Where Technology, Media and Culture Meet: everybody gets riled up about Orange’s terrible Internet service, but one magazine wonders if your online life is really something you should even miss.
Words by Ramsey Tesdell, Laith Abou-Ragheb and Nicholas Seeley. Content by JO Magazine. Powered by 7iber.
Let’s Talk About Climate Change
What happens when a large group of committed individuals decides to talk about one topic for the day? Despite the fact that the event is called blog “action” day, what happens is mostly just a lot of talking.
The latest blog action day was October 15, and the topic was climate change. And, according to event organizers, the day actually saw a 500 percent increase in blog posts about climate change. Governments, companies, organizations and well-known bloggers all joined in to discuss ideas on how to combat the persistent threats to our environment. A popular Apple blog talked posted “Five apps to help save the world,” while Google’s official blog gave a green tour of Google’s Campus. On 7iber.com, H.E. Khaled Irani, Jordan’s minister of the environment, wrote a post about what his ministry is doing to help promote ecological awareness, and how to tackle the Kingdom’s most pressing challenges.
Other public officials who joined the debate were UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, UK Foreign Minister David Milliband, and US President Obama (or at least, his blog). All of them offered lengthy posts about the situation. Now if they would only do something other than just talk. Like, say, pass some legislation before the COP15 conference…
Save the Earth with your iPhone
A “green tour” of Google
Walk Don’t Run
And definitely don’t drive.
There’s a growing phe nome non hitting Amman’s streets—one that seems completely out of place in such a pedestrian-unfriendly city. It’s called “fast walking.” It’s a pretty simple concept really, which consists of (you guessed it) walking really fast.
Fast walking became a mini-trend in Amman thanks to a Facebook group (FASTWALK GROUP) started by Mowaffaq Maraqa. The group promotes the activity, and lists a series of nearly unreadable rules, include the classic: that all you need to pay is “a visit all along with yr(sic) big fat smile.”
As stated above, the twice-weekly events are free and open to the public. And despite the length of the walks—they’re roughly 12 kilometers, and take about two hours to walk (fast)—they’ve been pulling in surprising crowds. Hundreds of people show up to each event.
A recent feature on Al Jazeera lent its support to the fad’s success—but probably not as much as the 1,511 members of the Facebook group did. Of course, since climate change is a theme, we’re also wondering how many of those thousands enthusiastically walking for health and enjoyment actually say, walk to work.
Testify!
www.ushahidi.com
Ushahidi is a Swahili word that means testimony. The website ushahidi.com was developed by a group of industrious Kenyans who sat down during the aftermath of their country’s 2008 election violence in order to develop a platform that created a mashup of crisis information—for example, tracking incidents of violence in real time.
Ushahidi was innovative in that it allows submission through email, a web form, and most importantly by mobile; then platform automatically maps and organizes the submissions, making the process incredibly simple.
Since the Kenyan elections, the platform has grown to be used around the world, including during the Gaza assault to track the sheer quantity of bombs being dropped, and in Lebanon, to monitor the fiercely contested 2009 elections. These days, ushahidi has developed into the goto name for crisis information.
Now the tool’s co-founder, Eric Hershamn, says that they are working on ways for Ushahidi to be not just for crisis information, to organize crowd-sourced information more generally. Look for Ushahidi to be utilized more and more for monitoring elections, as well as recording breaking news events around the world.
Laughing All the Way to The Bank
Who said Arabs aren’t funny? I don’t know if anyone actually said that or not, but guys in airport security never seem to laugh at my jokes. But here’s one group of Jordanians who sure know how to make people laugh. Their site, Talasim.com is part social network, part aggregator for original comedy material. (We profiled them in xxx xxx, and again in September 2009 as part of our series on creativity).
From spelling mistakes with big implications to funny videos of people doing silly things, Zeid Koudsi and Sabri Hakim are laughing all the way to the bank after pulling in a € 50,000 award from Seedcamp, an intensive week-long event held in London every September that targets young entrepreneurs from across EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).
Not just anyone walks into Seedcamp and gets handed a check, and Hakim credits their unique business as the main factor of interest. “We won the award because of the uniqueness of the business proposition, our investors and the unique community we are serving.”
Talasim fought off 1,500 other ideas to be the number one selection of the 21 finalists. Recently they were also selected as one of the top 10 investment-ready startups in the Arab world during the Investing in Technology Forum, held in Cairo.
When asked what they will do with the money, Sabri Hakim didn’t hesitate in responding that he’s already got the color picked out for his new car.
“No, no,” he laughed, “For real we hope to further expand into the region and build a strong on- and offline presence in more parts of the Arab World.”
He adds that he thinks of Talasim as “a platform for self-expression in the Arab world through comedy.” In the future, he says, “we hope to be pretty well established with shows of international standards.”
From the looks of its recent success, it seems quite likely that Talasim will do it.
Find out about Seedcamp:
www.seedcamp.com
