How Many Times Should You Try

Read Quote of How Many Times Should You Try? on Quora

It's Where You Take Them To !

You will be missed 

I got this feeling like, I'm sure, many felt and feel when they heard Steve Jobs died.  Like I lost someone too, like something stopped. 

It's different because I never saw him in person, talked to him or received one of those published emails. 

Steve gave a lot to the world and inspired many, including me.

But a part from technology and Apple, He proved, at each tipping point of his life, that the world can be shaped with nothing more than vision and goodwill. 

You will be missed 

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!

Timing!

I heared a lot about timing from experienced entrepreneurs, startups and blogs and always thought it depends on the product we are launching and the market we target.

WRONG! Timing will always affect adoption results. Demos :

For most tech products, launch and major announcements will be buried while :

• Conferences are taking place: except if we are part of it !
• Big Players announcements: Hard to get attention when Google Plus is launching/opening (or even tweaking this days).
• Major News: and I mean really mainstream news.

Any market :

• Seasons: will the product be more used in fall, spring ? Think about it a second here, every service has it peaks and downtimes.
• Target: What if the target isn't receptive at all at launch? i.e: Launching an accounting service when accountants are on tax filling schedules.
• Competition : hard one here! Because it's more than direct competition. At launch we are competing with everyone else launching in the same industry. How many new apps or services do people try on a week? a few!  Also, we don't be wanna labeled as "like X" if someone got his product out first.

How to get it right ?

One way is Minimum Viable Product. Having an MVP release at the best possible time according to forecasts = Visibility !

Another Way is Smart-PR! Smart here stands for finding people that will be interested in the product no matter what. 

Influencer's: It doesn't have to be the Scoble like influencer's. I'm a tech influencer for my entourage as I keep talking about new stuff I use and discover. Find the right one's on Twitter, follow them, mention them, etc.

Stay Informed: This is a very crucial point! Setup Google alerts, twitter searches, make a list of the main influencer's and read them at least once a day.

A Timing case study would be Dodo Case as mentioned on Tim Ferriss blog

Our target market on launch (obviously the early adopter of the iPad) is highly connected and highly social.   They wanted to talk about their new toy and we become part of the conversation.   These conversations spun up in the ‘echo chamber’ of Twitter and Facebook and quickly made it to the tech blogger community.   Josh from Engadget reached out to us directly and we recognized he was a guy we wanted to get our product to quickly (he got case #16).

A little bit of luck and we are ready to go! LESSON LEARNED :)

Insipiring: The hidden purpose of CAPTCHA

Once in a while, you came by a great video that inspires you and all you want to do is sharing it with your entourage. Well, this is exactly the purpose of this article!
Before letting you scroll down and hopefully enjoy it as much as I did, I'd like to introduce the speaker and what he's talking about.

Luis von Ahn is a professor and an entrepreneur in Computer Science and one of CAPTCHAs inventor. CAPTCHA is the character based security system that we always have to fill to make sure the response or the actions are not generated by a computer.

Like everyone and before watching the video, I found this system very annoying specially when the words are really messed up! But now it feels like collaborating to make the digital world a better place!

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).