Twitter republic brings what the Egyptians don’t have

Few days ago the Egyptian tweeps have conducted the first elections for the twitter presidency, hundreds of Egyptians who dream about freedom and a democratic state for better Egypt have decided to fill their practice gap, take their dreams to the cyber space and enrich their democratic awareness, perhaps they live to see an end to the dictatorship in Egypt.

A public debate between the two presidential candidates – @abo3atef and @maboulazm – has taken place before the elections to introduce their programs and demonstrate their personal talent to the voters. Yesterday the organizers have announced @abo3atef as the first twitter president; the organizers have considered this round as an experimental trial to learn the proper channels and processes of conducting a well organized cyber election in the second round which is planned to be on the 1^st of August. The adoption for technology and new ideas to eliminating voting problems and establishing a system of transparency brings to the surface the current immobility of the Egyptian national election process and Mubarak’s insistence in using methods that have been ceased decades ago to ease the election rigging, and the monopoly on power and wealth.

it’s worth mentioning that Ayman Nour – @ayman_nour – the 2005 Egypt presidential elections’ candidate has participated in this cyber election and congratulated @abo3atef through a tweet from his own twitter account.

 

Technorati Tags: Egypt,Democracy

Egypt’s future debated in NYC: between internal repression and external pressure

New York–During the last three days, Egyptian intellectuals and American academics met at New York’s City University to discuss the currently ambiguous future of Egypt. They debated issues of regime repression, especially this month’s extension of the Emergency Law. More importantly, they questioned whether to accept external pressure, namely US interference, in the process of democratic reform in Egypt.

The main organizer of the conference was the Alliance of Egyptian Americans (AEA). It invited many prominent figures from different Egyptian political parties and movements, who came to the US especially for the event, to discuss the issue. The presence of a younger generation of Egyptians living in the US among the audience, particularly members of the Egyptian Association for Change-USA, and their profound disagreement with some statements made by the older generation of speakers furthered the controversy.

After receptions, dinners and pleasantries, the most important sessions of the conference took place on Saturday. Eminent Egyptian speakers in these sessions were Hassan Nafaa, professor of political science and coordinator of ElBaradei’s National Association for Change; Yahya al-Jamal, legal and constitutional expert; and Osama al-Ghazali Harb, founder of the Democratic Front Party.

The sessions covered different critical topics, including the current constitutional crisis and the culture and modernization of Egyptian society. They started with al-Jamal’s extraordinary summary of the history of the Egyptian constitution. This history was much needed to place current demands made by ElBaradei to amend the constitution in the proper context. Afterwards, Nafaa provided elaborate insight into upcoming elections, while Harb analyzed the characteristics of the Egyptian authoritarian regime after 1952.

Nafaa affirmed that, despite anticipated fraud in the coming parliamentary elections, not all opposition parties would decide to boycott them. “Some of the official political parties will continue to conclude deals with the government as they used to do,” Nafaa predicted.

The government seeks to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood’s MPs. Thus, in this year’s assembly elections, the regime might replace them with members of the official political parties. Through such alliances, these parties would find a good chance to gain a few more seats, which wouldn’t change their limited representation in the parliament anyway. That is what they have done over the last three decades.

As for Harb, he focused on the last five years of Egyptian political history, focusing on the limitations on freedom of media and expression in Egypt. More importantly, he insisted that external pressure on the regime after 9/11 played a major role in enhancing the margin of freedom in the country, as was evident by the state’s establishment of the National Council for Human rights and the National Council for Women.

“I personally welcome any American pressure on the regime because it had a positive effect on the Egyptian people over the last five years,” Harb opined.

During the last two decades, the most notable means of exerting such pressure has been through extending millions of dollars in funding to human rights organizations in Egypt. They also involved inviting young activists, such as bloggers and members of the 6 April youth movement, to receive training at Washington, DC think tanks, particularly Freedom House.

