Google and Wael Ghonim - The Horns of a Dilemma

Image via WikipediaEgypt has a hero, albeit a reluctant one, in the shape of Wael Ghonim, the young activist behind the 'We are all Khaled Said' Facebook page. Imprisoned in a blindfold for twelve days, his release apparently brokered by Egyptian businessman Naguib Suweiris, Ghonim is now free and his first words to media were eagerly picked up and relayed around the world - his bravery and resolution were inspirational and are being widely credited with reinvigorating protests yesterday.

The media, as media does, scrambled for details on this new hero. Until his disappearance, Ghonim was an anonymous figure outside a small circle of activists organising the growing protest movement using online tools - although his Facebook page reached over 50,000 people. Luckily, he is a marketing manager at Google, so his official Google piccie was quickly procured and everyone had a nice, clear image of Ghonim. In front of a Google logo. The media also had a nice, snappy explanation of who Ghonim was. He was a 'Google Executive'.

'Google Executive' is brilliant. It's a neat, two-word characterisation that gives the guy some weight, some background, gives us a sense of just who this guy is. Together with the photo, it also neatly ties this young revolutionary activist who was at least partly responsible for bringing Egypt out onto the street and its government to its knees, to Google. Dubai newspaper Seven Days went even further today, with its splash screaming 'Google Chief Slams Traitor Claims'. 'Google Chief' reads so much better than 'young activist', does it not?

Google must be torn. On the one hand, there's little doubt that Larry Page, Sergei Brin and many others over at Goog Mansions would privately support and applaud the freedom of expression, activism and hope that Ghonim undoubtedly represents, let alone his courage. But on the other hand, this is a young man whose actions have helped threaten to bring down a government. His strong association with Google, which does business with, and increasingly depends on the support of, governments (some of which have much in common with that in Egypt), must be giving Google a great deal of pause for thought. It opens Google to the possible implication of involvement in all of this, if only  implicit involvement - surely, critics would aver, a company with the technological resources of Google would know what was going on here. The charge is bunkum, but that rarely stops charges being laid. And Ghonim must have been getting up to at least some of this stuff on company time, surely?

Yet Google can't sack Ghonim. The outcry around the world as this company that stands for the values of freedom and choice sacks a hero would be enormous. Can it champion him? Not without ensuring virtually every government in the world is deeply suspicious about the company, its motives and its staff. All governments, as Wikileaks has taught us, have something to be ashamed of. The best outcome for the corporate people at Google would probably be a quiet resignation and a few public words thanking Google and exonerating it of involvement.

You can imagine the conversation. 'You call him.' 'No, you call him.'

Service With A Smile.

Image via WikipediaMany of us are inspired to post on blogs by life's little hiccups rather than its delights. It's the part of human nature that fills our news with death and destruction, with Chi-Chi the panda's new baby relegated to the furry animal slot at the very back end of slow news days broadcasts. It's why the traffic slows for the accident, but not for the family picnicking on the verge. We're more interested in the negative than we are in good times. It's one of the reasons why Gulf News' local news pages are such an utterly compelling read.

Well, I'm bucking the trend. I've got something good to say. Al Ghandi Electronics, the distributor for Philips, has the best customer service out there. Bar none. It's stunning.

The washing machine's 's on/off switch bust. Put in a call to the boys and girls at Al Ghandi's Dubai service centre and got a woman who used my mobile number to access my record on their database, which held all our details from the last service visits they'd made. She told me the service callout would take 2-3 days as they had to ensure they had the part to repair our machine. I got a text shortly after with a service ticket number.

Two days later, in the morning, I got a call from the technician who wanted to set an appointment to come to the house. He asked for directions and told me precisely what the service fees would be. We agreed on 5pm and that was lovely.

At 5pm precisely two blue-shirted technicians were outside the house. Fifteen minutes later they left. They were pleasant, knowledgeable and efficient. Our washing machine was fixed.

This isn't the first time they've come out. They fixed the broken seal on our oven a few months ago and we'd called them out years ago for our last washing machine (the reason we bought Philips again was the service we'd received). Every time they've left me looking like a beached guppy as they drove pleasantly away, waving goodbye.

