 We've heard some discussion this morning about demand, demand for broadband, demand for services. This is, I suppose, really brings the whole equation together and brings it all home. What exactly are consumers expecting? The way I often express it myself is that consumers, they're looking for services, they're looking for an experience, they're looking for communication, they're not actually looking for technology. Most consumers I know couldn't care whether the broadband comes out of a water tap or out of the wall or out of a windmill or some way through the air. Once the service is delivered to them, to their house, to their family, and they can communicate with their friends, get the content that they want. And for an operator, from an operator's viewpoint of course, is well, why am I going to build this thing? Why am I going to buy off me if I build this thing? It's the same thing for governments. If we build this thing, what are people going to use it for? Well, I think you're going to get some of the answers in this session. We've a very varied group of speakers and I'm going to introduce them as they get up to speak. The first speaker is a person I met some months ago. I was very sorry when I met him because if he hadn't been offered a job by Vodafone, it's Khalifa Salah Haroon. He's not here representing Vodafone. Vodafone have a separate speaker. However, he's here as a young Qatari who set up his own website. Iloveqatar.net. You will also talk about Qatar Living, a lot of other content ventures they've taken. Khalifa, the stage is yours. Okay, so first of all I just want to say that I'm not the most best person when it comes to giving presentations. If you want to sit around the table, have some shisha, talk from the heart. I'm the person that you should come to. I just wanted to start it off with a little bit of a dream moment. Now, I remember growing up watching television and hearing from my western friends in western school, which I studied at, that it was all about the American dream. I remember thinking, wow, it's fantastic. You know, all I need to do is step foot in America and the first thing I can do is anything. On a side note, I remember when I went off to university that the first thing that a lot of Arabs did was dye their hair. They would dye their hair, change the color, and when I asked them why, it was just because it was a symbol of freedom, they said. If you look at Qatar today, I can definitely say that there's a lot of freedom. Freedoms that my father perhaps wasn't able to enjoy. Nowadays, it seems to me that I can probably go as far as calling it the Qatari dream, if not the Gulf or GCC dream. Where else can you find a country with so much opportunity? Thinking about it, you know, just quite simply, I mean, where something's done in the U.K. or in the U.S., and you can go ahead and apply it into Qatar, or, you know, where there isn't that much competition if you think about it, and where people or the public will part with the real so easily. Where so many see flaws, I see opportunities. It's fantastic because anybody can go ahead and just complain and rant and say that there's no opportunity for them in Qatar or in the GCC or in the Middle East because of bureaucracy. That's where a smart individual will come in and say, oh my God, it's my chance to try and make that change. So many people see that, many people or Arabs in Qatar see that the best way to bring over a business or start-up a venture is by bringing over a franchise. That's not what I agree with. I think that at the end of the day, if as a Qatari, I would love to export a brand rather than import it. It's up to the Qatari market to learn, adapt, and improve upon what's already available. So if we're looking at something that can make the biggest socio-economic impact, then I think it's online and e-commerce and that's the way forward. So I'm going to be talking about three topics, understanding the region, types of Arabic sites, and support for e-commerce in the region. Now to understand the region, a lot of people seem to make the mistake of lumping all Arabic countries into the Middle East and thinking, okay, I'm going to target the Middle East. It's a common mistake that not many people realize the error of their ways until it's too late, two, three years after creating a website. Let's, for example, if you look at Egypt, Egypt is a completely different in terms of the culture, in terms of the society, in terms of openness, in comparison to Syria or Qatar or Bahrain or any other Arabic country. So when I was in university, somebody asked me, where are you from? And I said, well, I'm from Qatar. The person replied, oh, I know Dubai. So I stopped, I looked at him, and I said, that's the equivalent of you asking me asking you, oh, where are you from? You say, well, I'm from London. So I know France. It just doesn't make sense. So sites, as I mentioned, seem to take more than they can handle, focusing on a whole Middle East because it's a wider audience. They think about, let me capture as many people as possible, rather than thinking about the quality of the content that they have. What that restricts them from, from an e-commerce point of view, is that the most obvious issue is when it comes to logistics. If I wanted to sell a product in Qatar, and I decided to, and I was based out of Lebanon, it would be extremely difficult for me to sell a product to somebody in another Arabic country. I should focus on Lebanon. More importantly, Arabs from different countries don't feel that they can connect emotionally. If I go onto a website that targets all Arabs, I don't feel like it means much to me as an individual, as a Qatari. I want to see a site that has a bit of slang or Qatari dialect in it. I want to see a site that makes me feel that I'm important. So the whole point is that if there's anything, if anything, that Gulf could be grouped together, you can have Al-Sham grouped together, and you can have, you know, African Arab countries grouped together. My point here is to focus. So here are a few examples of some Arabic, popular Arabic website. We have Qura, we have Doha.com, and we have Qatar shares. So what do all these popular sites look like at the moment? If you notice, if you look at the general layout of the site, you can see that the income comes from advertisements, and most of them are either social and information-based. They're very busy. So there's a number of reasons which I've come up with for the reason why the sites end up looking the way that they do. Number one, font. It's tiny. It's so amazingly difficult to see anything. That's set at 12 points, even at 14 points. So that means we need larger fonts. Larger fonts means that there'll be less room to place content, and that's a good thing in my opinion. Let's look at language. If you're targeting the Middle East, you're probably going to have to write the site in informal Arabic. That's not personal, and if it's written in Qatari, other nationals might not understand it. And if you want some examples, see me after the conference, and I'll give you some inappropriate examples of how Arabic can be misunderstood across different countries. The CMS. So there aren't many content management systems that consider Arabic the Arabic language. If I wanted to simply highlight something using let's use a CMS far cry, I found it to highlight it's extremely difficult just trying to capture that Arabic word, because