And it's back...ArabNet 2015

Yes it's that time of the year where tech enthusiasts, business professionals and various professional and financial bodies get to rub elbows with all the real and wannabe entrepreneurs.
Of course not everybody there really know why they are attending, it remains however essential for any professional in digital and innovation to be present.
The various insights into new industry trends on the local and regional scenes have always proven their value.
It also a very good opportunity to extend one's network reach. Just make sure you are not behaving like a used car salesman handing out business cards. Careful selecting whom to connect to and how you can synergize with them is a cornerstone of building solid business relationships.

As a blogger evolving in this ecosystem, I was invited once more this year. I will be warping my business schedule to make it there. Give me a shout if you want to connect during the event.

PS: Below is the event's official press release:

My First Day With Uber Beirut

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN MORE APP REVIEWS ON YOUTUBE CLICK HERE:

When I set off to write this post, it was meant to be called "My First Ride with Uber Beirut". However, I chose to rename it for the purpose of fairness and giving credit where credit was due, since I managed to squeeze in two rides on the same afternoon/evening with two very different experiences.

Some of you who follow me on Twitter might have noticed that I immediately reached out to Uber Beirut upon news of their launch. I am a big fan of the hailing app concept and have had the chance to try several apps in several countries starting with Romania.

Uber however is not just any app, and regardless of any controversy that you might have heard, these guys have an excellent business model that is spreading like wildfire and I can totally understand why:
What's not to like about the promise of ordering a timely, elegant transport with a courteous driver and a friction-less payment method from the comfort of your smartphone?

My First Ride in Beirut...Uber-Lebanese

I set out heading from Badaro to LAU Beirut on Saturday (2014-07-12), and placed my order at 18:53. Surely enough, I was notified that the driver would be arriving within 4 minutes. So far so good, but 4 minutes later with no car in sight, I followed up with a short text to the driver indicating exactly where I would wait for him, to avoid any confusion.
From there on, things went downhill. It took the driver 32 minutes to reach me. I was seriously panicking that I would not be able to make it on time to LAU.
I called the driver to inquire how close he was as the car seemed lost in a maze of streets in Achrafieh. He assured me he was close to the museum but what I was seeing in front of me suggested something else. I then finally spotted him coming towards me but stopping to ask for direction, so I called him again. He saw me also and hung up as he pulled up.

Click to Enlarge

As you see from the info above, I was off to a bad start, and had less than 30 minutes to get to my destination. Doors were to close at 19:45 at LAU. As I got into the car I was surprised again that the driver was not familiar with the area and did not know how to make up for lost time to make it there, so I co-piloted and navigated him through my usual road.

I must, however, in all due conscience, say that he seemed really apologetic and stressed that he had been so late and he was really helpful and courteous through the ride, adjusting the cooling and proposing me a drink of water since he saw I had been sweltering in the heat for 30 minutes. He also did his best to get me to my destination on time. I eventually made it on time  and got off just 15 meters away from the lower gate although he proposed to drive me exactly there. I did not want us to get caught in the Koraytem road maze.

I was left perplex on what to make of this experience. On one hand, I had waited in the heat for half an hour and lost my chance for a decent seating at the event, on the other, the vehicle and the driver were up to my expectation in terms of quality and behavior.

I still do not want to categorically draw any conclusions and perhaps traffic was hard on the way to Badaro from Abdel Wahab Street although on a Saturday afternoon in summer, Beirut is usually traffic free.

Uber Redeemed by Abbas

After the ceremony in LAU had finished, we decided to grab a bite at the nearby Deek Duke restaurant (Google Map). I wanted to try again taking Uber. My girlfriend had ordered a ride a few hours before me that day and was extremely satisfied. So I opened the app, GPS blasting, and placed an order. A car was assigned to us a few minutes away. I then monitor the driver skillfully avoiding congested roads to make it on time and arriving at the marker that was supposed to represent our location.
However, as we look around, there was no car anywhere near.
I immediately call the driver, and we quickly realize the app had placed us in Bliss not in Hamra. I bare a lot of the responsibility this time as I did not really zoom in and look at the pin.
However, he reassured me he had understood where we actually were, and sure enough, a few minutes later a sparkling new BMW Series 5 pulls up.
A neatly dressed driver disembarks, introduces himself as Abbas, opening the door for us.
Once in the car, he apologizes once more (although he was not to blame for a faulty GPS location in the app) and asks if the air conditioning setting was to our liking and we were comfortably seated. The rest of our drive home was smooth as can be and upon our arrival we got the same royal treatment as when we boarded the vehicle.

Final Thoughts

Sure, some of you will say I am being tough on the first driver and the company, and that a normal Taxi will have lied and weaseled its way out of this, and even not shown up at all.
But you know what? This is NOT a random taxi company managed by some fat-bellied, sweat-dripping, flip-flop wearing driver. I based my expectations on the reputation of what is the fastest growing company in this field. Just consider this: Uber had recently been seeking $12 Billion valuation in its latest funding round

In the entire commotion I had not noticed that I had received a mail follow up. Uber had reacted to the rating of the first drive that I had input on the app even before I got to write this blog post and reacted by giving me a 5$ coupon on the spot. I think this is just one facet of how professional these people are. I also think the driver which I had the unfortunate experience with, has the potential of being an excellent driver as he gets more used to the roads and the process as a whole.
Uber did warn us this was a sort of a "beta" release. Therefore, I will cut them some slack in that area but above all I will thank them for one of the best rides home I have had in a very long time.

