In any project and in every company during the planning stage, the owners and the creators start by studying the markets and see the benefits of each one in order to decide their target.

Now talking about web business, markets aren’t the same as in other businesses, we have a different kind of globalization in cyberspace, better communication facilities and a much wider audience, which leave us finally to the users judgment, the users who have too many options and choose only what best fits their needs.

Local Market

Local market, which is in my scenario the Middle East in general, and UAE in particular is one of the most fresh online markets right now, a gold mine, a lot of open opportunities, many ideas to be implemented and different kind of problems that have to be solved, but still there are many difficulties that every local web startup is facing, sometimes it’s the monopoly between the big local web firms, and sometimes it’s the misunderstanding of the real needs of the local internet user.

Replicating and Translating

Most of the local web applications currently are either being translated or replicated from another international successful web applications, I could rarely find a really creative competitive idea in here, something that is made for the specific requirements of the local market, not just a replication of what’s out there.

Local startups have this wrong impression that if an idea has worked globally and internationally then it have to and will work here too, but unfortunately this is not the case, if the web application does not support the local language (Arabic for example) or doesn’t have too many users from the local market, it doesn’t mean that it needs to be reimplemented or translated, maybe it means that it’s not made for our needs in the first place.

When we’re talking about the local market we should do something that fit our needs and solve our problems not just follow the hype and see what can be re-done just to simulate the same success story of an international replica.

Lack of Knowledge

One of the problems in the local market is the lack of knowledge of the cyberspace basics, I’m not saying that there is NOBODY who knows about Web2.0 or the new trends for example, but I’m talking about the percentage of those who know to all other local internet users..

How many of those who heard about these trends do really understand the meaning, for example few days ago I received one of these yahoo groups email circulars, that has “Jewels of Knowledge” as its subject and one of these jewels was: “What programming language is GOOGLE developed in?” and at the end of the email the answer was “Google is written in Asynchronous java-script and XML, or its acronym Ajax”. This is just an example of the low level of knowledge circulated and its lack of accuracy.

Maybe it doesn’t matter which programming language Google used, but in the other hand such level of knowledge should be raised, so the local internet users get a better understanding of what’s available and what they can get instead of just recycling what’s made for them and accept anything only because there is no alternatives.

Educating the internet users isn’t easy, and to give the right information is something very crucial, one of the most successful tries I’ve seen so far is Serdal a blog by Abdullah Al-Muhairi who has done a great job, writing and lecturing in Arabic about the new trends, demonstrating and explaining most of the new technologies, we need more of these tries, at least to build a solid knowledge background for the user to let him see what’s available and ask for more, ask for better.

The knowledge of the end user encourages the competition and makes the market more healthier, look at the Japanese market for example, the high level of basic internet knowledge every user have, they are always asking for more, and the competition became really harder, which made their products and services more enhanced and better shaped to give the users better satisfaction and more real solutions.

Low Level of Competition

Competition is the best motive to improve ourselves, you want to be better than your competitors so you start improving your products and skills, the more competition there is in the market the more healthier it is, and the better and competitive products and services will be.

Locally the competition is very low, sometimes it’s due to the outdated skills available and sometimes due to the monopoly of the big companies, those companies that insist on hiding the “lamp” and always trying to convince us that the “candle” is the only available mean of light.

There were and still are many tries to do something new, fighting all the way to deliver the best solutions available, but yet they are very few, few to the level that they are hard to find, I really find these tries very positive and sure they will be the pioneers or the local market and hopefully they will be more soon.

I hope the local market will reach the level of tough competition to have a better and healthier market, which will encourage us to join and compete by trying to deliver a better solutions instead of just being the first to copy these solutions from the international market.

Wider Audience

One of the best advantages of cyberspace now is the wide audience you can speak to and target, normally starting a business is limited to how far you can deliver your product or service to, which was very small circle in the past, but now in cyberspace, this start circle is big already, the easy access for the end users to reach your products and services by simply type the URL of your site to be in your world, your application is deliverable to every plugged user to the net.

Such an advantage should be used wisely, the solution of the problem should be generalized to serve a wider range of users not only for a specific country of city. When a web applications is served in Arabic for example, we are not targeting only a small city or even one country, but we are targeting every internet user who speaks Arabic wherever he/she is.

Why International Then?

So local or international? personally I chose the international market because I found it more beneficial to me than the local market, I’m not saying that the local market is not good, maybe it is a mine of gold, but not a mine of knowledge, at least not for me.

Internationally I find better knowledge and more competition which helps me develop myself and stay up-to-date with the latest technologies, I couldn’t do this while working for the local market.

The tough competition and the variety of solutions available internationally always have motivated me to do more and learn more, not to mention the great opportunity of meeting new people with better knowledge that I can always learn from.

What about you? what do you prefer? working for the international market, or target the local market? and why?

Every human being have a dream, a target or even a problem to solve, and sure there are many others out there with the same hopes, when they start to contact each other, trying to help each other and get united to achieve their shared goal they start the community seed.

