Philippe was stranded in Doha because his employer was refusing to grant him an Exit Permit to leave the Country. Like most Gulf states, Qatar requires foreigners who wish to work in the country to have a local sponsor. However, unlike other Gulf countries, Qatar give sponsors the authority over whether their employee is allowed to leave the country or not. A law which some western organisations say is akin to modern day slavery.

When I met Philippe he had been stuck in Qatar for nine months and had been living at the residence of the Belgian Ambassador to Qatar for six. He had seen his multiple efforts to get out of the country blocked at every turn and, after staying out of the public eye for so long, he seemed ready to tell his story to the world.

Deborah, who is an author and journalist (and also Tweets), had already persuaded Philippe to set-up a Twitter account and we decided to help him get his story out over Twitter and on a Blog. A few late nights later, Phillipe was prepared - He had a Blog set-up, he’d put together a Press Release and he had got the hang of Twitter and started putting some teasers out about his story.

Last night he flipped the switch and today there has been a number of articles about his case in the Belgium press, a huge interest in his Blog and a slew of followers on Twitter where, inspired by Dan Baums strategy, he is telling his story 140 characters at a time. It has been great to see the story spread over Twitter and watch Phillipe take phone call after phone call from journalists and politicians just 24 hours after getting the ball rolling. His friends have even put together a Phillipe Liberation Front group on Facebook after he updated his status with links to his Blog and Twitter feed

@hostageinqatar on Twitter Search

It really is a testament to the power of social media that by using Twitter, Wordpress and Facebook, Philippe has been able to make enough noise to attract the attention on international media within a matter of hours. Every one of those services is completely free as well. It goes to show that, as long as you have a compelling story to tell, the tools are out there for you to reach a large, international audience, if you use them wisely.

Warren Ellis once wrote “Journalism is like a gun. You’ve only got one bullet, but that’s all you need, if you aim it right. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.” I think the same goes for Social Media. I hope we’ve managed to aim this right to help Philippe get home to his wife and kids.

You can read all about Phillipes story at his blog and through the press release. Personally I’d reccomend you follow the story on Twitter as that will have some more details and will give you an idea of his personality and what he has gone through.

My borther showed me this trick a few years ago and I have been doing it ever since. All you need is a Twix and a hot cup of coffee to create chocolaty goodness. Watch the Video to see how it’s done. I’ve also been told that the same can be done with Penguins (the chocolate bisucit, not the residents of Antartica) and something called Tam-Tams. Enjoy!

It’s generally accepted that an Application is usually faster, better looking and can be more feature rich as some device hardware can’t be accessed from within the browser.

When it comes to Twitter applications on mobile devices, a native Application is the clear choice. The UI is generally awesome, you can have extra features such as TwitPic support and location support, and you can leave it running in the background so it can alert you to new tweets, DMs and/or @replies. When it comes to Twitter Applications the browser should lose hands down.

However, when it comes to the iPhone, things are a little different. There are, of course, a bunch of great Twitter applications for the iPhone avialable through the App Store. Most of them are free and have all the features a Twitter-Fanatic will need. The problem is that the iPhone doesn’t allow for Multi-Tasking so none of these applications, as great as they may be, can run in the background.

Why is this a problem? Well if you want to do anything else with your iPhone like check your email or make a call, you have to exit the application. You then have to reload the application again when you want to check your tweets which can take a few minutes at start-up.

Enter Dabr, by far the best web based Twitter application for any mobile phone. It comes as feature filled as is possible from within a browser and looks clean. You can check your replies, search, follow, unfollow, favourite, re-tweet and everything else. In fact the only thing it can’t do is post Twitpics (but can on a handful of devices) and geo-tags, which is down to browser constraints. Take a look, you certainly won’t regret it.

