Digital Digest

A personal take on recent Internet and Technology developments

from – and/or potentially impacting on - Qatar and the Middle East

Issue 2: July 2012

rassed@ict.gov.qaContact us:

Twitter: @ictqatar

Context

This digest aims to share some of the key digital developments from

across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in recent months.

It also highlights some global communications developments which may

impact on Qatar and the wider MENA region at a later date.

Visit: http://www.slideshare.net/ictQATAR/ for Volume 1 and future issues of this digest.

Stories of particular interest in this second issue include a number of reports looking at the

growth of data, smartphones and raft of new technology developments. It has also been a busy

month for Internet Governance issues, from new domain names to “take down” reports.

-------------------------

Disclaimer All content in these slides is in the public domain and referenced so that you can read the original sources.

Any omissions, errors or mistakes are mine, and mine alone.

Feedback, suggestions and comments are very welcome.

Contents

Slides

1. Developments from across the MENA region

• MENA fastest growing region for Internet traffic

• Newspaper growth slows due to online shift

• World mobile ad spend in 2011 was lowest in MENA

• In Brief: Social Media News

• In Brief: Content related news

• In Brief: Technology News

• “Peak Games” in the Spotlight

4-11

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

2. Wider Internet & Society Research

• Research: Smartphones seldom used for phone calls (UK)

• Youth: Impact of using mobile technology whilst driving

• Emerging Technologies: Tablet Wars – Google and Microsoft

• Internet Governance: New top-level domains, Transparency reports

12-18

13

14- 5

16

17

3. Coming Up – three emerging issues

• Research: The future of advertising is mobile

• Technology: Wearable Computing – soon to become the norm?

• Governance: Initiatives to discuss Internet Rights and Freedoms

18-22

19

20

21-22

Images: http://bit.ly/LCN5yC and http://bit.ly/LTzNud

1. Recent developments in the MENA region

Including: Web traffic growth, News habits, Mobile Ad spend and News in Brief

• Cisco report that Global IP traffic is anticipated to increase threefold by 2016.

• The Middle East, Africa and Latin America, will lead the way in this growth.

• Traffic in the Middle East and Africa will grow at a CAGR of 57% between 2011-16.

- MENA will generate 836 million DVDs’ worth of traffic, or 3.3 exabytes per month.

• Business IP traffic will grow fastest in the Middle East and Africa.

- Anticipated CAGR of 33 %, a faster pace than the global average of 20%.

Table: Global IP Traffic, 2011-2016 Image: http://bit.ly/M9q1J7

Source: Cisco’s annual Visual Networking Index

1.1 MENA fastest growing region for Internet traffic

Above image: http://tnw.co/JZtlT3

Print is still most popular medium for reading news in the MENA according to new research published by the Arab Media Forum.

1.2 Newspaper growth slows due to online shift

Migration from print to online has been slower in

the Middle East in comparison to the rest of the

world, but this may change over time.

With newspapers in the Middle East recording

the lowest circulation growth rate in the past 3

years, (as shown in the table below) this trend

may have already started.

Read the full report via: http://www.arabmediaforum.ae

1.3 Mobile ad spend in 2011 was lowest in MENA

• $5.3 billion was spent on mobile ads (from display to search to messaging) in 2011.

• The Interactive Advertising Bureau reported that spend in Asia beat the other markets.

• The Middle East and Africa had the smallest spend, at just $172m.

The market breakdown by % is:

Read more: http://read.bi/MmvVDk

Asia-Pacific 35.9%

North America 31.4%

Europe 25.9%

Latin America 3.5%

Middle East &

Africa

3.2%

• Saudi Arabia is Twitter’s fastest-growing market percentage-wise month on month: http://bit.ly/NmjXLy

• Young Emirati women started a twitter campaign called #UAEDressCode, urging foreigners to cover up in public places: http://bbc.in/NaETEH

Image and Story: http://bit.ly/Pe9B3K

1.4 In Brief: Social Media News

• Club Penguin, Disney's virtual world for

children is launching an internet safety

campaign targeting 100m children and parents.

Disney will support the campaigns on its TV

channels, websites and magazines across the

EMEA region, as well as the site itself.

Ask.fm CEO Ilja Terebin told Techcrunch that their Q&A service

is “most prevalent in Turkey, Argentina, Russia, Saudi Arabia,

Germany, and Spain”. It’s also seeing fast growth in most of

South America and the Middle East.

MENA users sign-up to Ask.fm via Facebook or Twitter, posting and

sharing questions and answers across their social networks.

Image and Story: http://tcrn.ch/KMjjaG

• Agence France-Presse (AFP), a French news agency founded in 1835, has launched its iPad app in Arabic. (Same as left.)

