Category Archives: Technology

Lebanese Ayah Bdeir Ranked 9th Sexiest Startup CEO Alive

Ayah

Ayah is the founder and CEO of Littlebits. She’s an MIT graduate and was also named number 33 on Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business for 2013.

You can check out the full list [Here].

Ayah Bdeir was 12 when her dad signed her up for programming lessons. The only problem: “I wanted to be an architect,” she says. Today, Bdeir has merged the two disciplines and created little­Bits, Lego sets for the 21st century that let tinkerers build their own electronics. Her neon-hued components snap together magnetically to form circuit boards, making it easy–and, more important, fun!–to construct anything from a remote-control car to an alarm clock to a talking puppet. LittleBits has caught on in the art and design worlds–this spring, New York’s Museum of Modern Art stores featured an installation of littleBits creations–and Bdeir envisions her kits as tools for proto­typing real products. “Everyone is creative,” she says, “and everyone is a techie.”

Here’s a small interview with Ayah where she talks about Littlebits.

Thanks Mustapha!

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No Internet Outage In Lebanon Tomorrow

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Via @NicolaSehnaoui

As expected and stated earlier, it turned out to be “an over-exaggerated and politicized matter that will be resolved swiftly by the Telecom Ministry”.

Moreover, and as stated by Minister Sehnaoui, Lebanon was never under threat of loss of internet bandwidth as, since April 2013 we have full redundancy through the Qadmos/Alexandros cables.

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What’s Happening To The Internet In Lebanon Tomorrow?

Update: No Internet Outage tomorrow. Read more [Here].

Lebanon might be facing yet another internet crisis next week as we might be cut off the Consortium IMEWE cable after having failed to pay our dues. As always, the political bickering between the Telecom Ministry and Ogero is the reason for this problem, as every side is blaming the other.

Al-Akhbar reported that Ogero chief Abdel Menhem Youssef waited until yesterday to inform the Telecom Ministry of the warning sent by Consortium, while MTV stated that Ogero had warned the Telecom Ministry back in May. However Al-Akhbar did mention that Ogero was no longer responsible for that cable since 2012.

To sum it up, if we fail to pay 1.85 million dollars by next week, we might lose 60% of our Internet capacity. Let’s hope it’s just an over-exaggerated and politicized matter that will be resolved swiftly by the Telecom Ministry. I will try to ask Minister Sehnaoui today and see what he has to say about that.

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Alfa 4G

[YouTube]

Alfa launched its 4G service few weeks back at Le Royal Dbayyeh and now all 3G subscribers can connect to the 4G network if their devices or smartphones allow them to. I thought the Samsung S4 would be 4G enabled but the version we have in Lebanon is not, same for the Note3. On the other hand, I was able to connect with the LG G2 to the 4G and I will share few speed tests later on.

You can find here below the 4G coverage map. Of course it’s good to finally have 4G in Beirut and few areas outside it but we need bigger quotas as 4G speeds will imply further Mbytes consumption. I am already finishing my 1.5Gb before the end of the cycle and I sure don’t want to pay more than 29$ to increase my quota.

4G [High-Res]

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ArabNet Developer Tournament in Lebanon

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For all Lebanese Developers and codes, the ArabNet Developer Tournament is taking place on October 26th at the Beirut Creative Cluster in Lebanon. Winners will get to represent in the ArabNet Coding Championship in Dubai and receive monetary prizes as well.

There’s also a Job Fair where you can meet with top local and regional companies and a Code Lab where you can discover the latest technologies in web and mobile development.

You can check out all the details and register [Here].

Lebanon

Last year, Lebanon won the first place at the Arabnet Development Tournament in Dubai.

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Review: Samsung Galaxy Note3

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I passed by Samsung a week ago and picked up the new Samsung Galaxy Note3 in order to test it out. I’ve been anxiously waiting for that phone to come out as I’m using the Samsung S4 at the moment and even though it is a great phone with an amazing camera, battery life is not that good and the phone has some software issues.

The Note3 is not curved like the Note2 and looks like a bigger S4. It’s an impressive phone that boosts a huge screen (5.7 inches) screen, a 13 megapixels camera (No Night mode though), a quad core processor with 3GB RAM, and is 4G and NFC-enabled. The Note3 battery life is better than its precedents and could last you an entire day easily.

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Source

I will not bore you with further technical details so here are some of the pros and cons and my final verdict on the Note3:

Pros:
- Gorgeous full-HD screen and impressive display (Super AMOLED).
- Thin and light phone despite its size (168 g).
- Very Fast (Quad core, 2300 MHz, 3GB).
- Amazing battery life (3,200 mAh battery).
- Great camera (13 megapixels, F2.2 aperture size and Digital image stabilization)

Cons:
- New faux-leather rear is a turnoff.
- A lot of useless features making it complicated to use (just like the S4).
- Too Expensive (880$).
- The Note3 I got is powered by an Exynos processor, not the better performing Snapdragon processor.

Verdict:
All in all, The Note3 is still the phablet to beat but I think it’s way too overpriced at almost 900$. I’d rather wait till its price drops and they get the Snapdragon 800 powered processor.

