I still have one major blog post/article about the recent Jordan ICT Forum 2006 in me. But that will have to wait for another 48 hours. For now I would like to point you Lina Ejeilat’s post about the discussion on the 2nd day of the forum around Arabic content (or rather the lack thereof) on the net.
But to put all of this in context, let me quote Samih Toukan, the CEO of Maktoob, who have recently launched Araby, a new Arabic search engine. He expects the size of the Arabic net to be 100 million pages. So far they have crawled half of that.
That statistic is depressing. We heard it many times at the forum: while Arabs are 3% or 5% (or something like that) of the world’s population, and while the Arabic language is considered the “5th in the world” Arabic content constitutes just 0.1% or 0.5% (pick one!) of the net.
I don’t what to even go into the more depressing facts cited in the final session by Dr Maen Nsour, the CEO of the Jordan Investment Board, who was the coordinator of the 2nd Arab Human Development Report, which focused on knowledge. When you start to understand how little “knowledge” is produced in the Arab region, the internet statistics no longer shock you.
A ray of hope may come from Arab entrepreneurs outside the Arab world, as Lina notices..
Into the Wind: TechWadi, Content Development… and More:
One of the things I found very refreshing, was the number of Arab-Americans among the speakers who are leaders in the ICT industry in the US and worldwide, and their desire to bring investment back home. One person, Ray Milhem, is a Vice President and GM at Motorola, and he is part of a group who founded Tech Wadi. Tech Wadi, according to their website, is “Silicon Valley’s premier professional association for Arab-American technology executives. Our mission is to foster connections, relationships, and entrepreneurship among the Arab-American technology community in Silicon Valley and beyond.”Another example is Suhail Calis, founder and CEO of Tocali Games. He was one of the speakers in the very interesting and important session on Content Development in the Region, which tackled the issue of the tremendous lack of localized Arabic content. He has successfully launched over 25 game titles on Playstation, Nintendo, Xbox, and others. He has been researching market readiness for adver-gaming, and says that now there is a niche for it here that they want to invest in.
Lina also notes some of the content success stories from Jordan. Content development could be a huge opportunity for Jordan. The problem is, I felt, that we have a bit of chicken and egg situation. With internet penetration levels so low (another depressing fact) who will invest in sophisticated content sites?
Someone has to break this cycle. I now believe that the telecoms and government of the Arab world have a duty in kickstarting a real net revolution, but providing cheaper bandwidth and subsidized PCs. Large content providers, like TV broadcasters should also be nudged to do something. Last but not least, a huge amount of educational content needs to be made available to convince parents that the internet is actually good for their kids.
Comments
3 responses to “Games and content for Arabia’s internet?”
Pretty depressing indeed.
But, on a similar not, why didn’t you make this specific post in Arabic? I don’t mean to be rude or anything. But don’t you think we should all start with ourselves?
You’re a community leader (correct me if I’m wrong) and therefore, the eyes and ears are on you to set trends.
Just a thought. I hope you don’t take it negatively
Why should i take this negatively.. On the contrary. Your point makes sense. It has been suggested to me in the past by my brother for example.
But I have a different agenda here.
As important as Arabic content is, I believe there is an even bigger problem with the presence of Arab ‘culture’ on the global scene. The Arab story is not being told by enough poeple. My aim here is to build bridges, rather than inform only.
Writing in English also gives me a wider potential audience from many cultures (including Arab culture).
Yet I really admire people who blog in Arabic. I admire people like Marwan (subzeroblue.com) who blog in BOTH English and Arabic. Sadly, my time is too limited for that.
Actually thinking about it, I think that the fact that there is so little Arabic content, though depressing, is less depressing that the low number of internet users in the Arab region.
It shows that people are either too underpriviged to connect and/or not interested to connect. The wealth of English content should be a magnet for nations who have a knowledge deficit. But the big Arab masses are not there yet.
I think you’re asking for too much man. I mean you can’t compare the arab world to the west, the internet… no wait… computers are still a mystery to the majority of people here (and that’s a fact) whereas for example 2 years ago I was in england and in a small village (pop 2000) this 70 year old guy (WWII vet) was telling me something about emails, biddi aguss eedi iza wa7ad hon 70+ be3raf shoo howeh il email, nevermind being from a small village. What I’m trying to say is we still need time
PS: hey man since ur kind of a community leader, maybe u should tell ppl to vote online for petra to become a world wonder (its free and u get 7 votes) http://www.visitjordan.com normally i wouldnt care, but what the heck..