• The app now offers 5 different editions: English edition, Latin America (in Spanish), Spain (in Spanish), Brazil (in Portuguese), and the new Arabic version.

• AFP has 16 offices in the Near and Middle East, and describes itself as the leading news agency in the Arab-speaking world.

Get the app here: http://bit.ly/Nqu5yZ

1.5 In Brief: Content related news

• Owners of the new Nexus 7 Tablet can benefit from

Google Currents which aside from creating magazine-

like editions on your tablet (either by publisher, Search

trends or your Google Reader subscriptions), also has

translation tools incorporated into it.

• At launch English content was translated to Arabic. Source:

http://tnw.co/LQPUdb

• A designer from the U.K. has created a prayer mat that lights up when it faces Mecca, known as EL Sajjadah.

(“EL” stands for Electro Luminescent

and “Sajjadah” meaning prayer mat)

See: http://kck.st/MExERM

1.6 In Brief: Technology News

• Google announced new features to its Chrome Web Store, a store for free

and paid web-based apps and browser extensions for the Chrome browser.

This includes a section with apps that work offline to its store.

• Google also announced it is bringing the Chrome Web Store to 6 new

countries: Turkey, Ukraine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and the UAE.

http://tcrn.ch/NqGlDi

• Boomerang, the scheduling software for Gmail, is now available for all

57 Gmail-supported languages, including Arabic, Persian and Urdu.

Try it here: http://www.boomeranggmail.com/

Via: http://tnw.co/Lwn7fB

• Peak Games, a gaming company focused on Turkey and the MENA is now the world’s No. 3 social-gaming company in terms of daily active users (DAU), with 9.4m daily players.

• Peak creates culturally-relevant social games, in contrast most big social-gaming companies simply translate Western games into other languages.

• With c.200 employees in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, all but one of their games are available only in Turkish and Arabic.

1.7 Peak Games in the Spotlight

• Popular games include Okey (18m

users) and Happy Farm, the world’s

No. 2 farm game, after Farmville.

“In the Turkish version, the farmer is not

covered, while in our Arabic version there

is a Saudi man with a cultural outfit.”

“We don’t have cowboys or American horses.”

Rina Onur, Chief Strategy Officer

Image: http://bit.ly/Ma2JRP “Peak has no plans to make its locally targeted games available in

English, as they don’t hold the same relevance for Western cultures.”

Business Week

2. Internet & Society: External Research Update

Images: http://bit.ly/KXUeK6 and http://bit.ly/KL2OMQ

Smartphones, texting whilst driving, tablet wars and new top level domain names

2.1 Internet & Society: Societal Impact

UK: Smartphones seldom used for phone calls

The UK’s largest mobile

operator O2 published

research which shows

that making calls is

only the fifth most

popular reason for

using a smartphone.

The average

smartphone owner

spends more than two

hours each day using

the device, with more

time spent surfing the

web, checking social

networks or playing

games than making

phone calls.

Source: http://bit.ly/MFXPZO

2.2 Internet & Society: Youth

• Research from the US shows the impact of people using mobile technology whilst driving – a problem familiar to us in Qatar and the MENA.

• 13% of drivers aged 18-20 in crashes admitted to using their phone at the time of the crash.

• Many cite the behavior of adults doing this as a reason for this being acceptable – and safe.

Source: http://www.onlineschools.com/in-focus/driving-while-intexticated

The law aside, potential solutions introduced in the US include:

2.3 Internet & Society: Emerging Technologies

Tablet Wars – Google enters the fray, as do Microsoft

• Google announced its first tablet, the Nexus 7, a 7-inch tablet priced at $199 for 8GB of storage and $249 for 16GB. It was developed in partnership with Taiwanese firm Asus.

• PC World noted that Amazon, Lenovo, Research In Motion and Barnes

& Noble also offer $199 tablets.

“At only $200, the Nexus 7 is a steal.” http://reviews.cnet.com/google-nexus-7/

“It's elegant, it's easy to use, and it's hands down the best tablet in its sub-$200 class.

But that alone won't be enough to launch Google past Apple, or even Amazon, in the tablet space”

http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/28/technology/nexus-7-tablet/index.htm

Images: http://bit.ly/LmMOBo and http://bit.ly/MCCJxs

Bloomberg report that Apple plans to debut a cheaper, smaller (7-inch)

iPad by the end of the year. See: http://bloom.bg/LkKV8h

• Microsoft have unveiled “Surface” a new Windows 8

based tablet with a built-in stand and keyboard built

into the screen cover.

Launch date and price are still to be confirmed.

2.4 Internet & Society: Internet Governance

• ICANN, the non-profit that oversees the Internet domain address system announced the full list of submissions for new internet address endings, which included .doha

• Currently, there are 22 global top-level domains (gTLDs) such as .com, .net, .co, or .org

• This figure will quickly change, with ICANN receiving over 1,900 applications for 1,409 new domain suffixes such as .google, .news, and .blog.