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Top 5 Smartphones released/to be released in September 2013

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Samsung Galaxy Note 3 Vs LG G2 Vs Sony Xperia Z1 Vs Nokia Lumia 1020

I don’t think we’ve ever had that many exciting smartphones being released in the same month as it’s the case this September. Personally speaking, there are 5 smartphones that I am looking forward to try out:

1- Samsung Galaxy Note 3
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I switched to Android back in December 2012 and got the Samsung Note 2, which is more of a phablet than a smartphone but I loved it. The screen was huge, the phone was ridiculously quick, the battery life was amazing but the camera wasn’t as good as the iPhone 4 or 5 and my Note 2 came with an insane chip, so I replaced it with the new Samsung S4 instead until the Note 3 comes out. I just hope it won’t have any software bugs like the S4.

2- HTC One
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The new HTC one is already available in Lebanon at Go Mobile, HTC’s distribution partner in Lebanon. I’ve tried the previous HTC and I liked it but I was always worried that I wouldn’t be able to repair it anywhere in Lebanon, plus I wasn’t very impressed with its camera and pictures. The new HTC wants to rival the Samsung S4 and new iPhone 5s and includes new features like the HTC BlinkFeed™, HTC Zoe™ and HTM BoomSound™.

3- LG G2
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The G2 is the LG’s latest flagship device and is a very powerful smartphone that has some very useful and unique features. I was invited to check it out before it gets released and I am very tempted to try it out. Unlike the S4 which is a great device but has loads of useless options, the LG G2 will have some unique features like the Audio Zoom (Yup Audio Zoom!), a breakthrough optical image stabilization (OIS) for the camera and rear keys. It’s a very powerful smartphone and a major improvement from the older LG models.

4- Nokia Lumia 1020
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Three words sum up this new Lumia model: 41 megapixel camera. The camera has become a very important feature in the smartphone industry and Nokia is introducing a camera that is capable of matching the pictures of a DSLR. The only down side is the OS which I am unable to get used to yet. I was hoping to see this awesome camera on an Android device but Windows acquired Nokia so that’s not gonna happen anytime soon. The Nokia Lumia 1020 is set to be released on September 25.

5- iPhone 5s
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I’ve been reading a lot about the new iPhone ever since it was announced, and it’s being portrayed like the greatest iPhone ever made and the best smartphone out there in the market. The fact is though that the 5S looks exactly like the 5 as most of the change was done on the inside. The new iPhone is much faster and comes with the latest iOS7, has a revolutionary and highly praised fingerprint sensor and a better camera among other things.

I was an iPhone user for 3 years but I like Android OS better now and I am not planning to switch back anytime. The only thing that interests me is the iPhone camera as Apple has always been ahead of others (At least till the S4 came out) in that field. Apple’s new iPhone 5s is set to go on sale today.

PS: The smartphones were listed randomly, not by order of preference

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EyeEm

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When we mention photo sharing apps, the first name that comes to mind is Instagram. In fact, many apps have been trying to rival Facebook’s latest acquisition but only few have been able to cope with it or at least draw online users’ attention by bringing different approaches to photo sharing. One of them is EyeEm and the reason I am talking about it is because EyeEm’s Chief Technology Officer, Developer and Founder is a Lebanese called Ramzi Rizk.

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Photo Hack Day – Berlin

I had the chance to meet Ramzi’s brother Hany during my visit to Berlin back in June and I attended a photo hack day organized by EyeEm where I got to talk to Ramzi. I had a lot of questions in mind and wanted to know how different EyeEM is from Instagram and what are their plans for the future?

To sum it up, EyeEm is not just focused on photo sharing, but tries to connect like-minded users through the photos they take. As mentioned in this article, “EyeEm’s app combines the familiar ‘snapshots and filters’ approach with metadata that collects not just location and time for each photo, but contextual information like what a user was doing at the time.”

So basically it’s a smarter app that focuses on the user’s experience after uploading the picture by analyzing the photos and their related data. Of course the importance of a photo sharing app is to produce cool photos with the various filters and for that EyeEm provides 17 unique filters, and more importantly and that’s the best part, allows you to upload the whole picture and not crop it into a square.

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Some of my pictures on EyeEm – User: Najib

I don’t think it’s fair to compare EyeEm to Instagram because both work differently. For example if you want to look at photos of Beirut you will have to follow some hashtagh on Instagram while EyeEm will automatically show you photos of Beirut if you had just uploaded a picture of the city yourself. If you’ve been uploading a lot of pictures of Beirut or Byblos, EyeEm will notify you of any future picture of that city assuming they are relevant to you. Last but not least, EyeEm intuitively suggests relevant tags based on your location.

In terms of numbers, EyeEm reached 1 million downloads in October 2012, and has since been growing by an impressive one million users per month. They are growing steadily and managed to raise $6 million dollars a couple of months back.

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EyeEm featured on the Reuters screen smack dab in Times Square New York

If you want to know more about EyeEm, the best way is to download it and try it out. It is available for iPhone and Android.

I hope that by the time you’ve finished reading this post, you would have downloaded EyeEm and started uploading awesome pictures of Lebanon!

Why we love photography from EyeEm

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