The Arab League’s fear of phone-ins

More evidence, if it was needed, of the gaping chasm between how Arab governments view the media, and how the media actually is. The Arab League is proposing a satellite broadcasting charter which would entrench state control over broadcast media and curtail political expression, reports Arabian Business.
The move is thought to be in response to TV talk shows, and the worry that privately-owned stations are too viewer-focused. The paper says Saudi Arabia appears to have recently banned live talk shows after someone mocked the size (30 per cent!) of a civil servant salary increase - a position seen as a criticism of the royal family. Saudi stations still run phone-in programs but it is not clear if they are still live.
The charter would ban broadcasting material seen as undermining "social peace, national unity, public order and general propriety" – a broad catch-all that could be used for the most minor of statements.
The move comes as Saudi blogger Fouad Al-Farhan spends his third month in jail, with charges yet to be brought – and if they haven’t found anything yet, it is unlikely they ever will.
As we’ve said before, frightening journalists when you only have half a dozen daily newspapers and a handful of broadcasters is easy; scaring citizens with 24-hour access to blogging software is not.

Private investors take flight

The Arab Business Angels Network launched last week. The network hopes to put entrepreneurs in need of finance in front of private investors with time and money to get involved. ABAN will also use a fund of its own to get into promising start-ups.
The idea is wonderful – this type of private financing is commonplace in Europe and US (where $25bn is invested each year), but doesn’t exist in the Middle East. ABAN hopes to find, and nurture, small businesses with the potential to grow. Entrepreneurs create wealth, create jobs, and help diversify the economy. Just as important as the money will be the experience; it is hoped cashed-out entrepreneurs will get involved, passing on their knowledge.
It has some first rate backers (Dubai International Capital is driving it, Intel and Dubai Silicon Oasis have signed as corporate angels), but it will need them if it wants to change attitudes to investing. When real estate and equity markets are making easy money, why bother dabbling with slow, high-risk investments? There is also an attitude, equally damaging, that if someone shows entrepreneurial spirit, don’t back them, sign them up to work for your company.
One major thing in ABAN’s favor is that it is not politically driven. Angel investors don’t need to be Arabs, start-ups don’t need to be created by Nationals; the point is that the business (and investment) will benefit the Arab world. As governments discuss nationalization, visa caps and incentives for local business, it is refreshingly modern in its thinking.

Dumb Bahrain tastes Dubai’s strike strife

Dubai, so often the pioneering driver of economic development in the Gulf, is well used to having neighbors copy its ideas. There must be a sense of satisfaction this morning to see the neighbors also get lumbered with some of the downsides. Workers on Bahrain’s Durrat al Bahrain project are striking over pay and conditions, and their bosses appear to have no idea how to sort the problem.
Media reports claim more than 1,000 workers are now locked in their camp, as the bosses on the $6bn project scratch their heads. The workers have been on strike for the past two days demanding better pay, hot water, better medical facilities and other basics such as lights in the toilets. They are being paid $150 a month and have been encouraged in their complaints; the Indian Ambassador says his government is planning to impose a minimum wage of $265 for all Indians in the Gulf.
“How will the company make millions without us, who they treat as slaves?” asks one worker. It is line that could be printed on strikers’ banners across the region. Dubai, for once, will be grateful the attention is elsewhere. It seems incredible the Bahrain Government, part owners of Durrat al Bahrain, didn’t realize that denying medical facilities and hot water - and paying subsistence-level wages - would cause a problem.

Thumb-power

SMS remains a technology with lots of potential applications waiting to be discovered and implemented — for everything from payment systems to information on demand. Given the mobile network operators’ strong desire to maximize profits, and the need for, say, Etisalat or Du to differentiate themselves, a good idea from a start-up has an excellent chance of getting heard.
The trend-spotting site Springwise has a good from the Philippines, where text messaging has caught on in a huge way. Two years ago, according to Pyramid Research, the Southeast Asian archipelago became the first nation on the planet where network providers saw revenues from text messaging exceed what users spent on voice. With its Share-A-Load programme, Philippine network provider Globe Telecom has capitalized on the local love of SMS messages by allowing its customers to send their phone credit (or ‘load’) to someone else. Globe charges PHP 1 or about US .024 for each transaction, making its service an easy way for parents to send money to their children, for example, to make sure they’re able to stay in touch.
Gulf telecom operators, hemmed in by government price controls, might do well to match this innovation.

Quick thinking creates slow-tech solution

Full marks to Jazeera Airways for its quick and positive reaction to the ongoing internet connection slow down. With more than 60 per cent of the airline’s bookings being made online, it has produced a slimmed down version of its site (just 16 kilobytes in size, loading in less than 4 seconds on very slow connections) to cope with the problem. And released a press release telling the media all about it.
I have no idea how well the site responds to the slow down, or much business Jazeera will make and/or save, but such responsiveness deserves credit. It will be interesting to see if it carries on with the low-tech site after the problem is cleared. Even on a good day, I’d bet customers prefer quick and simple to slow and complicated.

Connecting with the right excuse

For commuters using the UK’s rail network autumn mornings would be sprinkled with late running trains. The standard, slightly baffling excuse would be that there were leaves on the line. Retailers, explaining a poor season’s sales, often fob off investors with the excuse that the weather was ‘wrong’, either too rainy or too sunny.
For Middle East telecom providers there is standard go-to line when services are disrupted: ‘damage to underwater cables’. A cable in the Mediterranean was damaged last week causing a slow down in internet connection speeds across the region. This was followed by damage to a cable off the coast of Dubai, and then another off Qatar. If one is bad luck, and two is careless, what does that make three?

In a region not given to public information announcements, maybe we should be grateful the telecom operators have even offered an excuse. But it is becoming tiresome. They used the same line last year when a cable was damaged off India. Would it be too much to ask them to explain how these cables are damaged, how they are repaired and how they plan to safeguard connections in the future?

KFC flaps its wings

If you want to build the world’s biggest sandwich you will have to top the 2,500kg monster created by Wild Woody’s Chill and Grill. The longest line of pizza currently stands at 186.3m, in Treviso, Italy. Doha can now claim to be the home of the world’s largest bucket of fried chicken – a 300kg mountain courtesy of Qatar Food Company, the franchisee owner of KFC.
Setting the record has certainly made the papers, at least locally, and no doubt QFC is proudly counting the press clippings. “We wanted Doha to be in the record books and what better way to offer customers abundant supply of the product they love, while setting a record on the way as well,” says Sherif al-Ashry, a company official.
But is this really the kind of story KFC wants associated with its brand? A wasteful amount of presumably cold chicken (it was shipped from six locations) sat in a shopping mall. It makes the brand look cheap and greasy.
And unremarkable. “Judging the thousands of food-related record requests we get every day, it’s hard to tell whether it will stand for very long,” Kelly Garrett, a Guinness World Records adjudicator tells Gulf Times. “Besides, records are being broken, faster than they are made, these days.”