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francispisani

Egypt's Entrepreneurs Look Beyond the Revolution - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Six months after an uprising led by people like her ousted Hosni Mubarak and overturned the established order of the Arab world, Ms. Mehairy has joined the ranks of Egypt’s newest business class: the entrepreneurs of the revolution. Instead of leaving Egypt as she had planned, she is staying to nurture a start-up called SuperMama, an Arabic-language Web site for women that has 10 local employees.
  • “Everyone is worried about what will happen next,” said Marwan Roushdy, 20, a student at the American University of Cairo who is developing an app called Inkezny to locate hospitals anywhere in the world. The name means “rescue me” in Arabic.
  • Mohamed Rafea, 30, and his cousin Ali Rafea, 23, are also optimistic. They along with three other young relatives co-founded Bey2ollak, an app that lets users warn each other about congested traffic routes. “We are lucky that we don’t need the support of anything except good wattage, as opposed to manufacturing goods or opening a store. Those kinds of businesses need the support of the government,” Ali Rafea explained.
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  • Like many in their cohort, Mohammed and Ali Rafea, who won one of the internships at iContact, are trying to solve some of Egypt’s problems through technology — and hope to turn a profit in the process. After the revolution, they said, Egyptians were turning to Bey2ollak to pass along information about the safety of the roads. “We added a new status to say that a road is a danger zone and there are protests and thugs,” Mohamed Rafea said.
  • and Sawari Ventures, a Cairo-based venture capital firm,
  • Ahmed el-Alfi, the founder Sawari Ventures,
  • Seeing the potential in Egypt, Mr. Alfi left Southern California in 2006 to move to Cairo. “Most of my friends questioned my sanity for making that move,” Mr. Alfi said. “But I was very encouraged by what I saw.”
  • “These entrepreneurs are thinking big and globally, and they are creating Web apps that you could see in Dumbo or Palo Alto,” he said, referring to the neighborhood in Brooklyn. “They are building companies and products that can be very influential. I would invest 30, 40 or 50 thousand dollars in these young entrepreneurs.”
  • As Mr. Gerber, one of the American delegates, put it: “We were just so amazed by the business acumen we found in Egypt.”
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    Six months after an uprising led by people like her ousted Hosni Mubarak and overturned the established order of the Arab world, Ms. Mehairy has joined the ranks of Egypt's newest business class: the entrepreneurs of the revolution. Instead of leaving Egypt as she had planned, she is staying to nurture a start-up called SuperMama, an Arabic-language Web site for women that has 10 local employees.
francispisani

New site shames bad Lebanese drivers - TNW Middle East - 0 views

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    Cheyef7alak takes a name-and-shame them approach to outing irresponsible drivers. Rather than put up with small traffic violations that are run of the mill in Beirut's streets, Cheyef7alak encourages users to snap photos and shoot video as the violation is happening. These then get saved for posterity on the Web for everyone to see.
francispisani

Where Africa and Technology Collide! - WhiteAfrican - 0 views

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    The iHub is Nairobi's nerve center for technology; a place where we can grab coffee, create apps, find funders and build businesses. It's where the community of web and mobile programmers connect with each other, businesses, the government and academia.
Marc Botte

Haïtit - Loramus, journaliste humanitaire | YOUPHIL - 0 views

  • Le journaliste de 43 ans choisit après le séisme d’habiter dans un camp, refusant la proposition de sa mère de se rendre chez elle. "Ma place était auprès des gens, justifie-t-il. Quelqu’un pourrait lire mes papiers et vouloir leur venir en aide."
  • Installées autour d’une table en bois qui mange le peu d’espace de la maisonnette, plusieurs grands-mères sont venues parler à Loramus. Passionné, ce dernier demeure intarissable sur son émission, ChiménKwazé ["nos chemins se rencontrent", en français] qu'il anime depuis plusieurs mois pour l'ONG HelpAge. L’idée: faire parler les personnes âgées qui ont notamment besoin d’un petit emploi pour continuer à vivre.
  • "Nous avons perdu nos archives avec la catastrophe, commente Loramus, tandis que Madame Kamita s’essuie péniblement le front, épuisée par la chaleur. Mais les anciens peuvent continuer de porter la mémoire de ce pays
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  • "communicateur social"
  • Enfant, il voulait "exercer au moins trois métiers". Après avoir été menuisier et journaliste, Loramus, qui vient de suivre une formation web*, rêve d’ouvrir un cybercafé. Une autre manière de diffuser l’information dans un pays où l’accès au web reste encore limité, et les connexions difficiles.
francispisani

Sinan Khatib: The key to success in the Middle East? Localization. - TNW Middle East - 0 views

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    Localization of an e-commerce site goes much further than just dealing with customers and payment methods. "In the US, local merchants are unsophisticated, you can't imagine how unsophisticated they are in the third world. With all due respect, it's rough. You're not dealing with the most cutting edge people in the world. They're old school. You have to know the dynamic of the local merchant. Every local merchant has a different psychology - how much can you push and pull, how in touch are they with new modern ways of doing business." Dealing with local merchants has been an educational experience, for all involved. Offerna has been playing a significant role in giving merchants new and dynamic ways of dealing with their customers, and in the process, building a loyal consumer base.
francispisani

