Tag: arabic

Abjad Hawaz 7o66i Kalamun, lost in the Markup

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أبجد هوز

An Arabic art gallery without some of the best crafted calligraphy holds no value. That’s a fact. Arabic calligraphy & poetry are forms of cultural pride and not just art. Going digital, we lose all that. From readability to interaction. It’s all gone. Bold? Italic? Underlined? Get yourself ten Arabic books. Open’em, read’em, do you find anything in Bold? Italic? or Underlined? No you don’t. But we do have all that on the Web. How come?

Some will debate this with Interaction & Readability unity across different languages–English that is but with all the author-ware software developers’ presence in the region there hasn’t been one solid negating report which gets us to a simple conclusion, not enough efforts, at least not as much as it deserves.

So with all the calls for Arabic content around and how much Arabic content is going to be important for the growth of Arabic users’ online experience and the Internet industry in general, the basics haven’t really been covered.

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Hotels.com Launches Arabic Website For The Middle East

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Hotels.comHotels.com, one of the leading hotel accommodation booking sites in the world, has announced the launch of its Arabic website in the Middle East.  The website is available at http://fanadeq.hotels.com and uses IP based country recognition, an Arabic-language interface and local currency pricing and payment methods.

Hotels.com, is part of the Expedia group, and currently operates 52 global sites. Expedia announced in the summer of last year that it would be launching a dedicated travel portal for the Middle East within the following 12 months, and it seems this is the result of that effort.

Covering the key markets in the Middle East, the new website aims to offer competitive, value for money rates at over 100,000 hotels worldwide. As well as the hotel booking function, the site also offers in-depth hotel information including Microsoft mapping capabilities and property facility information. The site also includes destination information and customers reviews all in Arabic.

Nigel Pocklington, Managing Director of Hotels.com commented, “By launching our new website in Arabic, we are committed to unlocking the full potential of the Middle East market. Our goal is to offer our customers an accommodation booking service with extensive choices, great value prices and excellent customer service.”

According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) barometer, the Middle East is already the world’s largest driver of travel, tourism and hospitality, with the sector fuelling the region’s current annual tourism growth of 11% per annum.

The Middle East has seen a steady growth in e-commerce over the last few years with an increasing number of consumers using the internet to buy products and services. One of the fastest growing categories for e-commerce across the globe is travel as customers are increasingly choosing the internet to look for the best deals.

Google Calendar Is Launched In Arabic

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Google Calendar (Arabic)Google today announced the launch of Google Calendar in Arabic. Google Calendar is a tool that simplifies keeping track of events, special occasions, and appointments — whether they’re on your own agenda or on the calendars of contacts who opt to share their schedules with you.

Google Calendar has become one of the most popular calendar services online. It has proven fast and easy to use; users can add events just by clicking on a time slot and typing in their event information. It’s also integrated with Gmail so they can add events mentioned in email messages to their calendars with just one click. Furthermore, any event on the calendar can be turned into an invitation just by adding the email addresses of the people to invite. Those invitees can then see and respond to the invitation, whether or not they use Google Calendar themselves. The services also makes it easy to share calendars with friends and family, and the other way around.

“Calendar is a great tool for organizing your life,” said Husni Khuffash, UAE Country Manager, Google. “It’s another of our efforts to provide users with fast, easy-to-use applications that help to simplify your life. We’re really happy to be launching this tool in Arabic.”

Google Calendar (Arabic)

Another benefit of Calendar is that it’s open, with the possibility to talk to many other calendar applications, enabling users to easily get event data in and out. And with the integrated holiday calendar, users can see public and national holidays listed automatically on their Google Calendars.

To try Google Calendar out in Arabic just go to the Google Calendar site, then click through to “Settings” and change your language to Arabic. 

ICANN Approves Big Changes To Internet Addressing System

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ICANNA couple of days ago, the Board of ICANN approved a recommendation that could see a whole range of new names introduced to the Internet’s addressing system.

Presently, users have a limited range of 21 top level domains to choose from — names that we’ve all come to know well like .com, .org, .info; in addition to the country-specific TLDs (.uk, .tn, .ae, …etc).

The approved proposal allows applicants for new names to self-select their domain name so that choices are most appropriate for their customers or potentially the most marketable. It is expected that applicants will apply for targeted community strings such as (the existing) .travel for the travel industry and .cat for the Catalan community (as well as generic strings like .brandname or .yournamehere). There are already interested consortiums wanting to establish city-based top level domains, like .nyc (for New York City), .berlin and .paris.

The expanding system is also being planned to support extensions in the languages of the world, enabling web addresses to be typed in Arabic, Chinese and other scripts. The present system only supports 37 Roman characters.

Upon approval of the implementation plan, it is planned that applications for new names will be available in the second quarter of 2009.

# Source: ICANN

New Deal To Launch Free Arabic Encyclopedia Online

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Emirates Internet Group has signed a cooperation agreement with Abu Ghazaleh Group to establish a free Arabic encyclopedia on the Internet.

The encyclopedia will cover a lot of applied science, and the human, economic and technology aspects will be addressed to the Arabic user, to enrich the electronic content of the Arabic language and to build a scientific referenced academic site with high quality.

A specialized committee of academics and scientists will insure the control of articles, and monitor and evaluate them from the perspective of academic and research centers. The enrichment of the encyclopedia will depend on the participation of knowledge specialists in specific fields, as the participants can correct and discuss and also to add more information in the encyclopedia, without violating the rights of the author or any other rights .

Two thoughts cross my mind in response to this piece of news: one is a very positive one; it’s great to see these Arab groups investing in knowledge and working to create more Arab content online.

On the other hand, I’m not too sure about the approach; instead of launching a whole new encyclopedia from scratch, with all the difficulties and costs that will entail, why not support the little groups of people from all over the Arab world who are passionately working on growing the Arabic version of Wikipedia?
I mean the platform already exists, it’s open, it’s easy to use, and it already has a head start, the teams are there already inputting information, and many people already trust it and use it, so why not just use that?
Is it so that it can be labeled as an Arab project? But isn’t the goal what’s most important? To share knowledge and get more Arab content out there?

I personally think this project would have more chances of success if it were to go with enriching the Arabic version of Wikipedia instead of creating a whole new encyclopedia, and I fear that if they don’t it’ll only end up like every other previous Arab initiative.

# Source: BI-ME