Vodafone Egypt #FAIL!!

Today I came a across a video shared by @MostafaNageeb on Facebook. The video is a part of Vodafone ISP ads campaign, the one with the three guys from “سمير و شهير و بهير”, the movie. I didn’t watch the movie, and I’m a (kind of) loyal customer of Vodafone Egypt, but I find the video pretty offending and ignorant too.

The video show Abbas Ibn Firnas, [a polymath: an inventor, engineer, aviator, physician, poet, and musician], as a maniac who would throw oneself over the edge of a cliff just for fun, mistaking him for the Greek fable of Daedalus and his son Icarus.

After sharing the video with a couple of links about who is really Abbas Ibn Firnas, and reading a couple of comments on my post on Facebook, I realized that some people were really anxious that they filed complaints to Vodafone Egypt about it on their Customer service complaints page, even more: some complained on the phone! The reply was: it depends on the volume of feedback they get, whether they will take it down or not. On YouTube, Vodafone replies (through the comments) is pretty mild.

Already, the ad on YouTube is getting lots of dislikes, so if you can, add yours too, there. If you find it that irritating, you might file a complaint too (find the links below).

One last note, Abbas didn’t get killed from that experiment!!

 

UPDATE (14-15/11/2010):

The ad video I mentioned above (which was "disliked" a lot on YouTube, also had many negative comments), was removed earlier today (14/11/2010) which made may people cheer about it. Only to find it republished under another name (Browser), a couple of hours later.

I was starting to feel that people were (kind of) exaggerating about the ad (even thought about re-blogging about it). But, now, that feels pretty sneaky of Vodafone, as if the people's feedback doesn't really matter, why are you doing ads for in the first place!? More over, were the marketing guys thinking that the (angry) users won't find out they did the republish!? Dah!?

 

UPDATE (17/11/2010):

We almost made it!! Read this post about it..

 

References:

The second ad republished, Browser [Arabic]

A video about Ibn Firnas [Arabic]

Wikipedia page about Ibn Firnas [English]

Vodafone Customer Service [English Complaints page]

Vodafone Customer Service [Arabic Complaints page]

Visual Studio Design view disappeared?

Go to: Tool>Options>HTML Designer

About #ArabNetMe, #EgyITevent and similar stuff!

Was there pretty late (around 1.25hrs late), traffic was awful

I met a lot of people @NohaMahmoud @MGhoz @maha_ashour @Salma_ts2al @AhmedMoneim @RamyMahrous @MostafaNageeb @mostafasiraj

I suffered a bad headache so if I wasn't that nice, please pardon me

I came across many people who seemed (twitter familiar) but due to my grumpy attitude, I was too shy to ask them if they were who I thought they were (@3GFalcon, @a_monem).

Saw @AhmedYahia face-to-face for the first time but again I was too lame.

Had a brief discussion with @AhmedMoneim about (what they decided to "hashtag" as) #EgyITevent, (aka Limousine Gatherings)

Saw @remon_z for a sec before he disappeared!

Was planning on travelling but had to stay for urgent stuff at work that just came up, a couple of min before I leave!

As usual (saw it twice till now) @ZiadAly embarrassed himself by asking the audience to raise their hands if they used or knew about his latest startup but a pretty small number of people raised their hands.

Someone was sarcastically talking about the analogy between @kanaafa (Irish I think?) being an investor here in Egypt & a typical Egyptian going to invest in an even less developed country than Egypt (if that is ever possible!). Though, I find what he did pretty brilliant, the note was quite funny on the spot, though!

The typical idea in my head of a digital media marketer (like .digitalrepublic CEO?) is quite the "showy" extrovert type of people. On the extremely unexpected side, Karim? was pretty introvert not talking or even giving context to data he was showing us (on a discussion panel!). Yet the data was pretty useful, but needed much accompanied talk, insights before and after. They could have become something like @HansRosling talks if done well.

Do people in non-English-speaking countries code in English?

I was reading a question with the same name on Stack-Exchange Beta site for Non-programmer-related questions (aka Programmers) when I came across this answer posted by a (probably Ukrainian) developer named Igor.

Accompanied by an earlier attempt by a colleague at work to write an enum in Arabic, I tried to write this piece of code:

Strangely enough it compiled and even ran showing the expected output (10)!! Note, the order above of the 2nd & 3rd line is mingled due to RTL issues in Gist. Visual Studio will show it in the right order (or at least, a more readable order for me, copy it & past it in your IDE to know how it looks).

Off course, I’m pretty convinced that this isn’t the best practice you should follow, (check my answer to the same question). Yet, I find this really hilarious! As a matter of fact, I took the claim that it’s bad practice too much for granted to the extent that I’ve never even tired to write such a strange piece of code :D

Does Google Instant really ruin SEO?

I was just reading an article I found on twitter about how Google Instant (the new Google search enhancement to be rolled out to all users soon) will ruin Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which I find kinda wrong.

First: SEO is a way to aid (content providers to provide ways to) internet users to find their way to their content. ie, it’s a mean to an end, not an end! So if Google (or Bing, etc) added new features to enhance the user experience (UX) and personalize search results that might break SEO, SEO should find a way to adapt. Killing innovation is not an option :)

SEO is not about deceiving people to direct them to your content, whether it’s relevant or not!!

Second: & that’s the main point here: As far as I can see, Google Instant is not ruining SEO as Steve claims. Search results are still gonna be shown as the good old days, the only main difference is that you won’t have to click ENTER after typing your search words. You can get instant feedback about where your search results meet your expectations or not. So if content-providers did their SEO job right, their content will show up according to the relevance of their content to the typed keywords.

So, what do you think? correct me if you can see it in any other way..

Update:

I find this tweet by @Bashmohandes more valid though:

Google Instant is cool, but I worry about advertisers, as some of their impression budgets are used while the user didn't show enough intent