Regular Lebanese taxi providers are still in a slumber, but they better wake up really fast and get up to speed with the century. They are about to be heavily outclassed and I honestly do not think they can do anything about it, especially those among them with new fleets and cocky attitudes.

"We Are Pleased and Honored..."

By Captainm (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

If you have ever flown out of Beirut's (only) international airport then chances are you probably have had the chance to hear the overzealous welcoming message that gets pushed through the loudspeakers all over the facility:

"Welcome to Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport. 

We are pleased and honored to have you in our city".

Pleased and Honored, you say?

Those two consecutive adjectives just get the best of me every time I hear them.

See, I am not a jet-setter, but in my modest travels, I have never heard any city airport shout-out to passing travelers that it was honored to have them over, even in the most touristic of cities.

This got me really thinking about all the hidden reasons and emotions associated with it, and to me, that sentence wreaks of self-loathing. It makes me feel, as a citizen who payed/pays for this facility,  like I am that sort of sleazy whatchamacallit-monger who is desperately cozying up to foreigners in hope of selling them some useless artifact; in this case the artifact is a city and a way of life that is in a constant downward spiral, simply because no one is willing to wake up and smell the coffee [sponsors, you are welcome to contact me and I will insert your coffee brand here, yes shameless...].

We are proud, we think the universe revolves around our Lebanese identity, and then we hurry and bury our heads in the sand in the hope of problems flying by unnoticed (proud Lebanese this is your cue to start bashing me if you have not started yet). 
Yet in the middle of all that, we are honored to have people in our city.  Because if there's something we can do well, it's sucking up.

We suck-up to the kindergarten teacher, to the principal, to the boss, to the client to the policeman and to the tourist. I'm not saying we need to be rude, but maybe, just maybe, if we ever decide to apply rules and law instead of flattery and pleasantries, we just might become a real nation and not merely a country; a state in a constant state of being pleased to have you in our city.

The Rise and Fall of MonotStreet.com

The Backdrop
 
The year was 2002, I was four years into my career as a web developer and I saw everything in HTML markup and Hexadecimal color codes.
I had springboarded myself from working at OGERO the local state-run fixed-telephony operator towards Cellis, France Telecom's burgeoning mobile operator in Lebanon (currently rebranded as Alfa). I was the first web developer to join the company.
Although my job offered me the chance to work on various challenging projects, it was just not enough to satisfy my hunger for more challenges. On top of that, my employment conditions had taken an unexpected turn to the worse and this incited me towards wanting to build something independently from my day job. An idea that would potentially allow me to run my own show without having to report to individuals who were, at the time, much less informed about the business of the web.

The Idea

At that same period, a tiny street in Beirut was becoming the hottest spot in town, where all the club, pubs and cafes were opening up. Monot Street was where nightlife happened. Unlike myself, Chris, a childhood friend of mine was an aficionado of the Beirut night life and It only took us one discussion and the idea was born: www.monotstreet.com a website/portal dedicated to Beirut's nightlife.
We were going to go all digital on a city that still lacked DSL internet, in a country where in many houses echoed still the distinct whizzing of the dial-up modem handshake; but we did not care.
Chris would be in charge of the field operations and I would handle all the digital aspects of the projects.

The Rise

In March 2003 we went live with a unique nightlife-inspired branding and full arsenal of gimmicks:

Our nightlife portal was armed to the teeth and ready to take on the scene with features such as:

• An exhaustive Directory of all the hot spots with detailed listing on venue style, music genres, opening hours, price range, location and popularity
   
• A regularly updated list of all the major Events happening in the street
   
• A news section ironically called @Monot way before twitter came into existence
   
• The Party Planner service which would suggest venues based on criteria of date, price, style and number of attendees provided by the user
   
• The Music section contained a directory of DJs who worked in Monot along with a weekly top 10 of the tracks being requested the most by clients of the establishments on the street.
   
• The Photos section contained picture galleries of people enjoying their outing in Monot - For the geeks reading this, I had implemented a JavaScript hack that worked like AJAX (the term was not coined yet) for viewing pictures without reloading the entire page and even added server-side code that would watermark the images on the fly -
   
• The interactive section contained a Chat Room and a Forum where people would be welcome to interact and exchange ideas. It also contained a poll that was intended to help us enhance our features further. At one point we had also partnered with Vibe Lebanon, the first Lebanese online radio.
    
• Daily Horoscopes were provided and updated automatically through a provider in Italy.

