This is what gaming should be like

Launching startups in the ICT field in Algeria is at the heart of the news, but the facts are far from following promises. However, events tend to reassure us about the state of the industry, and one of them is the support of the MED-IT, which will focus on “Empowering young talent and innovation IT” to the next edition.

Image source: MED IT

MED-IT, if you do not know, the International Exhibition of Information Technologies, an exhibition that deals with IT in general. It will return in the next edition, the ninth, between 24 and 26 September at the Palace of Culture Moufdi Zakaria Algiers.

Trophies for the next MED-IT like previous editions, will have to discover and highlight young Algerian entrepreneurs.

The format of the competition is as follows: four startups will be selected to have an exhibition space of approximately 6m ². Contractors will later present their startup in 5 minutes and 10 slides at the ceremony awards.

This contest will also enable these micro-enterprises to benefit from greater visibility, but also gifts from the sponsors of the event.

Startups involved in the “MED-IT Awards 2012” are all firms with less than 3 years, less than 10 million annual turnover, and an officer of less than 35 years. Obviously, the industry must be related with the IT and business projects must be a minimum innovative to be selected by the jury of seven experts from the competition.

The Ceremony Trophies MED-IT 2012 will take place on September 26 of the same year. For more information, the official website of the event is available online . If you meet the requirements, then do not hesitate, sign up!

BAGHDAD (AP) – Baghdad’s embattled residents can finally get their milkshakes, chili-cheese dogs and buckets of crispy fried chicken. Original recipe or extra spicy, of course.

A wave of new American-style restaurants is spreading across the Iraqi capital, enticing customers hungry for alternatives to traditional offerings like lamb kebabs and fire-roasted carp.

The fad is a sign that Iraqis, saddled with violence for years and still experiencing almost daily bombings and shootings, are prepared to move on and embrace ordinary pleasures – like stuffing their faces with pizza.

Iraqi entrepreneurs and investors from nearby countries, not big multinational chains, are driving the food craze. They see Iraq as an untapped market of increasingly adventurous eaters where competition is low and the potential returns are high.

“We’re fed up with traditional food,” said government employee Osama al-Ani as he munched on pizza at one of the packed new restaurants last week. “We want to try something different.”

Among the latest additions is a sit-down restaurant called Chili House. Its glossy menu touts Caesar salads and hot wing appetizers along with all-American entrees like three-way chili, Philly cheesesteaks and a nearly half-pound “Big Mouth Chizzila” burger.

On a recent afternoon, uniformed servers navigated a two-story dining room bustling with extended families and groups of teenagers. Toddlers wandered around an indoor play area.

The restaurant, located in the upscale neighborhood of Jadiriyah, is connected to Baghdad’s only branch of Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken, a U.S. chain concentrated in a handful of Midwestern and Southern states.

Azad al-Hadad, managing director of a company called Kurdistan Bridge that brought the restaurants to Iraq, said he and his fellow investors decided to open them because they couldn’t find decent fried chicken and burgers in Iraq. He called the restaurants a safe investment for companies like his that are getting in early. He already has plans to open several more branches in the next six months.

“Everybody likes to eat and dress up. This is something that brings people together,” he explained. “People tell us: ‘We feel like we’re out of Baghdad. And that makes us feel satisfied.'”

Baghdad’s Green Zone and nearby U.S. military bases once sported outposts of big American chains, including Pizza Hut, Burger King and Subway, but they shut down as American troops left last year. Because they were hidden behind checkpoint-controlled fortifications, most ordinary Iraqis never had a chance to get close to them, anyway.

Yum Brands Inc., owner of the Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and KFC chains, has no plans to return to Iraq for now, spokesman Christopher Fuller said. Burger King declined to comment on its Iraq plans, and Subway did not respond.

Dining out in Iraq is not without risk. Ice cream parlors, restaurants and cafes were among the targets of a brutal string of attacks that tore through Iraq on Aug. 16, leaving more than 90 people dead.

Iraqis say the chance to relax in clean surroundings over a meal out is worth the gamble. For them, the restaurants are a symbol of progress.

“This gives you a feeling the country’s on the right track,” said Wameed Fawzi, a chemical engineer enjoying Lee’s fried chicken strips with his wife Samara.

Baghdad’s Mansour district is the heart of the fast-food scene.