Equal Participation

Every community out there is created to achieve something, a better understanding of a new concept for example, spreading a new trend, sharing some knowledge, or even having better discussions, the community in general (not only the cyber community) has the power to do this, so what is more powerful in the online community? I quote here:

“… Communication from many people to many people is close to the norm in cyberspace. This opens participation in decision making, creating the potential for conclusions to be reached in more egalitarian ways than are available offline…
… The inclusion of people in offline decision making is limited by the need to meet together, to speak only one at a time, to overcome the hierarchies of identity…” Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace by Tim Jordan

The ability to contact each other without any time borders, to express ourselves more freely, to speak (many) at a time instead of one at a time, allows us to be more effective and social, speaking freely without any hesitation or limits. Online community strengthen our individual cyberpower and crystallize our cyber identity to give us at the end a credibility that represent us and our community as well.

Information Overload and Credibility

Now the information overload problem has an alternative solution, when we want to search for information online we try to find the community that powers this type of information and see if it can provide us with the desired knowledge, this has solved two problems, the information overload and the credibility issue, not as a complete solution but at least as an alternative one.

Technology has helped the online community to evolve faster and to be of more benefit, new technologies like blogging, wikis and news feeds optimized the information flow between community members and their followers, for example if you want to follow up the web standards news and stay in touch with all its development, simply you have to subscribe to the community leaders feeds and now you are in touch.. if you know what they know then you know everything. The information power again, the core of cyberspace.

Back to credibility, every online community has its own credibility that got initiated by the very first members, and this credibility has been maintained while members are joining and leaving this community since then, but whenever a new member join, he gets his share of this credibility as if it’s a certificate, people will have a better reason to trust him, as long as they trust his community.

Online communities are becoming more popular day after day, many people are finding salvation in it, a place to speak freely, to contact these with the same interests and to achieve a shared goal, recently I have joined the diet contest community, trying to achieve the goal of losing weight and get back in shape with all the other participants from all over the world, this is a live example how no matter what is the goal or how simple it is, there are always a lot of people who wants to do it and start a community.

No matter what our nationalities are, or where we live, once we are plugged and connected we enter this virtual world, this reminds me with the Matrix movie where they had to be plugged in order to get into the Matrix, although I don’t agree with its negative view of the AI evolution, I prefer Isaac Asimov way of humanizing the machines by giving them feelings and not taking them as enemies, but in both cases the question is about the new technologies and what new concerns they will make. What about cyberspace? Hasn’t it given us a strange power as individuals?

Information Overload

When we decide to dig for a piece of information, few years back we used to get short with the found information from books and papers or even asking experts, spending a lot of hours and we still feel that a lot is missing, but now online by surfing the web for few minutes we can find more than we need, we start selecting, choosing, and filtering, there are a lot of results and alot of answers for the same topic we are looking for. When google gives you over a milion search results it’s impossible to see them all, you will filter and choose, this is the information overload, it has even created the new concept of procrastinating where we start going from site to another and forgetting what we were doing in the first place.

Information overload has given us this individual cyberpower, being able to find any information about anything at anytime. We feel powerful and able to seek anything, like if we have it all in our minds, we are not afraid of difficult questions, but we developed our skills to find them and filter the results effectivly.

Having more knowledge and the ability to learn faster have encouraged people to produce more than consume, like this article for example, there are many resources online about cyberspace and cyberpower, but I felt that I have another vision so I didn’t hesitate to share it online, another source, another information overload, and it’s up to the users and readers to choose from.

Different Identity

For individuals cyberspace has opened new gates, bypassing censorship, participating in decisions, the ability to know the forbidden and even share all of this, this power is still evolving, with the revolution of Web2.0 people are not only consuming and producing information online, but they are interacting with it, and developing new types of information, wikis and web applications, everybody has his own home (account) in every website, it’s not only being plugged, now it is being logged in too.

Whatever you are in real life, whatever your work is, or your physical conditions are, it doesn’t matter, it’s just about your ability to use the computer and surf the web, and you’ve got this power, in cyberspace there are no nationalities or skin color or lifetime disability, you can be what you want even if you can’t be it in real life.

We still hear a lot about people who fake their identities online, sometimes it is not really faking as much as it is showing the real inner personality that they can’t show in real life, expressing some sort of ideas that they can’t express in real life, or they don’t have anybody to share it with.

Credibility

What about the credibility of these information and knowledge online? How much are they trustable and how much they are not? It is interesting how some individuals has developed a new way of trust, it’s not about reading the information, they prefer to know who wrote it, or where is it from, they check the site name, the writer name and sometimes they dig to check their credibility, this may sound a good way, but at the end not all internet users are able to judge their sources.

In the other hand it became more difficult on the authors themselves to maintain and establish this credibility, there are no jury to judge them, it’s their readers who will trust them or not, anyhow credibility is still a big unsolved issue in cyberspace that require some more research and work.

Cyberspace is a space that powers the individuals and get powered by them, cyberpower is really a huge subject with a lot of things to discuss, in this article I tried to summarize the individual cyberpower from my point of view, there are still some other cyberpowers to talk about like the community power, and the giants power, which I’ll be posting about shortly.