It always amazes me that this amazes me. But it stands as amazing customer service here in the UAE. So this is for them. Why the rest of 'em can't do this is beyond me.

Awesome

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeI know I'm a grumpy old man, but I do have a number of pet hates. You know, things that any reasonable human being would rail against like grocers' apostrophes (Avocadoe's 2 for £1) or the awful American habit that has crept across the Atlantic of referring to everything as awesome. It's all too often accompanied by a specific pronunciation, AWESUUUUM! It helps to assume the expression of a particularly stupid chihuahua presented with a chocolate a moment before it has been smacked on the back of the head with a cricket bat.

It's like a linguistic background radiation. That Kit-Kat was awesome! You breathed in and out again? Awesome! This is all so totally, awesome! Wouldn't it be awesome if they have fish on as a special today?

No. It wouldn't.

I think my least favourite thing about this over-use of the blasted word is that if a Kit-Kat is awesome, what is the sight of two million Egyptians gathered in brotherhood in Cairo's Tahrir Square? What is the sight of them praying together, Christians and Muslims alike? What is the sound of two million voices raised in unison demanding that Hosni Mubarak resign on this 'Day of Leaving'? What is all that hope, that joy and that peacefully expressed, human want for justice, peace and freedom?

Yes, people. This is awesome. Mind-bombingly, thrillingly awesome. I have the feeling, the first time since that awful low of the early hours of Thursday morning when it looked like it might all be over after the terrible violence from Mubarak's thugs throughout the night, that these voices might, finally, be heard. I'm supposed to be editing, but I'm glued to AlJazeera, whose team must surely now win every award in television, journalism and sheer bloody minded determination this year. They're using satphones to broadcast their images - cameras stolen, office closed, license withdrawn and journalists under threat and yet they're still maintaining world-class non-stop programming. Awesome.

Have a flip through these when you've got a moment. The amazing images of photojournalists Samuel Aranda and Iason Athanasiadis that bring this all home. They're awesome too.

Benihana Kuwait. What you can do.

I'm sorry, I know I'm going on about this but I believe strongly that it is wrong and should be addressed by the very public that Benihana Kuwait has shown such contempt for in its actions.

I sent this message to Benihana Tokyo, the company responsible for the international Benihana franchise,  tonight. You can do the same - cut and paste mine, write your own, whatever. Just use the contact form linked right here.

Hi

I'm contacting you to let you know that I, and very many others across the Middle East, am angry and concerned that one of your franchisees has seen fit to issue suit against a blogger who posted a negative review of a poor experience in Kuwait's Benihana franchise.

The resulting online outcry will not go away, more and more mainstream media are picking up the story and it is highly likely to be covered by international media. It's a landmark suit - not only against Kuwait's most popular blog, not only unfair but also the first time that a company in the Middle East - a region with its own issues with censorship and repression - has sued a blogger.

Benihana Kuwait's maladroit handling of this issue has already created a social media case study that will run and run. It's time to stop this.

I urge you to pressure your franchisee into dropping this unwise suit. It has already caused untold damage to the Benihana brand in this region - you can act before it does so internationally.

The guys at 2:48AM shouldn't have to defend an expensive, scary and vicious - let alone frivolous - suit from a corporate company in this way for expressing their opinion as consumers. It's got to stop.

Thanks.

PS: A chronology of this goof-up is now up over at the UAE Community Blog.

Why The Benihana Story Matters

Image via WikipediaIt's been amazing to watch the Benihana Kuwait story spiral into the stratosphere. That the story has such a strong pair of legs is squarely down to the fact it matters deeply to very many people in the region and around the world - consumer opinion expressed in a blog crushed by a lawsuit filed by a company.

The story(I posted this yesterday which has more detail) was carried across a number of blogs yesterday (and will be in more today, doubtless). As SeaBee pointed out: "I wonder if they're beginning to understand how business works in the real world. You know, the place where customers have a say too. Where bullying and threatening creates a backlash."

It got taken up by a fast-growing community on Twitter (use the hashtag #BenihanaKUW to see the conversations) and then someone found that Benihana Kuwait had a Facebook page. The resulting flood of comments made it quite clear that public opinion was 100% against the idea of a company suing a blogger and expressed shock, outrage and a deep rooted anger.