At the height of sectarian fighting in 2006 and 2007, it was tough to find shops open along the neighborhood’s main drag. Militants targeted shop owners in a campaign to undermine government efforts to restore normality.

These days, roads are packed with cars. The traditional Arabic restaurants long popular here now find themselves competing against foreign-sounding rivals such as Florida Fried Chicken, Mr. Potato, Pizza Boat and Burger Friends.

There is even a blatant KFC knockoff called KFG, which owner Zaid Sadiq insists stands for Kentucky Family Group. He said he picked the name because he wanted something similar to the world-famous fried chicken chain. And he believes his chicken is just as good.

“In the future my restaurant will be as famous as KFC. Why not?” he said.

One of Mansour’s newest additions is Burger Joint, a slick shop serving up respectable burgers and milkshakes to a soundtrack that includes Frank Sinatra. It is the creation of VQ Investment Group, a firm with operations in Iraq and the United Arab Emirates.

Its Mansour store is outfitted with stylish stone walls and flat-screen televisions. Another branch just opened across town in the commercial district of Karradah.

The group also runs the Iraq franchises of Pizza Pizza, a Turkish chain, and is planning to launch a new hot submarine sandwich brand called Subz.

Mohammed Sahib, VQ’s executive manager in Iraq, said business has been good so far.

Even so, running a restaurant in Iraq is not without its challenges.

Burger Joint’s servers had to give up the iPads they originally used to take orders because the Internet kept cutting out, he said. Finding foreign ingredients such as Heinz ketchup and year-round supplies of lettuce is also tricky, and many customers need help understanding foreign menu items like milkshakes and cookies.

Health experts are predictably not thrilled about the new arrivals.

“The opening of these American-style restaurants … will make Iraqis, especially children, fatter,” said Dr. Sarmad Hamid, a physician at a Baghdad government hospital. But even he acknowledged that the new eateries aren’t all bad.

“People might benefit psychologically by sitting down in a quiet, clean and relatively fancy place with their families, away from the usual chaos in Iraqi cities,” he said.

Purveyors of traditional Iraqi specialties, who might be expected to oppose the foreign-looking imports, don’t seem to mind at all.

Ali Issa is the owner of fish restaurant al-Mahar, which specializes in masgouf, the famous Iraqi roasted carp dish. He said every country in the world has burger and fried chicken restaurants, so why shouldn’t Iraq?

Besides, he said, he and his family are fans of “Kentucky,” the name Iraqis use for fried chicken, regardless of where it’s made.

“Sometimes we need Kentucky. Not just fish, fish, fish,” he said.

FOR one household a cannon blast signals the end of the daily fast during the holy Islamic month of Ramadan, just as it has done for many years. For another the beep of an iPhone does the job, thanks to a smartphone application called Ramadan Times. The app sets the fasting times depending on the location of the device. People are surprised at their smartphones’ capabilities, says Arif Hisam, head of PakData, the Pakistani company that created the app.

Islamic hardliners may have issued a slew of fatwas against digital technology, including chat programmes (they could lead to flirting) and the use of Koranic verses as ring tones (disrespectful). But Muslims have embraced the internet and smartphones just as the rest of the world has—and, in some ways, even more.

A recent survey by Ipsos, a market-research firm, found that rich Muslim-majority countries boast some of world’s highest rates of smartphone penetration, with the United Arab Emirates ahead at 61%. But even in poorer Muslim lands adoption is respectable: 26% in Egypt, not much below Germany’s 29%. More than a third of people in the Middle East now use the internet, slightly above the world average.

Muslims use their gadgets in much the same way as everyone else: they text, they use social networks, they buy online. But the adoption—and Islamification—of the technology has a deeper meaning, says Bart Barendregt of Leiden University, who has studied South-East Asia’s growing digital culture. “Muslim youngsters are adopting technology to distance themselves from older, traditional practices while also challenging Western models,” he argues.

Many smartphone apps cater to religious needs. Some show mosques and halalbusinesses close to a user’s location. Salah 3D is an iPhone guide to how to pray. Another app, Quran Majeed, includes text and audio versions of the Koran not only in Arabic, but other languages, making the holy book more accessible to Muslims whose first language is not Arabic. It has been downloaded more than 3m times.

