This moment I am lying in bed. I’ve been lying here for the better part of the last 48 hours, with a fever and a headache. It’s a common cold or a flu (apparently not of the swine variety).

As I write this, the Nile has turned into a river of tears. A little while ago Egypt, the mother of the world, as Egyptians like to say, has just lost 1:0 against Algeria in football match held in Khartoum.

The past 48 hours allowed me to “rediscover” Arab TV, as the TV in the bedroom kept me company for most of the day in my self imposed quarantine. So what better to do than watch the game of “brotherly hate” on the Egyptian “Space” Channel (ie the state run satellite TV channel). As I gradually immersed myself in Arab TV, I was emerging out of my usual web media bubble and starting to think about Arab real life.

So to get the whole thing out of my head, I brought out the long ethernet cable, got the net into the bedroom, and now, with a bit over 38 degrees celsius of fever, I will dump my thoughts into a blog post..

1. Football is the true “god” of Arab masses: Even Sheikh Qardawi is upset that this match (and the one preceding it in Cairo a few days back) is consuming Arab masses to such a level. The tension was so high between the two countries on both the popular and the official levels. State media and resources in both countries where working in overdrive. One rarely sees such state mobilization in this part of the world. Forget Palestine. Forget the prophet Mohammad cartoons. Forget unemployment. When a football is involved the whole Arab state machinery starts rotating around it.

2. The “modern” Arab national state is more than alive and kicking. Forget about the artificial borders that colonialists used to divide the Arab nation. These borders and the national states within them are now sacred. These were two Arab teams competing for a ticket to go to the word cup. But Arabness took a back seat here. This was the Nation of Egypt against the Nation of Algeria. To be accurate, there were also voices of reconciliation and Arab solidarity on various levels. But it was clear that people totally identify with their modern states.

3. As I watched the match on Egyptian TV I was amazed and amused by the way Egyptians where asking God every five minutes to bestow victory upon their team. Even some of the advertisers did that: “Pray for Egypt”.. “Oh God support Egypt”. If I was a martian who just landed on earth tonight (with a fever) I would think that the Egyptian where appealing to their own National God and not the God of all muslims. I mean why would God take sides between team from muslim countries??

4. Consumer brands are the God of media. The amount of advertising sold on the Egyptian channel was astounding. But just consider this: the very second the referee whistled the match to an end, the live images were IMMEDIATELY cut to show an ad for Pepsi featuring Arab pop icon Tamer Husni. To me this was unbelievable. For several reasons:

First, for goodness sake, think of the emotions of the tens of millions of Egyptian TV viewers. They are totally devastated. Their football heroes beaten in the battle field. Probably in tears. Can’t you give them a moment to mourn. To see their team for a few moments after it was defeated. To say goodbye. To cry for them as they make it around the field to salute the fans. NO. NO NO. DRINK PEPSI.

Second, if I were the Pepsi brand manager I would be horrified by my brand being the first thing people see (with a dancing Tamer and a cute girl) the very second of the Egyptian defeat.

Then finally, after a whole barrage of upbeat ads, that totally felt out of place, we get the Egyptians football analysts (which remind me old Egyptian military analysts explaining what happened in the 1967 war) who promptly embarked on a clinical analysis of the game. No consolations. No emotions. Just technical talk.

Earlier in the day I was channel zipping. On Al Jazeera’s “live” channel, which covers all kinds of events in their entirety, there was high brow cultural panel from Doha with the Palestinian intellectual Azmi Bishara, discussing his latest book: What does it mean to be an Arab in our days. I am sure that Mr Bishara has something super smart to say about today’s match. But I think that no one hears him when the football crowd roars.

Going to the opening of the Global Entrepreneurship Week tonight was like going to group therapy. My partner Razan and I had just had an “afternoon from hell” dealing with extremely lame financial reporting issues at the office. It’s the stuff that makes one curse the day he or she decided to be entrepreneurial and start a company.

In that mood we left the office and headed over to Le Royal Hotel, and found hundreds of people in front of the ballroom. Very interesting. This was not an event promoted with big ads or Royal Patronage, yet the crowd was big. I am happy to report that the ratio of suits vs jeans/casual was pretty reasonable. Yes, there were the “usual IT suspects” (myself included but also a healthy dose of younger faces.

The therapy at the GEW Jordan came in the form of an amazing lineup of of speakers. There were zero boring government officials. There was no mindless “invest in Jordan” talk. Just a series of great speakers.