View the full list: http://bit.ly/L4MYed

• Google published its latest Transparency Report which includes numbers of removal

requests received from copyright owners or governments as well as user data requests

from government agencies and courts. Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst at Google

commenting on the increased number of requests for content to be removed wrote:

“It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from

countries you might not suspect—Western democracies not typically associated with censorship.”

See: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/

• Twitter has also published its first transparency report, receiving 3,378 "takedown"

notices so far this year. The network removed 38% of the requested tweets. Report: https://support.twitter.com/articles/20170002#

Images: http://bit.ly/Nllsre, http://wapo.st/LxfiDT and http://bit.ly/KZQ58h

3. Coming Up – three emerging themes

Internet Rights & Freedoms Mobile advertising Wearable Computing

The future of advertising is mobile

• Writing in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson noted that US audiences:

“…Spend more time engaging with mobile devices than reading print.

But print publications still get 25-times more ad money than mobile…

There is still a huge gap between the rapid adoption of mobile and the budgets assigned to it.”

But he thinks this will change.

“Imagine a world in the next 2-3 years,

where smart phones

are in the hands of every consumer and

tablet sales will exceed PCs.

It will be a world where global internet

users will double, led by mobile usage.

At that time, mobile will no longer be a

support medium, it will be THE medium.”

3.1 Internet & Society: Societal Impact

Source: http://bit.ly/La41Kl

3.2 Internet & Society: Emerging Technologies

Wearable Computing – soon to become the norm?

• At their I/O Conference Google announced Project Glass, Internet-connected glasses which will be available to the public from 2014. If you can’t wait until then, I/O attendees can buy a $1,500 “explorer’s version,” which will ship next year.

• The glasses contain a camera to collect photographs or video, as well as a number of tools needed to determine location and direction. It also has microphones for collecting sound, a speaker to relay audio and uses Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

• Product manager Steve Lee told Wired that they weighed about the same as a pair of sunglasses and gave examples of how he had used the product whilst cycling to capture content to share with friends and to receive SMS messages.

See: http://bit.ly/KSQkBY

Image:

http://bit.ly/NyxSwe

See a 2’30” demo: http://www.youtube.com/w

atch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4&

feature=youtu.be

And the live “skydiving

demo” launch here: http://www.youtube.com/w

atch?v=D7TB8b2t3QE

Wired: Do you think this kind of technology will eventually be as

common as smart phones are now?

Lee: Yes. It’s my expectation that in three to five years it will

actually look unusual and awkward when we view

someone holding an object in their hand and looking

down at it. Wearable computing will become the norm

3.3 Internet Governance: new initiatives to discuss

Internet Rights and Freedoms

American Congressman Darrell Issa has published a Digital Citizen's Bill of Rights asking

for people to “comment, criticize and collaborate” in refining the draft (published below).

1. Freedom - digital citizens have a right to a free, uncensored internet

2. Openness - digital citizens have a right to an open, unobstructed internet

3. Equality - all digital citizens are created equal on the internet

4. Participation - digital citizens have a right to peaceably participate where and how they choose on the internet

5. Creativity - digital citizens have a right to create, grow and collaborate on the internet, and be held accountable for what they create

6. Sharing - digital citizens have a right to freely share their ideas, lawful discoveries and opinions on the internet

7. Accessibility - digital citizens have a right to access the internet equally, regardless of who they are or where they are

8. Association - digital citizens have a right to freely associate on the internet

9. Privacy - digital citizens have a right to privacy on the internet

10.Property - digital citizens have a right to benefit from what they create, and be secure in their intellectual property on the internet

Source: http://keepthewebopen.com/digital-bill-of-rights

Elsewhere, organizations and individuals are

being asked to sign up to – and discuss – a

Declaration of Internet Freedom.

“We believe that a free and open Internet can

bring about a better world. To keep the Internet

free and open, we call on communities,

industries and countries to recognize these

principles. We believe that they will help to

bring about more creativity, more innovation

and more open societies…

Let’s discuss these principles — agree or

disagree with them, debate them, translate

them, make them your own and broaden the

discussion with your community — as only the

Internet can make possible.”

http://www.internetdeclaration.org/freedom

Images: http://bit.ly/Nia0gf and http://bit.ly/Mw3vtM

Thank you for reading.

Visit our SlideShare channel for previous

Issues and our monthly Tech Top 10:

http://www.slideshare.net/ictQATAR/

Contact us: rassed@ict.gov.qa

Twitter: @ictqatar

Disclaimer: all content in these slides is in the public domain and referenced so that you can read the original

sources. Any omissions, errors or mistakes are mine, and mine alone.