Harb’s statement came as a shock to the younger people in the conference room. Tension immediately rose. Many of them, who were also members of the Egyptian Association for Change-USA, disagreed.

The air in the room was even more heated with the presence of Saad Eddin Ibrahim. Ibrahim’s Ibn Khaldun Center is one of the largest recipients of such funding and a longtime advocate of US intervention in Egypt’s democratization process. Ibrahim was not officially invited to the conference, as AEA President Mahmud al-Shadhili affirmed, due to his close ties with the US administration. Nonetheless, he insisted on showing up.

Young people in the room were constantly “tweeting” and “Facebooking” each other to exchange their reactions to the ongoing debate. One of them posted Harb’s statement on his Facebook page, and immediately received angry responses from other young Egyptians living the US.

“I disagree. What did it [external pressure] do? Was the dictator removed? The answer is NO! International pressure is only a matter of cosmetics on the face of the pressuring country, nothing more,” one female commentator noted. “As a matter of fact, this old generation of Egyptian intellectuals like Osama failed to deliver anything to us and is still advocating stupid solutions that certainly did not work in the past. It is time for us as a new generation to forge our own solutions.”

The activism of young Egyptians in the US has grown so rapidly in the last few months that it is becoming an unprecedented political phenomenon of its own. These young people previously abstained from attending what seemed to them as “elite events”–such as this conference–but now their energetic spirit can be felt both inside and outside Egypt. The majority of these young forces have never been involved in politics before, but they have suddenly surfaced with ElBaradei’s fresh thrust of hope.

“Change should be one hundred percent Egyptian. International pressure comes with baggage and expectations. If we want to build the foundations of a longlasting democracy, we have to do it ourselves,” Ahmed Raslan, a young Egyptian surgeon living in Portland, Oregon argued on Facebook as Harb was speaking.

It is worth mentioning that the Kifaya movement’s Georg Ishaq was among the invited speakers. He is also heading to Washington, DC on 19 May to speak to the Egyptian community there. Beth Baron and Joseph Massad were among the American scholars who gave scholarly analytical presentations on Egyptian political affairs.

As the conference winds up its activities today, the Egyptian intellectuals and opposition figures will soon head back to Cairo. It is unclear, however, how the Egyptian regime will receive them.

[AlmasryAlyoum’s link]

http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/news/egypts-future-debated-nyc

LiveJournal Tags: Egypt,Egypt democratic reform

Apple, Google, and the mobile ads

Before the end of the last week Chris Nuttal and Richard Waters wrote about the battle that’s about to begin between Apple, and Google on the mobile ads.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9b1476de-434a-11df-9046-00144feab49a.html 

Apple is moving ahead on their own ad network – iAd. It is going to be very interesting to see what Apple can do with their offering for this market — in my opinion, it’s actually going to be kind of hard for them to gain some footing in the near future.

For Google Ad words, it’s a mature product and successfully becoming a cash cow for Google, it’s pretty easy to use it now and create an advertisement – two lines of text and an icon if you want. From my research on iAd, apparently it wouldn’t be that easy to create an ad.

There aren’t many things that Apple completely fails at, however iAd targets completely different customers other than what Apple has right now, they are with high standards, including a really good and established channel, powerful tools to measure their success, and cost effectiveness.

The pricing model for Google Adwords is based on an auction on words, Apple has not announced yet how it’s going to be on iAd but they have to come up with a very creative pricing model that can attract customers from Google.

Over the last year the tension between Google and Apple went to a different level when Google released a new mobile with almost the same capabilities of an iPhone, it has been considered a real competition for iPhone. With Apple’s entrance to the advertisement market and taking some shares from Google, Apple would reach strategic position that might put them in a better position in negotiating partnerships with other supporting sectors.

Now there’s already a fight on acquiring the big mobile and web ad agencies, Apple already tried to acquire AdMob but Google came in between to prevent it from happening, and now lawyers at FTC (Federal trade commission) are working on assembling evidence to build a case to block Google’s acquisition of AdMob. It seems like the next few years will be full of changes in the web and mobile advertisement market that will bring up new opportunities and investments.