it's constantly trying to shift between left and right alignment. Then we look at the designs. They're very cluttered, similar to what's common in Japan and in China, but the point is that sites aren't aesthetically pleasing. Why are they popular even though they don't look that nice? Because people are desperate for information. So, again, the lesson is, simplify and focus. We also need a bit of support when it comes to e-commerce. So how can we increase broadband uptake in the region? E-commerce is the way. There are a number of sites, for example. You can look at Vodafone. We can also see various attempts at creating online markets. The biggest thing holding people back though is an adequate postal service in my opinion. So, the other four points that I have are ease of access. We need to bear in mind that whenever you create a website, you need to make sure that as many people on any device can connect. Let's look at the mobile device. A lot of people have had their first experience online on their mobile in Qatar. So why don't we create more mobile dedicated sites? Then we have the connections. It's not really that easy to find a connection in Qatar, and I hope it was. We need to make it easier for them. That's where the telecom industry comes in. 3G, in my opinion, is what everybody thought Wi-Fi was going to be. I remember my father, when he first bought the Wi-Fi-enabled laptop, he went out to the garden and said, why don't I have internet? And it took me actually a couple of hours to actually explain the concept behind that. So, why have people not been as active in the online sphere? Well, a couple of reasons I thought of are the price of domains in the Middle East. It's only until quite recently that prices have decreased, but even then a domain costs around 200 riyals compared to the $10 for a dot-com domain. It used to be that people had to set up a business so that they could get a domain name. It's changed now, but that means that I couldn't start an online business because I had to have a high-street business first. That really goes against helping encouraging people to set up online businesses. The other three points, lack of confidence. A lot of people don't understand the benefits of an online business or expanding your business online. The most common thing I hear is, no, people just want to come and walk into a shop. Why? Why does an individual have to come into a shop? That leads into infrastructure. Besides education, we have a serious issue when it comes to the postal system. I can't order something and have it sent over to my house unless I use an extremely expensive courier service. At the moment, a project has to be reserved and picked up at a post box or in a store. So why should I sell something? Why should I buy something online? Why wouldn't I just simply go into a franchise or a branch and pick up the item myself and I could see it in my hand? Then finally, I end up with regulations. We need to incentivize people to create online businesses. Possible suggestions could be to make it easier for people to set up businesses. What about allowing people to set up businesses at home? What about a guide for how to start up an online business? What licenses or permits do I need and so on? So Qatar is already a melting pot of different nationalities and cultures and it shouldn't be that difficult in my opinion for us to move on with the new era. It's funny how the technology bubble, the online bubble was something that we thought passed, especially in the West, but now it's coming to the Middle East. A forum on a website is nothing more than an online medallist. We're used to sitting in a medallist. We know, we discuss, we share information, we get to know each other. We can do this online. The irony of all of this, which I want to end it with, whenever I step into people's medallists, I notice that a lot of the guests sitting there all have their laptops whipped out and are connected online. So it works both ways, create an online medallist or bring online to the medallist. Thank you very much. Thank you, Khalifa, for those interesting insights into setting up a website here in Qatar and some regulatory issues for us. Our next speaker is Jan Halsberg, who's head of product management at Vodafone Qatar. Vodafone has been operating in the market here for about eight or nine months now. As regulator, I won't make any comment other than the competition is starting and is going well and we hope to see it develop. And I hope Jan will give us some insights into the Vodafone way thinking about products and content. Thanks. Excellent. First things first. Salam Alaikum. Guten Tag. Good afternoon. I've been with the Vodafone Group now about 11 years in various different functions and I've had the privilege 14 months ago to be sent on assignment to our most exciting local market, which is Qatar. And looking at the challenge that we are discussing today, which is how to boost uptake of consumer broadband, I would like to share two concrete examples with you where we think from a Vodafone perspective we have been successful in actually stimulating consumer demand in that space. I'd like to combine that with a little bit of a personal story. So when I came to Qatar and I was looking at our initial product portfolio, I was consulting various different experts and of course secondary market research on the region and on Qatar. And there were a few common assumptions on the potential of particularly mobile internet in Qatar that were shared with me. The first thing people told me is that in Qatar there is of course a big share of the population which is migrant workers who are helping with the industry and overall growth of the construction in Qatar. And obviously it was very clear in people's mind that mobile internet is not relevant for the migrant worker. Why is that? That's very obvious. One, these people lack capable phones. And two, really if you look at particularly blue colour construction workers you would assume that there is a limited literacy. So really mobile internet, not for them. It's not like in the West. Then we looked at a different segment which is the locals. So that of course includes the local Qatari population but also I would say an extended segment of customers I would say local Arabs who are living here in Qatar permanently. And then again what I was told by industry experts and consultants out of Dubai and not secondary research, mobile internet really not relevant for that segment. One, lack of relevant content. So less than 1% of the mobile available content is in Arabic. And then two, there's a really low mobile internet penetration in the region. So look at the vast majority of the market really mobile internet smell like a niche. Where we took it from a voter from perspective we said okay let's turn this upside down. One, because we think there's a real consumer opportunity with mobile internet and two, we were new to the market. So we really had no revenue that we need to forego. So therefore we said okay let's give this a go. Let's challenge ourselves but first and foremost let's challenge this market to see what mobile internet adoption can be if it's free. And what we did was to launch to all of our customers so that included people who were on an account and people who were on prepaid, free mobile internet. Not only we launched free mobile internet but we wanted to give customers usage occasions. Usage occasions