Parliament Elections: Way to go – الانتخابات البرلمانية
It is my first time to write a blog post in Arabic, I am very enthustatic to write this as it may benefit many for the next parliament elections that we all must go and vote for it, however I don’t recommend for any of us to invalidate his vote as one counts. please give me your feedback after reading.
Before going into details, I would like to give a bunch of thankfulness for all who had helped me in writing this post; Mohamed Hendawy, Mostafa Nageeb, Omnia Nageeb and Haddy El Haggan .. thank you many. Let’s start. 😉
لمعرفة ديرتك ادخل رقمك القومي هنا: http://www.elections2011.eg/
الاول نتكلم عن طريفة التصويت, في اليوم المحدد لانتخاباتك روح اي لجنة انتخابية داخل دائرتك ومعاك بطاقة الرقم القومي اللي هتديها لرئيس اللجنة او حد من مسئوليين اللجنة فهتاخد بطاقتيين, واحدة للتصويت بالنظام الفردي ووحدة بنظام القوائم اتأكد ان البطاقتيين لونهم مختلف وعليهم ختم اللجنة الفرعية, في بطاقة النظام الفردي هتحط علامة علي اتنين: واحد فئات و واحد عمال او فلاحين, وفي بطالقة التصويت بنظام القوائم هتختار قائمة واحدة بس .. اكتر من اتنين في بطاقة النظام الفردي او اكتر من واحد في نظام القوائم هيكون صوتك باطل
اجمالي عدد الاحزاب في مصر هما 49 حزب لمعرفة المزيد عن الاحزاب بالتفصيل:
http://www.a7zab.com/index.php
و اللي هيكسّل يروح لكل موقع يشوف البرامج المختلفة يدخل هنا و يقلّب في البروفايلات اللي محطوطة: http://egypt.electionnaire.com/
دا ملف مجمّع معظم المعلومات المهمة عن الأحزاب المختلفة و مواقعها الالكترونية و التحالفات القائمة
http://www.mediafire.com/?dxwdk22o494m926
The next post inshAllah -within the next few days- will include:
-تقسيمة دوائر الفردي ودوائر القوائم
-المرشحين في الدوائر
-مرجعية كل حزب سواء كانت اسلامية, سلفية, ليبرالية, اشتراكية او قومية
-نقاط البرنامج الانتخابي لكل حزب سياسي
Marketing Decision Support Systems – The Mix.
The section of “Marketing Decision Support Systems” from Marketing “Lamb, Hair, McDaniel”
Accurate and timely information is the lifeblood of marketing decision making. Good information can help maximize an organizations’s sales and efficiently use scarce company resources. To prepare and adjust marketing plans, managers need a system for gathering everyday information about developments in the marketing environment-that is, for gathering marketing information. The system most commonly used these days for gathering marketing information is called a marketing decision support system.
A marketing decision support system (DSS) is an interactive, flexible computerized information system that enables managers to obtain and manipulate information as they are making decisions. A DSS bypasses the information-processing specialist and gives managers access to useful data from their own desks.
These are the characteristics of a true DSS system:
-Interactive: Managers give simple instructions and see immediate results. The process is under their direct control; no computer programmer is needed. Managers don’t have to wait for scheduled reports.
-Flexible: A DSS can sort, regroup, total, average, and manipulate the data in various ways. It will shift gears as the user changes topics, matching information to the problem at hand. For example, the CEO can see highly aggregated figures, and the marketing analyst can view very detailed breakouts.
-Discovery-oriented: Managers can probe for trends, isolate problems, and ask “what if” questions.
-Accessible: DSS is easy to learn and use by managers who aren’t skilled with computers. Novice users should be able to choose a standard, or default method of using the system. They can bypass optional features so they can work with the basic system right away while gradually learning to apply its advanced features.