 

Technorati Tags: Apple,Google,iAd,Adwords

World’s Leading Companies in Web Development, 2009

Ranked by: Editorial determination of companies’ reputation, products, and industry influence.

1. Adobe Systems Inc.

2. Eclipse

3. Google Inc.

4. Microsoft Corp.

5. Ruby on Rails

6. Sun Microsystems Inc.

Source Citation: "World’s Leading Software Companies in Web Development, 2009." Software Development Times, SD Times 100 (annual), June 15, 2009, p. 24. Business Rankings Annual 2010. Gale, 2010.

Chrome OS, Follow-up

A week ago Google said the first devices (they are devices now, not only the netbooks, but they said the netbooks will be the first to have it) running its new Chrome operating system will be available by the end of 2010, Sundar Pichai, a Google VP, said “the company is specifying what hardware features, such as chips and wireless cards, devices must have to run the software”

“The new operating system comes as Google looks for ways to diversify its business. Online advertising constitutes 97% of the company’s $22 billion in annual revenue and efforts to cash in on its software applications and video-sharing site YouTube have generated limited results. Analysts say Chrome OS is an ambitious long-term strategic move, but any impact on the company’s financial performance would be years away.”

“In a statement, Microsoft said Google’s product "appears to be in the early stages of development."” [WSJ]

Pichai said “Chrome OS can pull data from devices such as digital cameras and will support printing, it boots up to bring consumers right into the company’s Chrome Web browser. It stores users’ data online, allowing them to access it from other devices. But the software will have some limited ability for users to perform tasks without Internet access, such as watching videos” one of the questions raised about the software in the past.

Technorati Tags: Chrome OS

my two cents on mac vs pc

it sounds like and old topic but the amount of tv commercials I see everyday made me think about putting an input on this, it might be helpful for someone outside the IT bubble and wants to buy a one.

mac’s point is the pc crashes, and it’s the only point they are flying over on all their commercials, if you are a pc user, how many crashes did you get on ur machine this year or ever?! both do the same thing, but pc is simply half the cost! the mac machines are finely tuned, beautiful pieces of art that must not only be used but be displayed at your desk or on the table at the coffee shop you frequent, if this is what you want then go for it, but at the end of the day it’s nothing more than an overpriced.

Google Chrome OS: Operating System redefinition

Sundar Pichai is Introducing the Google Chrome OS on google’s blog.

Here we go again, Google is extending its web domination thought to something bigger, The thought is “how do you design an OS knowing what and how people are using it”. and for now the Web is the answer.

I believe it’s a part of a smarter strategy by google to get a tiny OS slice – for now – from MS by introducing it on the netbooks, while keeping in mind the previous losers and MS’s bloody fight to keep the first seat in the OS world.

Microsoft Local Impact Map

yet another cool silverlight app., time well spent. It has nice stories though.

NH Code Camp 09

last weekend I had the opportunity to attend the New Hampshire Code Camp ’09, organized by the New Hampshire’s .net user group. Within the next few lines I’ll try to give a brief for the sessions I caught and my comments about them.

