Mohamed Salah: Local Search, Yellow Pages and Web Technologies

Last week we hosted a press conference at our premises in Maadi to announce to the media the launch of the strategic partnership between Egypt Yellow Pages and Otlob.com the online food delivery website in Egypt owned by LINKdotNET. More than 40 reporters, journalists, PR,  IT Specialists attended the conference that introduced the new food delivery service on Yellow.com.eg

Click here to try out the new food delivery service in more than 380 restaurants

Here is the video report of the event:

Here are some event photos:

From left to right Mohamed Salah, Marc Lambert, Ahmed Eraqi and Walid El Saadany

Yellow Pages & Otlob.com Press Conference

Reporters at the event

Many reporters, journalists and IT Specialists attended the press conference

Some photos for the joint press conference between Navteq, Nokia and Turkey Yellow Pages to announce signing the strategic partnership deal through which Turkey Yellow Pages will provide business listings information of more than 500,000 listings to Navteq.

Navteq and Turkey Yellow Pages Partnership

Presentation by Göktuğ Okan Oğuz - General Manager of eBusiness - Turkey Yellow Pages

Press Conference of Navteq and Yellow Pages

After all,  I want to say that the big winner from this partnership is the large user base in Turkey who will benefit from combining the maps of Navteq and the data of Yellow Pages

Turkey Yellow Pages Partners with Navteq and Nokia

Turkey Yellow Pages signed a 5 year strategic deal to supply business listing information to NAVTEQ and Nokia global mapping platforms. This is the kind of partnerships that the giant mapping provider Navteq and Nokia are looking for. In these days, the mapping technologies have reached a new level, GPS became a major component in any mobile phone, not less important than a camera. Most new cars are already equipped with in-car navigation systems. Detailed maps are now available for almost anywhere in the planet. Without a detailed map a GPS would be useless.

So the equation that stood for some time was:

GPS + Detailed Maps = Know your way

Now this equation has totally changed, having access to hundreds of thousands of locations for hotels, restaurants, shops, gas stations, hospitals, …. definitely means much more. It means you do not need to worry any more about finding a place you want to go to.. All what you need is to decide what you want to do, and the where or how is not a problem anymore.

The new equations is

GPS + Detailed Maps + Business Listing Locations = Find your destination

It is so exciting now that Turkey Yellow Pages data will power up Nokia OviMaps which were offered for free a few days ago.  Nokia OviMaps is now one of the most convenient mobile maps that you could use, not only because it is free now, it’s technology has changed from raster images into vector maps so the application can be downloaded locally to your mobile from Ovi App Store, and it’s size is no more than 8 MB. This includes all the maps installed on your local mobile, no need to keep downloading images from the internet.

Back in late 2006, when we developed our Nokia Mobile Search plug-in for Egypt, UAE and KSA Yellow Pages we were so delighted about it, it was a breakthrough for the use of the mobiles in our daily life to find a restaurant or a hotel on the move. One and half years later Nokia decided to drop support for their Mobile Search applications. Their insights were toward mobile maps. Now here comes OviMaps, the new amazing free Nokia mobile mapping platform and again powered by Yellow Pages, the most trusted local search provider as always.

So stay tuned for the upcoming updates from OviMaps which Turkey Yellow Pages will power up its data soon…

The first 4G network will be launched in Sweden and Norway early 2010. It’s speed is gonna be approaching 100 mbits/sec, the interesting news is that they haven’t invented a handset yet that works on 4G, so users will only be able to access the network using a USB modem and a laptop!

Eventually, they will make a handset but what does this tell us, broadband internet access from a cellular network being available for computers before mobiles? it tells us what it is really gonna be used for, i mean what’s the importance of this high speed on a mobile device? are you going to install torrents or emule on your mobile and start downloading movies? of course not… but imagine what would this speed mean to an internet user from his computer.

In my opinion the main source that is gonna drive revenues for mobile networks is the data service. It’s not the voice or SMS services any more. Today i can talk and send free SMS’s to my 400 colleagues at EYP for free as a part of our enterprise lines. The time is now over for anyone who pays 1000+ LE for their mobile bill, as you can now pay 300 LE and talk almost unlimited (2700 minutes per month).

Welcome to the new era of mobile broadband service!

Today i received my Google Wave invitation which i applied for about 2 weeks ago. You can request your invitation from here.

The idea behind Google wave is to replace the email system which was invented 40 years ago with a more modern and advanced communication media. The wave or a communication stream is a single entity that is stored at Google server and allows people to communicate, cooperate and collaborate. Share their media, photos, videos, and gadgets and even chat in a real-time manner. You can say it is something trying to put all the social media and web 2.0 buzz that we see these days.

I think it’s gonna be a big thing if people use it the way it is meant to be… otherwise it will be a mess, a really big mess… idea of a wave is to be one topic under which people put their contributions in one centralized place. Imagine that some recipients will open the same wave and start putting their comments  branching the topics into other topics that were not intended when the wave already started… It will be a complete mess. Imagine also that there will be no webmaster or owner of the wave, anyone can do whatever he/she wants…. No rules…

Imagine when you receive an email and you reply to it. Then after a couple of days the same person wants to send you another email, so he replies to your old email and talks about a new topic… isn’t that a mess an email that has something that is not related to the original email subject… How would this happen in Wave? much worse.

What i want to say is that wave will only work good if people get the right education to use it… and it becomes a culture… otherwise it will be one of those things that looked good at the beginning and then started to make our life more complicated after this like emails and mobile phones!

Google has released a developer version of the Chrome OS that they announced last July. VMWare image can be downloaded here.

I just tried it out, there is nothing but a browser, just Google Chrome browser and nothing else… So far…I wouldn’t recommend downloading and running it unless you are planning on reading the source code or contributing to the project. This is what you get after you login to Chrome OS

Chrome OS

Read more from the Official Google blog or watch their video