn!
And if that’s not bad enough, another top 20 search result is that pesky Fat Expat!

Look, I give up. It’s strictly against the rulebook of this blog, but I feel guilty about this one. Here’s some useful information:

Fakhreddine Restaurant
1st Circle
P.O.box 840524
Amman 11184
Jordan
Tel: 4652399 / fax: 4641792
Tel: 5515419 / fax: 5535170

Was Lawrence buggered by Turks?
How’s that for a result? Admittedly you have to search through five pages of sites that aren’t nearly as authoritative as this one, but someone not only did that but actually clicked on the link here, too! No answers here, of course, just some silliness. Damn!

Under the sink tap mineralisation
The winter nights must simply fly by, no?

Ramadan at Al Awir Central Jail
I still don't know how they got here...

Non-animal enzyme powdered cheese
Apparently this blog is the fourth most definitive place in the world for people searching for non-animal enzyme powdered cheese. Which I take as an enormous and deeply strange compliment!

du du du dah dah dah
Imagine – you think you’re about to get the lyrics of the Police’s slightly nonsensical single or even a sneaky MP3 or two and all you get is me whingeing about telephone companies in the UAE. Damn!

"All my thoughts and fancies are concentrated on you"
Isn’t that the oddest collection of words to search the Internet for? What’s more, all your search results are concentrated on this post, too – all one of them!!!

Less strange, but still possibly interesting:

Russian girls Dubai
A long time ago I wrote about a Russian girl called Alla Khrapovitskaya, who had been horrifically attacked in Satwa. Ever since, I’ve been picking up searches for all sorts of Slavic peccadilloes and some unpleasant searches which came here because of the description of the nature of the attack. And no, I’m not repeating the words again.

Chelmsford Club New Delhi
You want to become a member of the poshest, most ‘back in the Raj’ style club in new Delhi and so you look for it on the Internet. And all you get is me having a laugh. Damn!

Acer Gulf
Much to my delight, having slagged them off mildly last year for a daft promotional campaign that saw tens of thousands of puzzled Gulf News readers in receipt of a small, black and (as I subsequently proved) utterly useless stone, when you search ‘em you still get me hanging out of a tree, hooting and throwing nuts. Damn!


And finally... searches that actually worked!

5p bag m&s customer reaction
A top ten search result – this leads to my grumpy post complaining about Marks and Spencers’ £12 million greenwash. And I am glad.

For some reason people have actually been searching for the ‘Du test’, as well!

I’m delighted to say that if you search Aquafina UAE or Aquafina TDS or many other things Aquafina, you get to my less than complimentary posts about that insidiously augmented bottled water product. Added to that, a lot of people have searched for various things related to consumer concerns about Pringles and, I hope, found some pertinent information here. At least one should aspire to being occasionally useful rather than purely frivolous, no?

Dosh

An interesting piece in today's The National by Angela Giuffrida regarding the developers vs blogs debate. Apart from quoting that idiot McNabb, the piece does well. But the following quote is something I thought other people posting on blogs might find of interest...

While there are no defamation laws in Dubai specifically governing online content, an online author found guilty of making false accusations against an individual or company faces similar penalties to those charged with defamation using other forms of media. “The penalties for such crimes are imprisonment of between one and six months and/or a fine of up to Dh5,000,” said Miriam McGregor, an associate at the law firm Clyde & Co.

So I hope you've all got a spare Dhs 5,000, just in case. The full story's here. Sorry about the PR bloke in it...

Word

I own the word ‘Numklefutumch’!

It originated from The Young Ones, the brilliant 1980s British comedy series led by Rick Mayall and Adrian Edmonson, Nigel Planer and Christopher Ryan and even featuring the occasional burst of Alexi Sayle. There’s a scene in the episode 'Boring' where two of Satan’s little helpers have an argument: one’s called Orgo and one’s called Numklefutumch. Numklefutumch has a problem because, as a little devil, nobody ever says his name, so he’s never called to earth to do evil, while Orgo is always getting stuff because people say ‘shall we go to eat out or go to the cinema tonight?’

At that point, Neil The Hippy tries to read something in the newspaper and pronounces it “Numklefutumch”, calling our little devil to earth in order to get up to some naughtiness.

So it’s word that, oddly, stayed with me. I started using it in the phrase, ‘faster than you can say Numklefutumch’.

And now, thanks to the strange dynamics of the Internet and search, if you google it, all you get is me.