A hypothetical example showing how DSS can be used in provided by Renee Smith, vice president and manager of new products for Central Corporation. To evaluate sales of a recently introduced product, Renee can “call up” sales by the week, then by the month, breaking them out at her option by, say, customer segments. As she works at her desktop computer, her inquiries can go in several directions, depending on the decision at hand. If her train of thought raises questions about monthly sales last quarter compared to forecasts, she can use her DSS to analyze problems immediately. Renee might see that her new product’s sales were significantly below forecast. Were her forecasts too optimistic? She compares other products’ sales to her forecasts and finds that the targets were very accurate. Was something wrong with the product? Is her sales department getting insufficient leads, or is it not putting leads to good use? Thinking a minute about how to examine that question, she checked ratios of leads converted to sales product by product. The results disturb her. Only 5 percent of the new product’s leads generated orders, compared to the company’s 12 percent all-product average. Why? Renee guesses that the sales force isn’t supporting the new product vigorously enough. Quantitative information from the DSS perhaps could provide more evidence to back that suspicion. But already having enough quantitative knowledge to satisfy herself, the VP acts on her intuition and experience and decisions to have a chat with her sales manager.
Perhaps the fastest-growing use of DSS is for database marketing, which is the creation of a large computerized file of customers’ and potential customers’ profiles and purchase patterns. It is usually the key tool for successful micro-marketing, which relies on very specific information about a market.
For knowing about MKDSS, click here.
The Voting Systems – and how they can affect!
This blog post will be mainly on different voting systems, difference between them, how can we make use of the most efficient ones and how it affected the U.S. President elections in the last period before Obama’s one. This post is inspired from Game Theoryclass that is taught by Dr. Mohamed El-Beltagi in Operations Research Dept., Faculty of Computers & Information, Cairo University.
I would like to introduce the Australian electorate which has experienced three types of voting systems: first past the post, preferential voting and proportional representation (single transferable vote). First past the post (a plurality system where the winner is the candidate with the most number of votes, though not necessarily an absolute majority of votes) was used for the first Australian parliamentary elections held in 1843 for the New South Wales Legislative Council and for most colonial elections during the second half of the 19th century. Since then there have been alterations to the various electoral systems in use around the country.
We can see how different types of voting systems can affect critical decisions, the previous president George W. Bush (43rd President of the United States) had succeeded by the majority rule. So, do you think Majority rule is the best voting method?
The text of the Egyptian Constitution for the President voting system is as follows: (Art. 76)
The People’s Assembly shall nominate the President of the Republic. The nomination shall be referred to the people for a plebiscite. The nomination for the President of the Republic shall be made in the People’ Assembly upon the proposal of at least one third of its members. The candidate who obtains two thirds of the votes of the members of the People’s Assembly shall be referred to the people for a plebiscite . If he does not obtain the said majority the nomination process shall be repeated two days after the first vote. The candidate obtaining an absolute majority of the votes of the Assembly members shall be referred to the citizens for a plebiscite. The candidate shall be considered President of the Republic when he obtains an absolute majority of votes cast in the plebiscite. If the candidate does not obtain this majority, the Assembly shall propose the nomination of another candidate and the same procedure shall follow concerning his candidature and election.
However, the Egyptian setup won’t get a Condercent candidate. Also, Egyptians don’t like the old ‘Art. 76’. So, let’s all wish a good voting system that can effectively transfer Egypt to the safe side.
Strategic Consulting Industry.
29th of May 2011, i had attended a session by Mr. Abdel-Azim Ahmed Osman, that was organized by DS&OR Society in Faculty of Computers & Information Science, Cairo University, Mr. Abdel-Azim Ahmed Osman was a graduate from Economics class in MIT, he worked for Booz & Co. for a while and now he is the CEO of TechnoCrete, a subsidiary of Osman Group.
This seminar was specially valuable for those who want to have an insight into what goes on in the work of strategic consulting and how decision are often made in Egypt under a great deal of uncertainty.
He started with the types of work in Booz, it consists of three categories; Business problems & Strategies, Market Sizing & Estimation, and Logic assumptions. Those are also the types that you will asked for in the interview (only one type to be asked at with a bunch of questions about logic assumptions). Also, in the interview they will assess the capability of stress, to know to what extent you can bare stress.
In your interview, you are supposed to convince your interviewee with your opinion by putting reasonable arguments, there are no wrong answers exists in Consulting field in general. The idea is how convincing you are and is your solution feasible enough for convincing our not.
A logical assumption question that was prepared by Mr. Abdel-Azim for this talk is; suppose you now have two empty buckets, one can carry 3 liters, and the other can carry 5 liters. However, you have a very big pool containing water and you only need 4 liters, how can you get them?* (Check the answer at the end of this blog post) you must be as fast as possible, take in consideration that you are asked in an interview under a stressful environment and no time for relaxing and thinking.
