Little did I know that there’s much more involved than entering my credit card details and clicking a button or two.

Skype logo

They say it’s not only about having a good product, it’s just as important to make it extremely easy and comforting for customers to purchase. I’ve had my eyes peeled for a Skype phone before I moved to Paris for a few months last year. It’s the logical choice, given that I’m frequently on the move, and want to be able to stay in touch with people worldwide at low prices.

I had written a blog post about the Skype -- Vonage rivalry, with the latter having the edge, mainly due to its simple plug-and-play, computer-independent setup. However, now that Skype phones are more affordable and widely available, it’s cheaper and much easier to use the cross-platform Web 2.0 application for long distance calls. Some of the advantages of a Skype phone include:

• Free calls to all Skype contacts, something Vonage does not offer
• Plug an ethernet cable into the phone (or connect wirelessly via some models). No need for a computer, just a constant internet connection
• Enjoy much more competitive packages, suitable for all needs
• Easy to carry around with you and plug into any internet connection

Egypt isn’t considered one of the ‘internet shipping’ friendly countries. Some services, such as Aramex, provide a US postal address so that Egyptians can purchase from the likes of Amazon and have it delivered to the US. The 3rd party postal provider would then charge them for bringing the packages to their doorstep. It is both expensive and time-consuming, but the best option out there nonetheless. Rumor has it you’re less likely to come up against any trouble with customs via Aramex.

After following my instinct and burning LE1,000 on Skype’s website for a Dual Phone, I quickly regretted it. I’d never ordered something from Egypt to be delivered to my door. And after three weeks and no show, it was clear that it was not a simple walk in the park.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1mflr-kQlk

Indeed, about a month after ordering, I get a handwritten envelope and a printed letter saying that my package was there and that I needed to go pick it up. Skimming the letter quickly, I fooled myself, albeit momentarily, into thinking that all I needed to do was stop by the local post office (the guys there are pretty chill -- we go way back) and pick up my VOIP phone and talk away.

Yeah…..about that. It turns out my package is held by customs and requires ‘experts’ inspection’, followed by an evaluation of the price (the actual price, which was included in the package, obviously, is no document the authorities go by) which I’ll pay and leave.

So I take the subway and get off at Ramses sq, and make my way to a huge communist block known as the Central Post Office. Funny enough, the entrance was hidden. The entire area is an architectural disaster, but with experience, you can find your way around things.

I went up to the 4th floor, where packages are received, and got to an enormous storage area with government employees scattered all over. After asking 4 or 5 people, I reached my destination where I gave them the form I received, and they gave me the catalog (pulled out of my package), and an official letter. I was told I need to hike to the other side of town and pay a visit to the official ‘Technology Management’ office where they can give the go-ahead for the phone to enter the country. After my 2nd question, the lady at the desk made it clear that she did not see it as part of her responsibilities to answer my queries, and that I should move on.

I took a cab through prime time traffic with a handful of papers and eventually made it to a modern, air-conditioned office where I wasted 10 minutes filling out a form before meeting the guy with the authority to sign my original form. He was on the his cell phone and wouldn’t even hang up, “This isn’t going to enter. I’m not going to let this through. That’s final”, and then he continued with his phone call.

Needless to say, I tried everything possible and could not get him to give me permission to let the Skype phone into Egypt.

As it turns out, any VOIP machine, of any sort, is completely forbidden from entering the Arab Republic of Egypt. That is mainly due to Telecom Egypt wanting to openly monopolize on all of the international calls made form within the country, but much more importantly, it allows the government to be able to track all of the calls made, and to review the log if there’s suspicion of any sort. They are so strict about it, that you can’t even bribe your way through it. True story.

I got back home and told my mother about it, which is an indirect way of asking for the highest connections that can do us a favor or two. We finally got to the assistant to the minister of technology, who said he’ll try his best. He came back saying that he couldn’t do anything, and that there’s absolutely no way around it.

