The Indie Jukebox June 18

Paul Kelly joins me from Triplew.me and we spin some of the best indie tunes from the Middle East, with a HUGE thanks from the folks at WhiteCubeUAE.

Here is this weeks podcast.



So what did we listen to?

Pie Are Squared - http://piearesquared.bandcamp.com/album/split-ep

Collaboration between Apta (Barry Smethurst) and Pie Are Squared (Mohammed Ashraf) remixed / recorded 2013.

VERY cool

White Cube

1. Zulfaqqar Shams: ZulFaqqar Shams scripts a mix of classical Arabic poetry and Egyptian street conversations, dealing with the apathy towards crucial social and psychological issues spreading through his generation -  cancerously‎.

www.soundcloud.com/zulfaqqar-shams

www.facebook.com/zfshams

Twitter: @z_faqqar

Instagram: z_faqqar

2. Bull Funk Zoo: Brain child of Assaad Lakkis and Hamdan al Abri. They’ve got an album out which you can buy in virgin. The funkiest band in the UAE. Don’t miss their show.

Album - Malak - Alters

Why not learn Arabic?

How do we get the non Arabic speaking expat population in Dubai to take on the Arabic language?

Maybe we need to tie visa renewals to language skills?

Better Arabic Education

Jonathan Featherstone of the Center for the Advanced Study of the Arab World and Mick Randall, Dean if Education at the British University in Dubai talk about how to teach Arabic better.

June 14--- Hayati Healthcare UAE

www.hayatihealthcare.com



Dr. Michael Malty and Tariq El-Titi talk about Hayati Healthcare, www.hayatihealthcare.com, and the fact that it is the 1st short-term medical loan facility in the middle east.

And they just won the the MIT Arab Business Plan Award.

HAYATI is the first ever dedicated Patient Financing company in the UAE and throughout the entire Middle East! Whatever your healthcare requirements, if your medical insurance policy doesn't cover the costs of the procedures you need, HAYATI is there to support you. HAYATI Health care Financing ™ allows patients to pay convenient and affordable repayments over time, instead of paying 'up-front' cash payments prior to treatment, so you can get the procedure you need, when you want it!!

MIT Arab Business Plan Awards Declared

(Staff Report)

13 June 2009http://www.khaleejtimes.com/biz/inside.asp?xfile=/data/business/2009/June/business_June546.xml&section=business

Two fledgling companies, one involved in patient financing, and another, a service provider that can rank non-spam emails according to their importance, competed with more than 1,200 companies from 17 countries spanning North Africa, the Gulf and Levant, and emerged as first place winners to split the $50,000 prize money in the 2009 MIT Arab Business Plan Competition. UAE’s Hayati Health Care, led by co-founder and chief executive officer Dr. Michael Matly, and partners Dr. Tarig El-Titi and David Matly, shared the prize with Saudi Arabia’s Syphir — a five-man team led by spokesperson Ghassan Fayad and co-creators Husain Al-Mohssen, Courtland Allen, Faisal Alibrahim, and Abdulrahman Tarabzouni. In second place with a $10,000 prize, was Egypt’s Rice Straw Fertilizer Company with team members Ibrahim Khater Youssef, Ahmed El Dorghamy, and Mohamed Abdel Raouf. Third place honors with a $5,000 prize went to Jordan’s Blog Souq composed of Ahmad Takatkah, Adey Salamin and Ammar Ibrahim. A special award was given to another UAE team, Vaxeal Therapuetics, a therapeutic vaccine research company formed by Dr. Ahmed Bouzdi, Dr. Bernard Maillere, Giampietro Corradin and Wassim Chehadeh. “This year’s competition turned out an amazing quality of participants, we had a very good quality of people and teams with very unique business plans,” said Ziad Younes, vice-chairman of the MIT Enterprise Forum for the Pan Arab Region in Lebanon. The MIT Arab Business Plan Competition is the equivalent of the MIT business plan competition in Cambridge which was initiated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alumni Association. The non-profit and volunteer-driven organisation builds connections to technology entrepreneurs and to communities in which they reside, as well as produces a series of educational programmes about entrepreneurship through its network of 24 worldwide chapters. “The quality of the participants’ business plans reflect that they understand what the competition is trying to achieve - that is so have a new crop of entrepreneurs that takes into consideration sensitivities and specifities of the Arab region,” said Younes. Hayati Healthcare is the first ever niche ‘‘patient financing” company in the Middle East. It markets and sells patient financing loans either through Healthcare providers to their patients, or directly to patients. Michael Matly, a Lebanese-American who holds an MBA degree at Harvard and an MD degree at at Mayo Medical School, innovated on the widely-used US model by including medical procedures such as dentistry and orthodontics, fertility treatments, LASIK and ocular plastics, knee replacements and other procedures that are not covered by conventional medical insurance and which, require large out-of-pocket cash payments by patients. “I was working in Dubai with my partner, Dr. El-Titi at the Dubai executive council, and we started seeing that the quality of healthcare in UAE is improving, but because of that, it was becoming more expensive, so we realised there was a funding gap. Patients wanted to have medical procedures that are not covered by insurance, or they did not have money to do it. We thought of creating a financing company, this is already being done in the US. We have a partner bank that is underwriting loans, our company is the intermediary between the bank and patients. We want a health care program that is more affordable and accessible to people,” said Matly. Syphir co-creator Ghassan Fayad, who is finishing his Phd in mechanical engineering at MIT this year said the team has already come up with three prototypes of systems that would rank email based on their importance.

May 20th---expectation of Arab World

Tonight we are going to talk about two ideas that are seemingly unrelated but very related!

1st is the idea that the Arab world is predicated on oppression.

This idea was advanced in a recent editorial in the Gulf News by a political scientist at UAE University.

2nd the benefit of a $10 billion foundation to improve literacy in the Arab World!

Maybe the two are more related than meets the eye?

The general view over the evening is that this is a great thing for the UAE and the region.

BUT the how it is rolled out will tell all!

Can a new system really be implanted when there is skepticism at large about western interests?

Will education change political ideals?

Is democracy what the world needs?

The reality is nothing can happen over night so we need to be patient but have very high expectations!

A good question is will the foundation aim its efforts at Arabs or the huge expat population that also lives in the region?

One thing if for sure there are more questions than answers at this point...

Stay tuned to this space!

Dubai public security and Arabic

OK when you call 999 in Dubai, whether you are an arabic language speaker or not what is your expectation?

So, have you taken the time to learn any arabic?

If not why not?