What The S Stands For

Apple is managed by some of the most brilliant people in their fields. You can see it in both technology and business! I hate to see how everyone acted like they are stupid releasing a minor update, so I'll share with you the way I see it.

I'll make it short.
Take a look at how Apple is very straight forward with naming and only giving +1 to radical releases.

The way I see it the S is a 5! like in 3 - 3.5 - 4 - 4.5 or the story telling way, it stands for Sorry (not there yet).

The S is Jobs manner of treating customers, naming products for what they really are! 0.5 step forward.

From what we saw today and from all the parts that leaked before (no they're not all wrong) there is an iPhone 5 on it's way and if I had to guess it will show up in June at WWDC. 

I would guess that the assistant feature will be a cutting edge technology.
Apple is currently listing it as "Beta" and makes it only available on the 4s. Why is that ? if it's a processor thing it should be available on the iPad 2!
My take is that as Siri has the ability to learn, Apple is testing it on limited device as beta users!

We'll see.

Apple was down 4% today kudos for who bought some stock and ... wait for it!

Facebook Stats for Middle East and North Africa (Finally)

Everyone knows that it's impossible very hard to find recent and real stats and numbers about social media usage in the MENA region.

So when I came through the "MENA Facebook Demographics" study realized by "Spot On", a public relation agency located in the UAE, I got all excited about it. If there is any designer out there motivated to make an infographic from this it would be great :)

Facebook users in MENA count for 15 million people divided pretty equitably between North Africa 7,704,420 and Middle East 7,286,460 : let's say 50/50 .

As shown in the map, users are mainly from the region top economic countries: 1. Egypt 2. Saudi Arabia 3. Morocco 4. Tunisia and 5. UAE.

English is the main used display language with 50%, followed by French (25%) and Arabic (23%). This can be explained by the users demographics data: education level, income level, social category, etc.


Concerning the users gender, only 37% of Facebook users in MENA are female (which is very low comparing to the US and UK +50%). 
However, Bahrain and Lebanon have the closest approach to gender equality with 44% of female users.


And finally, two interesting results about age and relationship status: 

UAE and Qatar, among with 6 other countries, have the oldest population of Facebook users. The rest of the MENA region sticks to the Occidental model with around 70% users with less than 25 years.

Because they have the oldest users population, United Arab Emirates and Qatar have also the most users with "Married" as a relationship status.

The study has a detailed page for each country and as a Moroccan, I wanted to share this one:

The full report is available on SPOT ON website (Thanks guys for bringing this data to everyone).

How recruiting Geeks will profit to your company

Before getting to the point let me explain two things about this blog post title.

First, I wasn't comfortable with the word "Geek" because people always tend to picture a guy or a girl sitting in their room full of empty chips bags and spending 25hours on Internet.

I just kept it to have a catchy title but now let’s just read it "Computer curious person" to make everyone satisfied.

Secondly, you may think "Yet another bullshit article about generation Y". Well, guess what? It’s not! And here's why: I know a lot of people from this generation Y (my generation, I'm 23) who don't fit in the description you may read on business newspapers (unless you consider knowing how to use a mouse and a keyboard and having an iPod is an asset).

Many people of this Y thing don't like computers, don't adore the software in it and most important they are as frustrated when they use a computer as the other generations.

This a crucial point because, on the other hand, Geeks enjoyyyyys using a computer all the day (as far as they have a minimum of freedom). Even when it crashes they still enjoy fixing it!

Now let's get to the main topic: How (on earth) recruiting geeks will profit to your company?

As I said we are used to technology, internet and all the stuff close to that.

We know how to search Google and have the best results, we are natively close to computers and new software’s and we follow tech news which makes us aware of new (may be free) services and tools.

We are familiar with computing languages, technical data and love to handle and optimize this stuff.

I had my first work experience (not a summer/student job) but a real experience, at 18. Since that time I did several long internships in 5 companies in various positions: Marketing, Sales, Finance and now in IS, but let's skip that.

It's just amazing how people underestimate the tools they are using and prefer instead doing it manually, like comparing two files by printing them and going row by row.

I'm not flattering myself, but for each position I occupied, I manage to build what Henry Ford called: Productivity optimization tools and that taught me a lot!

Writing some Excel's VBA code isn't that hard for people used to it or linking an HTML form to a spreadsheet a get the results directly instead of always typing and typing. 

Want a good dashboard for your financial charts and projections? Sure, I'll do it.

The other advantage is that they have experienced and seen many programs so when you train them to use yours it will only take a couple of weeks before they nailed it (and maybe show you some new features).

This can save you a lot of cash if you have any small tech or web projects, I mean if you want to roll out an internal website or a collaborative platform for example, you will know who to put in charge instead of hiring someone to do it.

And even if they don't have any knowledge about that, Geeks are curious by nature and are, for most of them, self-learners using forums, step by step tutorials, videos, etc.

Geeks are what mass media meant with the generation Y speech: they are the real digital natives!!

They will help you make and save a lot by bringing those skills and interest and re-engineer the way your business people do their work.

Now the problem is: Those people are often already working in the company, but in IT and IS.