Q8Ba7th Official Blog

The visit before my last, I was so disappointed and distracted all the time by how Marina Mall has turned into, and I can only guess it relates to the Avenues invasion. Each parking lot has small sign before it, that would seem like handicapped parking only at first. Corridors were filled with booths from all kinds, some even blocking the outside view of some shops. restaurant tables are all covered with company ads. Well that last one might seem ok, but over all you get the feeling they’re sacrificing quality for short-term profits.

This last Wednesday however, I’ve seen the worst of all. Big chunk of the booths are gone, but on one of the sides, this is what I saw.

Yes, this is inside Marina Mall. I looked at it today in disbelief again. How could they allow it to go this low? Is there no limit to how bad the mall can get if it makes few extra bucks today, never mind tomorrow?

Sad really.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Name: Q8Traffic

Site: http://twitter.com/q8traffic

Type: Twitter / Info / Traffic

Language: English (mostly)

Brief: Q8Traffic is a new simple, yet can be very useful, idea. Q8Traffic is basically a twitter account that retweets all tweets that includes the hash #q8traffic. So by following it, you get what everyone else says about the traffic condition on Kuwait roads.

Example: You’re driving by Road 50 towards Kuwait City, and road jams at third ring road.

You tweet: “Traffic jam at Rd 50 towards Kuwait city near 3rd ring rd.”

As I’m following Q8Traffic, I would get an instant update about the traffic and be able to avoid it. What’s in it for you you say? What goes around comes around, and other people will be helping you as well hopefully.

Ofcourse, we’re not suggesting here you tweet while driving 120 km/h (or more) ofcourse, but if road is already jammed, this update can help others avoid the jam, and minimize it as well.

Snapshot:

Popularity: 4% [?]

Name: Q8Stock

Site: Q8Stock.blogspot.com

Type: Blog / Finance

Language: Arabic

Launch Date: March, 2007

Brief: Q8Stock is an unofficial specialized Kuwait Stock Market blog that brings you quick small tips everyday about some of the stocks performance for that day, with little advise on what to do.

What would be even greater is a small quick daily podcast that is released right after market closing, so that people will hear it on the way back from work in their car, and get an idea of the market performance. How wonderful would that be? And we all know how much interested are people into the stock market over here.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Name: Our Kuwait

Site: ourkuw.com (Coming Soon)

Twitter URL: http://twitter.com/ourkuwait

Type: News

Brief: Our Kuwait is a new upcoming site, still unclear how the main site will be and what will be it’s nature, but it’s already got a Twitter account, and it’s primarily about latest on the stop Kuwait news in Arabic. I’m not really a fan of local news, but this one is quite good and could help me stay updated without much hassle, I highly recommend it. What’s so good about them is that they give you what they promise… News, rather than opinions which sparkle heated debates, and I hope they stay that way. Just to keep it right, turns out they do give their opinion along with the news.

Just follow them on Twitter, and get updated instantly.

Their website is still under construction, but I’m sure following their Twitter account would keep you updated once it launches.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Site: PIFSS.GOV.KW

Name: The Public Institution for Social Security

Name (Arabic): المؤسسة العامة للتأمينات الاجتماعية

Type: Government

Brief: PIFSS have started providing it’s online services as part of the e-government project a while ago, giving it’s users access to loads of information about their social security status and numbers, as well as allowing them to submit certain certificate requests.

Review:

Registration:

Sadly, for registration, PIFSS have decided to go with their own online user credentials, thus taking a step away from a unified government identity. Perhaps the reason for this is the slow progress of the unified identity, who knows. To start the registration anyhow, you first click the Electronic services link at the top left of the screen.

From there, click on New User? (مستخدم جديد؟), fill in your civil ID number and click submit. After that, you will have to complete a certain form with some personal information, secret question and such. Once you submit the form, you will have to wait for few days, after which they will notify you of the time to come and collect the password with an email like this:

Sadly, this is an after two weeks kind of period, which is too long just to create the account and deliver a password. Hopefully with time this process will get faster. You can go on the specified date or later, and you collect the password from the main branch, car parking building, Floor # 2. It was quite empty when I went there. You need to go in person and have the Civil ID with you, sign few papers and you’re done.