are actually relevant to them to use the mobile internet. And that included of course next to Google, favorite email services, also content. And then content that really appeals to everyone in Qatar like Al Jazeera for example or Cricket scores for the workers or social network for some of the local population. We keep extending that. So one is take price out of the equation. Two, provide usage occasions and relevant content. And three, provide an experience that is radically easy to use. So that was the missing bit. And the way we achieved that is that we leveraged a global Vodafone platform which automatically configured all of the phones that would be using a Vodafone SIM card with the right settings. So anyone could use it. It was available to all customers and it was free. So now if I may ask the round, I understand we have a lot of industry experts here today from various different parts of the globe. What do you think in percentage of our total customer base? So these are all of the customers that we have acquired so far. End of December these were 350,000 customers. How many of these in percentage do you think are actively using the mobile internet? That means at least once per month they are browsing and using the phone for mobile internet in percentage. Sorry? All of them? Well that's very audacious. I would love to see that. Any more views? 8? 8.0, 8.0, great. How much? 3.0, 30%. 40%. I think these are very audacious estimations. To give you a little bit of a feeling, the industry is around 13%. In the West what we have seen in the Vodafone group is that the highest penetration has been 38%. And where we are at currently in Qatar is 60% active customers. So 60% of our 350,000 customers are going online at least once per month. That means that Qatar in this case is not only leading the region when it comes to mobile internet penetration and not only leading here as a local market where I could go back actually to Vodafone group and share with pride that we have the highest penetration of mobile internet adoption and also bear in mind other markets had been doing promotions as well. There's another piece of statistics I'd like to share with you. 50% of these people who were using the mobile internet were actually going through our mobile internet web page. That's the thing you see here on the right-hand side. So 50% of these were actually finding the usage occasions that we have given and the ideas of what to do with mobile internet. So Google search, email, Facebook, Al Jazeera, etc. were quite relevant and certainly cricket scores was amongst the most popular destinations for workers. So one example of how you can actually boost consumer uptake of a mobile internet or a broadband proposition in general is mobile internet. The second one I would like to give you is e-commerce, in this case our online store. So when we came to Qatar, again what experts told us, people who pay with cash, people go into stores and buy their stuff there. Online really has no opportunity. Again, we said let's turn it on our head. We launched the whole Vodafone Qatar operation online exclusively. You could only pay with a credit card and we had an exclusive offer which was number reservation. So any number on the Vodafone network could be reserved through that portal. What happened in the first few days is actually our server crashed. We were able to recover that within 24 hours but what we saw was millions, millions of searches on numbers and actually all of the transaction going through our portal. I think Khalifa has already alluded to this. One of the big challenges was the logistics. So we had to partner with a local logistics company to actually deliver the phones and the sims to our customers' house. But what we have seen is that these come in myth around barriers to consumer adoption and barriers to adoption of online servers. They're actually not true. You can't get the experience right if you get the offer right and if you just seriously undertake this type of venture. So we still have online now up and running as one of our major distribution channels and it's doing well. We are second place after Qatar Airways in terms of transaction. Let me conclude on giving a few thoughts on what it takes to specifically stimulate consumer broadband demand. One is, and I think I spoke about that already, is a genuine understanding of segments. So don't second guess. Have the customer in mind, not the technology. The second one is service ubiquity. So instead of thinking about DSL, Fiber, 3G, LTE, YMAX, National Backbone think around ubiquity of access. So think about the various different usage occasions where customers, so consumers and businesses are needing the internet and then built for purpose. The third one is obvious, but key. Simplicity and ease of use. Simplicity in the way you buy the product. Simplicity in the way you connect and configure the product, but simplicity also in the way you actually design the offer. The fourth point, and that is of course relative to the occasion, is speed and bandwidth. So anything you launch needs to be at least 500K in terms of speed. Last but not least, innovative offers are also key to the success. So I think one good tendency to do is to do best practice all around the world and see what has been done elsewhere and bring the best to Qatar. But the challenge that I would like to put is to think about specifically innovative offers that are invented in Qatar that will work here and that then will drive behavior. So offers can actually drive behavior. And of course, last but not least, competition. Thank you very much. Thank you Jan for that very concise and interesting insight into the initial months of competition in our market here. Our next speaker is, and you've heard him already, is Rob Middlehurst, who is deputy general director of the telecommunications regulatory authority in Bahrain. We felt that to balance this panel we wouldn't just have service providers and content providers, of which we have two more, but we also needed to get a regulatory perspective on this. Rob, the floor is yours for 10 minutes. Well listening yesterday and today brought some other sort of home truths to me. Some realizations, one of which is age. There's a comment earlier about if you're born after the 80s you're sort of a digital era child. If you're born before the 80s you're a migrant. So those who were born in the 60s and beforehand, where do we live? Because we grew up in a world of sort of Alan Irwin and Jean Roddenberry. We had space, we had Star Trek, we had books by Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and we had this world which was being drawn for us which is somewhere in the realms of science fiction. As we've grown up, all of a sudden we've realized that science fiction is here today. We all use it today. The vast majority of the things that were available then, some form of handheld portable computer. Some form of scanner that would give us a diagnosis. There were all the realms of these people in the 60s and early 70s. Today they exist. The concept of teleportation is still one which is probably 100 or 200 years away certainly for a sentient being anyway, but there are technologies available today that have moved protons from one atomic structure to a different atomic structure. So teleportation does exist but not for things that are living and that raises a whole philosophical question about if you disintegrate someone