I just stumbled upon this cool website that made use of more than 280 million tweets to reveal geographic mobile and twitter usage patterns.
The above screenshot shows the usage pattern in Beirut. But looking at Lebanon map, you can notice that most mobile twitter users are located in or around Beirut, and the majority of these people use either iPhone or Android.
Thank you Mireille
As you all know, and in order to stop mobile phones smuggling in Lebanon, the ministry of telecommunications is now requiring all traders to register the IMEI (a unique ID assigned to each mobile device) of every legally imported mobile phone or tablet.
The collected IMEIs will then be used as of today June 1st to filter the devices that are allowed access to our mobile networks (alfa and touch). So typically speaking, a legally imported mobile phone with its due taxes paid will be allowed to connect to the mobile networks, while other smuggled ones will be denied access since their unique identifiers are not registered at the ministry.
The weakest ring in the process is of course the group of people who will be responsible of the data entry of the registered IMEIs. Since they will be easily able to register and IMEI of some untaxed mobile if there was not much control over them.
As a result, mobile phone prices ended up notably increasing over the last week. For instance, the guy who sold me my mobile was listing the iPhone 16 GB for around $650 since mid-May I guess, then he increased the price 2 days ago to $745. Logically due to the fact that the handsets he’s currently offering were legally imported and subject to some import tax.
Everybody is eventually complaining about all of this, especially that it gets a bit complicated when you buy some used handset from abroad. And I know it’s wrong to complain about a price increase when it’s a result of complying with the government taxation rules, but still, a $100 increase totally sucks!
Hind is a former swimmer who used to train with the American University of Beirut’s swimming team and recognized the need for a monitoring device to track hear rate during her practices. So she came up with Instabeat, a device that is designed to fit any pair of swimming goggles to tracks a swimmer’s heart rate, caloric burn, and number of laps.
During practice, swimmers will be alerted through LED lights as to whether they are performing in fat burning (blue), mid-range (green), or maximum (red) zones. Progress over time can also be visualized after connecting the device to your personal dashboard through a USB port. Future prototypes will allow syncing data to your mobile phone using Bluetooth.
You can read more about Hind Hobeika and her Instabeat device on Intabeat.me. And if you feel like supporting her, you can take part in her indiegogo campaign to raise $35,000 needed for further development of Instabeat.
Thank you @sam_lb
