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#ArabNetME 2011: Days 2, 3 and 4 Round-up

April 2nd, 2011

The 2nd day, which is the official forum day 1. was actually great, met a couple of very interesting people… It shocks me how taxis in Lebanon are bloody expensive, If you’re not sharing a car then a trip from Hamra to Sin El Feil where Habtoor hotel is located costs around 10,000 to 15,000 LL. Which is insane compared to rates in Amman.

Anyways, the event started on time and I managed to grab my badge, The first panel started at 10:30am titled “Fostering Entrepreneurship”, moderated by Omar Christidis, with the following panelists: Rashid Al Ballaa (National Net Ventures), Usama Fayyad (Oasis 500), Gideon Simeloff (TwoFour54), Reshma Sohoni (Seedcamp) and Mohammad Al-Alfi from (Sawari Ventures). It was great and I managed to ask Usama Fayyad about Oasis 500, where he said Oasis 500 aims to help 500 companies/startups launch in 5 years? my question was isn’t that too much for Jordan? and he gave in a massive answer.

The rest of the day was actually cool with the TechCrunch part as well.

I was really sick the next day with a killer headache/migraine and I managed to arrive at 2:00pm, but was tweeting the whole thing and streaming from my hotel room with minimum brightness on screen… When I first arrived, I met with Manal (The Manalyst) and sat next to her and iMadi, an ex-work mate of mine. That was the moment where N2V announced the iPad 2 winner. I didn’t expect to win at all to be honest. The trick was:

That I solved and tweeted to @n2vtweets, and it was a Question in English, written while not switching the keyboard to Arabic, so the question/trivia was: How many birth days did Ahmed Shawqi have? and the answer clearly is 1. Because a person only has one birth day and celebrates the anniversaries later on.

Then, attended the most interesting panel at ArabNet this year, The “Social Media and Citizenship” panel, moderated by Samih Toukan (Jabbar Group), with the following panelists: Mohamed El Dahshan (AlMasry AlYoum), Fouad Al Farhan (Nailam) and Mohamad Nanabhay (AlJazeera English) on Skype.

It was an interesting panel, Dahshan did a great job talking about the Egyptian situation, Fouad an ex-jailed blogger expressed his experience in the Saudi blogosphere that gave us a great exposure of the situation and how to express your freedom properly. Also, the great closing Keynote about Entrepreneurship and Citizenship
by Fadi Ghandour.

I’d like to thank Omar Christidis and everyone else at IBAG for the great event, N2V for the iPad 2 and the great people I met, and to my great twitter followers. See you next year!