So why choose this Browser application over Twitterific or Twinkle? Simple – The browser is one of the few native applications on the iPhone that *can* multi-task. Within the browser you can run up to 8 tabs simultaneously which allows me to check my email while my tweets are loading up or read a news story (Note: I know Twitterific and others can open links within its own browser but you can’t open pages you want to visit from that ‘browser’. It’s not the same thing). Also if I want to do things like make a call or run another application the Browser stays running in the background and re-loads again as soon as I open it up. Sure it isn’t true multi-tasking like you get on Symbian and other devices but it’s as close as I can get on the iPhone.

The other advantages are that Dabr is totally AD free, unlike some of the Free iPhone Applications. It’s also a lot quicker when refreshing that the native Apps. But if all that wasn’t enough there is another great reason to use Dabr. The developer behind it, @davidcarrington, is great at responding to user requests within days and ever a few hours in some cases. Just send your requests to @dabr on twitter and you’ll be heard

Tarek Quotes Clever

It’s strange which quotes, words or sentences stick with us over the years. Some people remember the funny one-liners. Some remember the inspiring and the uplifting. Some latch on to the thought provoking. They come from many sources - Books, songs, movies, plays, speeches and everyday conversation.

Personal revelation of the week - I love great quotes. I think it’s fantastic that one line can inspire so much thought or laughter, tears or imagination. You may have noticed that I started my last post with a quote. I am the quote king, hear me wax lyrical.

The reason I bring this up is that about 6 months ago, at the Tuttle Club in London, Mario Cacciottolo asked me to think of something important that someone once told me. You see Mario runs a photography project called, wait for it,  Someone Once Told Me. The premise is simple - Think of something great that someone told you, write it down on a big piece of paper and get your photo taken in glorious Greyscale. Simple, elegant and the results are quite amazing.

It took me a while to remember something that had stuck with me and that had a suitably interesting story behind it. Well that’s not quite true, I knew immediately which quote would be perfect, I was just trying to think of something else that wasn’t so personal. Most of the quotes I remember aren’t from people I know, just look at the quotes on my Facebook page - A poem, a song, a book and a TV show. Clearly I hadn’t been surrounding myself with funny, interesting or inspiring people.

The Icon

I ended up having to go with the personal quote, after all that was the whole idea, and the results can be seen in the picture above. It was said to me by my mother in September 2001: “Be good! And if you can’t be good, be careful!”. (My first thought was that she’d be annoyed that I let the world know that she had started a sentence with a conjunction.) Mario recorded an audio clip of me explaining the story behind the quote and why it meant so much to me. If you’re interested you can hear it by clicking on the Audio icon (left) in the top left-hand corner of the picture on the SOTM site.

Mario is constantly on the look out for more people to contribute to SOTM. You can email him directly to arrange for him to come and take your photo or you can do it your self and sent it in via the website or the SOTM Flickr group. He is also looking for contributions in foreign languages and I’m going to try and see if I can arrange some Arabic contributions from Qatar.

I must say I’m very happy that I went with that particular quote. It feels good to let a story that meant something to you out into the world like that and the handful of comments the picture got on SOTM meant a lot to me. You should try it too, I’d love to hear what Someone Once Told You.

“Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around.”

I’m sat in a generic American coffee shop in downtown Doha sipping on some rather good coffee, nibbling on a tasteless muffin and wondering how I got here. I can still remember when I decided that I’d make the changes that lead to this moment – It was 2.5 years ago on a sunny beach in Abu-Dhabi in December 2006.

I was coming to the end of my first year working in the Mobile Industry and had taken a break over Christmas to visit my family and to figure out where I was going. I should have been happy with where I was at the time. Years earlier, during my last year of university, I had decided that I wanted to work in the Mobile Industry in a job that married my two main areas of interest, mobile devices and the mobile Web. And there I was, working for Volantis, a mobile web specialist, as a Mobile Device Engineer. I’d got where I wanted to go. Targets reached. Dream job attained - this is where I had wanted to be.

The thing is though, your hopes and dreams change. Your aspirations grow, they adapt, they get re-worked and re-imagined. Sometimes they even get scrapped and replaced with something completely new. A totally different direction. Sure I was exactly where I had wanted to get to when I had graduated university, but this wasn’t the end of my road. I had a future to build.

