Selling my IT Recruitment Agency

Due to some health issues, I have decided to go for a farming project away from computers, mobile phones and the Cairo pollution. I have thus decided to sell my IT recruitment agency www.genie-jobs.com within the following two months.

Hosni Mubarak in Google Timeline View

Google currently has a cool experimental search feature which provides a timeline for search queries. All you have to do is write "view:timeline" before or after your search query in the Google search box. An interesting search query I've tried using timeline view was for Hosni Mubarak. The timeline clearly shows a rise in 1981 which as the year Hosni Mubarak became President of Egypt. The other even higher rise in the timeline is in 2005, that was the year when Mubarak was reelected as President of Egypt in a first ever multi-candidate election to be held in Egypt. This new experimental timeline feature in Google search is way cool.

Google Business Plan Competition

Google.org is supporting a Business Plan Competition in Tanzania. I hope Google supports a similar program in Egypt. Perhaps Google may be sponsoring the 2008 Business Plan Competition in Egypt.

Arabic Spelling Check in Gmail

I was thrilled today while replying in Arabic to an email sent to me when my hand automatically pointed and clicked on the check spelling link in gmail to find that it was actually able to detect and check the spelling of my Arabic written email! That was really thrilling, for I had been really frustrated for long finding that the spelling checker in gmail supported English but not Arabic. Google is bringing more and more support for Arabic in its products. I hope the day comes when Google opens up AdSense for content for publishers of Arabic content as well.

Microsoft Surface

Microsoft has created a nice piece of furniture: a table. Unlike regular wood or steel tables we know of, this table has a touch screen on it's surface. The new product is call Microsoft Surface. Unlike early touch screens which allowed a person to use one finger to manipulate objects on the screen, the Microsoft Surface allows one to use to fingers simultaneously to manipulate screen objects.

Binary Clocks!

No, it has nothing to do with atomic clocks. A binary clock operates the same way as other digital clocks, except that intead of displaying decimal numbers it shows binary numbers as its output!

Google Developer Tools

Google has attacked Microsoft head-on through it's Google Apps which is positioned to take over Microsoft Office. Although Google has not create an operating system to compete with Microsoft Windows, yet, it has tried to push the open source Linux operating system. Google also has given big support to Firefox to compete with Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser. Google Desktop and its Gadgets are also present a strong blow attempting to take ground from Microsoft.

How about Microsoft Visual Studio? Will Google be trying to give a blow to that too? Well, Google has already started this by releasing the Google Web Toolkit. What's interesting is Google's between-the-lines announcement today that it needs to hire engineers at its Chicago branch to join other "Chicago engineers [who] are currently working on Open Source and developer tools." So it seems Google is focusing more and more on releasing developer tools. Let's see if that will have any effect on Microsoft Visual Studio's future.

Internet in the Desert

Vodafone Egypt now offers a bunch of 3G services including the 3G Light Box which allows you to connect a small group of computers to the Internet even if you are at a remote area in Egypt.

Let's say you are doing land reclamation in some part of the Egyptian desert and want to have Internet access in this future farm of yours. Forget about getting ADSL there, so the practical solution could be one of Vodafone's 3G solutions. As for pricing, a 300 LE monthly fee for 2 GB of data transfer is not bad at all, given you'll just be browsing of course and not doing the heavy downloads you are used to back at home with your ADSL connection.

Folders and Tags Coexist

It's interesting that Yahoo has decided that both the folders and tags can coexist with each other. It has the case to hale tags as the Web 2.0 predecessor of the old folder idea.

Google has particularly made this idea clear by it's then revolutionary design decision to drop folders and go for tags in gmail. In its beta verson of Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo has decided to let both folders and tags coexist. The nice thing about tags is that you can apply a whole bunch of them to a single element: a single email, a single bookmark, a single blog post. Yet folders still have the advantage of being able to nest them within each other and thus creating a hierarchy, something which are not possible in the flat world of tags. Users are also used to folders, which is something convenient to give them. Perhaps tags would do something about their flatness in order to be more competitive against folders. Or are we going to see more web stuff having both tags and folders coexisting with one another?