and reconstitute them, is it the same person? As a new life being created and all that. I think those are problems which are going to be resolved sometime in the future. But I think something else that was brought home just in Khalifa's presentation was that we still have a lot to learn and as a regulator we have a huge amount to learn. The rate at which this industry is changing, the rate in which we've moved from semaphore, flags how do we communicate to each other letter post the introduction of the printing press before that and then we move to telegraph, eventually to telephone now we move to this brave world of the internet in which voice over IP is commonplace and used illegally in some countries not in others. The rate of change is accelerating and accelerating but the rate of regulation is not necessarily catching up with it and we have to start thinking in new ways of saying well if all of these things are going to be delivered by these super high speed networks irrespective of whether they're in wireless or whether on fixed communications then at what point does the regulator say I can step back from this now we talked a little bit about things like broadband networks and whether the government gets involved whether the state intervention whether or not incumbents will use the networks on their own and maybe that's where the secret lies if we go into the cloud world then applications Skype to this world, gizmos, whatever they just live in the cloud they don't live anywhere else so when we start regulating them we have to ask why are we regulating them what service are we regulating in what jurisdiction are we regulating what license or what legal instruments are in place to allow us to regulate and then more fundamental mental question of why are we regulating if we look at the base level we can see very clear links and say broadband okay it's a it's an infrastructure we can understand the building blocks of that it's like building the road if one company controls it we can understand how to regulate that to allow others to come into it we're now moving from relatively slow speeds to what we conceive to be phenomenal speeds but again it's another generational thing when the first international cables were laid across the transatlantic cables people believed they would last for indefinitely huge amounts of capacity few years later they put another one in few years later they put another one in a few years later and so on and right now they're putting another one in the bandwidth growth is just always there always a need this is being consumed in some respects by the likes of google by the likes of myspace, facebook etc again we have problems in how to regulate or should we regulate then it comes to the question of what would we regulate do we regulate contents is the role of a regulator in the future nothing more than a sensor it's an interesting question because if the networks are ubiquitous and affordable to everybody if we have this super highway that is constantly being regenerated and made faster and faster and faster and the access regime is putting in way that allows everyone to have access to it then have we achieved the original view of Carlsberg which said job finished when he left his sessions at off-tel in the very early days of regulation content is a whole new world as a telecoms regulator it's like sort of opening a pandora's box what should we do how far should we go and in some parts of the world particularly in an Arab world in an Islamic world there are very strong moral codes now there could be a role there for regulation within those moral codes in other parts of the world where those moral codes aren't the same is the role of the regulator the same so it's a cultural issue that starts to come into it and it turns a lot more blurred as we move through the different varieties of what content is now a question posed was IPR infringement theft should we be regulating that and you look at the technologies that sit behind it things like BitTorrent or organizations like Napster and things of that nature BitTorrent is just a technology so would we regulate BitTorrent no the use of BitTorrent may lead to illegal activities but as we've heard yesterday I think it was some countries actually use BitTorrent in other ways and it's very productive as a government means of disseminating information so applications that sit within it could be absolutely perfectly legal and we wouldn't want to touch it you then look at the say the music industry or the film industry since companies like Napster or sites like Napster were created has it has illegal download of music damaged the industry it's a different difficult question to answer because if you look at the finances that sit behind it okay you've got one or two record labels at the moment which are going through some difficult times that's not necessarily because of the illegal download of their content it might well be more about the fail to diversify their base and move into new media the fail to take on artists who are willing to use the internet as the primary means of distribution of their content but if you look at the overall revenue from the music industry it continues to to grow year on year yet the level of illegal download still continues to increase so is it damaging now a few months ago my daughter came home from school and she's 12 years old her ICT teacher has set some homework and there were 12 questions she was asked the first question was is illegal download of music bad very simple question please discuss and the first question to me was what's illegal download of music dad she goes on iTunes she says iTunes illegal no you pay for that on iTunes well what's illegal download then so you start to explain to her and she goes well what about the artists do they get any money for it no what about the companies who would normally produce the music in that case it's got to be bad but what about all your friends who've got the latest music and you all listen to it and she goes great so there's this different set of values which there's a generational change coming in and as we heard yesterday there's a need in the internet for things to be immediate there's a need on the internet for things to be free there's a need for them to be the latest the greatest whatever it might be but it has to be there okay from a regulatory perspective would we look at regulating IPR for infringement the answer is no it's not a regulatory issue it's a legal issue and one of the problems is companies who are suffering from IPR infringement think it's a regulatory issue because it happens on telecommunications networks okay so they come to the regulator and yeah we all in the Middle East suffer this on Dreambox okay showtime and orbit scream and shout all the time because Dreambox accesses its content for $30 a year and send us $30 a month now the reality is showtime and orbit should take them to court they should sue them for IPR infringements they should sue them for theft okay it's not a regulatory issue all we can regulate is not that type of activity but we can put in place things that say operators shouldn't knowingly allow illegal activity on their network that make them think a little bit about the types of content they allow and I think I've got about a minute left now that raises another question it's a fundamental question about business on the one hand we say I want to build my business and