On that beach I sat down and plotted my path – what next? I thought of a lot of different things that day and here is what I took away:

• I believed in the Mobile Industry and wanted to stay involved in Mobile
• I was still passionate about the Mobile Web but not about Mobile Devices
• My passion for Social Media was growing and I needed to harness that
• I need a role that had a creative aspect to it
• I wasn’t a pure Engineer or Developer
• I needed more leadership experience
• I needed to get involved in Mobile and Social Media communities
• I didn’t want to work for other people my whole life
• I had to get out of the UK

A few days later I flew back to England and went back to work. I thought of the changes I wanted to make once or twice but, as is always the case with these things, they got drowned out by the noise of daily life.

But the seeds had been planted and on a subconscious level my mind was made up. I started to make different choices in the months that followed, not realising at the time that they were helping me make the changes I wanted to make. I asked my company to move me to one of our offices outside of the UK, I got involved in more projects and teams at work and I started going to Mobile and Social Media events on a regular basis. I even started to blog again, both here and at my internal company blog.

Before I knew it I was in Seattle for a 3 months stay at our US offices and working on projects that were stimulating and challenging. I was working more closely with different parts of the company and with our customers. I got more useful experience in those 3 months than in the whole of my first year with the company – progress was being made. Sure enough a few months later it looked like I was on my way to a permanent move to Seattle, a move I was really looking forward to.

In life, things never go smoothly for long and change doesn’t happen easily and without sacrifice. In the year that followed, my move to Seattle became a saga of frustration, disappointment and broken promises. I started looking for jobs elsewhere and ended up with an offer from Google, but turned it down based on the renewed promise of a move to Seattle as well as a promotion.

I went through 4 months of waiting for a US Work permit going as far as ordering a new car for my arrival in Seattle. All this uncertainty coupled with the acute feeling that I was becoming stuck in a rut meant that my morale was at an all time low. My productivity slipped and I completely lost interest in my work.

The only positive thing that happened during that time was my involvement with various Mobile communities. I had become a regular at networking events making some great industry contacts (and some good friends) and absorbing everything that there was to learn. I immersed myself in the Mobile world getting involved in conversations that were going to shape the future of the industry and figuring out where I was going to fit in to it.

I was also getting my Social Media game together making sure I was always learning and adapting with that fast-paced industry. The more involved I got the more sure I was that whatever move I made next it would involve Social Media in some way.

So a year passed from my moment of clarity at the beach and from the outside nothing seemed to had changed – I was still in the same job in the same country. But I wasn’t the same person, I was far more experienced, more intelligent, more plugged in, more confident and better connected. I was in the perfect position to make the next step.

And then the opportunity came – I changed roles and became Mobile Web Evangelist at Volantis. While the role did end any possibility of moving to Seattle (a real sore point by now) it was the ideal change for me as the job description covered all of my main interests – Mobile, Social Media, community involvement, future thinking and customer interaction. I loved the job and dived straight into what needed to be done. Fast forward a few months as a Mobile Web Evangelist and I knew this is exactly what I wanted to do next - I was getting closer to the next step I had pictured on that beach.

While it was clear that the job was what I wanted, it was just as clear that I needed to find a new place to do it. As luck would have it I was unexpectedly made redundant a week after I had started interviewing with other companies. With a nice redundancy package I was able to take my time in finding a new job.

Time to speed the story up, don’t you think?

The months that followed in the summer of 2008 were some of the best I’ve ever had. I did some freelance work for a PR company, an interesting an eye-opening experience. It was good to see how the other side worked. I also had a paid writing gig for a Mobile blog and did other bits of freelance work whenever they came up. I met great people. I partied. I laughed, cried, danced, slept, argued, listened, fought, grew, absorbed and laughed some more.

