Marouen Bloggin' his Life

After my previous post about Tunisiana's launch of EDGE service, I think this may be Tunisia Telecom's answer :

Alcatel has been awarded a US$61 million contract to extend the GSM/EDGE mobile network of Tunisie Telecom, the incumbent fixed and mobile operator in Tunisia. Under the terms of the contract, Alcatel will provide Tunisie Telecom with its Evolium multi-standard radio access solution which integrates all GSM-based mobile technologies, from GSM/GPRS to EDGE and 3G/UMTS. Source: http://www.cellular-news.com/story/16613.php

I hope that this will not take a long delay to be provided to the customers (like me).

I'm publishing here the call for participation about the 3rd online capacity building program on internet governance provided by Diplofoundation for interested people from developing countries. I had the opportunity to participate on the 2nd « round » and I spoke about my experience on this previous post

Do not miss it, it's very interesting and important

DiploFoundation, in cooperation with various partners, is currently accepting applications for the Internet Governance Capacity Building Training Programme. This programme aims at improving Internet Governance (IG) related knowledge and skills for participants from developing countries.

The Programme will comprise of a first online training phase, which will last from 1 April to 10 July 2006, and a second research phase (optional) which will run from 15 July to 1 November 2006, as well as capacity building fellowships. Fellowships, which will be awarded to the most successful participants in the programme, will include placements with partner organizations and attendance at Internet Governance related meetings including the proposed meeting in Athens later in the year. The programme will facilitate community building among participants from different national, cultural and professional backgrounds.

The application deadline for this programme is March 25th, 2006.

Information and application: http://www.diplomacy.edu/ig

After reading this post about the abnormal results of 'http' query in famous engine Google, I decided to try it and I had almost the same result with Microsoft on the first line. At least Yahoo! Is giving a more reasonable result as you can see here (click on image):

Well, I think that the main reason why I'm writing this post is because I promised yesterday to Troubadour that I'll blog more often so I decided to speak about the 11th meetup which took place two days ago on the Latina restaurant in the Berges du Lac.

It was a nice evening as usual full of funny topics and a lot of laughs like in all the meetups I've attended until now. But to avoid repeating what other bloggers said already, I will choose other topics. I'll start by saying that this meetup was the first one to be sponsored by the owner of the restaurant. And it was even his idea when I explained him this phenomenon of bloggers meetups. He was so kind to invite us and offer us the drinks. But honestly, even if he is my friend, I never had the opportunity to visit his nice restaurant and enjoy the music and the free wireless internet access after the night when I organised a dinner for about 140 persons during the WSIS days. I like also the idea of having salsa courses on weekends even if I prefer watching dancers and enjoying the latino music I like so much. Thank you Haythem.

Another point that my friends will miss in their blogs is to thank the great efforts done by the four Musketeers (Subzeroblue, Karim, Tom.Z and me) to insure the success of these important meetups to empower the community and to try "pushing" the bloggers for a more active role in the society. And as I said in the Zaghouan conference, these people (and of course all the community members inside or outside Tunisia) are the best gift I had from joining the Tunisian blogoshere.

Nice to meet you all new and old friends.

Karim, when is the next meetup (or should I say picnic in the mountain )

I went today to the opening of the first tunisian outrsourcing fair Outsourcing 2006 in Tunisia. This fair is organised by the consulting company 2CW in partnership with Enrnest & Young and StelFair Tunisia.

After a fast walk in front of all the stands, the most important one (at least for me) was Tunisiana (the first private GSM operator in Tunisia) because I had some technical questions about their SMS platform and when the MMS will be opened to service providers. But thanks to a nice guy in charge of «Marketing watch » for added value service (a nice position), I knew, with a live demo as proof, that GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) will be launched in few days, as long as EDGE (Enhanced Data rate for GSM Evolution known also as EGPRS) with a practical bandwith of 120 kbps and will be available to all Tunisiana's subscribers with a free activation by a phone call to the hotline. And the billing will be done according to the transfer size not to the connection duration. But the price is not available yet.

Now, people with mobile phone supporting GPRS/EDGE will be able to check their inboxes and « blog » from anywhere in Tunisia through the equipment or using it as a modem for a laptop. Tunisiana will sell also PCMCIA interfaces supporting the SIM to be plugged directly to the laptops.

Any answer from Tunisie Telecom ?

On november, just after the WSIS, I decided to have a rest by going on a trip to the south of Tunisia I've never visited with two friends Andy (for the states) and Tom (from Australia). The trip wasn't planned at all, but Andy had in mind to make the Star Wars tourism and to write about it an article to share the experience we had. I'll not tell more, I invite you to read the article published on the Associated Press website.

PS: On the article, Andy is right. I'm more a Star Trek fan.