I'm going to build server farms I'm going to build co-location space I'm going to fill that with as many business applications and customers as I possibly can so great we build all these lovely big warehouses effectively with great air conditioning systems and international connectivity and power we fill them with servers with many many different companies operating in this very small space but do we ever sit and ask what's the business they're conducting the answer is very rarely I work as an operator for most of my life and working life anyway and very rarely did we ask what's the nature of the business you're conducting what's the nature of the content you host on your servers and it creates some interesting problems because we go back to the moral code and cultural issues no one likes to see immoral contents no one likes to see content that's on the risque side we're exposed to that however I would argue with virtually every operator in this room that every one of them has servers which have that type of content on it it might not be viewable in this country but it certainly is viewable in a different country so the world of regulation starts to go into a very grey area which is do we start telling people what they can and can't do in their businesses rather than asking them to open that business to other people so if we then go back to the very first question which is how do we stimulate demand in broadband I think the answer is we have to create a very broad broadband path now whether that's done through public-private partnership whether that's done through private endeavour as a debate which is going to run for another quite a long period of time but once we have that in place and we have the access regimes in place then the need to stimulate comes from the operators not from the regulator we've put in place the environment that allows business to develop we've put in place the rules that allow networks to operate and inter-operate with each other and we shouldn't be governing the retail businesses of those organisations themselves if there are legal issues that are involved that comes through different mechanisms and not through the regulator thank you very much Rob several thoughts there near and dear to my own heart regulators always agree the next speaker is Muhammad Nanabi head of online Al Jazeera English Al Jazeera is a very well known brand known for its TV but it's also becoming increasing known for its websites Muhammad, floor is yours good afternoon so I just want to take a bit of a step back I think my colleagues before me have laid a great foundation for what I'm going to say today because I'm really going to focus on two things one is entrepreneurship we need to drive the businesses and start the businesses that are really going to fuel the demand that we need to grow broadband penetration and the second part is just to look a bit about the content and look at some of the intellectual property issues around them and if you step back and you start to think if we're talking about broadband and driving broadband what does that mean? at the end it means how are we going to drive content that's all it is what's the content that we're going to push down these pipes so then you start asking yourselves how do we get to the point where we have content producers we find to have an El Jazeera which is now in the business for 14 years a worldwide international news channel with a network of sports channels well funded going around and you can have the BBC and you can have these other big companies but that's only half of the story because when you really start looking at the traffic online lots of traffic comes to us lots of traffic may go to Vodafone and your Airways but most of the traffic are really going to companies that were started by two guys in the garage so I want to just step back and talk about that and how do we try to encourage that within the broader region because I think when we start seeing these two guys in the garage starting these companies that's when you're really going to see broadband take off you're going to see content localised and you're really going to start seeing the innovation happen so if I can just take you back to the pre-internet era and when people were trying to innovate it was really hard you know it was governments and corporations and experts and bodies and panels and funding papers and research departments and all sorts of things and to get anything done required a lot of work and a lot of effort but if we move forward to the internet era the era that we're in at the moment innovation is totally different it's simple, it's fast and there's a number of components making up this ecosystem and the challenge that we face now is this ecosystem so if we just look at this when you start looking at how these companies form up you start looking at what this ecosystem looks like and it's simple innovation at the edge it's not in the centre it's not with some centralised body it's pushed out to the edge it's the companies on the edge it's the people on the edge it's entrepreneurs, venture capitalists who are funding it and it's all built on top of this cloud our sets of standards that are open everybody can plug into them everybody can use them, there's a stack that works there's an open source layer around it which makes it cheap and easy for people to start building on so if you look at a Google, or the next Google what are they going to build it on? it's going to be two guys out at Kutter University or Kutter Foundation and they can have a web server that costs a couple of dollars to rent a month that web server is running a patchy software it's going to be running a MySQL database it's going to be running on a Linux operating system all of these components are free and these are solid platforms which everybody uses from Google to Facebook to Yahoo to Algebra itself so the cost to entry is cheap it's nearly nothing, it turns towards zero when you look at when Google was started it was two guys in Stanford running servers in their bedrooms in a dormitory so the cost to start something up and as it turns towards zero what it means is the cost of failure goes to zero as well it's cheap to fail now we always look at failure as a bad thing it might be shameful to start something and have it fail but the only way you're actually going to get to the next big idea is by failing and failing multiple times because you're going to strike that one thing that takes off and because it costs us so little to fail multiple times you're going to succeed in innovating and trying things out and especially in this time when business models are uncertain no one knows how are we going to make money of news how are we going to make money of music a couple of years ago when Napster was around everybody was trying to figure this out no one could sit down and you couldn't get McKinsey to come and tell you how it's going to be done because no one knew everybody was trying to figure it out so the only way you could do it was by trying it they'll pivot, they'll change direction and they'll make a success out of it so this cost of failure is critical and this is what we should be encouraging people try it, fail now there's a whole ecosystem around this it's not just Joe walks up the street and decides to start a company there has to be people who can fund these companies there has to be venture capitalists and angel investors around them there needs