Move to new datacenter

As announced earlier in the week internally - we have moved to a new datacenter last night. The move went pretty smooth and it seems like we have been able to reduce ~3 hops on average on a global level which should give us a better accessibility ratio.

The only "downside" is that we have been assigned a new IP address as also announced internally - however since our hosting company run our DNS there should not be any interruptions. The total downtime was ~ 20 minutes.

Please let me know if you notice any problems.

Cheers
Klaus

Google's quest for world domination

"According to the WSJ, Google plans to offer an electronic-payment service that could help the Internet-search company diversify its revenue and may heighten competition with eBay's PayPal unit. Codenamed Google Wallet, a payment service could represent a significant expansion beyond online advertising, which generated 99% of its $3.2 billion in revenue last year. Google's move could potentially threaten eBay's successful PayPal service, which generated $233.1 million, or 23% of eBay's revenue in the first quarter."

You can read the article for free from Wall Street Journal - using John Battelle's Searchblog if the above link is not working.

This could dramatically change the e-commerce scene

Cheers
Klaus

r u l8 2?

I have been toying around with automatically inserting explanations of commonly used abbreviations and acronyms on our site - like:

UAE, GCC, CRM, GATT, WTO, FMCG, ISP, VPN, VoIP, GSM

So if you run your mouse over any of the above you should see what the abbreviation means - sadly a bug in IE makes the availability of such information invisible in normal circumstances - however on AME Info you should be able to see the above abbreviations underlined dotted.

Let me know what you think about this in general and a list of suggested abbreviations are also welcomed of course.

Article #50,000 posted

Today we published article number 50,000 on AME Info's English site. At current rate (approx 500 articles a week) we should be adding some 24,000 English articles every year making it the largest archive of corporate news in the region to my knowledge - there sure is a lot of history in there.

On the Arabic version of AME Info we have started to catch up the content and we surpassed 25,000 articles archived this week - adding some 300 stories a week at current rate.

Finally we currently have 613 video clips and 137 audio features available.

Keep up the good work!

Computer Associates - Industry Talk

Computer Associates now has its own dedicated video section on AME Info.

The series kicks off with an interview with CA's regional Vice President, Gilbert Lacroix.


(Click to watch)

CSR Middle East

AME Info has started a dedicated section on Corporate Social Responsibility.



The section is an opportunity for people involved in CSR in the Middle East to share ideas and opinions, and also publicise events. It will include regular contributions from various organisations, from the private sector to governments and NGOs.

Relevant article submissions are very welcome.

IE tabbed browsing

MSN has released version 1.2 of its search toolbar, which brings tabbed browsing to all compatible versions of IE ahead of the release of Internet Explorer 7 which is expected before year end. Tabbed browsing is excellent, it is running fast and supporting most features you'd want.

Check it out - if you have room for more toolbars that is..

http://toolbar.msn.com

Cheers
Klaus

AME Info Radio news

This week on AME Info Radio we have Celebrity Views with the fastest man on the Earth, land speed record breaker, Richard Noble, whilst Executive Views looks at the development of tourism in Qatar. Coming soon a special look at poddcasting - another way of listening to the latest AME Info Radio interviews and there will also be a Seychelles Special - 'Investment opportunities in the Indian Ocean Islands'.

Advertising this month comes from British Airways and there is also a series of three 'ads' for Emirates Holidays.

'Stay Cool with The Blizz'

AME Info & Golf

Well the AME Info team has started playing golf !

Sean, Elias, Erik and myself will attempt to play every Thursday afternoon from approx. 4:30 - 7.00 pm at The Montgomerie which means driving range for an hour or so and then a round on the Par 3 course.

If anyone wants to challenge or join us - drop me a line. Some of us are good, some of us not so good.

Sean is an experienced player and he showed skills with amazing chip shots, whereas Elias' putter was VERY hot on certain holes !

Erik is normally the master of the Par 3 at Monty so if you want a challenge on short game take him and Sean on :-)

Some of us are also game for a round on the 18 hole course during the summer so let me know if you want to play with us.

Cheers
Lars

Advertising kit updated

I am pleased to inform you that we have a brand new advertising kit now with a lot more information- in fact each product now has a dedicated page with all the specs, prices and examples.

We have added quite a lot of additional stuff as well including some recommended read from IAB as well as a page outlining the ad submission process.

Do let me know if you have any additional ideas or comments in general

Arabic RSS feeds

As of today we offer the following free RSS feeds in Arabic - we hope you will find them useful :-)

* Education
* Energy, Oil and Gas
* Executive Motoring
* Financial News
* Healthcare
* Media and Advertising
* Personal Finance
* Real Estate and Construction
* Retail and Leisure
* Telco, Internet and IT
* Travel and Leisure

All feed validates according to RSS 2.0 both English and Arabic. The Arabic feeds are all windows-1256 encoded, application/xml+rss

Let me know if you have any problems with the feeds.
http://www.ameinfo.com/rss/

Happy sharing

Klaus

Podcasting

Well I guess it is time that we join the Podcasting community too - for starters we have just one channel with the latest 5 radio features produced. There is no reason video cannot be podcasted too - but given the file sizes and our current format (FLV) I think we should wait a bit...

Take it for a spin here:
http://www.ameinfo.com/rss/podcast.xml

You can pick up ipodder from:
http://ipodder.sourceforge.net/ (and yes we will be making a branded version soon if there is interest)

Sadly we do not include the length or the file size of the audio clip (or video for that matter) - guess we need to add that sort of info. For now I have inserted a standard 500000 (bytes)

Let me know what you think - perhaps a user should be able to tick the features he/she likes and generate a personal list to be downloaded?

Cheers
Klaus

Networking

Last night's networking evening in my opinion was absolutely fantastic. Apparently many faces attended, but the most exciting aspect for me was to meet the people who have been a part of AME info, in some shape or form, and to draw on all the valuable insights many of the attendees I met had to offer.

Thank you very much

AME Info Networking event - May

Last night was the AME Info networking event - held at the Le Meridien Mina Seyahi in Dubai. The event was very well attended by over 75 business people. It was interesting to see the mix of attendees increasing in variety each month, must be something about the business developments in this part of the world.

Grweat to see everyone there, trust most had an enjoyable time. Obviously evident as there were several people staying behind after 10 pM.

See you all next month again.

E