The N97 has been on sale in Amman for the past few days (apparently for JD 450, US$ 633). There is a lot of Nokia and activity and buzz these days. I’ve been invited to attend its launch in Beirut but couldn’t go. Instead, I caught up with Bruce Howe, the marketing head for Nokia in Levant (which means he’s the guy responsible for making people in Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq lust over the latest and greatest Nokia devices!).

The N97 in Bruce’s hand looked great. But it was our bad luck that it was totally out of battery. But no worries, Nokia have promised me that they will provide the 360east Lab staff (i.e. your truly) with a “test unit”, so wait for the N97 review on 360east soon. I hope.

Loyal 360east readers (hello Nina, btw, nice meeting you today), have noticed that my blogging activity has dropped to almost zero. That’s not because I am out of blogging ideas or that there aren’t enough thing that piss me off in town. Actually I have at least 10 blog post drafts sitting there on my Mac, waiting for me to finish them. I’ve been busy with a huge personal project that has sucked the last bit of energy out of me. I hope that within a few week I will be back (with a vengeance).

The reason I am telling you this is that I will not write a super long post transcribing Bruce’s interview here. No time! Instead I will post it as a podcasts (gasp!). Remember those? You might even remember MixUp Arabia, the first podcast from Arabia, which I kept doing for a few months back in 2005 (aka the good old days).

I recoded my talk with Bruce on my 5800. As I was listening to the sound file I noticed that it skipped a bit at certain points (which is totally weird). But I am posting it anyway..

I asked Bruce about why OVI wasn’t working properly with Zain. I asked him about when the heck we’re going to get the long promised Amman map on our phones. I asked him about navigation and how it works in the Levant with its pretty chaotic cities. I learned that there is a ban on GPS in Syria (surprise surprise) and that despite the fact that we Levantines are poorer than our Gulf brethren, we still are willing to dish out top dollar to get our hands on Nokia’s latest high end devices (never call them phones in front of a Nokia executive).

Nokia are really trying hard to be locally relevant. That seems to be their weapon in the face of the iPhone onslaught. They recently announced a competition, called Bil3arabi, for Arab app developers, offering US$ 100,000 for the best application submitted, and US$ 25,000 for the second prize. Let’s see what the region is capable of.

Speaking of the Ovi Store, it hasn’t been very well received so far. Apple’s 50,000 + App store is making a mockery of OVI and similar mobile app stores. I installed the OVI store on my 5800 a couple of days ago and wasn’t impressed. Neither the apps nor the interface of the service are too exciting. I particularly missed the abundance of free or or 99 cent games and little apps i’ve seen on the iPhone’s App store.

Anyway.. If you are a mobile geek, you’ll have to listen to the podcast

Listen here in MP3 (23 min 29 sec/ 10.8 MB).

What Bruce doesn’t talk about (but sort of alludes to) is that there seems to be an exciting upcoming announcement coinciding with the official launch of the N97 in Jordan. This device lives on data. And I think Nokia wants to make it easier for us users to really enjoy data on the go.

It is a pity that Jordan is now seriously lagging behind when it comes to 3G. Now with the iPhone, the N97 and other smartphones coming to town, internet access through mobile should be really taking off, and with it all sorts of cool content and applications. For now we’re stuck with GPRS/EDGE. Hmm.

Another Nokia piece of news: I recently attended the launch of their recycling program in Jordan, which is the 2nd country in the Middle East to get that.

Now you can send your old phones (even non-Nokia ones) to a number of recycling spots around Amman. Nokia did a global study and discovered that over 40% of people just keep their old phones tucked away in their drawers at home. Almost no one send them to recycling. Nokia want you to get over your attachment to your old phone and help save the planet by sending it back to them. So much raw materials could be saved if people started doing that.

However, it would be cooler if device manufacturers paid consumer some amount of money for the phones they give back. No chance for that I guess!

And I leave you with this this interesting fact for your next dinner conversation: If every Nokia user in the world (there are 1 billion of them) removed their chargers from the wall socket after charging their phones, the energy saved could power 100,000 homes. Damn!

It seems that Jordan’s tolerance and moderation can’t include a 28 year old poet who “dared” to use a fragment of Quranic language in one of poems in a way that a religious authority found offensive.

The news that a Jordanian court has sentenced the poet Islam Samhan to one year in prison plus a JD 10,000 fine (and that his book has been confiscated from the market) should be truly disturbing to anyone who cares about freedom in this country.

You may not like the guy’s poetry and your religious sensibility might tell you that what the poet did was “inappropriate”. But should anyone be put in jail because of some “risky” language. There are a million offenses out there in our society, from child abuse to unsafe buildings, to reckless driving, to corruption that deserve the attention of our religious leaders, judges and journalists. But no! This poet’s “crime” is way more important!!