We should consider ourselves lucky in Jordan to have such events. We get some inspiring international speakers like Creative Common’s CEO Joi Ito, LinkedIn’s founder Reid Hoffman, Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker. Then you get Arab tech entrepreneurs like Sami Shalabi (who sold his startup Zingku to Google) and Habib Haddad (founder of Yamli). Not to forget the local Jordanian entrepreneurs. There were the very truthful observations of Ketab’s Khaled Kalaldeh, the amazing energy of consultant-turned-social-entrepreneur Maher Qaddoura (founder of the Hikmat Road Safety initiative) and the impressive story of Dr Amjad Aryan (founder of the fast growing Pharmacy1 chain in Jordan) and many others..

In the early 2000’s the dominant business event was the Jordan ICT Forum. Jordan also attracted the World Economic Forum. But this new wave of entrepreneurial talk is different. It’s no longer giant corporations doing the talking (think of Intel, Cisco and Microsoft). All talk is about open source, collaboration, innovation and creating something out of nothing. Real startup people sharing their stories. Very cool.

The organizations who put together this opening night and the rest of the week’s events really deserve to be applauded for this spirit. Endeavor Jordan, The Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship, Creative Commons an the Young Entrepreneurs Association are delivering a much-needed event to keep the ball of entrepreneurship in Jordan rolling. Thanks for the therapy!

Finally!

I’ve been covering developments in getting Amman and Jordan mapped electronically for a few years now, at one point even suggesting that we as users just do it ourselves!

This whole GPS maps and navigation business in Jordan was being held up for over a year by what seems to be regulations hurdles, combined with some entrenched business interests. So although I am happy that Amman and Jordan finally have a fully functioning digital map, complete with important points of interest (restaurants, hospitals, hotels, etc), I am still quite annoyed by the fact that the Kingdom had to wait for so long to finally getting this working, in the hands of consumers.

But Nokia have done it. Nokia ads promoting their mapping product are all over Amman and its malls. The maps will be available this week in stores, and within 10 days for online download, as been told by Nokia Mohammad Al Sheikh, the guy responsible for this business in the region. While the maps will be free (which is fantastic for finding stuff and getting around) voice assisted navigation (see video above, in Arabic) will be a paid service (US$ 10 for one month and US$ 100 for a whole year of voice assisted navigation for the WHOLE OF THE MIDDLE EAST).

So if you’re going to Riyadh or Doha next time, for 10 bucks you can have an assistant in your pocket giving you directions to drive around town.

I am now in the process of testing the service in Amman. I was given a one year navigation voucher by Nokia and a new N97 mini with the maps preloaded for testing.

So far its been working great. I even had instances where the navigation system made me aware of some tiny streets I didn’t even know existed.

Of course, long-time Amman residents will probably know their usual roads and shortcuts better than any navigation system, but even they could benefit from GPS mapping for their own city. Amman has grown tremendously. Try finding your way around Sahab if you are a resident of Jabal Al Hussein who rarely ventures outside central Amman!

Tourism will also benefit form the availability of a proper map for Amman and Jordan. The map already has 13,500 points of interest on it. I tested this in Abu Dhabi, and found that even tiny restaurants are on the map, complete with their phone numbers!

Nokia will also invite users to add their own points of interest to the map, using their OVI service. So user generated mapping will also play a role in this offering. Navteq, the Nokia owned mapping giant which is behind all of this mapping and technology will regularly update the map every 6 months. This is important for the fast evolving cities of Arabia.

I will continue testing the service and might post more detailed experiences with Nokia’s Amman and Jordan maps.

In the meantime I am still watching out for Jordan’s amazing home grown mapping service, insideJO, which did a great job on their own, a testimony to Jordanian tech innovation at its best. I think they too are launching soon and I hope we hear good news about that offering to.

[Thanks to the Ikbis team, especially Mohammad Jardat, for shooting the cool video above of our first test drive! With two cameras! ]

For the past two years, the subject of Amman has been unavoidable for me. Not only do I live in this city, but I’ve also been, with my company SYNTAX, involved in the first big branding effort this city has undertaken. I am overdosed on Amman! The branding project has been completed but writing about Amman this year is still unavoidable
So, on Friday Amman held its first large city parade. I was really glad that I came to this event simply as a spectator with my family.

It turned out to be Amman’s most colorful day!

Now, just for some moments, consider some of the tough realities of contemporary Amman (let’s forget, for a moment the “10 thousand years of history” the tourism people like to talk about):

A city of refugees, starting with CIrcassians brutally kicked out of their land, to the Palestinians, to the Iraqis of today (and many other groups). On the more positive side, Amman was also at one point a utopian city representing a new Arab beginning. But this is largely a city of displaced people.

A socially divided city. Let’s not forget that we’re still with one foot in the Third World. This is not a European middle class city.

A city used “practically” and not celebrated emotionally. People just wanted to build a house where they felt safe. Have a job. Get the kids educated. No time to philosophize about this “city”.