I shall die a happy man... Odd, marginal and perhaps irrelevant, maybe, but happy nonetheless.

Footnote: As you will see from the comments, I screwed up faster than you can say "nmkl pjkl ftmch"... :)

Spanked

Gulf News today carries, on page 41, a slightly strange advertisement for telco Du’s Unlimited Blackberry offer. The ad, which struck me as unusually weak in a market slopping over the brim with weak advertising, offers “unlimited wireless access to email, calendar, messaging and internet through seamless and secured office connectivity”. It features a sketch of two aliens looking amazed at a Blackberry, having discarded a number of other useless gadgets.

Unusually, Gulf News has also, on page 36, spanked the offer editorially. GN’s Nadia Saleem not unreasonably points out that the ‘unlimited’ Du offer is actually limited to 1 Gb of data transfer, after which usage is charged at Dhs 0.01 per kbyte (or, in other words, a cool Dhs 10 per Mbyte). When contacted about the fact that its ‘unlimited’ offer is actually limited (a slightly paradoxical thing, I’m sure most would agree), Du apparently told our Nadia, “someone might use the data access facility to download movies all day or use the mobile as a modem to transfer large amounts of data”.

Ooh! The rotters!

Firstly, the point is surely that in today's 'always on' world, the data volume is not the charged unit in the vast majority of internet transactions. Package prices are the way forward and the amount of data used in a given package is not germane. The internet is not circuit switched - you pays for the pipe - access not volume. Operators billing volumetrically for access are sort of cheating, really. Particularly when they have mobile IP infrastructures.

That apart, I personally received something like 250Mbytes of useful* email this month, despite being on leave for three weeks of it - and the month's not over yet. If I include the junk, we're looking at a mailbox of over 300 Mbytes and I haven't started allowing for internet access, streaming video or any other cool apps or toys. So it's actually conceivable that a heavy user would actually want 1Gb of access.

What’s missing here are a few words on their advertisement to explain that they don’t actually mean unlimited when they say unlimited. Perhaps interestingly, Etisalat, the big telco, doesn’t limit its unlimited offer.

I bet the GN advertising sales boys aren’t talking to our Nads today, though...


PS: I know I said I wasn't posting for a couple of days, but I couldn't resist it...

*Useful is a relative term.

Kipp

I do agree wholeheartedly with Kipp's slightly grumbly blogpost about the RTA's adoption of social media.

If they're really getting hardcore about online media, they'd do well to start reading some of the reaction from 'customers' on the UAE's blogs. Although I suspect that when it comes to true 'customer feedback', we're looking less like joining a conversation and more like sticking our fingers in our ears and shouting lalalalalala until all the naughty people go away...

And this at a time when the RTA's Salik website still, a year after the launch of the toll, isn't fully functional and doesn't actually provide a fully transactional service.

A Facebook page doesn't make you cool - but it certainly can make you look like an organisation that doesn't get the dynamics and potential of the Internet but which is ticking the 'things we feel we should look like we're doing' boxes...

Cuil

Thanks, as usual when it comes to geek stuff, to the usual Italian gent.

There's a new search engine in town. It's called Cuil, pronounced 'cool' after the Irish folk hero Fionn mac Cumhaill or if you're American, apparently, Finn Mac Cuill. Fionn gained all the knowledge of the world by sucking his thumb. It's complicated and involves a salmon.

There are some potentially cuil things about cool, including the fact that its results aren't simply link based (ie: it doesn't rank sites higher just because they've got more links to them) but also promise to be more contextually relevant. Search results are categorised where relevant, which means if you search for 'Dubai', you get tabs which include Dubai Hotels, Jobs in Dubai and Dubai Airport. They missed tabs for 'Dubai Traffic and Dubai Rent' but it's already looking like a pretty different approach. Y0u also get a pretty smart drop down menu of categories, including one on 'neighbourhoods of Dubai'.

It's brave enough. I'm old enough to remember a world before the Yahoo! Google duopoly: Alta Vista, Lycos, Webcrawler and a million other search engines once jostled for our attention and our searches. Cuil offers, for the first time in years, something different and an alternative to the leviathan. Only time will tell whether it's going to work out a winner. But for now, take a tootle along and check it out before the servers break - everyone's talking about the Cuil new kid on the block and their servers are already creaking under the strain of all that buzz...

Seat

If you've got a little time on your hands, make a cup of coffee, sit down and relax and take 15 minutes or so out to read this 10,250 word post from UAE based blogger and Etisalat customer service victim Sam. It documents his 43-day attempt to get his Internet connection upgraded from 1Mb to 2Mb.