to be people who can acquire these companies so they can have a liquidity event and then once you're acquired they're going to go on and fund the next generation of entrepreneurs so it's this whole ecosystem that needs to be nurtured in both so if we just go to and zoom in on Qatar itself if you look at the Qatari market and you look at Alexa numbers which are the best we have if you look at the players, who are the big players on the web you're looking at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Facebook, Wikipedia and Qatar Living so that's what you have those are your big six eventually now the interesting thing about all of them all of them were started by two guys in the basement that's what they are or a guy in his dormitory at university these are your big players driving your consumer demand if you, you know, I'm sure my colleague from Vodafone will tell you this all the traffic's going to Google it's going to YouTube, it's going to Facebook it's going to Flickr where people are posting these photos this is where the traffic's going all these companies were started by two guys with no funding, at some point they raised a little bit of money they probably got angel investors who gave them $100,000 they ran these companies then they went up and raised some venture capital and they built them into billion dollar businesses market cap, you know, it's a bad month this month it's about $170 million so eventually this is what you need to do there's no reason why the next Google couldn't be out of this region there's no reason why you couldn't believe it just means we need to get the ecosystem right we need to have all the pieces in place where we can promote entrepreneurs and get young people that's why it was nice hearing Khalifa starting talking about entrepreneurship people trying these things and looking at the scale this market's a great market in the Middle East there's 300 million people they all speak the same language it's on the cusp of taking off it's the same place where Japan was a couple of years ago so it's about to explode and it's just enabling people so they can start and build these things no one's going to build it there's no institution that's going to come out and put a grand strategy together to build this and that's really what's going to drive demand drive entrepreneurship it's going to solve a lot of problems and I said this is all built on the stack it's sort of this open source stack this open stack that we have of these web standards of the protocols that we use of the software that we use so let me just talk a bit about content because when you look at the stack it's easy for people to understand what Apache is and it's the web server that everything runs on but if you keep going up higher in the stack you get your database you get your application and then you look at the content on top of it and this becomes a critical question and this is what my colleague just spoke about earlier when his daughter asked a question about what's an illegal download and eventually when you look at that what we've been doing what we've been doing as industry as a society is criminalizing an entire generation of our children we've criminalized our children when we've tried to throw them in jail because they've downloaded a song or downloaded a movie now it might not be right we know that it's morally wrong but those laws don't apply now because when your daughter who's 12 years old or 6 years old grabs that file and you've created an environment where it's become illegal for them we've criminalized our children and what we need to do is step back and say is there another way? we shouldn't be stealing content we shouldn't be stealing anything so is there a third way that we can move towards and one of the things as Al Jazeera is we've been really interested in that how can we find that third way and how can we contribute to developing that third way and the important development we've got lots of content we create this great news everybody in the Middle East watches our Arabic news channel so our challenge since we've launched our English channel is how do we break into markets across the world how do we go global with this and the internet's been a key factor for us one of the big markets we're trying to get into is North America and to get into the US market so we've been using online to push this so what we did was at the time and if you look two or three years ago there was this whole war against YouTube Viacom there was lawsuits going on and everyone was pulling their content of YouTube and all the stuff was going on and everyone was trying to figure out what do you do with YouTube because everyone's going to YouTube to watch the video and we turned around and said no if the audience is going to YouTube that's where we should be we should be where the audience is so we developed a strategy that we call distributed distribution instead of just looking at linear distribution we put it up into a satellite or down an IPTV pipe with a cable operator let's put it out there on the internet and let's put it onto YouTube and not only is it on YouTube where everybody is everybody's going to watch video on YouTube but people then our audience people who love our content, who enjoyed our content would further distribute it for us because they could then take that YouTube video and embed it on their blog, on their website and push it further along so there was a next step in this distribution so it wasn't just Google doing it for us but our audience was distributing our content further and that's what you really want you want people who are passionate about your product to be doing your distribution so you turn your customers into your marketers so our content there's about 20,000 videos online from Al Jazeera, you can find our full programming up on YouTube and what this means is over a billion minutes of video have been watched since we started this and this is phenomenal for a broadcast out of Qatar and a huge audience across the world most of half of our traffic comes from the US so people from the US are watching Al Jazeera both Arabic and English consuming this content produced here in Doha so we thought well this is great we can now distribute our content and people can see it whoever wants to watch it can watch it so what do we do next? what's the next step on top of this? is there something else we can do? so you can take it, you can view it, you can share it now there's in the creative process because you might want to take that content and maybe you want to create your own documentary maybe you want to share it to your students at class so what we said was can we enable this and this is where when we start talking about copyright and talking about IP we found a solution there's something called Creative Commons which was started out by Professor Lawrence Lessig who was at Stanford in Harvard and he's one of the great intellectual property lawyers professional lawyers in the States and he said how do we solve this problem how do we not criminalize our children and he said well if we have on one hand copyright which is all rights reserved and you can't do anything with what we have and you have on the other hand people stealing things which is illegal there must be somewhere in the middle and what somewhere in the middle means is there's some rights reserved these are my rights, I have them, it's my content but I'll give some of those