Blue Chi’s

I’ve been craving for some new music for a while now and I’ve been hunting for this album in the market for a more than a month now, finally found it today in Carrefour.

Marwan Khoury is a Lebanese singer/song-writer/music-composer, he has started as a musician and was a a band leader for some of the famous Lebanese singers such as Wael Kfouri and Sabah. He released his first album in the year 2003, but only became really successful when he released his song ‘Kel Al Qasayid’ and last year he had a huge hit duo with Carol Samaha. Marwan Khoury has written and composed songs for artists like Elissa, Asalah, Majidah Al Rumi, and even Abdul Majeed Abdullah! He is a whole-set artist who writes, composes and sings his own songs. His brothers Dany and Caude do his musical production.

I just got his new album called “Ana Wl Leil” (That’s how they like to spell it?!), and it’s nice. I have track 3 (Awlak) on repeat, can’t get enough of it! The album has the due with Carol (Ya Rabb) and a remix of it as well!

There is something about cheesy love Lebanese songs that makes me just never get enough of them!

(BTW, Marwan is signed to Rotana production house, so his original CD costs RO 1.5 only (less than $4!), Rotana has lowered the prices of music CD from RO 5 to RO 1.5 – the best move ever to fight piracy! Buying new Arabic CDs is now very tempting!)

Check out the video for Ya Rabb with Carol Samaha below (with lame English subtitles!):

Just finished reading this book today. I’ve never properly read a business book before, even though I did take one business class in my foundation year at uni. I decided reading this book upon the recommendation of a friend, and I thought that it was really good. I think that everyone of us should read at least one business book, it’s a crazy world out there, you never when you’ll decide to leave your day job and jump on the business bandwagon!

“The New Business Road Test” is a book to help entrepreneurs assess their business idea before they start it. The majority of new businesses fail. But this book tries to help you identify a lousy business idea before you start it, so that you can stop before it’s too later, or hopefully amend your business idea so that it can survive. Mullins does this by introducing a new 7-domain model for examining a business opportunity, four of these are related to the market and industry, and three are related to the entrepreneur/business team.

Mullins identifies a distinction between the market and the industry, where the industry is a collection of customers and perspective customers while the industry consists of the sellers.

The seven domains of the New Business Road Test are:

1. Market macro-level: Market attractiveness
2. Market micro-level: Target segment benefits and attractiveness
3. Industry macro-level: Industry attractiveness
4. Industry micro-level: Sustainable advantage
5. Team domain 1: Mission, aspiration, propensity for risk
6. Team domain 2: Ability to execute on critical success factors
7. Team domain 3: Connectedness up, down, across the value chain

The book illustrates how these domains can make or break a business idea and how their impact is not simply additive, but complicated as a failure one single domain might mean that this is not business is fated for failure, while on other hand, the 7 domains can show how a good business can survive in a bad industry if the other domains are positive.

The New Business Road Test was a very interesting read with lots of real life examples and several practical forms and guidelines for analysing and surveying if your business will pass the road test or not.

I think that they sell this book in City Centre Borders, but I got it from Amazon.co.uk. Highly recommended for anyone interesting in reading a new business book!

I read the second edition of the New Business Road Test is published that was published by the Financial Times Press.

I still did not manage to get over Omantel’s newly announced and ridiculously priced ADSL packages. The operator who answered my phone call this morning gave me wrong information, nobody knows yet if there is a cap or not on any of the new packages. I called again a minute ago and this operator told me that the issue has not settled yet, and that an announcement will be made on the 1st of May. I do not know if what he is saying is true, he might not know what he’s talking about just like the previous one.

However, the Fair Usage Policy hits that the cap is only available for the beginner package (512Mbps) and the Unlimited Package:

How Fair Usage Policy Works
Omantel will continuously monitor network performance and may restrict the speed available to very heavy users. This applies to customers on Home ADSL 512 Kbps and 8 Mbps Unlimited packages who actually reach a certain threshold of traffic. Customer in those situations will be contacted by Omantel and their speeds will be reduced until the next month

How come the FUP is not applicable to other packages, could that be because there is no cap on them?!

