The Heat of 2012

Posted on January 3, 2012 by marafat

Judging from what analysts are saying, 2012 will be another bumpy year, a year of no havens. Elections everywhere where it matters, gigantic economic imbalances (to put it mildly), pretty nasty turn of events in Emerging Markets (including China), and a messy turning of the leaves of US geopolitical fortunes.

The Arab Spring looks less warm and rejuvenating today than it did half a year ago, and it is abundantly clear that we need to brace ourselves for a roller coaster ride. Things are not going as expected. Or perhaps they are. In any event, that’s just the way it is: change of the magnitude we are experiencing involves a contest of so many players, so many interests, so many points of view, at so many different levels of politics and society. The cost of freedoms and better societies is not cheap.

None of this makes life easier for a social media company in the Middle East, where all this topsy turvy accompanies the already turbulent landscape of what we used to call web 2.0. But coming from a career in trading financial markets, this constant of uncertainty is a familiar way of life. All the better for us to embrace it. After all, strong materials are forged under high pressure and heat, not sunshine and a polishing cloth. In all likelihood, 2012 is a crucible year. And so, we roll up the sleeves!

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Reflection Time – Intro

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Kareem Arafat

It was 6 years ago when we decided to start TOOTCORP. Mazen, George and I were incubated at SYNTAX. We had a 1 year old telecom company called Olivoice that focused on VoIP as a technology to provide discount calls to Arab Americans in the US. We used to sell Vonage-like routers (CPE units) that were tied to monthly calling plans.

TOOTCORP started when we were thinking to attach value-added services to Olivoice subscribers that kept them in touch and in communication with what is happening in the Middle East, or precisely the Arab World. We then started to think, why don’t we start a blogging engine, a podcasting platform, and a photo and video sharing platform. Ahmad Humeid went into spiriting out the vision of these platforms, backed by visual prototypes that till this day I find amazing.

The idea became too sexy to us, and we decided to converge all our VoIP business into a web media business that focuses on self-publishing tools. And here we were. Mazen, Ahmad, George and I on the verge of embarking into a new venture. We called up Wael Attili to join, and he gladly hopped on board.

Ahmad was insisting we launch something fast. The easiest was to launch TOOT (itoot.net), which is a blog aggregator. In 2005, RSS was still new, and of course RSS made it possible to aggregate those amazing blogs that TOOT till this day aggregates.

I remember sometime around this time 6 years ago, Ahmad Humeid and Jad Madi, our only developer back then, pulled off several nights designing and coding the TOOT site. On new year’s eve of 2006, at possibly the first hours of 2006, TOOT was finally launched. Ahmad and Jad at SYNTAX office alone. I remember being a bit noisy in the office, and a bit playful. Ahmad and Jad were totally serious. At one point, Ahmad politely says to me: “Kareem, we are trying to get this done. Be quiet. We need to concentrate”.

I think till then, I did not know what I was going into. I did not know what blogs are exactly. I did not know any blog but 360east.com! I certainly did not know what RSS is. All I knew on the 1st of January is that we launched a blog aggregator that aggregates 40 something blogs, and that TOOT had a blog.

Quickly, I started catching up on this stuff. The reception of TOOT in the blogosphere was great. Bloggers started adding the “i’m on toot” badge, and more bloggers were asking to be added. Many asked why they were not added, although they requested to be added! Suddenly, the question of quality, selection, objectivity and fairness all popped up. How do we decide which blogs to select? What are the factors that play into our perception of a quality blog? Are we being objective? Are we being fair to the people?

Roba Al Assi joined to help us answer all these questions. We would all meet for hours every week discussing these questions. We all read a lot of blogs back then. Roba did most of the heavy lifting. She read literally all the blogs on TOOT everyday till this day, and never failed to handpick the daily featured posts.

We would also spend hours thinking of the next iteration on TOOT. Sadly, after 6 years, nothing has changed on TOOT (http://itoot.net). We got busy with IKBIS.

The story of IKBIS is an interesting one. I still have more to say about TOOT. But for now, this is only an intro.

I am going to try to share as much as possible some of the experiences I passed through at TOOTCORP in a series of blog posts, and the lessons learned. It’s time to reflect. Many times this will be my personal view on things, and not necessarily other founders of the company.

Let’s see :)

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“What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”

Posted on December 8, 2011 by marafat

That apparently is a sign on Facebook offices. Clearly the imperative is to innovate, as well as to share things before they are perfected. The other slogan at FB is “Done is better than perfect.” “Iterate, iterate, iterate!” says Sheryl Sandberg.

Iteration is a word we’ve been bandying around internally for years now. We are not particularly good at it —though not awful— due mostly to a lack of resources. We are just too thinly spread to get things done quickly enough, which clearly slows down our learning, feedback intensity with our community, and ultimately hurts our ability to deliver. —We are doing something about expanding our resources…

Be that as it may, the other day we decided to focus some time on becoming more intentional and explicit about our culture and passions as a company. This improved company site is part of the effort. It is also part of an effort to become more fearless, be more open, more engaging with our community, and therefore iterate. Indeed, we even decided to stop trying to perfect our tagline and go with it and see how it goes.

“Arab Content for an Open Society” might sound a bit too NGO-ish but for the umbrella brand we think it is a good start. It has the merit of being honest and direct about who we are, our beliefs: most of our work is social media though we have social networking ambitions. We are Arab, and we are committed to a tolerant, fair, fearless, advancing society. That is, one that does not fear iterating itself.

Mazen Arafat

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On Shutting Down Watwet

Posted on July 14, 2011 by marafat

Last week I read some tweets and blogs on our decision to shutdown Watwet. Among many things, it highlighted just how bad we are at Tootcorp in communicating with the rest of the early adopter community. We didn’t even have a press release. There is no good reason for this, particularly in an age of frantic communication and mass calls for openness in other areas of our lives. So anyway, here is a blog entry – hopefully the first of a few, to try to dialogue a lot better…

The decision, when it came to it, was one of timing rather than whether we should wind Watwet down. For nearly two years it was clear to us that Watwet needed to be something very different from Twitter. To paraphrase Ahmad Humeid, one of the founders of Tootcorp, the Twitter of the Arab World is Twitter. And while we spent considerable time working out niche angles for Watwet, in the end we didn’t under the pressure of other priorities. Quite simply, we lacked the funding, mental bandwidth, connections and media DNA to take it in the directions we needed to take it.

There are some interesting opportunities to pursue for media-savvy teams in the Arab world to give it a shot, and I would be very happy to discuss with anyone who is serious. Given that we have the technical knowhow to implement the solution (and it is not as easy as it seems), watwet could partner effectively with such a party. Similarly, we think there are interesting corporate or white-labelled deployments of watwet technology that corporates in the Arab world should pursue.

Next entry, I will give my two cents on social networking in the Arab world, which was a question posed a few times on the watwet news, and one we wrestle with with elsewhere as well.

As for watwet, we live and learn. We thank everyone who supported us and look forward to more ventures together.

Mazen Arafat