Nothing like being able to start showing people what I’ve been immersed in the past few months! It’s been a crazy journey for the team at SYNTAX and Spring and it will only get crazier.

What was a sketchy idea a few months ago has turned into a full fledged project with a powerful vision: building [...]

Can someone please explain this to me: brands and slogans that totally loose their edge when introduced into Arab markets.

Here are three examples:

I bought this shaving cream the other day. The tagline/product identifier say “Cool Kick” in English. The Arabic translates into “Cool Touch”. Oh how soft and nice!

Arab men can’t take a kick.. They [...]

TootCorp, makers of Toot, Ikbis and Watwet, have launched their fourth product and the company’s first aimed at the global market. It’s called ZOOFS.
Here is what TootCorp cofounder Kareem Arafat had to say about it:

Zoofs is a new way to discover YouTube videos that people are talking about on Twitter. Zoofs swallows millions of Tweets [...]

Over the past few years, Ikbis.com has grown in size and in depth. Ikbis Channels, in particular, have been multiplying in number and are being used by a wide variety of users and organizations: from people sharing a an interest to global broadcasting organizations reaching out to Arab audiences.

Here are 6 examples of what I [...]

Visiting Beirut is always a bitter sweet experience. My last trip to Beirut to attend ArabNet, the region’s first web business conference was my third trip to the city in 8 years, each of which had the duration of 48 hours. Each time I visit beirut I leave with a book, always from Librarie Antoine, [...]

Photos stolen from Andfaraway
With a ballroom full of participants during all sessions, buzzing networking activity during coffee breaks, inspiring talks from both older web hands and young ones, startup demos from all over the region, not to mention very active tweeting and live blogging, we can say that day 1 of the ArabNet [...]

Here is one of my favorite anecdotes about the Arab web industry: the web advertising spending of the whole Arab region, including the rich Gulf region and Saudi Arabia is less than the revenue of a single niche web marketing agency (which you never heard of) in Seattle where one of my friends works. Now [...]