I agree with Muscati in that the government is also to blame for not having a strategy to close up the digital divide by forcing Omantel to provide affordable Internet to the public. If you think about it, what do you think will make more people use the internet, the speed or the price? Have ever you heard of someone who does not have a broadband internet connection at home because its too slow? Omantel’s exchange point in Rustaq has no business whatsoever (a fact), will higher speed make people of Rustaq decide to get a broadband connection now? Obviously not. What the people really need is an affordable always-on internet connection that works. Not faster internet that is times more expensive than what we used to have.

I was not impressed by Omantel’s new broadband packages, they are ridiculously priced. Here is the breakdown for home packages:

1. Package 1, connection speed 512Kbps, and 1baisa per MB @ RO 12.
2. Pakage 2, connection speed 1Mbps, 2GB free bandwidth, and 1baisa per MB @ RO19.
3. Package 3, connection speed 2Mbps, 5GB free bandwidth, and 1baisa per MB @ RO29.
4. Package 4, connection speed 4Mbps, 10GB free bandwidth, and 1baisa per MB @ RO39.
5. Package 5, connection speed 8Mbps, unlimited bandwidth @ RO 99!

NO MENTION WAS MADE ABOUT THE PRICE CAP, but I called just now to check and the guy who answered had no idea what the hell the price cap is, but said that the cap is still RO 39 for all packages PLUS the rental price (RO12 to RO39). (UNCONFIRMED, CHECK THIS POST)

The pricing of these packages is crazy, let’s not even talk about the 100 Rial package, I can’t imagine myself even just paying RO20 for 2GB of bandwidth. And are they trying to act all stupid with awain their “1 free email account included” – who the hell wants to be stuck using the ugly @omantel email or their buggy web based client? I also would not dare to install a random anti-virus software they are also ‘giving free with all packages’. Don’t they realise that the point of broadband connections is sharing the connection among many computers in the home, what is the point of giving a single anti-virus license.

The new packages of Omantel show us badly how much they enjoy their monopoly.

I can’t believe they dare to charge people RO 99 for an internet connection, I just can’t.

Why the hell don’t we have any other internet ISP in Oman yet?! This is absurd!!

PS. Not a lot of people know that internet connections are marketed using ‘bit’ speeds and not ‘byte’ speeds. The small ‘b’ is for bit and the capital ‘B’ is for byte. People who work at Omantel do not even know that (just confirmed that when I called now). This means that a 512Kbps means 64KBps, so a 600KB file will take about 6 seconds to download. A 8Mbps connection speed equals 1MBps, that is ONE Mega Byte per second and not EIGHT Mega Bytes per second.

Today was the World’s Intellectual Property day, a day to celebrate innovation and promote respect for intellectual property. Unfortunately, in Oman intellectual property is barely respected. Oman is a member of WIPO and the WTO, but still, our IP is mostly sweet talk and does not exist in practice. Pirated games and software are widely spread in large shopping malls and small markets alike. Pirated DVDs are sold outside cinema theatres in Ruwi. Trademark infringing phone covers are sold in all mobile phone stores. We have no such thing as patent registration.

Our culture traditionally does not promote innovation or creativity. It considers many forms of art as either useless, haram, or even gay. Fine arts, music, and creative performances are looked down upon. There is barely such a thing as Omani novelists, Omani scientists, or Omani thinkers. Most of our school books are written by Egyptians and Sudanese school teachers who barely know anything about our culture. Our laws are written by Egyptians who barely know anything about our culture.

The majority of people in Oman do not have any respect for intellectual property, many people think that it is fine to infringe the copyright of software made by Microsoft because Microsoft is American. The highest educational institute in the country, Sultan Qaboos University, has its computers loaded with pirated software. IT supervisors in SQU tell students that the West stole algebra from us, so we have the right to steal 3D Studio Max.

I can’t think of a single positive thing to write about intellectual property in Oman. We cannot celebrate innovation in this country, probably because we don’t have any of it yet.

Geeks around the world have decided to have a computer “Shutdown Day“. I find this very funny because it is the exact same thing I did in April 2006 (and I survived it). I would love to try out another shutdown day, I find it very refreshing, but I don’t won’t be able to participate on thhis ‘international shutdown day’ these people are suggesting because Saturday is a working day in Oman and I need to use the computer for work. Maybe I’ll have my own private shutdown day sometime later.