In Booz, teamwork consists of different associates from different backgrounds, leaded by the Project Manager, who is responsible for every wrong act done by any of the associates (untying the tie or removing the suit jacket is not acceptable in front of the clients or at the office). The Project Manager meets with the team every week for discussing the updates and brainstorm for solving the client situation.
Booz and McKinsey, are the consulting giants in Egypt. However every one differs from the other with some points, Booz is known with a good reputation and strength in the financial recommendation in the whole MENA region, While Mckinsey is acting perfectly in the telecom industry than Booz.
Here you can find materials for going deep through the Strategic Consulting industry, Click here for Booz materials. The best book that explains how to approach and solve case studies is:
Marc P Cosentino: Case in Point:Complete Case Interview Preparation – 5th edition.
*You will get the 3-liter bucket filled with water, and emptying it in the 5-liter bucket, so in the 5-liter there is now having 3-liters, doing the process again so it will have the 5-liter filled, with 1-liter only in the 3-liters bucket. So, by emptying the 5-liter bucket from all water and then putting the remaining 1-liter in the 3-liter bucket into the 5-liter bucket. Then filling again the 3-liter bucket and emptying them in the 5-liter bucket so now you have 4-liter.
Opportunities in Market Research Industry.
On 22th of May 2011, I attended a talk by Mr. Amr Farouk by Decision Support & Operations Research Society. Mr. Amr was CEO of Imtenan where he shifted its coordinates for reaching international markets, now he is the founder and CEO of Progressia Global Consulting. The talk was mainly about how to reach opportunities in market research in general, discussing enterpreneurship and career steps in Marketing science in general and in Consulting Industry specially.
Operations Research & Marketing Research, it answers the question of where is the money.
The question, what is the main difference between a professional and an amateur in real life knowledge obtaining?
Clients usually pays for selecting them the pinpoints the potential for increasing their revenue for example; Enjoy case study was that they want an expansion increase in the local and global market, they already exports to 28 country worldwide, they wanted to focus more in Italy, so they wanted to know the size of their market share, the consulting company found that all of Egyptian beverage companies export with 0.5 million Euro, not only this, but also the nectar of juice is Mango and Strawberry while Italians drinks Cranberry, so the idea is pinpointing where the company can focus more for getting more revenue.
In food industries, the producers giants; Chipsy and Lay’s, Lay’s has made a frontier attack on market and spent much on Advertising, so Lay’s started to capture more from market size and took years to take a portion from what it paid, they literally bought the market instead of going to a consulting experts and paying them more less. While Rotato‘s idea was smart, their consulting team found that there is still a space for the design of the bag, so they decided to make small rectangles (with a provocative style :D) with some advertising campaigns, it was very obvious on shelves of supermarkets. So the idea exists in finding the shortest cut for what you want.
Always, trade-off exists, people do not like the best balance for what they want to reach, what happens is that the project is released to the market then the company makes the pricing decisions, Jaguar; has released their FX-type in Egypt with 1 million EGP, based on that some people bought Mybach which a much more number (8 million dollars). So after clients bought the Jaguar they found that the reselling value is bad, they thought that it is like the Mercedes S500, so its price decreased back to 600 thousand EGP then 400 thousand EGP. So trade-off must always exists, there is no magical solution to problems, the idea to give him the opinion of which you can lose at, whether performance, price or time of manufacturing. So, don’t waste your potential.
Marketing knowledge has became so hard to obtain, in the past cars was classified into FIAT or Regata, FIAT was that they sell whether 132 or 128 or 127, now the market contains a huge bunch of cars known and not known. We may need to ask why the Matrix type (Hyundai Manufacturer) succeeded in the Egyptian market? Why AlRehab City was more successful than Dreamland and Madinaty? No one knows the reasons for those. The fields that can answer those questions are generally: Market Research and Operations Research.
Also, Marketing information is mysterious, a huge portion from the youth sector have money to buy small cars, as we see; SMART cars penetrated the Egyptian market, so it was supposed to make a BOOM! in which it can be considered as a small car with a good price. Whoever, Ford Ka but people weren’t very motivated to the SMART car.