I did a lot of interviews that summer and I turned a lot of offers down (this was before the Financial Crisis had really taken hold). I just couldn’t find what I was looking for and while I was getting by with the freelance work, I wasn’t in any rush. There was one role that bucked the trend though.

In June I was at the Mobile Web 2.0 Summit in London and was part of a bloggers panel at the event (Huge thanks to Bena Roberts for arranging that). After the panel, in which I craftily managed to mention I was available for freelance work, I was approached by 2 members of Al Jazeeras New Media team who were in the audience. Cards were exchanged and interviews followed in July. Finally, here was a role that was perfect for me – The role involved Social Media, Mobile and everything in between. It ticked all the boxes I had set on the beach.

The only draw back was that it was in Doha, which is worlds apart from London or Seattle, but the move felt right. I knew this is what I wanted to do next. The hiring process was slow and lasted all summer but by October I was set and after a break in California for my Social Media Road Trip I was off to Doha, to Al Jazeera and finally, to this coffee shop.

It was only really when I sat down and though about how I got here that I noticed how I had made things happen. I wouldd have never noticed otherwise and would have assumed that it was just life running its course. But the truth is the decisions we make, the things we think about; they are more important than we realize. Even when it doesn’t feel like it, they are constantly helping us carve out our path.

As I said at the beginning, here I am 2.5 years after the day on the beach in Abu-Dhabi. I’ve got to where I wanted to go. Targets reached. Dream job attained - this is where I want to be. But I know now that hopes and dreams change. My aspirations will grow, they will adapt, they will get re-worked and re-imagined. I think it may be time to head to that beach in Abu-Dhabi again…

What's your #awesome09 news?

It would be an understatement to say that things have been a bit gloomy lately. Just today Bill Gates was in the news predicting that the current financial crisis would last another 4 years. The IMF are predicting that in 2009 we’ll see the lowest growth rate in the world economy for the last 60 years. Throw in the fact that many people have been made redundant, (I was one of the early ones last year) with more soon to follow, there really isn’t an awful lot to be cheerful about these days.

The general air of depression and trepidation that plagued the end of 2008 has followed us into 2009 and I want to try and do something about that. To explain my cunning plan I have to go back to January when I was chatting to Alfie about our recent news, all of which had been pretty awesome.

I was loving my new job in Doha, he was in the middle of some very cool projects at Moblog and we were both riffing about projects we’d love to work on this year. The word ‘Awesome’ came up quite often in our conversation, so  much so that by the end of it we had pledged that 2009 would be the Year of Awesomeness. Among all the doom and gloom coming from the media it was good to have a positive outlook again and naturally it made sense to spread the word.

So i did. On Twitter:

#awesome09 is born

And there the simple idea behind Awesome09 was born. Now more than ever people need to hear good news, something positive to connect with. So I am asking everyone to share all the Awesome that comes their way in 2009 with their communities. Anything that that has made you smile, that has given you hope, that inspired you or that you just thought was pretty damn cool. Share it all, the small Wins and the big ones.

I’ve got the ball rolling with the #awesome09 Hashtag on Twitter and this post will be tagged the same so that Technorati et al. will pick it up. If you’re an avid user of another community then please spread the news on there as well - “We’re going to make 2009 the year of Awesome”. Are you on board?

I haven’t always wanted to unlock my iPhone 3G, I never really saw the point. I’d be able to get a handful of cool apps but I’d miss out on immediate updates from Apple.  All that changed though when I moved away from the UK (yes, more on this soon I promise) and my device basically became a large iPod Touch.

I couldn’t do much about the situation at first. The only real unlock solution was the Turbo-Sim which I didn’t have access to and seemed to be a bit dodgy judging by some of the stories I’d heard from users. Luckily the iPhone Dev-Team have been hard at work on an unlock application and today they finally made it available to the public. Here is how I unlocked my iPhone 3G from a Windows XP machine using QuickPwn 2.2 and yellowsn0w.