We’re in the process of trying to get it somehow, but it looks like I’ll have them reject the package and return it, and hopefully get an almost full refund.

Bottomline is this: buy yourself a Skype phone from abroad, and smuggle into Egypt so that you can make all the calls you want for close to nothing. This old-fashioned government is trying to use outdated techniques to control the people. But as we all know, they will inevitably fail. The web, with all its protocols, is power to the people, and no authority is big enough to contain it, nor control it. We have the saying, and we decide what to bring up, and what to demolish.

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Egypt, for example, has opened up the press freedom over the past decade, which has encouraged a number of independent newspapers to take the stage. That, along with the exponential technological advancements that the world as a whole has experienced, has left the government thinking that perhaps it has bitten off more than it can chew. In the 80s, the three main papers were all governmental, and any story shared between the three, regardless of it authenticity, become true to the masses. Not only that, but propaganda posters and cartoons were highly effective.

Now the times are-a-changing.

After the horrific sectarian clashes in the south of Egypt, the entire Egyptian blogosphere was talking. Twitter was on fire. Facebook was flooded. And the blogs discussing the issue were scattered all over. That is when Al Ahram, Egypt’s main government-run newspaper, decided to weather the storm. Besides the fact that their website, when it actually works, looks like cow manure reshaped to fit within a computer screen, their approach was older than the president himself:

The ridiculous propaganda cartoon by Al Ahram

The “illustration”, which seems to have been scribbled and slapped together by a six year-old with mental illness, depicts the happy Egyptians together celebrating peace and prosperity. A Muslim coming out of a minaret shouts out simultaneously with his Christian counterpart standing on a church tower, “our shared enemy is the devil.” If that’s not enough, the “doves” in between are carrying hearts back and forth to imply unconditional love exchanged by all the peoples. The worst part of it all is that it’s not a joke – Al Ahram genuinely thought they would indirectly fool the crowds into believing that the all is well at the land of the Pyramids.

20 years ago, the cartoon could’ve stood a chance. Now, it could only make matters worse. The main reason being that with access to unlimited and uncensored information between the different people across space and time, old school propaganda has become ineffective. People no longer fall for the idealizing images of brutal dictators, nor photographs of happy citizens enjoying life. Not only does it need to be far more sophisticated, it also needs to be significantly more convincing. After all, there’s a lot of competition, and the web is anyone’s to create and share.

Dictators with over a quarter of a century under their belt might feel safe, but few have hopped on the fast-track trail of the internet and are therefore are not in as much control as they would like to think. For that reason, along with education, health care and infrastructure, internet access should be one of the aspects in the developement of over-exploited nations. Since effective communication is key to any change, the web is absolutely crucial in connecting the people and giving them the power they need to gain equality and justice.

The web has been, and will always be, power to the people – nothing can take that away from it.

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Photograph by Nora Shalaby

You can visit Nora’s blog, or check out her photo stream on Flickr.

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If you are in any way related to the design and/or multimedia realm, chances are you heavily rely on a handful of Adobe’s products. In fact, even the regular users with minimal technical knowledge naturally run applications such as Adobe Acrobat Reader, and more recently, Rich Internet Applications built on AIR. There is no doubt that with the acquisition of Macromedia in 2005, there has been very little competition in the different areas of the design and multimedia industries.

Adobe Photoshop Prices

Any web designer in particular is likely to be fully dependent on Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Flash, the later of which is by far the biggest gain from the Macromedia acquisition, as it brought the entire RIA industry into Adobe’s playground. As a freelancer, it only makes sense to purchase those applications, right? Well, with a total price tag of an incredible $2,300, it is of little surprise that the majority look to work around the hefty asking price. Sadly, millions of designers and web developers world wide rely on illegal copies of Adobe’s main money-makers, and it is not difficult to see why:

1. It is obviously a lot of cash, not the kind someone at the early stages of his or her freelancing career can dispose of
2. Following such an investment, as soon as the new version is out, the one you own becomes obsolete, and you would have to pay a significant amount to upgrade
3. It is easy to think that stealing a license is only temporary, until you have developed the capacity to live with the open-source alternatives (GIMP, Inkscape, etc.), or that you will be making more money in the future, allowing you to make such an investment