After that, just open the envelop to get your password and login. First thing I suggest is change your password to something you can remember, rather than rely on the numeral one given to you. If you forget the password, you can reset it online by answering the secret question, no more trips to Kuwait City.

Online Services:

The online service portal design is quite neat, pretty fast to load, and very easy to follow, renders on different browsers and operating systems properly apparently, as I was using Firefox on Mac with no issues. This is the main page with your personal information.

And from the side menu, you can access loads of information and certificate request forms, such as the allowance info, registration periods, retirement salary calculation if applicable, and your current salary and cut amount.

Summary:

PIFSS online service I believe is an ideal of how online services should be. Quite informative, neat and clean design, easy to read and follow, and quite fast as well. Ofcourse, other e-Government services are bound to have more interactive features, like paying the bills and such. For PIFSS, I’m sure there is also a long way to go, but this is quite a good start. My only concern beside the long time for password delivery is how each entity is delivering with it’s own user credentials, which will complicate unifying the user identities later on across all the government. But again, maybe they couldn’t spare to wait for Civil Service Commission to get ready, or maybe the latter was making it too complicated. Who knows.

Go ahead and try it I say. You will get quick access to your info, and be able to support further enhancements in the e-Government.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Name: Kuwaiter.com

Category: Community / Information

Language: English

Brief: Community driven site for Kuwait upcoming events, offers, and for people to express their wishes by demanding certain events.

Review: Seeing it emerge only less than a year ago, the site right now is covering quite a lot about the upcoming events in Kuwait, with the ability to comment and rate these events. This events list can be really handy for both consumers and business owners to see what’s out there and reach out. Another less populated section gives you the current offers available in the market, and it’s up to the business owners here to really fully utilize it. The neat part I see is the Demand section, which allows you to express your desire for a certain type of events, and then more and more people can share your demand. Business owners can then simply see the trend and desire, to fulfill what people already need. That’s a small market study for FREE.

Should You Sign-Up with Kuwaiter.com?

Kuwaiter.com believes so for the following benefits:

1. Keeping track and sharing events with friends and community members.
2. Adding your own events for “free” and promoting events to the entire Kuwaiti community.
3. Create groups and share similar interests with the community.
4. Easily export events via calendar widgets or tools.
5. Send the event to your email, print a copy and/or invite your friends to it.
6. You will have your own “personal community page” which allows you to see who your friendsare, what events and groups your friends are joining.

Warning About Registration!

My biggest frustration of the site came after I received a spam email from someone saying she found my contact info @ Kuwaiter.com. I was stunned and when I checked my profile, it seems my email used for registration was put on publicly without my consent. I checked their Privacy Policy page to see if I missed something, and no, they’re not supposed to do this.

I went to my profile page and realized my Profile info has been set to Public by default, which doesn’t make any sense. Even if I chose to make it public, usually profile information does not enforce sharing of user’s email account. So if you want to register, definitely make sure you visit the Profile page immediately after sign-up and adjusting the privacy to your likings.

Suggestions:

• Preserve user privacy: Simply allow users to opt-in for sharing their email and other profile info publicly. By default, private information should be, umm private!
• Tags for Events: If you go right now, you will see loads of events, many of which are for elections. Now you may be interested in Shopping events only for instance, so it would be nice to allow tags to distinguish event types, and help people see what they like. Yes there are categories right now, but they’re not really enforced nor followed, and I don’t see an easy way to filter events out.
• RSS Feed for Events: Right now, there is an RSS for the news only, which isn’t really the main content of the site. People would come here for events, and I bet they would like to subscribe for RSS of their favorite events, e.g. Shopping, Electronics or so.

Summary:

With the exception of the Privacy issue, I’m pretty impressed by the amount of content so far put in the site, keeping it always fresh, and would wish to see more extensibility and ease of reach for it.