Later in the day, the papers picked up on the story, The National, Gulf News and 24x7 all ran stories which, at least in the case of the first two, ran in print today. And now million-subscriber website The Next Web has picked it up - which is the start of what, IMHO, is an inevitable move into the international media.

Why so much outrage? It's a complicated mixture - most of the online people who have commented know perfectly well that Benihana's reaction is unacceptable today. Consumers have a new freedom to express their views and opinions in ever-expanding forums and it's a right we're not willing to give up easily. We're not going to tolerate being bullied or seeing the truth repressed. On a larger scale, that same sense of empowerment and fairness is driving some reasonably large collections of people, a million of them on the streets of Cairo today. Without wanting to 'big up' the Benihana story, I do believe it is a microcosm of the bigger one we're watching unveil in Tahrir Square.

We're talking to Kuwaiti blogger Mark on the Dubai Eye Techno Tuesday show today at 11am Dubai Time. If you're Dubai-based, you can catch it on 103.8FM or if not you can listen to the livestream at http://www.dubaieye1038.com  and follow the hashtag #DubaiToday.

Update: Here's the AudioBoo of today's talk between Jessica Swann, myself and 2:48AM's Mark  As many will know, this afternoon Benihana Kuwait chose to delete the comments from its Facebook page, one of the most obnoxious gestures of absolute contempt for the views of the general public - its customers and potential customers.

Benihana Bashes Bloggers

Image by Okinawa Soba via FlickrKuwaiti blog TWOFOURTYEIGHTAM (2:48AM to you) is a lively and wide-ranging affair put together by bloggers Mark and Nat. It's respected, popular, well-written, pretty objective and, as both are designers, is clean and easy to read. The B-side to 2:48AM is 2:48PM, which is a community blog and is pretty big as blogs in Kuwait go (and Kuwait has a lively blogging scene).

In the middle of December last year, Mark posted a review on the 'A sides' of Kuwait's newly opened Japanese restaurant Benihana Kuwait. It's linked here for your delectation and delight. Mark wasn't terribly impressed by his experience at the restaurant. Although he pointed out that, "The service wasn’t too bad for a restaurant that’s just been open for a few days and the staff were really friendly." he also went on to say: "The problem with my experience last night though was with the food, it was disappointing to say the least."

Mark  then explains the reasons for his disappointment in detail, concluding, "Would I go back to Benihana? No I wouldn't.'

He also took a video of the 'show' the chefs put on while cooking. The acrobatics at Benihana are apparently something to behold, but this is a very ordinary looking display of, well, cooking.

So there we go - a bad experience at Benihana Kuwait gets a bad review from a customer. And there it ended. Or not quite. Nested in the 74 comments (I said it was a popular blog, didn't I?) are several 'happy customer' astroturf comments that came from, as Mark pointed out, the same IP address. And then there's the comment (linked here for your listening pleasure) from a geezer called Mike Servo, who claimed to be the general manager of the Benihana management of Kuwait and who threatened to sue Mark. A couple of quotes:

"...our rights and name is being used in a wrong way and broadcasting the video without a proper consent from us is really annoying specially Benihana is just opened up its doors to the public. We are seeking and consulting our legal dept. on how we can form a type of law suit against your website to be brought up to the Kuwait authorities."

He goes on to trill: "We want you to give us your information, your name, your number and your address so our lawyer will take it from there and be sure that you in Kuwait were the jury is 100 % clean and fair."

And then for some bizarre reason starts talking about elephants: "We also expect that you might be sending people to Benihana to make a play and that is why we have informed the CID about that, In the past we encountered your add in Subway and it is one of our companies franchise, we really didn’t give it any attention, and it very clear now that Subway is an elephant while other competitors are closing down, however this time we will not let it go and we will follow you legally."

Not terribly nice, in all. He ends the comment by asking Mark if he's Lebanese!

"A comedy classic" says one following commenter.

"I have a feeling that your restaurant will be closing in no time at this pace! I’m planning to try it out to see how bad it really is, and if it is bad I’m going to probably write a worse review" says another.

"I was going to visit Benihana .. but after seeing how you treat customers reviewing your restaurant, I plan on avoiding it at all costs." Is another comment.

