Google’s First Lunch with UAE Bloggers

Last week, I was absolutely pleased to receive an invite to attend Google’s First Lunch with UAE Bloggers. I have to admit that I haven’t been on the scene for a very long time which made this invite a lot more valuable in my eyes. I arrived this morning at The Pavilion Downtown and was welcome by Hind Rasheed, Communications Manager of Google MENA to a very pretty branded area outside on the grass in lovely weather. It was also great seeing some of the region’s online big guns such as H.H Sultan Al-Qassemi, Samer Marzouq and the guys from Tbreak.com.

We were then introduced to Ari Kesisoglu, Google’s Managing Director for Middle East North Africa who leads all of the MENA operations in the Middle East along with Maha Abouelenein, Head of Communications, MENA. It was quite an informal and relaxed session where we all introduced ourselves and got to hear from Ari about his background and when he joined Google. After the pleasantries, we were lead to the auditorium for a quick presentation.

Before I go into details of what was presented, I have to say that the Google culture really shined throughout the day. Even while presenting, the entire team of staff is very laid back, cool and project very young energy. Compared to how dull and boring Facebook staff look on stage during F8, this was full of energy from the moment it begun.

Ari lead the talk starting with sharing a lot of interesting insights about the region. Here’s what I caught and found to be most interesting:

• Everything in Google revolves around the statement “Organizing the World’s information”. This shapes the thought of every single initiative that the company undertakes.
• Another statement that caught my attention was “We want to change and improve the way people do things”. (You hear that Apple? Not force us to do things your way)
• Google’s Team exceeds 30,000 Globally with enough hardware and coding to make Solomon blush.
• Markets have 3 phases for online usage. Building Infrastructure, Creating Content, Doing transacations. Ari believes the Middle East still hasn’t gotten its content phase right.
• Out of the 350m who live in the Middle East, only 85m are online making penetration rate at approximately 25% (50% less than mature markets such as the UK at 75%)
• Google’s External Data shows One Million new users joining the internet monthly in the Middle East
• Google’s indexing data has seen a surge in Arabic content from 1.1% to 1.5% alone in 2011.
• Google notes that the quality and frequency of Arabic Search has increased drastically in the past 2 years
• Google is not a political organization but will fight to the death to find ways to enable people to express themselves.
• Google has 3 types of projects for the region. 1 – Localize Existing Apps, 2- Create Apps (Speak2Tweet, BahrainTalks), 3 – Support Startups

Once Ari was done with the above, Maha went into explaining more on a product level and while most of the products she mentioned were tools I was aware of, the Google Media Academy is a project that caught my eye. This is an initiative by Google to work with journalists and educated them on how to use Google products efficiently. This couldn’t have come in a better time and it’s something that I can’t wait to see the results of. Something else that caught my attention was the Google Transparency report where Google lists all the requests of global governments to take down content. I had never heard of this.

We then moved to a Q&A session where we were asked to bluntly state anything we wanted. There was a plethora of questions. Some of the topics raised included interoperability between existing Google products, Android Arabic Support, The Google vs. Facebook war, importance of bloggers in the PR mix and a lot of other topics.

My main query to Ari was that it’s very weird to see a 1 million user per month increase while content only increased by 0.4%. The answer came highlighting that early adopters struggle a little when moving online so they spend their time lurking and reading rather than creating. I now wish I asked if they had a graph showing an approximate time of how much a user needs to be comfortable with creating content. For next time.

Finally, we got presented with an absolutely gorgeous menu of food. Lunch and the company was superb. Also got to make some new friends and catch up with old ones too.

Overall, this was an excellent initiative by Google and I can’t wait till we get to hang out again and discuss products in more details. Also, keep an eye out for Google+. 2012 is going to be one hell of a year.