Blue Chi’s

Boys and girls we are celebrating the Twestival with everyone around the world this Thursday! All users of Twitter (active or not) are welcome to join us on board of one of the ferries of  the National Ferry Company for a 2-hour round trip! Snacks will be served and special performances will be made by a local dance group.

Please register via BOTH of these links if you would like to come:
http://tinyurl.com/yfww2h8
http://twtvite.com/4ariqg

For more info please visit http://muscat.twestival.com/

Sangeetha at the Digital Oman blog has taken the initiative to organize a gathering to Omani people on Twitter, which I will be attending. If you are on Twitter and going to be in Town on the 8th of October then feel free to come join us!

We are going to meet up in Barista Coffeeshop in Masa Mall at 7pm on the 8th of October.  For more info follow Sangeetha on Twitter and check her blog.

UPDATE: THIS EVENT IS MEANT TO BE FOR PEOPLE WHO USE TWITTER. PLEASE REGISTER AN ACCOUNT ON TWITTER BEFORE JOINING AND THEN POST AT SANGEETHA’S BLOG TO CONFIRM YOUR ATTENDANCE.

The Digital Nation Seminar that I told you about was held last night, the topic was supposed to be about locally generated web content, but somehow many people felt that they had to talk about the ePayment Gateway as Kishor points out in his blog (He also has some suggestions for PEIE).

I’ll be on the discussion panel tomorrow evening at the Digital Nation seminar series to talk about the creation of local web content. Muscati is also going to be on the panel. The event is going to be held tomorrow Monday September 15th at 9.30pm in the Intercontinental hotel, entry is free of charge, just make sure you email mulkie@kom.om before you come. (You can still just show up even if you forget to email Mulkie so that’s not an execuse!).

I attended the Big Business Idea Competition finals last night. The Big Business Idea Competition is one of the nice initiatives made by PEIE and Ernst & Young to promote entrepreneurship among the Omani youth. The concept of this competition is simple, you submit your business plan, if you win, we will give you a grant of RO 5,000 ($15,000) and office space and facilities for an entire year free of charge to make your big business idea a reality (Check rules here). It is a really nice concept in essence, but for some reason, even after running for three years in a row now, we have not yet seen a single successful startup emerging out of this competition:

Just came from the Digital Nation seminar that was held at the intercon. I did not think that it was the most amazing, I actually personally do not think that Second Life will necessarily work for tourism because:

1. The fact that you have a place in second life does not mean that anybody will visit it. Just like the fact that if have a website on the internet that does not mean that people will visit it. You still need to promote your content. How are we going to promote (not build) Oman in second life?
2. The demographic of the second life users are not the same as those Oman targets to come to it as tourists.

Investing in second life can also be a real risk because building places on it can be expensive, I do not know how much it would actually cost to build something in SL, but I imagine a full proper building would be in the tens of thousands of dollars and a city will surely be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Add to this the fact that you probably cannot reuse these assets (3D models and objects) for other purposes because of SL’s proprietary environment.

Second Life has major accessibility and usability issues such as:

1. It requires the user to install the game on their machine to actually get into Second Life. Second life cannot be accessed from internet tables, mobile phones, or anything other than a proper PC with a proper graphics card and a highspeed internet connection. Not all people have this.
2. Second Life is not as easy to use as people make it sound, just customizing your avatar takes time and can be a hard thing to do. Even just moving the player and flying around is not something that you can expect the average Omani Internet user to do. Young people who grew up playing games will get it, but don’t expect a 30 something Omani person to learn it now. Building content for Second Life is, in plain words, difficult to do and requires high technical skills.
3. Second Life requires a high speed internet connection and the internet connection in Oman, including the latest upgrades by Omantel, suffers from connection quality issues (such as those affecting latency) that make online games lag.

I am too tired to write a lot about what I think of this topic, but I generally think that social networks such as Facebook and MySpace are better places to easily promote products and services – FOR FREE. In Facebook, anybody can create a page or a group, and then just use the viral nature of these social networks to spread the word. Instead of trying to recreate the Muscat Festival in second life a group can be easily created to which Facebook users can subscribe and receive the latest news about.

Anyway, the Chocolate Fudge was so good it compensated for my disapproval of the use of Second Life to promote tourism. But then again I did not network well at all, I didn’t talk to a single new person – and that was not cool. Hopefully the next one will be better!

I’m back in town, got back from Egypt last night, had to go directly to Sohar, came to Muscat a couple of hours ago. I hated Egypt, I don’t think that I’ll ever go again. The conference was the worst ever I’ve been in terms of organization, the seating was so messed up I don’t even know where to start, we didn’t have water to drink, I asked for some and I was turned down, the food was the closest thing I would imagine they would be giving in prisons – it was so horrible, you guys have no idea.

Half the audience also had no idea what the event was about, they thought it was about investment promotion in the Arab region or something like that, when it was about the risks of international investment treaties – something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. The UNCTAD speakers were the best as usual, an excellent non-UNCTAD Egyptian lawyer also discussed the first case ever to involve a Omani investor. It was very interesting.

However, that is not to say that I had fun in Egypt or anything like that, every single person on the street seemed like he would do anything to rob money off a foreigner. It was really horrible. I also had the very unfortunate incident of using a faulty ATM machine in the airport that claimed it gave me the money I attempted to withdrew and gave me a statement confirming that it did when nothing came out! It was the airport right when I came, and through the mess and noise of the airport, I just decided to take my freaking statement and just use another machine. I checked my bank account today and the amount was deducted. I do not know if I can get my money back, but will try to contact Bank Muscat even though I doubt they can do anything.

I hate Egypt and I’m never going back to it again.

I’ll be attending a conference on international investment dispute settlement in Cairo later this week (Wednesday and Thursday). The event is organised by the secretariat of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) jointly with the Cairo Regional Centre for International Commercial Arbitration. The conference will discuss the challenges faced by Arab countries in the area of bilateral investment treaties. This is relevant to our work at MOLA because we are responsible for reviewing all international agreements prior to their signed by our country.

I’ll be traveling on Tuesday and I’ll d be back on Friday.

PEIE is organising a very interesting campaign for promoting local Omani products in the format of a dinner event to be held at the Oman Tourism College where all the food served will not have any ingredients that have traveled more than 150 kilometers from their direct source to get to the college.

‘Food-Miles’ is such a cool concept, I have never though about how much distance a meal I’m eating has traveled to come to my dish. If you think about it, the shorter the distance an ingredient travels, the fresher it is. I have no idea how the Oman Tourism College will manage to do it, 150KM will mean that even ingredients from Sohar will not qualify, I assume that the dinner will mostly be sea food as the sea is probably less than 2KM away from the college.

I did try their food at the eGames Conference and it was not bad at all. This event is free of charge, so I might as well just go for the sake of the free meal! (And to support local products of course! )

The Origin Oman 150KM will be held on the evenings of the 25th and 26th of May. You can get your invitation by emailing hamida.albalushi@peie.om (we are NOT related).

I think that as Oman opens up to foreign investment and as our country concludes more and more free trade agreements, local business will have a hard time surviving the fierce competition, so we do need to support and promote local products. The Origin Oman campaign aims to do that by organising various events, some for the public to make them aware of good local products and service, some of Omani business to help them raise their standards.

PS. PEIE is also holding an RO 500 competition for students to design the Origin Oman logo, make sure you check it out if you are interested.

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.