This comment neatly sums up the considerable outpouring of anger at the management of Benihana Kuwait - for astroturfing, for its furious reaction and for threatening a lawsuit. "As a representative of such a well known brand it is shocking that you would conduct yourself in such an unprofessional manner. I am sure the franchise policy of Benihanas is not one of engaging those who are not satisfied with its product by posting baseless claims and threatening frivolous lawsuits that serve no other purpose but discredit any legitimate concern or issue you may have."

Mark posted up on Twitter yesterday that he had received the lawsuit. Benihana Kuwait actually went ahead and sued a blogger for writing a bad review of their restaurant. I have the feeling this won't end here...

UPDATE: This is the Benihana Kuwait Facebook Page. A truly stunning read.
(You'll have to click 'Just others' to see the comments)
Update to update: They deleted the comments. Grief.

When Egypt Stopped Laughing

Image via WikipediaOver the years, I have watched Egyptians laugh at themselves and the regime they live under. It's a particular type of humour I have noticed most in the Levant - a sort of gallows humour that makes a joke out of the lack of freedom and the ubiquitous mukhabarat.

Every time elections would come around, people would laugh about how he was going to lose this time. When he polled the upper 90 percentile of votes as usual, people would laugh at that. Jokes would be cracked about the lack of freedom, respect and hope for the future (or the rising price of food) because, well, what else could you do?

It struck me the other day that the Egyptians simply stopped laughing.

Colleague Marwa got out of Alexandria on Friday - her eyewitness account of the journey she and her husband took is the stuff of adventure novels - roadblocks, burning tyres and the fear of driving through teeming, excitable crowds as people bang their hands against your car roof, an awful din that makes you cringe and fear the metal will cave in. The guttersnipes burning tyres, unaware of why the world has suddenly gone mad, but capering around in great glee at the sudden anarchy.

As we can all see from Al Jazeera's stunning coverage, the situation is deteriorating and looters are roaming the streets. Communities are coming together to protect themselves, rather in the face of a strategy that appeared to be built around pulling the police out and letting law and order break down (even giving it the occasional shove in that direction, apparently) - Marwa's mother's apartment was saved at the last moment by a neighbour, the men have come together now and blocked the street so that the residents are safe. The army, she reports, have been unfailingly polite and pleasant and have refused to use force against the protesters - something that Al Jazeera's coverage has also shown.

But it would appear to me that things are inevitably going to get worse before they get better whatever the outcome - food supplies will come under pressure as travel around Egypt is rendered nigh on impossible by roadblocks and gangs of thugs (including those carrying government issue firearms). Medical supplies will be stretched and a wide range of basic services are already going to be under pressure, which will only increase the longer the protests carry on.

Everyone I know is quietly hoping they'll be able to laugh again soon - a different, more carefree laughter, perhaps.


One minor triumph to have come out of all this has been Al Jazeera's. I have been watching their coverage of events and it has been very, very good indeed - BBC quality reporting with an authoritative voice and a wide range of viewpoints rather than constantly repeated reports and whole minutes of text snippets with a repeated sample of the same parping theme tune. It has also focused on the news - not constantly nipping off to talk about how some footballer sprained his earlobe or some manager was 'sick as a parrot' but thought it was 'the rub of the green'.

If you're interested in what's happening in Egypt, give AlJaz a spin. It is streets ahead of anyone else.

Egypt's Tweets of Rage

Image by National Media Museum via FlickrEgypt's Day of Rage unfolded yesterday afternoon, the news of gathering crowds and images of protesters heading for Tahrir square shared over Twitter by activists and people in general in a fascinating, blow-by-blow (later on, literally) account. I can't find Ramadan Al Sherbini's lead story from Gulf News online today, so here's a link to another of his stories on the protests.

As before, with events in Iran (which I wrote about extensively in relation to the role of social and mainstream media, you can get the backstory here if you like), the information flow quickly became cluttered with a mixture of retweets, Twibbons and other outside voices clogging up the #Jan25 and #Egypt hashtags.

However, as before, those of us following a number of people in Egypt had access to reliable, first-hand information and were able to watch the story unfold. As the afternoon wore on, mobile networks went down around Tahrir - the government was blamed for the outage, but operators are insisting it was their networks at fault - and vendors around the square, cafés and the like, took the password protection off their wireless networks so people could continue to get word out. There were widespread reports that the government had blocked Twitter, but this is a technically aware generation, people - access was obtained using different clients and proxies.