It'll likely resonate with you if you've ever dealt with Etisalat or any other monopoly provider. It'll resonate if you occasionally cry into the void at the sheer frustration of dealing with call centre culture. It'll make you angry. It'll make you marvel at how he didn't commit any acts of violence, vandalism or inappropriate behaviour.

And, with a bit of luck, it'll get widely publicised and lead to a thorough-going witch hunt over at Etisalat towers. Because it's the voice of a frustrated, annoyed, ignored, disrespected and utterly impotent consumer being jerked around by people who represent disempowered, dumb, rote process gone mad.

Enjoy!

Tunes

The Internet has made a huge number of things easier to do. The processes of disintermediation, whereby a supply chain is shortened by ‘cutting out the middle man’ and simplification, whereby complex transactions are reduced to a ‘one click’ action have meant that we can now conduct transactions across a vast range of products, services and geographies. For the past few years, for example, we have bought gifts from friends and family online rather than buying stuff locally, packing it up and posting it. So a customer from Dubai can review, select and buy a product from Latin America from a French website and have it shipped to Scotland – and do it in a few minutes. If you stop to think about that, it’s pretty mad.

But one area where the Internet has actually complicated things is in music. You see, I can’t buy music online, unless I buy and ship a CD to myself. Apple’s iTunes service doesn’t support the Middle East and neither does Amazon.com or Napster – if anyone out there knows of a company that will sell music to the Middle East, please do tell me. In the meantime, I’ve used my UK credit card and a UK address, so now I’m buying music from America using a fake British identity and sending it to Dubai. Which is also mad, albeit a different mad.

And don’t even get me started on the brilliant online music streaming service Pandora. That’s closed to us and I’d have bought a huge amount more music if it wasn’t.

What’s amazing about this is that the music industry is complaining about online piracy and the like – it’s hardly any wonder that people unable to get the legal product will buy the illegal one. And in the Middle East they are doing so in remarkable numbers. In fact, one Lebanese colleague was famously surprised to be told that you could actually buy music online rather than downloading it from a sharing site.

So I was delighted to read in that rather natty newspaper The National that GETMO Arabia has been launched – a download site that offers access to online music, movies and the like. Over 800,000 titles, apparently. It’s nice and easy, you just go to www.getmo.com and sign up. The site looks smart enough, the log-in process is simple and effective. It’s great all the way up to actually buying some music. For a start the selection is extremely limited – you’ll find way more choice at the airport duty free. And when you actually do find something you want to buy (it did take me a while. I’m not your average R&B buying Dubai punter) you discover that you’re expected to subscribe – at a hefty €5 per month if you want unlimited downloads – the next plan down at €2 per month supports a whole three downloads. And that before you even get told what price each download is!

So that’s where I stopped. Because I’m not paying €5 per month for unlimited access to a highly limited choice of music at an unknown price. Nope, I’ll stick with my daft iTunes account – and feel sorry for anyone that doesn’t have a UK address and credit card up their sleeves, because the region’s music fans – and music industry – still doesn’t have a decent download site that can be accessed from here.

And that ensures the online music piracy in the Middle East will go on. You have to admire the music industry – a bunch of yo-yo toting cretins if ever there were one.

Darwin

The chances are that you've heard of the Darwin Awards. One of the cruellest and yet funniest corners of the Internet, the Darwin Awards are given to people who have done the world a service by removing themselves from the gene pool. It's a celebration of the many pointless, stupid and utterly dumb ways in which people choose to die. And it's very funny indeed.

The most wonderful thing about the Darwins is that they're real. Each award is sourced and must be backed up by a 'proper' print reference from a known medium. A couple of examples from this month's batch for you follow. And yes, I did say this month's. You can subscribe to the Darwin Awards newsletter (as I, in fact, do) and get a monthly update of clownish carnage. The fact that there enough utterly stupid deaths going on to keep this thing going on a monthly basis is in itself something of a worry.

I do hope you enjoy these. You can go to the website here.

NEW YORK: Joe, 20, was drunkenly driving through Wayne County farmland in upstate New York. With the utmost of inebriated care, he steered his car directly into a ditch and knocked over a powerline. Oops! How could he rescue his car from the ditch without getting a DUI?

The only way out was to steal a nearby farm tractor, and winch the car out himself. So he aproached the nearest farmhouse, managed to start a tractor, and motored over to the scene of the accident. He then proceeded to drive several tons of metal into the downed power lines.

