Thanks to Abdullah Al Muheiri (aka serdal), I will have the chance to give a talk case studying restate.ae today at the Emirates Internet Group.

I know it’s a bit late to announce the talk, but my fault was in not announcing it unless restate.ae new design is up; well, the new design implementation took longer than anticipated and here I am announcing the talk on the same day. I should have avoided false dependencies, announced the talk a week ago and posted again announcing restate.ae new design today.

The talk will be in Arabic and it will take place in Knowledge Village in Dubai around 07:30PM, Conference Room 2. Abdulla will start with his talk 5 ideas from Web2.0 where he will share some of his ideas on how to get the most out of Web2.0 great web apps.

More about the event can be found on EIG website, see you around..

restate.ae is a real estate portal for the city Dubai, but it’s not just another portal out there, it’s built from our need to be able to find a property in an easy, reliable and affordable way. We didn’t find the portal that satisfies our needs and we believed we can do our own so we ended up doing it ;).

The two main key points we had in mind when developing restate.ae are:

• A better search: Because every property has a lot of attributes to search with, the most common search mecahnism out there is the advance-search, which I personally hate, specially when I need to search over and over again, so what we did is to simplify this concept, use some Rails love and Ajax magic and create a filtering mechanism that let you find your property a click at a time.
• More information: To ovoid being a classified-listings website we worked on collecting and genrating more information of every single property we list as much as we can, we used the listings information we’ve got to generate realistic statistics about locations and we always kept the place for users to express themselves and interact with each other.

Thanks to Ruby on Rails, we were able to launch restate.ae in a relatively short period of time, Rails also helped us extract a comprehensive codebase out of restate.ae which we’ll start releasing some of it sometime soon as open source Rails plugins.

So whether you are looking for a property, interested in Dubai or just procrastinating here, please give restate.ae a quick visit and let me know your thoughts, we really appreciate every feedback we receive.

I thought that the lack of time was the reason that stopped me from blogging, but later on I realized that when you like something, no matter how busy you are, you will and should find time to do it. It seems that blogging was not one of my priorities lately but hopefully now it is, I miss blogging and interacting with other cyberspace friends, so no more lousy excuses, I’m back and back for good this time.

So maybe it’s time now to announce what’s that big thing that kept me hiding away for months, it all started when I met Cloves Carneiro Jr, an amazing Ruby on Rails master who recently moved to Dubai, after a couple of Rails meetups together we couldn’t help it and we both decided to start SpinBits to simply: webify with quality.

As you can tell I’ve been enjoying a lot of Rails goodness lately at SpinBits, I have a lot to share with you guys here, very interesting tips about Rails in general and Rails Edge in particular, so stay tuned.. but for real this time ;) .