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

Best Companies to work for!

A great start by a great guy called Mohamed Nour (I still don’t know him personally till this moment), he did a tremendous job publishing an initial survey results about the Software Industry Market in Egypt, the results still not pretty accurate but we still need to appreciate the faithful attempt to provide such information, the survey aims to publish an accurate indicators about the software development industry inside Egypt including the professional level of the software companies, the companies technical level, management, process, salaries and work environments.

the following is one of the survey charts indicates the best companies based on the votes:

the survey has indicated some good future considerations, in my point of view the most important points for the next attempt would be providing the authorized protection by one of the major entities like MCIT, and a good marketing campaign for the survey using independent participants so it could cover thousands of participants of the different market slices to provide more accurate results.  

check the survey results

How well Egypt’s economy serves its own citizens?!

Recently the world economic forum (WEF) has released its global competitiveness report for 2007-08 ranking Egypt number 77 out of 131 - it dropped from 62nd in 2005-06 to 71st in 2006-07 and now it’s 77th! – and this is what the Egyptians should care about, more than what the government is announcing everyday about the economical growth on the basis of their attractiveness for foreign investments! this report looks at how well a country’s economy serves its own citizens in respect to education, health, transparency, market efficiency, corruption, inflation..etc.

 

I am not with the words which say that the current Nazef’s government is not doing well at all, but all what this government should do is showing more awareness for the Egyptian majorities, and in my opinion this is one of the key points to push Egypt into the developed countries, by focusing on how the economy will serve its own citizens by their own plans not using the world bank recommendations and advices which serve their economics more than ours by breaking all limits on our markets in the first place instead of developing our economic, our faithful plans will truly lead to a country free of poverty which automatically fixes the Egyptian awareness and education problems then lead to a truly Egyptian economy that serves its own citizens!

 

IT outsourcing global trend

the question here is how outsourcing is going to affect your career, in the united states, many corporations are planning to outsource thousands of IT jobs to offshore teams, outside firms or even establish their offshore development shops. most of these jobs belong to offshore teams or organizations are in India, Egypt, or southeast Asia.

 

outsourcing is a business trend you must fully understand, I don’t expect the trend to reverse anytime in the foreseeable future, and everyone has not to feel powerless to cope with the changes either, apparently the nature of work will change dramatically with offshoring, the total number of the IT jobs will increase in the countries that receive outsourcing contracts, and it will decrease in the untied states, so much future growth will happen outside the united states. Likewise the IT salaries will increase in these countries and will relatively decrease in the united states, but the job stability at these countries will remain unclear until the outsourcing business models mature.

 

hmm finally above this, whatever your chosen career path, strive to find happiness in your work, don’t fear the ongoing change in Information Technology just because others are afraid..