There are many services yet to be offered, and only O.R. graduates who are capable of doing it; Web 2.0 Research, now instead of coffee shops, Facebook, Twitter, foursquare and other social media networks have replaced all our conversations, now Resumes and CVs are uploaded online on LinkedIn. Web Metrices (Google, Yahoo!, Bing), eye tracking “imotions“, Eye tracking “imotions“, Mobile Research as most of people are carrying now smart phones so surveys are conducted through mobiles, systematical observation of outdoor advertising, and CircleTie, which is mainly based on Global Positioning System (GPS) and Geographical Information System (GIS).
International Research consulting firm main players: AC Nielsen and TNS. Most of decisions aren’t taken by Egyptian Consulting firms. All large corporations and organizations go to AC Nielsen, TNS .. etc. However, you can help by providing data and opinion. Those big consulting firms can buy from you the data -data may be the number of outdoor in certain areas- not the opinion.
Career or Entrepreneurship? That is the question, you have two tracks whether to be an entrepreneur or to go through the career from entering level, to the plateau. The career plateau goes as in the following figure:
What is the different between 2000 LE per month researcher of 5 years experience and 10,000 of same experience?
It depends on many factors: How good is your English?, Are you a proactive? How efficient are your computer skills? and finally Personal development.
Underestimating, yourself, planning your career based on money, accept parent’s choice without a fight, deciding jobs on experience basis, thinking for a short term, confusing what you are good at with what you like to do, and not becoming updated are the main point that can effectively damaging your career. So be careful.
Finally, there is an important thing which is “big five model“: Holland theory questionnaire which concludes in which career will you fit.
‘YES’ or ‘NO’: Referendum result analysis
This post is about the analyzing the referendum results, If you are asking yourself why ‘yes’ has got the majority of votes while you and many of your friends voted ‘no’, so please check this out.
As we know, ‘yes’ has got 77% of votes (14.2 million of people), this graph is considering all our governorates (29, ‘including Helwan and 6 Oct. as governorates).
I think awareness campaigns must be focused more on places that mostly would affect the decisions, as you see Cairo is the most, but most of them are educated enough to know what they want. On contrast, it seems that places as October (Actually, i don’t know how it got all that ‘yes’ votes, but as it contains many regions that contains uneducated people, so it helped.), also Kafr El Sheikh, Fayoum, North Sinai … etc., you will find that sum of those areas had got the ‘yes’ for dominating ‘no’ decision.
As we see, the eligible people to vote but they didn’t go to the voting places are 60% (27.3 million) of the population density. While 40% (18.5 million) only who successfully voted (whether by ‘yes’ or ‘no’).
The participation rate was very low, however it was a good step for people to raise their voice with what they really want.
According to statistics, Egypt youth is the largest segment in population, as we see that 43% of population is less than 18 years old (they are illegible to vote), they are the largest in Cairo, and decreasing while going down with other governorates.
At the end, I would like to say that I am happy that we started raising our voices with our opinions. I hope in the better stages for presidential and parliamentary elections that the participation rate increase more than that. Also, the awareness campaigns must be more targeted to areas that don’t have about what is the difference between both.
قصيدة ميدان التحرير – لمروة علي ..
I would like to have an honor of posting this marvelous poem in my blog that was composed by my colleague Marwa Ali, those true and amazing words describe her great talent of writing.
This poem describes the situation nowadays of every Egyptian feelings towards his country. God bless our EGYPT!
Enjoy those brilliant touching words!