rights to you so what we did was we said it's great content, it's Al Jazeera content filmed by our cameraman and our reporters in the field it's world class content, you're not going to find better we're in places where no one else is and we'll give it to you you take it, you use it you build upon it and this is how knowledge is created this is how we create knowledge at universities this is how we create knowledge we stand on those who came before us so we said we put it out there and let filmmakers use it so we licensed it to them and we started this the war on Gaza because we were the only English language broadcaster with people in Gaza so we took this content, we put it out there and it was amazing to see what happened we put it up midway through in January and suddenly in a matter of hours literally after sending out the press really saying Al Jazeera has done this with the first broadcasting in the world to do this and give away our content in this manner the Wikipedia community the people built in Cyclopedia they grabbed this content and said hey we're talking about this war but we've got no visuals for it because it doesn't exist, everything's copyrighted but you've given this to us so we've taken it and put it into our Cyclopedia so now it's contributed to the collective knowledge of society and it'll always be there in Wikipedia so we're enabling this creativity suddenly after this teachers started taking it at universities teaching their journalism students how to cut up video, how to use it it was used by NGOs, it was used by other news broadcasters broadcasters in Europe they didn't have access to footage from Gaza now they were broadcasting our news so we enabled this life cycle to just continue and continue and it's amazing to see where it ends up this video was used in video games, music videos all sorts of places so this is the culture of entrepreneurship of creativity that we're trying to enable and support so this was our repository where you can go up get the video, download it import it into your favourite video editing software cut it up and reuse it make a documentary so finally just to tie this all together you know and if anything that you take away from this talk is just we need to create and foster entrepreneurship in this region that's the only way we'll be drive, not only to drive broadband not only to create great businesses like Google and so on which need to come out of this region but to help our youth, you know to give them the chance to build something to build something they can be proud of they're proud of and we're proud of there's a company called Yemli which is an Arabic you know you can type in Arabic and it enables Arabic on your web browser he started an organisation with the World Economic Forum called Yella Startup and you know and the whole idea is just to tell young people Yella start up the company you know don't stick with the cushy job that you're going to get, that's going to be there you can always go and work in the government or in whatever in your father's business but go out and start the company, try it the cost is so low it costs nothing to start the business online so, thank you very much I think we'll take some questions a bit later thank you very much we're now going to go from a very interesting concept there and I think we could discuss it a bit in the discussion session about creative commons to a man who's going to talk about the other side of it, intellectual property it's Hussain Speck Yusuf who is managing director of fairwood music, Arabia Speck I feel like there's a debate already starting inside my mind because I've got fairly different views on some of the stuff that's been discussed here just to give you a bit of background I run a company called Fairwood Music Arabia, we are the largest music publisher in the Middle East and North Africa we represent the music publishing catalogs of universal music publishing group and EMI which are the two largest music publishers in the world so between those two catalogs and the number of independent catalogs we represent close to about four million copyrights in this region making us the largest owner of musical copyrights in the region the concept of musical copyrights and I'm going to talk about that because that's what I do kind of goes back to an ancient or not so ancient argument which started in 1850 where a French composer walked into a restaurant and had his dinner and there was a band playing music and at the end of his dinner he called the manager over and he said great meal but I'm not going to pay the bill until you pay me for the music that was played because your band was playing one of my compositions and that started a debate in the halls of justice in France which eventually evolved into what we now know as modern copyright laws which is essentially what a music publisher is we protect the rights and the revenue streams owned by songwriters and composers on behalf of them when we look at one of the core questions of the panel today which is what particular kinds of content are likely to drive mass broadband uptake I think we have to look at history as an indicator of the future to a certain extent and if we look at similar markets emerging markets who were on the cusp of a digital revolution which I think is starting to happen and develop in the Middle East we see that really music plays an integral role in that on a mobile side most estimates would say that music is the most kind of serviced area initially through ringtones but now through ringbacks and full stream full streams and full downloads in fact the two times that mobile rang over the course of today it was two musical ringtones both times so I think that's probably a good indication of how often music is used in a mobile context and also in a digital context even within YouTube where we're looking at film and TV now that broadband speeds are getting so fast I think it's almost impossible to go on YouTube press a video and not hear a piece of music that's somewhere in there as part of the audio visual product and also some of the most popular channels on YouTube are owned by the major labels like Universal so I think that that's quite clear there's no real question or debate about that I think that the question though itself can be looked at again in fact Rupert Murdoch who I probably don't agree with on a lot of things but recently when they announced the Apple iPad there was a comment that he made which said they were asking what he thought about the Apple iPad and so on and he said content is not just king it's the emperor of all things digital and he went on to say specifically about the iPad that it's not powered by batteries it's powered by great content and without that great content it's nothing but an empty vessel and so although you know we probably come from two very different worlds myself and Rupert Murdoch I think that he spot on on that and today I think there's a bigger question which is not just what kinds of content are likely to drive that mass broadband uptake but rather what can we do to create and facilitate the creation of that content and the delivery of that content to the Middle East and I think that that's the real question that we really have to analyze and look at and I think that the biggest impediment that the Middle East has had and I've had this publishing company now for two years and when we launched out of Dubai we're still the only music