Goodbye Joe. Hello Darwin Award.

CZECH REPUBLIC: Steel is valuable, especially the high grade alloy used in steel cable. Scrap metal dealers do not ask questions. They pay in cash. And a good supply of cables can be found in elevator shafts.

This particular goldmine was a towering shaft inside an empty grainery near Zatec, 40 miles northwest of Prague. The cable was tightly fastened, and the far end of it disappeared into the shadowy distance above.

After substantial wear and tear on a hacksaw, our man finally cut through the strong steel cable. At that instant, the counterbalance, no longer held in check, started to move silently downwards, accelerating until it reached the bottom of the shaft.

Result: one proud winner of a "terminal velocity" Darwin Award.

VIETNAM: A rolling stone is not all that gathers no moss. Three Vietnam men scavenging for scrap metal found an unexploded 500-pound bomb perched atop a hill near Hanoi, and decided to retrieve it with a little help from Sir Isaac Newton. After all, gravity is free. As they rolled the bomb down the hillside, it detonated, blasting a four-meter crater and sending all three entrepreneurs to a face to face meeting with their deceased hero.

Conference

On June 1st in Amman, the iblogimedia conference will take place. This is the Middle East's first social media conference. I'm sort of mixing work and pleasure by posting about it here, because we're involved with supporting the event but, hey, rules are made to be broken, no?

Whether it'll do anyone any good to talk about Web 2.0 for a day is yet to be seen, but I am personally hopeful that the event will help to bring greater awareness of consumer generated media in the Middle East to a wider audience, share experience and ideas and also help organisations to define ways of gaining benefit from working with social media. There are some really cool speakers and panellists lined up already.

I look forward to seeing you there... :)

Disappointed

I do enjoy having the occasional peek at the searches that have ended up referring hapless wanderers of the Internet to this lonely little blog and I like to share the cream of the crop now and then. So here are some more of the searches that ended up getting decent, law abiding people misdirected to this dusty little corner of the internet. You do wonder sometimes what on earth people are up to.

Anyway. I have also appended the best advice I can think of, just in case the disappointed searchers ever try and repeat the search. I feel bad they should have wasted their time here instead of finding the thing they most sought in the world at that moment...

ideas for making fake human kidneys for a project
Let’s, for a second, put aside any natural concern about quite what project we’re talking about (I mean, is this project biology lecture or project scare the hell out of your little sister by filling her wendy house with body parts?), I’d maybe look at using balloons filled with sand. You’ll have a hard time getting a balloon that’s the same colour as a kidney if you don’t live in the Middle East, but my local Lal’s Supermarket sells some really dodgy party balloons and you’re sure to find a couple of kidney coloured ones in each bag. They’ll also be deliciously, realistically, squishy. Now just cover them in lots of tomato ketchup. Don’t let any policemen find you wandering around with a bag full of human kidneys. For some reason it makes them suspicious.

Are there big parks in Ajman
Yes. But there are bigger ones in Sharjah and Dubai.

Are Russian girls grumpy
Generally only if provoked, I find. Otherwise they’re often really quite lovely. However, all girls can be grumpy for no particular reason for a few days every month and so consequently they’re generally always best approached with caution.

Is traffic in Dubai bad?
Are you kidding me? Is there someone in the world that really hasn’t appreciated this, the one abiding truth in the city of a thousand cranes? Yes the traffic in Dubai is bad – gut-wrenchingly, heart-achingly, distressingly, road-rage-inducingly bad. It’s about as bad as you’d want to get: hours of sitting around in pointless, aggressive, lane-swapping lines of epic proportions, the crawling lines of cars laced with belching fumes as they stand on shimmering tarmac. People regularly pitch late for meetings: events are planned around traffic patterns or alternatives found to avoid dragging people through the misery. I do hope that starts to give you some idea of the picture here. And no, the traffic regulator, the RTA, isn’t really helping very much as far as I can see – although we can only hope that its long term vision and plan are better than its short term communications.

Note to RTA: putting up roadside advertisements trumpeting your achievements in areas where the traffic has been rendered immobile by your actions is not the way to people’s hearts.

Dubai lalaland
You pretty much nailed that one on the head.

You need to leave Dubai and look up towards the sky.
If you like. I hear more and more people talking about quitting Dubai as prices go through the roof and the traffic makes each day a grind. The whole rental/property thing isn’t much fun, either. And it’s about as multidimensional as a poster of Victoria Beckham, but personally I’m still highly amused by the place.