…إتقال عليا كتير
..إتقال يا بلادى إنى هفضل مَذلول
..و باب الحرية هيفضل قدامى مَقفول
…و مش هنادى بالتغيير
..إتقال إنى هفضل راضى و ساكت
..و مَواكِب الكرامة سَبتنى و فاتت
…و هفضل راضى بكونى فقير
..إتقال إنى خاين و إنى سبتِك يا بلادى
..مع إنى دايماً بحُريتك بحلف و أنادى
…بقولها و هفضل أقولها قدام أكبر كبير
..إتقال إنى عميل عشان مش بسمع كلامه
..و عشان أنا ضده و مش مُؤيد جنابو
…و إنى مش مقدر إللى عمله من تطوير
..دا كل إللى قالوا كلمة حق إتنفو
..و إللى كانوا بيصلحوا برضه إختفو
…شُفت ناس بتزرع عمار و تحصد تدمير
..شُفت ناس ماتو محروقين, غرقانين
..شُفت ناس باتو مظلومين, متشردين
…دانا شُفت فيكى كتير
..ياما استنجدنا بيكْ و انتَ مش سائل فينا
..مَوْتِنا و الروح لسه فينا
…بس ده وقت دفع الفواتير
..طلبت حقى بالذوق و انتَ رفضت
..قلتلك سلمية برضه ضربت
!!و مستنى إنى أفضل تحتَك أسير؟
..دم إبنك يا أم الشهيد عندى غالى
..و أنا صمتى صرخة صوتها عالى
…و خلاص صوت الأرنب بقى زَئير
..متخفيش يا بلادى أنا مش هسيبك
..هتعب عشان تعبى هو دم وريدك
…خلاص يا بلادى جه وقت التغيير
!!لسه مش عارفه أنا مين؟
أنا إبنك من ميدان التحرير
Yesterday 31 March 2011, i had attended a session by Mr. Mostafa El-Beltagy, that was organized by DS&OR Society in Faculty of Computers & Information Science, Cairo University, Mr. Mostafa El-Beltagy is a team leader in Marketing department at Vodafone, his previous position was marketing researcher at Nielsen.
He talked with us about the telecommunications industry, and how the three competitors: Vodafone, Mobinil & Etisalat are competing with each others, telecommunications industry is a very dynamic market that can’t be predictable or deterministic, also classic perceptions in taking decisions doesn’t usually works. Sometimes you need to say “i think it is the perfect decision” (i.e.: using best guess, or an educated guess. However, its risky), you can also try on a small scale to prevent huge losses (discrete event simulation by trial and error).
Between the telecommunications giants, Game Theory that is taught by Dr. Mohammed El-Beltagy this semester to Decision Support & Operations Research department (Faculty of Computers & Information – Cairo University) on their third year, seems to be very important to use its methodologies, as you need to know or guess the other players’ decision even if you have incomplete information, as every company puts its own price for every minute (and whether the minute rate will differ after certain minutes and so calculating the call rate) without knowing the competitors’ decisions yet, which is corresponding to “The Bertland game”.
he talked about some of the case studies that helped him later on as how P&G was successfully succeeding in adding new customers, one of the most significant that happens when he was researching, is that when your smallerize the unit of anything (e.g.: PRIL made a small cup of instead of the 750 ml bottle for the daily consumption). Such things can be more significant in Egypt due to the country economic’s state, as some customer can buy the small cup on a daily basis, but he can’t afford the 750 ml, even if the total of the cups price is more than the 750 ml, its more complicated to him to buy it at once because of his daily salary.
Some funny perceptions are located in humans’ brain, in pricing decisions if you choose the ($9.99), it would be much more better than ($10.00), although the difference is only 1 cent, but some portion of people round it down, so they say ($9.00), which increases the sales of a certain product, the others who round it up to be ($10.00) almost doesn’t differs with them much this more cent, so they round it up.
Some one asked about Abbas Ebn Fernas advertising campaign that was for Vodafone USB modem, he is an Arabian figure and it doesn’t meant to be sarcasm on him, after an attendee question about whether it was prepared to be added then removed, the answer is that it wasn’t to be added and removed with a formal apology from Vodafone to make people love them more and to be more loyal :D, they didn’t think about it in such way.
So, his advices for any who want to penetrate the marketing world can be collected in some important bullet points to be considered in the interview.
– You must be present, you need firstly to convince yourself that this job is fitting you, you can’t convince others if you haven’t enough self-confidence of your capabilities for this job. It will be impossible to be accepted.
– You need to be very confident in yourself and your capabilities.
-You need to know your main strengths and weakness points, its unacceptable to start thinking about them in an interview, as for sure you know them well enough.
-As for applying for a marketing position, you need to have strong analytical skills, you won’t be asked much in an interview about how you can make a full market research about this or that, but they will test your logical thinking and common sense by small case studies.
To enter a business field you don’t need to have been graduated from a business school, but in technical field mostly it needs some strong graduates from the required field or at least equivalent.