publisher in the UAE and within two years for us to become the kind of leader in the region I'd like to think it's because I'm a genius but I also think that it probably has a lot to do with the fact that music publishers have not wanted to enter the Middle East and the reason for that I think is because I think that there is a need for regulatory infrastructure and I think that regulatory infrastructure needs to although there might be differing opinions on whether regulatory infrastructure should be involved in things like Napster or what happens on mobile kind of telecoms you know by telecom operators I think that regulatory infrastructure should always be on par and in step with law and there is law in Qatar and in the UAE and throughout the Middle East and copyright law is protected what I think is interesting when looking at what that major impediment is is the fact that as a music publisher I can tell you that in the UK or Europe or in North America for us to license music now if we accept that music is such a major kind of integral part of content that's being distributed out digitally or on mobiles then the next step is well okay why isn't there more why isn't iTunes in the Middle East for instance or why aren't there more legal services so that people can legally access music even if it's on a free basis because there are services in the UK such as Spotify which essentially supplies music for free and it's based on an advertising revenue model so why aren't any of these services available in the Middle East and why are 300 million plus people essentially starved of that content and the reason I think is because it's so difficult to license content because in other markets we have a performing rights organization in place now in the UK if we use the UK as an example PRS the Performing Rights Society acts on behalf of music rights owners and then you've got music users which would be the broadcasters the telcos, the radio stations and so on and on the other side you've got the music creators so the intermediary is the Performing Rights Organization which essentially aggregates all the content and supplies a license or a number of licenses to a music user but it's a simple process we don't really have that in the Middle East and actually in the Gulf there is not a single Performing Rights Organization in place to license the universal EMI, Sony and Warner Brothers catalog and then go to Rotana for Arabic catalog and then go to Alamel Fan for more Arabic catalog and go to T-Series for Indian catalog they have to do 8, 9, 10 deals and for them to do those deals what ends up happening is you end up finding that a lot of people have inflated views of the value of their repertoire because there's no regulatory infrastructure in place, there's no standardization so you go up to somebody and you say hey I want to license your music because I'm about to open a new telco digital service and they say great it's going to cost you a million dollars for 10 songs and we want that in advance please otherwise don't use our music and if they want to use music because they want to supply music to their subscriber base they're stuck between a rock and a hard place there's no fiscally responsible way for them to do it because there's no standardization in the marketplace I believe that is the role of government and possibly with regulators in concert to work together to try and put some sort of infrastructure in place to help facilitate that process so that we can deliver content and going by some of the the analogies that I saw earlier on in the day where we tend to talk about roads and highways I think it's kind of like I think it's because we both live in the UAE that we've got this Shakespeare Road analogy but there's two analogies that come to mind immediately one is the copyright law is there so that's the highway is a city that we live in or the country that we live in and people going 200 miles an hour is just the way it goes until somebody puts up the speed cameras and tells you well actually you're not allowed to do it it doesn't mean that before the speed cameras were there you weren't allowed that it was okay to go 200 miles an hour it was still the law to go 100 but people were people have to be coaxed into following that law and the speed camera the regulatory infrastructure that needs to go up in place the second analogy that came to mind as I was hearing some of the guys talk is the idea that we're building a bridge here we're building a bridge through all the technological innovations that we're talking about the technological innovations through the access to broadband the wires, the machinery whatever it takes to create the facilitator to get broadband the consumer, that's the bridge but the island is the content otherwise you have nothing to go to and so you can't just focus on providing the access you have to provide some sort of foundation to deliver the content as well and unless we we look at that I think we're missing a trick and I'll close with a fairly simple idea which I believe is being in the Middle East constantly inspires me because you're always on the cusp of doing something new and really pioneering something new you can be on you can be the guy to pioneer something and that's I suppose what I'm trying to do in my own little way but there's always a lot of focus on innovation and wherever you go there's always the focus of being the best and the greatest and let's innovate the market leaders and whatever we're doing on a digital basis or not as some of the previous panels were saying but there's also innovation that we have to focus on at a cultural level and cultural innovation means that when you've got local artists, local creators, they are it's the same as as the previous speaker where he was saying well we need to focus on entrepreneurship well people creating copyrights people creating intellectual property are the entrepreneurs of the arts world and we need to kind of protect those rights because what ends up happening is they end up getting left by the wayside and without some sort of infrastructure in place what we've seen by the United States or the UK or the European societies where the quote-unquote creative economies have really grown and boosted is that you can't really create you can't create one without addressing the other and the fact of the matter is if you have a society where content creators aren't rewarded for innovating then they won't innovate and so you can't have a staying or Madonna or AR Rahman coming out of the Arab world until you do something about making sure that that person can benefit from the creation of his or her content and so the final point that I would leave on is the idea that we have to support innovators in music or arts as content creators which leads to facilitating and providing access to the content through some sort of performing rights organization in the Gulf so that we are able to deliver content to people in an easy way and the positive side to that is that it's not just about paying copyright owners but the consumption of indigenous content regionally means that the society as a whole in the region will benefit from that but even better is that that music will end up getting exported around the world and we can see we can see the sort of attention that's paid to UK copyrights American copyrights or Canadian copyrights or Indian copyrights being now paid to Arabic copyrights thank you