UPDATE: I’m not sure if this is a coincidence or a response, but I received this email few minutes ago from Kuwaiter.com:

So personally I’m always happy to see strong actions taken against spamming, but Kuwaiter.com should’ve been more careful about disclosing people’s email in the first place. Public email is an open invitation for spammers. Thanks though for starting to take corrective measures.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Name: Q8eGifts.com

Business Type: Gifts Shopping

Language: English/Arabic

Launch Date: First seen November, 2008

Brief: Kuwait online gift shopping site offering flower bouquets and chocolate gifts.

Review: Q8eGifts comes with a unique theme of it’s own, and a nice design aimed at showing best offers at the top. The variety and type of products offered so far are not so attractive, while I do notice some slight updates on the gifts collection, they do need a wider range to choose from, and it definitely needs more original or unique content of its own to separate it from the rest, rather than regular chocolates you can find at the grocery nearby you.

Popularity: 25% [?]

With every new year people come up with their own new year resolutions. Targets they want to achieve, and things they want to improve on. A logical question is why does it have to be at the beginning of the year rather than whenever they really feel like it. Two main reasons maybe (besides following the crowd blindly :

1- It would give the person a good time line to measure his progress over the course of next year.
2- New year gives the feeling of a new beginning.

At all rates, I thought of sharing today the new started blog of a friend. Personal Growth Map is not really a typical type of blog that we have in Kuwait, but is rather a blog focused purely towards the personal improvement and development. And in his words, here is what Haider wants to achieve from his site:

• To explain what personal development is, so that you can develop a more comprehensive understanding of the subject, and how everything else fits into it
• To help you make the best use of the personal development resources you already have, and the information you come across
• To propose a way in which personal development material should be presented by other websites, to make them easier for us all to use
• To present the Personal Growth Map, which is an approach that I developed for personal development that makes having a balanced life very achievable

The blog has only launched in December 08, but has recently been kept updated regularly on an almost daily basis. Hoping it will you you, me and others stay motivated throughout the year in pursuing our year resolutions.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Name: Wataniya Airways

Business Type: Travel

Launch Date: December, 2008
* Date we first noted site online. Could be different

Brief: Wataniya Airlines is the second private airlines going into business next February, and they are the first premium service private airlines, as opposed to the low cost Al-Jazeera Airways. Wataniya Airways have 2 planes so far parked at Toulouse, France, and have 2 more coming later. The two airplanes will be starting their back and forth journeys between their country of origin, Kuwait, and the destinations Dubai, Bahrain, and Beirut on the 8th of Feb, 09. Travelers can already book their ticket flights online.

via SOME contrast

Review:

While Wataniya Airways site has all basic features for travelers to book their tickets, it is still behind I say compared to Jazeera Airways and others. The site design is rather pretty simple and looks like a ready made template. Search box date selection could be improved. Rather than having drop down menu for each entry (e.g., day, month, year), the approach of Jazeera Airways showing dates in human readable format is more appealing. Site response time is also occasionally slow

Booking: Once you perform a flight search, a new full screen window opens up with a complete different URL, but within the same theme, to complete the booking process. This is the engine and service that is powering their online booking system, something that Al-Jazeera is also doing. The different however is that Al-Jazeera does it so transparently. No domain change, nor a new window for it. The Wataniya Airways’ new window is so inconvenient, and makes it difficult for the normal user to browse back and forth. It also forbids him from doing multiple flight searches, which he may want to do for comparison purposes. Any new search loads in the same previously opened window. Also, the redirection to a complete different domain (cat.sabresonicweb.com), makes the end user confused. A simple subdomain mapping would be sufficient to overcome this problem, and give much more confidence and credibility to the user.

Another thing is Wataniya site still does not seem to offer seat selection, nor even a preference. At least, I was not able to spot it. Jazeera on the other hand had it since it’s early launch days. Made a pretty positive impression as well.