Mainstream media got access to events through Twitter too - sometimes even quoting the Tweets of journalists on the stweets such as this example from the Wall Street Journal. Such a huge repository of eye witness reports makes for a fascinating account of events - and, importantly, creates awareness and publicises the protest. This post, from Global Voices, shows how Tweets can be used with devastating effect in reportage. There were a lot of brave journalists among the crowds, including Al Jazeerah's cameraman, who was hospitalised with four rubber-cased bullets lodged in his arm as police tried to break up the demonstrations.

Twitter was also being used as an organising tool, with people able to share information widely - when you tweet to a popular and timely hashtag, you're effectively multicasting. And it's being used to get word out this morning, as a second day of demonstrations appears to be on the cards.

There has been a lot of debate over the role of social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, in Tunisia and, prior to that, Iran, both in terms of quite how fundamental both were to events and how reliable reports were. Without a doubt, the closer you are to an event, the more reliable Twitter becomes - by closer, I mean that you have established relationships with people of reputation on the ground or, at the most, at a second remove. Once you get past the third degree of separation, you're losing eyewitness credibility and getting bogged down under the hashtag traffic. But you're also seeing a world that has had its attention brought to the Jan 25 protests and reacting overwhelmingly in support of the protestors, something that Tunisia hacked Facebook to stop and that Egypt appears to have blocked Twitter to stop.

Blocking Twitter won't stop word getting out. You're as well to try and stop grains of sand falling through marbles. Here, for your amusement, is the official word from the Egyptian State Information Service. Compare it to #Jan25 and enjoy.

Fatal

Image via WikipediaNice story in today's jolly The National claims the Gulf's road safety record is 'appalling'. They're right, too. According to the piece, which quotes figures from the 2009 Global Status Report on Road Safety, you're seven times more likely to be killed on the UAE's roads than the UKs.

If you don't like it, you know what you can do, people...

Speakers at the Road Safety Middle East conference, speakers appeared slightly baffled that the Middle East bucked global trends in that the wealthier the country gets in the region, the worse the fatality record. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for the 15 to 29 age group, apparently. And the UAE averages 37.1 road fatalities per 100,000 people compared to a global average of 18.8.

The story's linked here. It's statistically sobering stuff.

Torches

Image via WikipediaDon't forget young Jan Palach
He  burnt a torch against the Warsaw Pact

Modern history has been changed by men who chose to demonstrate against repression by taking their own lives in the most painful way I can imagine. The one I remember from history at school, and an abiding image of the '60s, was the Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức, who burned himself to death to protest the oppression of Buddhist monks. In 1969, Czech student Jan Palach (the couplet above is from Stranglers' bassist JJ Burnel's 'Euroman' solo album just in case you wondered) set fire to himself in front of the Russian tanks as they rolled into Prague, bringing winter back to the Prague Spring. I visited his memorial and it did make me terribly sad.

Palach died in January - the same month as Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose act of final desperation was to lead to the overthrow of the government. You're reading this because I was listening to the radio yesterday and heard the presenters mispronouncing his name, 'That Tunisian chap, you know, Booazzi or something.' It seemed odd to me that anyone living in the Middle East should be unaware of this man and why he was driven to do this to himself - particularly given the consequences of his action.

I find it hard to even think about what would drive a man to contemplate the act - the acrid stink of petrol, vapour shimmering, a scratch and whiff of phosphorous. The lazy whoomp of the flame. How could anyone with a shred of imagination even contemplate doing that to themselves? And yet Bouazizi was not to be alone - like Palach, his act has inspired others to follow the same course. There has been a spate of copycat immolations around the Middle East, five in Algeria, one each in Mauritania and Saudi Arabia and four in Egypt. In all, four of these people have died.

None of these men is likely to be remembered beyond a family's grief and a listing in the obsessive Wikipedia list of political self immolations (it's here - an odd list of lost causes and forgotten martyrs). But Mohammed Bouazizi, like Jan Palach and Thích Quảng Đức, changed history. Uniquely, he is the only man to have directly caused a government to fall by taking his life in this way.