To start with you have to make sure your iPhone is running baseband 02.28.00. This is the baseband that comes with the iPhone 2.2 firmware so if your device isn’t on the right baseband you simply have to update it. You can check your baseband in Settings/General/About/Modem Firmware. You might also want to backup your device before starting. I did do this but even with the Jailbreak and unlock I didn’t lose any data at all and no sync was needed.

If your running the right software then the first step is to Jailbreak your iPhone. For this you will need QuickPwn 2.2 by the iPhone Dev-Team which can be downloaded using torrent files available here. The Jailbreak procedure is pretty basic if you follow the instructions. iClarify have a great guide to using QuickPwn so if you don’t feel comfortable just following the instructions in the application use their guide.

Once you’ve successfully run the Jailbreak and the device has restarted, open up the Installer application and click on Tasks to update to the latest version. When this is complete you’ll need to add the yellowsn0w repository as an install source. To do this click on Sources then Edit and add a new source with the address http://i.yellowsn0w.com and then click Done.

Now you should be able to find yellowsn0w in the package list. It can be found in the Recent Packages folder in Categories but I imagine you could also search for it. Click in the package to install it and you’re almost there. The install process itself has no GUI to it (i.e. it doesn’t have anything to visually indicate that anything has installed successfully) but will tell you to reboot your device. When you reboot your phone, yellowsn0w works its magic, and your device will now be unlocked.

The final hurdle is where most people seem to fall down though. When the phone is rebooted you’ll have to swap from your supported SIM to one from another network. When you do this re-start your device again as the unlock didn’t seem to work when I swapped the SIM when the device was on. You should also be patient as it might take a minute or two before you pick up a signal with the new SIM.

If you find that you can’t get a connection you can try turning off 3G and/or switching Airplane mode on and off again so the device tries to re-connect to the network. If all fails, reboot the device a couple more times or uninstall yellowsn0w in the Install application and re-install it. (Note - If your new SIM has a Sim Tool-Kit you’ll have to follow a few specific steps to get it working. Check our the iPhone Dev-Team blog for the details. The PAYG QTEL SIM I used did have Sim Tool-Kit and the unlock worked fine but this was after I’d used a regular QTEL SIM first.)

Hopefully your iPhone 3G will now be Jailbroken and unlocked free to use any SIM, anywhere. You can update the APN setting of your iPhone in Settings/General/Network/Cellular Data Network so that you can use Data services and you’re all set. If you don’t know the APN settings for your network you should be able to find them here.

Well I hope this guide has helped. I’ve confirmed that my iPhone now works with QTEL in Qatar on both PAYG and Post-Pay and Vodafone UK. If you have any trouble please leave a comment below and I’ll try to do what I can to help. Good Luck!

If you follow me on Twitter or if you’ve hit the Blog in the last week you’ll have notice that I’ve begun a 2 week road-trip around California. I’ve just completed the first 3 legs that took me from Los Angeles to San Francisco along the famous Highway 1. Yes, it has been awesome!

Normally I wouldn’t necessarily blog about a vacation like this but there is a twist this time. As you all know, or at least should know, my two main passions are Mobile and Social Media. I talk about them all the time, I blog about the subjects and, more importantly, it’s what I do (i.e. it pays the bills). Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about LBS as well and while I was deciding what to do for my break an idea hit me.

The Idea

I’d always wanted to go back to California and see more of the state, especially the Pacific Coast along Highway 1. This would have me traveling up and down the California coast and also in-land to Las Vegas, another place I’ve wanted to experience. It hit me that this would be the ideal trip to put a lot of services to the test.

The Challenge is to broadcast as much of my travels as possible to my online community (and my mom). They would track where I was going, check out the content I was producing and even pitch in with suggestions and advice. It would be a marriage of Social Media, Mobile and LBS and a great proof-of-concept to show people the power of the tools we are starting to have access to.

It is also a great opportunity to assess exactly how far we’ve got in these areas in terms usability, reliability and interactivity.