Websites tailored to Muslims also abound. Artik Kuzmin, a Turkish entrepreneur, will soon launch Salamworld, a Facebook for Muslims. “People told us that they worry about moral standards on the internet. They don’t feel it is safe for them,” he says. Salamworld’s moderators will try to allay such fears by taking down photographs with too much flesh and deleting swear words. Online dating services are multiplying. “Far more is permissible in Islam than people think,” explains Abdelaziz Aouragh, who runs Al Asira, which claims to be a sharia-compliant sex site, from the safety of Amsterdam.

Social media’s role in the Arab spring has been widely discussed. But even more important may be how the technology is changing Islam itself by creating a virtual version of the ummah, the single nation of Muslims that Islam’s followers consider themselves to be part of. All kinds of online forums allow open discussion of religious questions.

For the first time, lay people can easily separate religious commands from tradition by looking at holy texts and scholarship rather than relying on their local preachers. “The digital revolution has given a voice to young Muslims. It is allowing us to criticise the religious establishment and create our own interpretations,” explains Amir Ahmad Nasr, a 25-year-old Sudanese blogger. He says that discovering the internet was the reason for his personal journey from devout Muslim to atheist and then to Sufi, adhering to a mystical version of Islam—an experience he describes in a forthcoming book, “My Isl@m”.

Faith in progress

Facing a threat to their authority, some Islamic scholars have called for a ban on certain sites, and a handful even a ban on the entire internet. But many more are embracing new media to avoid being sidelined. Muslim scholars at al-Azhar University in Cairo run an “Islamic Hotline”. Users call or e-mail a question, which is answered within 48 hours. Other muftis upload lectures to YouTube.

The internet’s impact is even greater for Muslim women. “You can look after your family, have a job, and avoid workplace problems with the hijab [veil],” says Kimberly Ben, a convert and freelance copywriter in Alabama, who publishes tips for Muslim women (sometimes called Muslimahs) on running a business from home on MuslimahsWorkingAtHome.com.

Being able to study religious teachings for themselves, Muslimahs are also chipping away at the predominantly male, orthodox domination of Islamic thought. The Prophet’s first wife, Khadija, for instance, has become something of a role model. She is said to have been a successful businesswoman when she married Muhammad. Last year, in protest against Saudi Arabia’s ban on women behind the wheel, Manal Al-Sharif uploaded a video to YouTube showing herself driving (which duly went viral and earned her nine days in detention).

As always, however, technology cuts both ways. Long before social media helped to usher in the Arab spring, jihadis used ghastly video clips and online forums to attract foot soldiers to their cause. More recently, the internet has led to shows of rabid intolerance. Earlier this year, when Hamza Kashgari, a Saudi writer, was deemed a blasphemer by his country’s authorities for a poem, the internet was filled with hate speech against him.

Yet as more and more Muslims buy smartphones and get online, it is unlikely that radicals will benefit most. Hatred and extremism fester in closed polities, whereas the internet tends to strengthen the tolerant and open-minded. Mr Nasr, the Sudanese blogger, even thinks that digital media will be to Islam what the printing press was to Christianity—and ultimately lead to a Reformation. “We’re still in the early stages,” he says, “but we’re going to see many eclectic versions of Islam.”

Air Algerie needs to do more. they should improve existing lines first

Algeria’s state-run airline company Air Algerie has planned to launch new destinations in Nigeria and South Africa in a bid to expand operation in Africa.

Air Algerie CEO Mohamed Saleh Boultif told reporters on Tuesday that his company, which used to be a pioneer in sailing in Africa, is aiming to develop once more its activities on the continent.

The company focuses on developing transit traffic, which is very popular in Africa, by creating a hub here at the International Airport of Houari Boumedien, he added.

It has increased flights to and from some African destinations since the beginning of the year, the CEO said. Flights from Senegal’s capital Dakar, for example, increased from two to five a week.

Meanwhile, Air Algerie is likely to suspend its Algiers-Beijing line due to low profitability and fierce competition from other air companies, Boultif noted.

However, it is studying possibilities of opening new lines to other Chinese cities, including Shanghai, he added.

As for the Algiers-New York City line, he said it would depend on the sealing of the open sky agreement between Algeria and the United States.

Air Algerie covers a network of 96,400 km, with an average of 3 million passengers and some 20,000 tonnes of freights being transported every year.

Its international network serves 45 cities, mainly in Europe, the Middle East, the Maghreb, West Africa, Asia, North America, in addition to a domestic network linking 31 cities.