Blue Chi’s

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!).

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!

Here is an exclusive to the readers of my blog, we are launching a new project called ‘Chemical Orange’ tomorrow at KOM’s eGames conference. Chemical Orange is a portal for downloading free mobile phone games. The slogan of Chemical Orange is “Fun, Fresh Gameplay” and that is exactly what it’s about. Our games are very *ethnic*, simple and addictive. We have two games at the launch and they are compatible with a large number of phones (all Nokia N-Series and E-Series all other phones running the Flash Lite Player). Our games are free of charge, but you might need to pay for using data on your phone, however, our games are about 50KB to 80KB in size, so that is about 40 to 25 baisa if you are on Oman Mobile’s postpaid. You can also download the games onto your computer and then transfer them to your phone if you don’t want to use the mobile portal.

To access the mobile portal, open your phone browser and access m.chemicalorange.com. Our actual website can be found at http://www.chemicalorange.com/

I am also going to speak tomorrow at eGames conference, hope to speak to some of you attending the event tomorrow!

Just got back from the Digital Nation seminar and dinner was served even though I did not expect it!!

Jokes aside, it was a good one, the topic was about the Digital Divide, which I do not think is as bad as much as people think it is, the Omani population is made up mainly of young people who will need it to survive, I think that the ITA is doing a great job, I love these guys.

Can’t believe that the Ministry of Legal Affairs was mentioned so many times during this seminar, the ITA is bitching about us to everyone saying that the e-commerce law is with us and that they are just waiting for us to approve it – I work at the Ministry of Legal Affairs, but I have NO IDEA what is happening about this law. I’ve seen it in our electronic archives, and I’ve read some of it, but I do not know why it is taking so long. Some government officials went to the states earlier this year to get some advice on it I think. Our FTA with the US has a chapter on e-commerce, so the the Americans would love to get involved as much as they can – which I think is in our benefit. Will snoop around MOLA to know what is happening.

I had dinner at The World’s Most Boring Table, hated it, I fortunately then had a super quick meet up with fellow bloggers Abdulla of BeInOman and Kishor Carippa.

I’m surely going to the next one!

Something completely different, I FINALLY GOT MY BOOKS, I ordered several books from Amazon.co.uk and just collected them today from Al Manahil. Got two novels, two business books, one law book, and one web usability book! Will tell you more about them later – I’m so excited about these you guys have no idea!

I had loads of fun at yesterday’s seminar. I have never done any sort of public speaking in my life before, so I was naturally terrified at the start of it. But it did get better when we sat down, it was also so much easier because it was a discussion panel and not a presentation or speech-giving kind of thing.

The Omani Cuisine got a lot of attention, barely anybody asked me anything about Oman3D, I got the impression that people thought I work at a place called Oman3D, and that I was at the event because I blogged at the Omani Cuisine? Well, I was glad to hear that people liked the OC that much.

Blogger Abdulla from Be In Oman also attended, had a very short chat with him. A very nice young person.

And for those of you curious to know what snacks were served afterwards, it was little nibbles, sandwiches, pocket-size-pizza, and juice.

On a different but related note, PEIE is going to hold its final Oman Manufacturing Group Seminar next week on Sunday the 16th of December at 7.30 at the Crowne Plaza. The title of the seminar is “Lean Manufacturing: Value Stream Mapping” and free dinner WILL be served. Hopefully I will see some of you there.

I’ll be speaking at KOM’s next Digital Nation seminar titled iGeneration: Embracing the Digital World next week. I’ll be sharing the panel with people from Cisco, Ericsson, Nawras, and Netsolo. The event is going to be held at KOM (and not the Crowne Plaza as previously announced!), this could also mean that free dinner might NOT be included, which is, I know, a real bummer for many, but you should still try to make it nonetheless if you are free at 7:30pm on Sunday the 9th of December next week, they might serve juice and biscuits.

Knowledge Oasis Muscat is going to hold the second seminar in its Digital Nation series next Sunday, the title of the seminar will be “Ramping Up Internet Usage and Content”, the panels this time will include the CEOs of Omantel, ITA (Information Technology Authority), and Nawras. The invitation email I received mentions YouTube, MySpace, and Orkut – websites which I really doubt that all of the people mentioned above ever used, visited, or even heard of. However, I am still going to attend to the event, because the seminar is only about or so and I don’t really have much else to do on that evening. I hope that it does not end up like the previous PEIE seminar.

Anybody could attend by simply emailing Ibtisam@kom.om to reserve a seat. Free dinner will be served afterwards.