A city with an inferiority complex. A young Arab capital trying to stand shoulder to shoulder with Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus. Not even to mention western capitals. Amman is often described as “boring”, “not a city”, “fringe”, “unplanned”.

A capital city of an “artificial” country. Those who feel that way forget, of course, that all identities are “artificial”. Yet when a country is still relatively young, many people scoff at its still emerging identity and its emerging capital.

A city undiscovered by many of its own citizens. My favorite examples are the 22 year old girl who’s never been to downtown Amman and the 25 year old guy who doesn’t know what Rainbow Street is.

A city that, until recently, was often treated by the “authorities”, as a traffic and infrastructure challenge and not as a cultural opportunity (despite the sporadic, exaggerated, grand poetic homages on national occasions).

So.. can such a city have a good parade?

The answer is a resounding “yes”.

And maybe it was the little touches that made this parade a success.

The city cleaners, those orange men that we often ignore, where suddenly marching center stage and greeted by the crowd. The street sellers with their typical carts carrying anything from vegetables to a meat grill, marched through the city with the same importance as the police motorbikes. The second hand clothes seller where there too, dragging their racks through the parade. Girls and women in various dress styles and attitudes. The “annoying” gas sellers, represented by a gas pickup. Amman’s most famous cartoon characters (Abu Mahjoob and Abu Muhammad), businesses, NGOs, actors. Not to mention horses, camels and lots of balloons!

Suddenly it was all there. The people, the organizations, the history, the authorities.. They where all marching together with Amman watching them.

For a few hours, a city simply celebrated itself. And if this is the “normal” thing that a parade is supposed to do, just consider that this is the first time this happens in Amman. Just consider all the tough realities I mentioned above, and you’ll understand the importance of what happened on Friday.

This event was not a “deep” intellectual exercise. But it achieved something that is intellectually very important: making Amman realize its own “cityness”.

Our Amman is the product of the 20th century, now moving into the 21st century. And this is what was celebrated. Not the Romans. Not the Ammonites. Not the Omayyads. But the people who are the Amman of today.

A number of lucky coincidences made this possible: Amman Municipality’s 100th birthday was presided over by a mayor who started his tenure by asserting that Amman should have a “soul”. This gave a voice to those Ammanis who saw value not only in the ancient history of the place (which indeed is important), but ALSO the contemporary collage of the last 100 years. In the background there was a branding initiative which gave Amman a new visual language that celebrated the populated hills and the diversity of the people.

The immense challenges facing Amman have not gone away, of course. But we the city seems to have taken an important step towards accepting itself and maybe even dare show its colors.

Check out my photos of the parade..

It’s been a long time in the making, but now its here.

Never before has Amman’s story been presented to its citizens and guest so vividly and comprehensively. It’s still a work in progress that Ammanis and their guest will complete in the coming months and years. I am talking about the Amman Centennial website, branded and designed by SYNTAX and developed by its sister company Spring.

I will let the site speak for itself and I urge you to visit it.

Telling Amman’s story was a key recommendation we presented to GAM as part of the comprehensive city brand we developed for Amman. A city without a story is a city without an identity. Amman’s story is unique. It is a city that defies easy classification. It is a hybrid, a collage, a melting pot. For that, Amman often gets dismissed by people who are looking for the stereotypical ‘oriental’ city, and even by many of its own urban elite, who consider ‘not cool’, ‘not original’, ‘not grand’ or ‘not serviced’ enough. But once you start understanding the story of this city, the youngest of the Arab capitals of the Levant, you start seeing it with new eyes.

This site is the first ever bilingual (Arabic/English) attempt to take Amman’s story to the mainstream. So far, only academics and intellectuals knew anything significant about the story of Amman. Many of the attempts of recounting Amman’s hostory fall into the trap of talking more about the Romans (and other ancients) than the Amman of the 20th century. What we tried to do for our client, GAM, here was to give them a package of information, that forms the basis of future efforts to tell the story of Amman. Our hope is that our effort and that of others (like the work of Dr Rami Al Daher, who created an exhibition on Amman’s story as well) will be translated into a future downtown interactive museum that tells the unique story of Amman.

As this is an interactive website, it offer Amman’s citizens and friends to share their own Ammani stories. So far a number of interesting pieces have been submitted, most of them in Arabic. My colleague and fellow blogger Roba Assi has contributed a number of posts reflecting on ‘her’ Amman in English. As this blog is in English, this is an invitation to English speakers to contribute to this site too.

Also, for the first time ever, the institutional history of Amman’s municipality (ie the history of GAM as an organization) is being told on this site (for now in Arabic, but the English version is coming very soon). It was an unbelievably difficult task to piece this history together. After a number of failed attempts, the task fell upon Mr Mohammad Rafee’, one of Amman’s most prominent historians, who was able to complete this task to the satisfaction of GAM.