Chris at our stand during
Fete de La Musique 2003

Upon launching the website we quickly gained momentum in spite of a competitor launching shortly afterwards. Although they were quite dynamic on the field, they were outclassed by our website build quality and our premium domain names (monotstreet.com & ruemonot.com). We made sure to cover all events such as Fete De La Musique and became familiar with the Monot scene. All we needed was to start bringing in some revenue.

The Fall 

We had set out to ensure revenue by proposing premium listing subscriptions to venue owners. The premium listing offered them several perks such as increased coverage, prime location in the directory and on the homepage, newsletter and forum mentions and preferential recommendation in the Party Planner section.

We soon realized this was not going to work, as only a handful of locations opted for premium. We had omitted to analyze the profile of the average venue owner and their understanding of what we were proposing. Many of the owners had converted into this business from non-related activities and did not really understand why they would pay a subscription fee (even a small one), since, anyway, their shops were always full and money was pouring-in like crazy.

We fell back onto plan B. It involved eliminating the premium subscription fee and relying instead on making the site popular enough, so that we could sell on-site advertising and ensure some form of revenue from all the efforts being poured into this venture. This approach soon proved itself also insufficient. Neither online nor offline we could build enough momentum nor find a market for advertisers. Club owners were un-cooperative even when we gave freebies and would not help us promote the site even if this would eventually help them highlight their own businesses.
We hung on to the project for several months before eventually giving up and calling it quits effectively abandoning all efforts in maintaining the website.

Afterthought

Writing this post 11 years after MonotStreet.com went live has given me some perspective (on top of a lot of market experience). At the time, we had attributed our failure to the negative and dismissive attitude that often characterizes the Lebanese society especially when dealing with club owners. We also wondered if we needed to have built some more features into the website. We didn't!
As far as blaming other stakeholders for not being able to push the service effectively, we were only half-right. Yes, we had trouble dealing with some people, but we also had trouble marketing to the end user. Getting the word out, familiarizing people with the portal, making it a daily go-to online destination was simply not possible at the time.
A deadly mix of weak internet, market penetration, slow connection speeds and mobile internet limited to WAP had dealt the coup de grace to our project in 2004.

Today, many similar concepts exist and thrive. They do because the ecosystem has changed, a new accelerator has been added to the formula. This new ingredient that has spiced up the mix in a way that allows to compensate for many of the issues that we could not surmount 11 years ago is called (yes you guessed it):  Social Media Marketing.

The existence of Facebook, Twitter and various other channels has made users spend more online time and familiarized them with the power and convenience of digital. Website owners can now run effective targeted ads to maximize awareness on their product and can push their content into these channels for optimized viral reach.

In a world of fast changing technological landscape, we are often warned that we need to anticipate things and move fast enough, yet somehow, moving too fast and anticipating too early was exactly what caused the downfall of MonotStreet.com. The End.

Social Media Fail by Alfa Telecom

As I sat in the auditorium watching someone present a really uninteresting piece of software, I could not help but check my twitter timeline.

It was on March 19th right before the ArabNet Beirut event. Alfa Telecommunications, one of Lebanon's two (duopole) mobile operators had been trying to boost their twitter following after their direct competitor Touch had overtaken them.

I cannot speculate whether this heightened interest in getting more followers had been instigated by me reaching out to some very high "powers that be" within Alfa pointing out how badly their social media is being run.
I had been part of the original staff that worked at Cellis which later became Alfa and I felt bad to see them trailing behind Touch after I had personally and single handedly launched them into social way ahead of their competition.

A first infographic sent on Jan 20th 2012 after Touch had debuted on Social Media

Without digressing further, Alfa was giving away valuable tickets to attend ArabNet to its follower base. A normal and fair practice that normally gets you to do something engaging in return for a prize.

What was not normal for me was to see the community manager behind the twitter account attributing the ticket to one of alfa's own employees.

I easily recognized the name based on my long period working there but I was not about to let my past relationship with Alfa cloud my sense of Right and Wrong.
Someone was taking the public for a ride. Whether it was intentional and malicious or simply oblivious it did not matter any more.
Using the most basic cognitive reasoning techniques I compiled the following image and fired a tweet at our dynamic and twitter-active Minister of  Telecommunication Mr Nicolas Sehnaoui

https://twitter.com/chemali/status/313959045935529984

The person on the left was confirmed as an employee.
The person on the right was an unfortunate coincidence and resemblance

The tweet went viral quickly and people tweeted back at Alfa expressing their discontent. Bloggers also took over the story with posts appearing on Plus961 and Blog Baladi

Alfa eventually took corrective measures in a format that suggested they were as surprised as everybody else by the fact that the winner was their own employee (even though his twitter bio pointed to linkedin where his job at alfa was prominently stated).

In retrospect, being caught with their hand in the jar could have been the best thing to have happened to Alfa as all other maneuvers were falling flat on their face. This made many people realize that the number 2 operator was on twitter and perhaps made Alfa realize that social media was serious business.
Billboards, TV commercials, brochures and the occasional sponsoring tactics were no longer enough to make themselves noticed. And this time the people could shout back their opinions.

Welcome to the era of Social Media Marketing!

At the time this post was written Alfa still had  46799 followers versus Touch with 70617 followers