While there are many companies across Egypt and the Arab world that run bootleg copies of professional software, such an act is almost unheard of in the developed world. You’re very unlikely to be working for a design agency in the US, for example, and find that the Photoshop on your work computer is cracked or has by-passed activation. However in Egypt, for example, in the biggest ISPs and web development companies, it is common to see your colleague walk in with the good news that he or she has gotten a cracked version of the new Illustrator that has barely just come out in the US. A couple of hours later, everyone at the office is talking about their first experiences with the new product, after having made more copies for their personal PCs at home.

Adobe is clearly very aware of the situation. They know how over-priced their products are, as well as how easy it is to crack them, and how common it is to get a hold of illegal copies. Nevertheless, their strategy is to allow individuals to get their goods for free, students to grow up using them at close to nothing, but for companies to pay the full price. The idea is to have everyone addicted to them, and then force companies to purchase the licenses, because their designers are not willing to use GIMP, which would’ve saved loads of cash.

This all makes sense until you being the foreign companies into the equation. With thousands of agencies world-wide running illegal copies, Adobe is missing out on the chance to make much more profit. The theory would be that, just like anti-viruses have become significantly cheaper over the past 4 years or so, encouraging even the most loyal of software thieves to purchase original licenses, Adobe’s price reduction would help bring legit customers on board. If Photoshop, for example, was priced at $350 with a free upgrade, the number of legit users would at least triple. Even if you’re starting up your own agency or freelancing for the first time, that kind of money is recovered with the first project, and you get to match the newest version when it’s out. After that, they could make it more challenging to crack it (acknowledging that it is impossible to completely end it). Thus, many more people would not see it worth the hassle to skip the fee payment.

Judging from the progress over the past few years, it does not look like Adobe will rethink its pricing scheme anytime soon. However, they are clearly on the losing end as their bizarre price tags are encouraging millions everywhere to get a hold of them illegally, while many foreign companies will do the same, knowing they cannot get into trouble. Either way, besides four or five of their applications, Adobe’s programs have been defeated by open-source alternatives a while back, and the current survivors will soon follow.

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According to the Internet World Stats, less than 6% of Africans are connected to the internet. Compare that with almost 27% of the rest of the world, and you will have an idea of the technology gap distancing the two. The sad part, in fact, is that there are a number of countries that have decent percentages, meaning this number is not an accurate representative:

Top 10 Internet Countries in Africa

The results show that Egypt is in pole position, thanks primarily to it’s hefty 80 million habitants. In fact, only 13% of Egyptians are connected to the World Wide Web. The country with the single hightest usage percentage, discarding Seychelles, is Tunisia with 2.8 million users, representing about 27% of the population.

If we were to glance at the other side of the spectrum, you’ll find that countries like Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, DR Congo, Ghana, Madagascar, Mozambique and Tanzania all have populations of over 15 million, with less than 5% connected to the Web. A mind-blowing extreme case is Ethiopia, with a population of over 80 million (like Egypt), with 0.4% accessing the Internet.

While we are in the developed and connected countries tweeting, poking on Facebook, communicating via VOIP and living in a parallel virtual and digital world, there are millions in Africa starving to death, without even having seen a computer. This shocking division is only getting bigger.