The Tools

The System: Tools of The Trade

• NokiaviNe – Nokias new “Life-Tracker” is an updated version of their great Sports-Tracker software. It allows me to record my journey using GPS and will also track the content I create along the way. I can then be upload the data to create a map of my trip with the content tacked onto it along the way.

  Nokia also provide a neat little widget that displays the trips on your blog. You can see mine on the new-look Homepage. You can also see the trips in more detail over at my Sports Tracker profile.
  

• Moblog – I’ve been using Moblog for years to upload content direct from my phone to my Moblog. They have recently revamped their software to include cool features like Geo-Tagging support and Mobile Web support.

  The Geo-Tagging support is what really appeals to me for this project as Moblog automatically generates a Map (using Google Maps) with all my pictures on it. This is in contrast to NokiaviNe which only allow you view one trip at a time. The fact that it also pings Twitter every time I post a photo adds to the level of communication I can have with my community while on the road.

• Twitter – This one speaks for itself. Twitter is what I use for most of my interaction with online communities – The Mobile community, the Social Media community, even my mom follows my Twitter updates. This makes it the ideal place to post updates especially as they have a great Mobile interface (and even better ones via 3^rd parties) and an SMS post mechanism that works in the USA. Already my Twitter followers have been able to provide advice on what to check out in the various cities I’ve been through, have recommended restaurants and have even provided a place for me to crash. The fact that Moblog works with it is a bonus as is…

• Spinvox – The voice-to-text specialists not only have a great Voicemail service but they also have great Social Media services that allow you to post messages to Twitter and other networks by calling in and leaving a voice message. This is invaluable to this challenge as I’ll be spending a large amount of time behind the wheel so calling in a post is very useful.Their new partnership with ping.fm is another cool feature as it allows me to send the same update to multiple networks which allows me to ping my Jaiku community at the same time.

• QIK – Yet another great service that is ideal for this challenge. QIK allows me to stream video live to the Internet and while the quality isn’t always great if you want a live-stream, the immediacy of it is what makes it worthwhile. Watchers can communicate with me directly and the video is stored so that people can watch it another time as well.

  Like with Moblog, QIK updates Twitter when i start streaming which keeps my community up-to-date on what is happening. The saved videos can also be uploaded to Moblog using…

• Shozu – The final piece in my social-media-mobile-LBS puzzle. Shozu allows me to upload content to multiple networks quickly and easily. I can use it to post content to Moblog and also to Facebok, Flickr, Youtube and a host of others. It can also support Geo-tagged content which is vital.
  

The Hardware

The Hardware

Once I’d identified all the Tools I wanted to use I had to sort out the hardware to run them on. Now here is the cool part – The only thing I need to do all this is a Nokia N95-8GB (though most new S60 devices would do).

Unfortunately my iPhone 3G just wasn’t up to the job as the camera wasn’t good enough to rely on for all my holiday shots, it didn’t take video and it didn’t have an equivalent to NokiaviNe. Now that isn’t a shot at the iPhone, it’s a great device but while it’s awesome for consuming content it isn’t so great at content creation.

The N95-8GB on the other hand has a great 5 Mega-pixel camera for all my photos and videos, GPS for all the tracking and tagging goodness, HSDPA support to make things quick and snappy (I am using a North America Version) and most importantly supports all the Tools I need for the challenge. WOM World were good enough to loan me a handset for the trip so I was all set.

How Can You Track My Trip?

I’m already in the middle of Day 5 of the Road-Trip so there is already content online from the last few days for you to check out. I have updated the Homepage of this blog to incorporate the NokiaviNe widget, my latest Twitter post and my latest QIK video.

The best way to keep track of where I am and what I’m doing is to follow me on Twitter. You can also check out my Moblog site along with the Content Map and my Sports-Tracker profile for the various Legs of the Road Trip.

I’d love to hear all your thoughts and comments on the challenge and also on the content I’m uploading so feel free to leave a comment here, on my Moblog, through Twitter or via email (abuesber [at] gmail [dot] com).