Pricing: That’s where it all ends isn’t it? So I tried to go through flight search from Kuwait to Dubai from 9th – 14th Feb, 09 for Wataniya Airways, Jazeera, and Kuwait Airways. A first note is, for some reason Wataniya site returns the ticket price in the currency of destination country, e.g AED, rather than the origin. As a Kuwaiti company, it should be either in KD by default, takes the currency of origin, or at least have in USD as a global currency. Not for any reason would I want to know the price in AED when I am traveling from Kuwait, and the least is I should have the option to change to my preferred currency. At the time of writing, there just isn’t!

Now as for prices, keeping in mind Jazeera is a low-cost service, these are the price ranges:

Wataniya Airways: 50 KD – 129 KD (42 classes)
Jazeera Airways: 10 KD – 70 KD (2 classes)
Kuwait Airways: 105 KD – 230 KD (3 classes)

So Jazeera highest exceeds Wataniya lowest fare, and notice how Kuwait Airways, a struggling service, has it’s lowest class fare close to Wataniya highest, and how their highest First class rate is above by 100 KD. While Wataniya uses Airbus A320, and Kuwait Airways uses variety of models, it remains known to many how consumed and old the airplanes Kuwait Airways operates, especially after last time new airplane purchase efforts were turned down. That, in addition to the frequent Wataniya 2 per day flight to Dubai should put Kuwait Airways almost obsolete for such destinations I believe, except when all other airlines are fully booked. Despite the known fact of the competition, we did not see any corrective measures on the Kuwait Airways side as well. Another thing is, Wataniya Airways gives travelers their own Royal Aviation Terminal, and this includes all traveler classes.

Future Destinations:

• Cairy, Egypt
• Amman, Jordan
• Qatar
• Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
• Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
• Damascus, Syria

Summary: Competition is always good, and Wataniya is opening more seats to the hot short destinations, at a promising better service quality. The aviation terminal is, if as good as it seems, a marvelous idea. Their site still seems to need some work in terms of design, performance, and booking features.

In general, I expect Jazeera to remain the target for most frequent travelers for it’s competitive prices. Luxury and late flight seekers will be the Wataniya ones. I still believe with the different in service type we will see both airways trying to eat up each other’s share though. Kuwait Airways… So far it’s still in it’s long sleep, and I don’t expect it to wake up anytime soon.

More References:

Info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wataniya_Airways
Jobs: http://www.bayt.com/job/company?xid=807752

Popularity: 36% [?]

Name: fruits-passion-kw.com

Business Type: Body Care Shopping Site & Company Profile

Launch Date: October, 2008

Brief: Fruits & Passion is a global brand for body care rituals, fragrances, and home ambiance products. Has a local exclusive dealer with previous physical stores. Now, while some people might have missed them from the market, thinking they are long gone, selling of those products is still easily available online.

Review: Fruits & Passion Kuwait as I see is a nice elegantly designed site, goes along with the type of business they are in, and matches the original Fruits & Passion global design. You can find there more information about the company, products, type of Spa services and others they offer, and you can also subscribe to their newsletter, since I know they very often participate in public and private expos.

For the people so much enthusiastic in such products, a shopping section is also available, and while it may seem like a secondary item in their site, I have tried it personally and they seem to have a pretty flexible and quick delivery methods, and are quite focused at it. They do offer gift baskets as well, which looks good, a bit expensive, and I think could use some extra items from outside their menu. For example, a New Baby basket can have a teddy bear toy, baby photo album or frame. Something to go along with it. Maybe this needs some further legal work on their side, as they represent an international brand, not sure. But it remains a good idea that adds value in my opinion.

They also offer gift vouchers if you want to gift someone, and a purchase of 30 KD or more will entitle you for a 10% discount on all future purchases as a VIP member, as well as some rewarding points.

The experience of shopping is rather convenient, easy to browse, flexibility to choose the taste you want on product page. The Add to Cart could use a bit of highlighting in the top left side to draw customer’s attention item was really added to the cart. Some people might miss it I guess.

Delivery: Delivery for me happened on same day based on my request, not sure how it’s made otherwise, but they seem again pretty flexible and supportive. Delivery charge is 1 KD for orders below 10 KD, so most of the cases delivery will be FREE of charge, unless you’re only in short of a shampoo .

Popularity: 34% [?]