Living in such extreme and harsh conditions, surely the priority should be to provide the sub-Saharan Africans with the basic needs of life, not Gmail and YouTube. But it is of my humble opinion that the Internet can solve a lot more problems that one would expect. The simple act of connecting people everywhere in the globe can help handle some serious issues that are in the way of development and progress:

• Censorship: There are more than 20 brutal dictatorship in all parts of the Black Continent. No regime in the right state of mind will allow it people to freely communicate, and that is the beauty of the Web. Besides the fact that it’s extremely difficult for any government to completely censor the internet (China have come pretty close), there are always ways around it. Give the Africans internet access, and the truth will be leaked and will reach everywhere, leading to solutions.
• Communication: With all of the different protocols available via the World Wide Web, giving people a method to communicate at almost no cost will always facilitate movement and help reach solutions efficiently.
• Information: Besides what is censored, having access to websites like Wikipedia and all of the specialized information hubs across the net can help millions educate themselves, even if on a minimal level. With such low standards of education, why not use the biggest and cheapest library on the planet?
• Leisure: In many cases, having access to the internet can provide Africans with an opportunity to actually enjoy themselves for once. Definitely not a priority at this point, but still an important aspect.

Therefore, we need to get the African continent on the Web. It will benefit the international community just as much as it would with the Africans themselves. As a North African myself, I am proud of the progress that Egypt has made over the last few years, no matter how insignificant in comparison to other power houses. And I hope my African counterparts can take advantage of the limited access that they are granted to do what the Internet is precisely made for: Expression.

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What is shocking is the difference in prices for installing and subscribing to a broadband connection at home or at the office. At the time of writing, one Pound Sterling would get you about nine Egyptian Pounds. Given that a can of soda costs about 2 LE (0.25 Sterling) in Egypt, as oppose to an average of 0.60 Sterling anywhere in the UK, how do you think the internet prices compare?

Virgin Media broadband packages' prices

Firstly, a company like Virgin Media offers mind-blowing speeds of up to 50Mbps, but it’s only a matter of time until such speeds reach the north African republic. Moreover, the “average” package with a speed of up to 25Mbps is at 35 GBP monthly (there are even better deals if you choose to sign up for a bundle with a landline and television, but that’s beyond this post).

Now if we were to look at TEdata, which is the leading ISP in Egypt, the following is what the prices look like:

TEdata price list

Notice that the maximum speed is up to 24Mbps, and a 16Mbps connection would cost you an amazing LE 1,355 monthly, which translates to about 150 GBP! Not only do you get a far inferior speed, not to mention the inevitable mediocre quality due to the primitive infrastructure, but you’re also paying five times as much. In a country where the average recent graduate gets paid about 300 GBP a month, those figures are unheard of.

It is normal for such technologies to be expensive at first, and to target the elite class that have the extra cash laying around, but this is a bit exaggerated. Time will tell if the prices in Egypt will follow the natural cycle of things, and settle down below the UK charts. At the moment, that seems highly unlikely. The important thing is for higher speeds to be introduced on one end, and for the lower speeds to become significantly cheaper on the other. That way we would be have a spectrum where almost everyone is cheaply connected at respectable speeds, while also serving the minority that require the highest speeds, and are willing to pay for it.

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• MyEgy.com: A portal for downloading Arabic and English movies, songs, programs and games. All perfectly illegal
• RapidShare: File hosting and exchange. Not necessarily used for exchanging legal office documents
• Maktoob.com: A Saudi portal offering everything from news to forums and downloads
• Travian.ae: An MMORPG, this is the Arabic version made for the Middle East

Add to the pile Masrawy.com (whose appalling design inspired me to talk about it), Yallakora.com (equally as disappointing, only this one focuses on football), and Filgoal.com (yet another football site, but definitely classier than the former), and you will have the unique mix specific to Egypt. Judging from this list, we could conclude the following:

1. Egyptians use the internet mainly for entertainment
2. Forums are over-overwhelmingly popular
3. People prefer local news sources as oppose to international ones, regardless of the poor quality
4. Needless to say, football is an essential aspect of life
5. Online gaming and downloads are a basic need

The sad but true story is that the Egyptians are not taking full advantage of the power of the web. In fact, it seems that people waste a significant amount of time between social networking, illegal file-exchange, and online gaming, than looking up information (via Wikipedia, for example, that hasn’t even made it to the top 20), or uncensored international news sources (such as BBC Arabic or AlJazeera). In fact, very little attention is paid to the aesthetics of a given website – the majority of regional websites in the list are over-exploited with ads, incompatible with Firefox, and just look plain ugly. The value of the website is in the free services that it offers, which basically means illegal downloads.