All of my web projects are offline because of an service outage from our host. We are using a dedicated server package from 1and1, which is supposed to be one of the best hosting providers in the UK, but I guess than having a 100% uptime is impossible. The horrible thing about this is that I can’t see anything about outage on the control panel and I have no idea for how long this has been going or when it will end. All I know is that Wednesday is usually one of our busier days of the week and we’re losing traffic I type this. Urgh!!!

Update: It’s 2pm and we’re back online. I’m checking some of our stats and it looks like the outage lasted only for two and a lahf hours. (10.30am to 1pm Oman Time).

I’ll be attending this conference organised by the Capital Market Authority tomorrow. It’s a one-day event only, I will be attending in my capacity as a Ministry of Legal Affairs legal researcher. Hope it turns out good.

We never thought people would go this mad over Chemical Orange games, our games were downloaded more than 50,000 times since we launched the website less than three weeks ago. I guess people in Oman are way more bored than what we thought they were!

In celebration of our first major milestone we are pleased to offer Chemical Orange relief for more people by adding 30 new mobile phone models to our list of compatible handsets (mostly new Sony Ericsson phones and some new Nokia phones).

Our 50,000 game downloads do not include the number of downloads made from our flash website or the number of times the games were shared via bluetooth among friends.

You can download the free Chemical Orange games directly onto your mobile phone by visiting m.chemicalorange.com from your mobile phone browser. You may want to check out our website at http://www.chemicalorange.com/.

I got irritated today by a local website that has been making press releases and claims about how popular their website is when in fact nobody EVER heard or visited their website. I am not going to write down the name of their website because this will probably be the best advertisement they might ever have to date, and I don’t think that they deserve it because:

1. They are liars.
2. They scam companies into buying advertising that nobody sees.
3. Their website has no content.

So instead of just complaining about fraud websites, I am going to tell you guys how to know if a website is REALLY popular and not just believe claims they make in the newspaper:

1. Distinguish between server hits, page views, and visits.
1. A server hit is an request to a server, when you open a page, that page might have four images and one sound clip embedded directly in it, so when you visit that page you make 6 hits (for the page, for the four images, and the sound that plays). Hits do not mean visitors or page views, the higher the number of hits does not necessarily mean that your website is more popular as it could easily mean that you website is inefficient and makes too many server requests.
2. A page view is the number of pages accessed in your website, a single visitor might check three pages on the website, so he adds three page views to your count, three page views do not equal three visitors. Page views are usually the measure for paid advertisement on the website because most advertisement are paid per impression (view).
3. A visit is an instance where a user visits your website, browses around and leaves. The visitor may request a 100 hits and could make 10 pageviews. Visitor stats could be divided into two categories, unique visitors and regular visitors. A unique visitor is a visit made through a different machine, a regular visit could be made by the same user visiting your website through different times of the day.
2. So if you see people using the terms above interchangeably then they probably have no idea what they are talking about. In the case of the local website I saw today, I’ve seen them claim that they have 200,000 monthly pageviews previously and today they’re saying they have 200,000 visitors – both figures are most probably made up.
3. Check website stats yourself using public website ranking services, these ARE NOT VERY ACCURATE, but they give you an indication on what is happening, you can compare this to local websites to see who is doing better. I recommend http://www.compete.com/ and http://www.alexa.com/
4. One of the easy things to do is to search Google for the website name, just the name without the www. or the .com part and see how many times it shows up, if the website does not come number 1 or 2 for its own domain name then this website is obviously not known enough, if it has been online for years and is visited by 200,000 people then obviously someone must’ve ‘talked’ about it somewhere or linked to it. If you only find pages from like newspapers press releases they made themselves and partner websites they are commercially tied with, then you know you’ve found a website that nobody visits. A popular website will be linked to from forums, blogs, and all sorts of websites.
5. If you are going to PAY for advertising on a website then you have the right to ask to see their statistics report. If these people are for real they would not mind showing you their actual stats – make sure you check traffic sources, popular pages, and visitor geostats.

I am not sure if people know which website I’m talking about, but my guess is that they receive less than 5000 page views a month – and I’m being very generous!

What most people do not realise is that advertising in traditional media (press, radio, and tv) does NOT convert to web visits. There isn’t a link close enough between reading/listening/watching the ad or the ‘infomercial’ and visiting a website – people will simply not remember you when they go online. The key to success on the internet for content websites is through SEO and linkbait – both of which should be obviously utilized after having some content to promote anyway.