Strangled chicken
Strange one, this. I can’t shake the nagging suspicion that this search is somehow linked to some strange perversity that I haven’t yet encountered. But maybe I’m just being a little too salacious.

Is a promotional stone valuable?
Not if it comes from Acer! LOL!

Sad cat
Some little things make all this worth doing, honestly. I am relatively proud of the fact that if you search Google Images for the image ‘Sad cat’, which several people appear to have done, you get to me on the second page of rather sickening results (yeah, it would be better if it were the first, but you takes what you can get). Sadly for those beguiled by the cutesy kitten, you get the following text directly underneath:

“Am I the only person in the world who thinks that the only thing less funny than the much discussed LOL Cats is being boiled to death in your own tears? I freely confess to failing to see the purpose or humour in this most pathetic of memes. Cutesy, dumbed down and with little originality or witticism, they synthesise the worst of ‘Ahhh, look at kitty!’ with a touch of ‘Who loves the naughty kitty then?’ It’s enough to make you puke.”

Take that, cat lovers! :)

Blocked

They're at it again. According to Emirates Business 24x7, Internet access is to be liberalised.

Before you get all excited, it's important to understand what the word liberalised means. You probably thought, like many people, it meant something like 'to make or to become more favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs'.

Progress, in this case, means extending the site blocking policy that Etisalat currently supports to its competitor Du and formalising the criteria to be applied to what content is to be blocked. That includes 'dating websites': Emirates Business, in its incisive report on the move, quotes a spokesman for the UAE's Telecom Regulatory Authority, the TRA, as saying that sections of social networking websites such as Facebook that encouraged dating would be banned but that residents would have access to the website excluding those parts.

Let us be very clear here, perhaps clearer than we have been over our use of the word liberalisation. Social networking results in opening up channels between people of every origin, creed and colour to enjoy dialogue, to share their thoughts, creations and experiences. It's really quite important.

We're not talking about blocking commercial pornography, sexual or blasphemous content here. We're talking about stopping people, individuals, exchanging information over an open platform.

It does strike me that if you can't deal with what other people have to say, or can't stand the thought that the people close to you cannot deal with the moral challenges of unfettered thought, I'm not really sure that the answer is sticking your fingers in your ear and shouting 'Lalalalalalalala' until they go away.

But I am sure that these blocking policies have the potential to continue retarding the adoption, innovation and use of these emerging technologies in the region. Liberalisation is an inexcusable misuse of language to describe this move, both on the part of the regulator that used it and the newspaper that allowed it to pass unchallenged.

Cable

It struck me this morning how much this FLAG/SEA ME WE cable outage must be hurting our good friends over at Du Towers given that their network is based on Internet Protocol telephony.

Poor old Du. It must be galling for them not to be able to take over the whole market by slashing prices left right and centre and so not realise one of the main upside benefits of an IP network, while at the same time suffering from the down-side of having an IP network - being horribly exposed to service outages when people drop anchors on your international cable infrastructure.

One of the reasons why the whole country didn't flock to Du when it launched was that the regulator blocked any price competition - mad, when you have an IP based operator launching against a ruggedly circuit-switched incumbent. However, in a perverse sort of way, Du is being paid off for being a not terribly interesting competitor, because it's able to charge circuit-switched telephone rates for an IP network - an absolutely enormous profit margin.

That this state of affairs exists because the regulator is so interested in protecting the vested interests represented by former monopoly and still massively dominant telco Etisalat is undoubted. That it is also artificially halting progress in the market is also undoubted.

However, the fact remains that the Du network is utterly reliant on the Internet to carry its international traffic - and that the recent outages have enabled a quietly gleeful Etisalat to announce that it is helping Du out. Du's response is evident in today's newspapers, a faintly ridiculous slice of blablabla press release announcing that there were now 1.5 million Du customers, which Gulf News for some reason carried faithfully in all its Technicolour puke-inducing glory.

So I called my pal who has a Du mobile and asked how his service had been, rather hoping (I must confess) for a horror story to pop on the blog. But he told me that he'd had no problems at all, that service had been completely unaffected by the recent Internet outages.

As he chatted to me, he started to break up until he was completely inaudible in a sea of pops, clicks and gaps. So I'm not really sure if the Du network has been affected by the cable outages or that's just the service quality he's used to. And I don't know anyone else who uses Du to ask - even though there are, apparently, 1.5 million of them out there...