MyEgy.com: sadly popular

While such findings can trigger depression and loss of hope, there is light at the end of the tunnel, especially if you keep the following in mind:

1. Egypt’s relatively new to the internet. There will be millions of users coming on board in the near future
2. There’s plenty of room for competition, which will invite start-ups and Web 2.0 projects to invest and bet on a market share
3. More international websites will realize the importance of having an Arabic version, potentially attracting millions of users

With free dial-up access nation-wide, and affordable DSL connections, there’s no doubt that more and more users in Egypt will rely on the Internet for news and information that was previously hard to get a hold of. But before we reach that stage, it is normal for a population to ecstatically celebrate freebies in an overwhelming fashion, before the rush calms down and the  real benefits of the World Wide Web arise. Until then, any Web 2.0 projects aimed at Egypt, anyone?

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The Dreams of Spring

The People Inside

The Last of the Bunch

Looking for future trends and techniques is not always the answer. sometimes we can look back at our own history for new ideas. You can view a large collection of vintage Egyptian film posters at Kodak Agfa’s Flickr page.

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No one can deny the increasing market share of open source technologies over the past few years. More and more regular home users are realizing the benefits of working with free software, and things can only get better. However, in many developing countries, such as Egypt, the open source trend has not caught up as one might have expected.

When proprietary software is expensive, and is a real pain to get support for, you would think that poor nations as the Land of the Pyramids would opt for the open source applications that are free, perfectly legal, and ever-improving. The reality, however, is the contrary. Very few names earn unconditional acceptance more than Microsoft and HP. Any entrepreneur would happily pay ridiculous amounts of cash for the satisfaction of knowing that he or she is using Microsoft products, therefore, the best. Any technical person, regardless of his or her particular field of expertise, would strongly urge the upper management to invest in HP hardware, because it is by far the best and most reliable.

Open source is the future

Even when it is abnormal not to use open source software, Egyptian companies, small and large, invest in brand names. For example, almost all hosting packages are on HP servers running Windows Server, with Microsoft SQL databases. That means that a company pays for an HP server, and instead of installing Red Hat Linux with Apache for example, they pay for a Windows Server license. And instead of using MySQL, they pay for Microsoft SQL. Suddenly, they’ve gone from cheap hardware with free software, to over-priced hardware, with unbelievably expensive software. Makes no sense whatsoever, but the Egyptian companies are ecstatic nonetheless.

Hosting is only one of the issues. Very few people would dare to give Linux a chance, hardly anyone would consider using open source alternatives to commercial products, and almost no one realizes how much money is being wasted for nothing. On an individual level, like most other developing countries, illegal copies of software are widely available and unanimously accepted.

So why do big companies like Microsoft and HP enjoy so much success in poor countries? Well, there are several reasons. On the one hand, many are simply unaware of the benefits, or even existence, of open source tools. On the other hand, educational institutions teach students to work with brand names, and so college graduates don’t know much better. Add to that the companies’ strategies in carrying out advertising campaigns to create the illusion that if a company works with a name that is not like theirs, they would be risking too much for anyone to handle. It is a sad story, and the future does not look too bright.

With the constant expansion of information available on the web, the curious ones out there are bound to think outside of the box, and go open source. However, for effective results, there needs to be government intervention, promoting free, legal software, and preventing big names from implying false information. Not only on a software level, but also on a hardware one. Many individuals compile there own personal computer for home use for dirt cheap, but then companies, even small ones, pay providers huge sums of money to have HP desktop computers for all of its employees. Extremely inefficient.

Unfortunately, Egypt is but another poor country taken advantage of by giant corporations in the technology realm. The Egyptian companies are not far behind because they are underdeveloped, but rather because they have always been over-exploited. However, with the spread of the web, the digital colonization is doomed to extinction, thus it is only a matter of time until open source becomes the way to be.

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