At SYNTAX, we often get ourselves involved in pioneering projects. Amman has never undertaken a comprehensive branding exercise. It never presented its story in an accessible manner. City identities, especially in this turbulent part of the world, are never easy to deal with. City’s stories happen at the intersection of the social, economic and political spheres of society. Creating this site was at times frustrating and stressful, to us and to our client. I am sure that people will find things to complain about. But for now it stands as a piece of the Ammani collage. It is an attempt to establish a new official narrative, blended with the non-official stories of ordinary Ammanis.

My hope is that it becomes a catalyst for further story telling about Amman and its spirit.

Give it a try..

This morning I woke up at 6 am Amman Time, be interviewed by Dubai Eye 103.8’s Business Breakfast show about Watwet .You can listen to the interview here. This comes hot on the heels of an interview that Emirates Business 24/7 did with Watwet CEO Kareem Arafat.

With the Twitter hype going mainstream in the region, more eyes are on Watwet too. The site recently enabled its users to use it a a Twitter client and mirror and also launched its sms-based services in the UAE via Du.

It definitely an interesting time to be in this business

I have three kids, aged 11, 6 and 3. So its obvious that a lot of children TV and content is consumed in our household. Kids today have an amazing array of media targeted at them: from Bluray quality Pixar movies in vivid detail, color and surround sound, to online Flash games and YouTube videos that show them how to build better paper planes, not to mention game consoles and other gadgets.

Recently, I bought my kids all the episodes of Maya the Honey Bee (in German) from the iTunes music store. It was quite interesting to see how they reacted to content that my wife and I watched as kids. They really liked it actually.

Our household in Amman is trilingual (German/Arabic/English). This presents some challenges to the younger kids. Of course, kids can learn languages very fast, but learning three languages at once and learning to read and write English and Arabic at school is not without its problems (currently we are facing this with our 6 year old first grader).

To get more Arabic content into the house, we went and bought the DVDs of Iftah Ya Simsim (Arabic Wikipedia page, English Wikipedia page), which is the Arabic version of Sesame Street (by the Children Television Workshop).

This is a landmark show in the history of Arab TV. It was produced, starting in 1979 as a joint production by the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. If we think back to 1979, this is very impressive. The UAE was merely 10 years old as country for example. Of course Kuwait already had a pretty advanced media, so the show was shot in a studio in Kuwait City, with outdoor film material shot all over the Arab region. Notably there are a lot of Iraqi actors playing leading roles in the show. I am pretty sure that Arab talent from all of the Arab region was used in the production, but it was the Gulf countries that paid the bill for getting the rights to use the Sesame Street content and characters. The show was given away for free to all Arab TV stations in the 1980s, and consequently got wide exposure (apparently the Egyptians refused to air for one reason or another!).

Although the show has a strong Arab character, the diversity of dress and the role of women is very interesting to watch after 30 years. Most human characters wore European dress styles, but there were also people who wore Arab dress. The main woman character was not veiled. Generally, the production felt quite progressive within its Arab frame.

This history of Iftah Ya Simsim ends with Arab politics and in-fighting rearing their ugly head. A number of its 3rd season episodes disappeared from the Kuwaiti studio after the Iraqi invasion of the country in 1990. Even more hilarious/sad was the fact that the puppets of the two main Arabic animal characters, the bear Numan and the parrot Malsoon were stolen.

So how did this 30 year old content perform with my 6 year old boy in 2009. Well, I would say 50/50. Of course, sound and picture quality are not that great. The content must feel somewhat alien to a kid of today. But we were able to get him to watch two episodes. With some nudging I think we’ll be able to go through the whole season with him.

I will be on the lookout for the Jordanian-produced children show Al Manahel (Arabic Wikipedia link), which also was modeled on one of the Children Television Workshop’s shows: The Electric Company.

The longevity of content, stories, songs, images, is remarkable. Yet I wonder what the state of Arab educational today is. Since I have stopped watching TV years ago, and as my kids have been mostly watching English and German content, I really can’t judge what, for example, Aljazeera children channel is doing. I will pay close attention to this in the coming weeks and months.

Today’s media landscape in the Arab region is TOTALLY different than the days of state controlled media 30 years ago. But the question of progressive children content must be at the top of our priorities at least to counter all the ugliness, pretentiousness and fanaticism that’s out there.. Does anyone know of progressive Arab material being done for kids (sorry, but the Jordanian produced DVDs like ‘Al-Alwan min Hawlina’ might be ‘cute’ but don’t really count as progressive).

I am increasingly interested in this field for obvious family reasons, but also as a field of research and study.