Prominent columnist Samih Ma’aytah, writing in Wednesday’s Al-Ghad, wants this incident to be the “last of sorrows”, and I think he means it as a warning to anyone who skirmishes with society’s “constants”. So in the name of “balance”, “moderation” and “tolerance”, artists and poets need to make sure they are not offending any authority or sensibility that this or that group of people consider “constant values”.

The problem is that everyone seems to be so easily offended! These “constants” might be lurking anywhere.

So in effect, moderates like Al-Ghad’s Ma’aytah, want artists and poets to be “very creative” but without offending society in any way. A poet like Samhan is portrayed by them as a mere “seeker of fame”. Their definition of creativity and innovation is one that comes with all kinds of safety belts and cushions to ensure that resulting great creativity does not cause friction with anyone’s beliefs.

While I understand that every culture and society might put limitations and red lines on what can be said, drawn or performed in public, what truly bugs me is that our moderates (let alone the religious conservatives) seem intent on making the room for innovation, creativity and dissent smaller and smaller, all in the name of balance and social calm.

This reminds of a creative brief I once received from a Saudi client, who wanted to create something cool and crazy for the youth market but that does not offend the conservative sensibilities of Saudi society.

The message was “Live LARGE, but within limits”.

Long live our moderation!

Yesterday, I received a comment on one of my posts from someone who said he’s from a company called Blink offering internet for business plans from 5 500 Mbit on their own infrastructure!

Has anyone heard of them or dealt with them?

Over the past week or so, several stories have been published in The National, Abu Dhabi’s quality English language daily, about Jordan’s technology scene, with a special focus on Jordanian web startups and the emerging culture around them.

Reporting from Jordan, The National’s Tom Gara has been firing off one article after the other, featuring a number of players from our local internet an tech scene, including, I am happy to say our team at TootCorp, creators of Ikbis and Watwet.

Photo from The National by Salah Malkawi

But the most interesting story by Tom by far is his attempt to answer the key question: why does Jordan have such an interesting startup scene?

The answers he brought together in his story ‘Jordan – the cradle of of internet stat-ups’ manage to paint a comprehensive picture that explains how a small and relatively poor country like Jordan manages to have a rather vibrant web industry, compared to its larger, and traditionally dominating neighbors. Very interesting read.
If you are interested in catching up on Tom’s reports from Amman, check out his post on The National’s beepbeep blog, where he put together links for all his Jordan stories.

I am very excited, as just a few minutes ago, the pre-launch page for the Amman Centennial website has gone live. This is not a ‘coming soon’ page, but an open invitation to all Ammanis (and expatriate Ammanis, of course) to share their stories of THEIR Amman.

The last 100 years of Amman’s history, since the establishment of its first municipal council in 1909, has witnessed its growth and evolution from a village nestled among ancient ruins, to a promising town in the early 20th century to today’s modern capital of Jordan.

The real story of Amman is the story of its people: their memories, struggles, encounters and events. This inspired the idea to solicit these stories directly from the people, to be published on the Centennial website once it is launched next month.

For now, you can already go to the site and submit your story, along with photos or documents if you like.

The Centennial team at the Greater Amman Municipality is hoping for the widest possible participation. So tell your friends about this site. Share your own story or ask you parent or grandparents for one!

It doesn’t have to be a long story (although you it can be as long as you like). Nor does it have to be extraordinary. The point id to create a collage of memories on the net that draws a picture of Amman by Ammanis.

Check it out here.

It’s almost like the “super computers” we see in science fiction movies. You ask the computer a question and the computer gives an answer. The question can be a request for historical data, a mathematic equation, the current temperature of a city, and so on. The thing is: the computer “understands” the question.

But this isn’t about science fiction.

We might be looking at a major milestone in computer and knowledge history: Wolfram Alpha was launched last night. I think we can safely say that not since the launch of Google’s search engine (and the mathematic algorithms behind it) or the explosive growth of Wikipedia have we witnessed, as consumers, such an important milestone in how we access and manipulate knowledge.

Yeah, sure YouTube has become a huge database of humanity’s video content and Facebook has connected or reconnected tens of millions. But Wolfram Alpha takes us back to the power of more complex “computing”.

It’s not a search engine that looks for the occurrence of a certain word on some webpage. It brings back data. It understands your question and bring back relevant DATA. It computes, plots, compares. It’s geographic, physical, mathematic, historical.

It’s a totally ambitious project by some really brainy people.

I won’t say more. I advise you to check out the video demo of Wolfram Alpha before trying it out. Then give the site a spin.