Some facts to be concluded from this speech in your daily life, is that its better to test anything. Thats for ensuring that the loss is minimized as much as it can be.
Blogger or WordPress? The way to go!
After taking the decision of blogging, you must make a small comparison and analysis for different types of blogging services, for choosing the best that fits you. This post is for helping you for taking the optimal decision (however iam blogging on wordpress, but i will be neutral :D).
So, lets start.
Blogger (www.blogger.com):
Blogger was the 1st Blogging service that i had used it is owned by Google, it was from 1.5 years when i used it for posting about certain topics (e.g.: Marketing Blog), but when i started blogging and writing posts it was necessary to create categories every post, or choose an existing one, even if you are writing in the same topic (i.e.: Product decisions, Pricing decisions … etc), thats wasn’t very good for blogging a topic related to more than one subcategory.
But, it gave me an option for editing my HTML to change the layout, also they make categories by month, so if you didn’t post for a while, you will find that every month their is only one post, which is a “post of the month”.
As it is owned by Google, so its easy to make money from your blog!, by using the Google Adsense and start putting ads in different positions for getting the maximum clicks.
Also, when you post in Blogger, you can only “ping” a limited amount of sites, whereas with WordPress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.
WordPress (www.wordpress.com):
I entered wordpress 4 months ago, starting my 1st blog which was a personal one, when you enter WordPress you might think you will pay for your blog, thats because of its neat view and professional options.
Another feature that in WordPress was the ability to make static pages. So for instance, this site has “What is Marketing?” is on a separate page, it helps much in accessing a certain page.
Also WordPress dashboard is amazing!, it is more user-friendly (and more feature rich) than blogger’s dashboard. In fact, blogger dashboard is more simpler than WordPress one.
In wordpress, you can’t edit our HTML and CSS code (which was available in blogger), it is something very interesting to design your blog as you need exactly.
Blogger search engine is way better than WordPress one. you can search for any other blog just from your blog in the above search box, while in WordPress it is more complex to start searching on a certain blog.
So, start now with what fits you ;).
References:
Why to blog?
Here is the question, why to blog? Do you think it is useless and only time consuming?
In the following lines, i will explain how much it is useful to blog constantly. So, just take a look to take your decision, whether to blog or not.
Firstly, you need to blog to express your thoughts and ideas, your opinions and explanations about certain ideas, habits or acts that had happened or still happening.
Secondly, if you love helping people, then blogging is a must. As by blogging on a certain topic, product or service, you help people much from no idea about this, to take your experience in this similar situation.
Thirdly, it is your future way of learning, searching and posting articles will make you understand more about certain topic, and also helping others.
Fourthly, to connect people like you, looking with same perspectives in different topics and also sharing opinions and thoughts.
Fifthly, by blogging, you can promote for a certain service or product, not by a direct traditional way of advertising, but it may be like this:
I was like surfing with my blackberry and i found that bla bla bla .. [Source: John Antonios – Social Media Marketing].
Sixthly, you can blog to make a difference, in technical or any other issues as providing evidence for your believe on this idea.
Seventhly, you can make money from your blog, (actually i don’t do this and i won’t :)), also many other bloggers don’t make money by their blogging, but its possible with your potential and commitment to start earning money from advertising and promoting for certain services or products.
Finally, you can blog just for fun and staying connected with friends and family!
For sure, I didn’t cover all the points, but finally i want to show you some stories that happened for people just because blogging, here it is:
I got a chance to work at MIT 
– Ricardo Vidal
Got invited to SciFoo – Pedro Beltrao
I was interviewed by ABC.com for a piece they wrote about customer service agents because of a blog post I’d written about my days as a CS rep. – Stupid Blogger (aka Tina)
funding from Submeta, superb collaborators, trip to UK, invitations to speak at confs, consulting work and just plain fun – Jean-Claude Bradley
I got my current job because of my blog and through reading other blogs. Started talking with the guy who hired me over IM because of a few blogs that he had done regarding cat litter and RIM Blackberry cell phones. – Alex Scoble CISSP
Also, before starting be sure that you read this: http://bit.ly/bhwYGj
Have a nice blogging time :).
This post references:
My Blog 