Keynote, How to survive as a techie in a lean economy by Patrick Hynds

this one has no references so I’ll give a quick brief of what he was trying to say, as the keynote speaker he started with a session about the market’s hot  topic of how to survive in this economy, he was trying to give a quick advise on how to keep your business and your job, starting with how should you conservatively acting with your boss/customers even they were idiots, where you should watch your steps and adjust your actions to meet their goals only even if they were not the perfect thing and you refuse to release something not prefect, then he talked about the value of communication and status reporting, we all know the value of the status reporting but who can always stick to sending out on a regular bases, he told a story about a manager with a number of employees where they should be reporting a status every week, it was literarily optional and there was only one employee who was doing the normal and sending it out on time, the manager didn’t follow exactly what his employees were doing but he just noticed that there was only one person who has the self-discipline to send his status report every week, and when the layoff time came over and he had to pick one team member to keep, he kept that one. Avoid being dogmatic, there are better ways to express your tech, don’t destroy your job by being the naysayer, make your pitch, but if you are overruled, accept it and try to pitch again or find someplace else. Don’t deal with the technologies as a religion you have to accept the others if their technology has dominated the market and you have no where else to go, for instance if you are a java developer and laid off your job you can’t stay at home because you can’t find a similar job, you will have to dig into the other world and get yourself a job to survive. Picking a niche, experts are always needed, so you will have to pick a one and dive into, he gave examples like usability – silverlight and WPF, technical problem solver – you are in if you can always solve the problems, scalability – a growth industry, security – hard to send offshore, most of these things can’t be exported, he was very aggressive explaining this point however he was talking reality when it comes on saving your income and your job. Business timeline importance, your product would be useless if you have missed your business timeline, don’t over engineer, for instance if an army asked you to produce a radar system and you have delivered it a day after the war started, at this moment your great radar became useless. This is a tough time for all industries and you must be a profit center, you must do everything right and distinguish yourself.

MSBuild Session by Steven St Jean

the session was fairly good, the MS build is a general purpose build automation engine that’s shipped with .net 2.0, 3.5, vistas, and windows server 2008, it uses xml-based language with a syntax similar to ant but with more power – he claimed, capable of using parallel processing and some other good stuff, here are some good references:

• MSBuild Overview – a good place to start if you are brand new to MSBuild.
• MSBuild Task Reference – a list of the built-in tasks, or “actions”, that can be performed by an MSBuild script.
• MSBuild Community Tasks – an open source project that collects a number of tasks to perform common actions that are not included. If you are doing anything non-trivial with your build, especially if you are creating deployment scripts, this will be indispensable. Download the nightly build (many new tasks/features since the last release).
• MSBuild Reserved Properties – a list of the built-in properties (variables) available to your script. Also keep in mind that all environment variables are automatically available to your script using the property syntax (so you get things like $(USERNAME), $(COMPUTERNAME), and $(SystemRoot) for free).
• MSBuild Well-known Item Metadata – a list of the metadata properties available on all items (variables with properties).

and as a MSBuild engine expert over the last three years he recommended “MSBuild and team foundation build” book as the no.1 reference.

JQuery Session by Chris Bowen

the session I liked the most, Chris is a very bright guy, knows what he is talking about, he started his session with the JQuery/MS story you all know from Scott Gu’s blog and the others who spread the word, then made some nice demos that show how cool and powerful the JQuery library is, and how its selectors,  animations, plugins, events have converted the JavaScript nightmare into an easy thing to do.

he has recommend the JQuery in Action as the no.1 reference for the JQuery, actually that book had two public recommendations during the event, that puts it up high on my reading list.

Team Foundation Server 2010 by Phil Denoncourt

I’ve been trapped into this one, I just wanted to know what’s new on the team foundation server and it turned out to be almost nothing, I wished I’ve attended anything else, here is a reference link for what’s new on the team foundation server 2010 if you are a fan.

Automating SharePoint with web services by Tony Sukiennik

yet another great session on the event, he featured JQuery and put it up as the greatest break that has been done lately on development! the session was a life cycle for the development of a client side service call for a SharePoint information on a SharePoint page, by the end of that session I’ve admitted that JQuery is a real break. more on the topic.

one of the interesting things I noticed during the event is the user group age range, with an easy look you can put them all between 35 and 75 and more than 70% of them are 50+, on the other hand when you look at the Cairo .net user group you will find almost 99% are below 25, this might raise up some interesting questions about who’s leading the industry, and who wants to know.

stop and listen, a little ad at Daniel Webster College where we had the code camp, enjoy.

Designing the perfect form

I came across this interesting post on form design and development, and thought it’s worth sharing, it shows by example what to consider when designing the prefect form and how it would have direct impact on how much or how little people use them..