Thinking about curation in the enterprise - confused of calcutta - 0 views

  • Content may be considered king, but distribution has always been the hand that rocked that particular cradle and ruled that throne.
  • curation. The SOP of curation, to paraphrase Rosenbaum, is Selection Organisation and Presentation. Curation is about human beings adding their passion to the filtering process, in order to select what should be experienced, put the selections into some cohesive order and then to make those selections accessible to the relevant audience.
  • Esther Dyson, whose writings about the future of search have been at the back of my mind all through my thinking about this. In Curation Nation, Esther quotes Bill Gates as saying (at a private dinner) “The future of search is verbs”. She then goes on to explain that “when people search…they are looking for action, not information….they want to find something in order to do something”. If you get the chance, you should read Esther’s writings on the future of search, just google it. In fact there may still be a YouTube video summarising her views
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  • Information flows in the enterprise should always enhance the ability of participants to do the right thing in the right place at the right time. Which lets me segue neatly into the crux of this post, curation in the enterprise. Every enterprise has its own variant of curator, people who help decide who sees what, when, and in what shape. Information overload is everywhere, the Shirkyian filter failure is everywhere, and into the valley ride the usual six hundred, theirs not to reason why. So in order to understand how enterprise curation should take place, it’s worth looking at some extreme forms of enterprise curation as practises today. There appear to be four main forms: The Signal Booster The Spreadsheet Jock The Soulmate The Sidler
  • The Signal Booster obtains power by PowerPoint, thinks in bullet points, rarely knows more than what’s on the slide. Acts as a mediation layer between those that do and those that decide.
  • The Spreadsheet Jock believes there’s safety in numbers, that firms can be managed by algorithmic trading. Runs the risk of past-predicting-the-future
  • The Soulmate is a crony of the powers-that-be, using that association to derive second-order power, and has an unusual effect: an inadvertent tendency to ensure that anything the CEO doesn’t want to hear doesn’t make it to the CEO.
  • The Sidler is a rare beast, someone who can only thrive in the rarefied environment of “briefing” cultures. They are often seen alongside the CEO, whispering in their ears, advising and commenting on the status of things they aren’t involved in. Sidlers are chameleons, sometimes boosting signals, sometimes driving spreadsheets, sometimes being soul mates. But always sidling.
  • All these are extreme forms of enterprise curator, responsible for deciding what information is accessible, to whom, when, and in what shape.
  • And all these are fundamentally inefficient models of curation in the enterprise,
  • Linus’s Law (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”) plays out very well in any community that is built to scale. So every staff member is empowered to solve problems. Every trading partner. Every customer.
  • In large hierarchical organisations, some form of summarising and filtering takes place in all information flows, from top to bottom as well as from bottom to top.
  • A web rather than a chain, the social enterprise is somewhere where everything and everyone is a node on the network.
  • Everyone’s not just a curator… Everyone’s not just a designer… Everyone tries out products and services, and provides active feedback.
  • This ability for two-way communication means that conversations take place without any loss of detail. The need for summarising is reduced, since the cost of hanging on to the detail is low.
  • Drilling into the detail was historically complex for reasons other than just the cost of doing so, or for that matter the distance expressed as the number of levels in the organisation, the divisional silos, and so on. We had the added complexity of security systems that did not differentiate between systems of engagement and systems of record, and as a consequence didn’t know how to handle entitlement safely and securely. Good social enterprise implementations solve that elegantly.
  • It’s not enough to have access to the information, that still doesn’t solve the overload problem. So we need access to expertise.
  • Find the people that are acknowledged rather than asserted experts, experts because of what they do rather than who they are.
  • As we move from the Hit Culture to the Long Tail of problem solving, we need more and more experts, “long tail experts”
  • The promise of the social enterprise is a remarkable promise.
  • Networked non hierarchical models. Involving everyone: staff, partners, customers. Two-way communications. Easy access to domain expertise. In an environment where aggregation takes place without any loss of accuracy or of the source data, where you can “follow an order or a complaint, safely, securely, efficiently, effectively”.
  • I’ve come to realise that the Social Enterprise is to traditional software what Skype is to traditional telephony, what Paypal and Square are to traditional payments. Quick and effective. Riding over the top of existing infrastructural investments. Focused on simplifying the customer experience, eradicating traditional frictions, reducing the distance between the customer and the firm. Engaging with the customer rather than with the back office.
francispisani

Study: Singapore most "evolved" in social media - Crave - CNET Asia - 0 views

  • Singapore is one of the most "evolved" social media markets around the world, according to market research firm Firefly Millward Brown. The global study, which was conducted in 15 countries between October and December last year
  • "In Singapore, social media has developed beyond a form of self expression and has become a functional part of the new Singaporean lifestyle. Social media is where Singaporeans gather news, discuss social issues, arrange social gatherings, express their creativity, share family memories, create professional networks, do comparison shopping and decide what to eat, buy and collect," Rastrick said in a statement. She cited three reasons that led to the development: The technology infrastructure in place; use of the Web for daily activities; and a population that stays connected globally.
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    Singapore is one of the most "evolved" social media markets around the world, according to market research firm Firefly Millward Brown. The global study, which was conducted in 15 countries between October and December last year,
Marc Botte

New York Times, in Collaboration with WNYC Radio, Launches SchoolBook, an Interactive E... - 1 views

  • Web site of news, data and conversation about schools in New York City on September 7
  • Access to SchoolBook will be free and exempt from The Times’s digital subscriptions
Marc Botte

Le rôle des réseaux sociaux sur le Printemps arabe se chiffre | L'Atelier: Di... - 0 views

  • Le rôle des réseaux sociaux sur le Printemps arabe se chiffre En analysant les tweets, échanges, blogs et vidéos échangés sur le web pendant cette période, il est possible de valider de manière empirique l'influence des sites collaboratifs sur les bouleversements qui se sont produits.
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