Saudi Arabian student on shortlist

Fahad Al-Daajani from Saudi Arabia was voted by the public onto the Google Photography Prize shortlist, winning a week-long exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London. His work will also be available for millions of Google users around the world to display on their personalized iGoogle homepages. From the shortlist, a jury of art critics and artists, including Martin Parr, Idris Khan, Michael Hoppen, Tim Marlow, Susanna Brown and Mariella Frostrup, chose Daniel Halasz from Hungary as the overall winner. The jury also awarded an additional jury’s commendation prize to Aliyah Hussain from the UK.

Google launched the competition in collaboration with the Saatchi Gallery to find talented student photographers and give them unprecedented online and offline exposure. Over 3,500 entries were received from 82 countries, including Australia, India, Moldova, Poland, Ghana, France, Germany, Chile, Peru, Mexico, the US, the UK and Saudi Arabia. Check it out at www.google.com/photographyprize.

Distribution center for Kingdom

Dell Middle East has opened its first local distribution center in Saudi Arabia. Based in Riyadh, it is part of the PC manufacturer’s push to build its presence among business and consumer customers in the Kingdom. The center will hold inventory in the country, rather than in Dubai as was its previous policy. This means that customers will have faster access to spare parts. This is the first independent local hub that Dell has set up in the Middle East. The company claims that it will shortly be introducing the possibility of four-hour parts delivery service to all customers.

Dell needs to take whatever measures it can to grow customer loyalty and sales in markets outside the US. The company posted a 63 percent drop in profits and a 23 percent drop in revenue, but warns that the industry has yet to bottom out. The announcement is Dell’s third consecutive quarterly drop in profits.

WiMAX trials under way

Green Packet Berhad (Greenpacket) has entered into 15 WiMAX Customer Premise Equipment trials with operators from 12 countries in Greenpacket’s MEA region including: Saudi Arabia, Libya, Armenia, Nigeria, Iran, Bahrain, Pakistan, Kenya, Ukraine, Georgia, Kuwait and Ghana. The company declined to reveal a timeline for “actual contracts” to materialize from these trials.

Greenpacket was established in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region in 2007. The company created a joint-venture with the Saudi Economic Development Corporation (SEDCO) to set up Green Packet Networks W.L.L., operating out of Bahrain. Greenpacket offers end-to-end WiMAX products, solutions and consulting services and undertakes R&D around the technology.

“This region accounts for approximately 23 percent of total WiMAX deployment globally and we foresee continuous and long-term growth in the WiMAX space of this region,” said Kelvin Lee, senior GM, Greenpacket. “WiMAX has proven to be an attractive option for both greenfield and traditional operators in the MEA region wanting to provide last-mile reach. WiMAX presents the very attractive proposition of requiring low infrastructure investment, which is particularly ideal for the low-density demography in this region.”

KSA’s fastest, most powerful HPC

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) have announced that KAUST’s high-performance computing (HPC) system, “Shaheen,” has placed 14th among the world’s most powerful supercomputers, according to the latest TOP500 List of Supercomputers.

The foundation of a joint research project launched by KAUST and IBM, Shaheen was developed to serve the university’s scientific researchers across dozens of disciplines, advance new innovations in computational sciences and contribute to the further development of a knowledge-based economy in Saudi Arabia. IBM confirmed that the Shaheen supercomputer system was delivered to KAUST in May and it is up and running. Time allocation on Shaheen will begin in August.

KAUST (www.kaust.edu.sa) is an international, graduate-level research university dedicated to inspiring a new age of scientific achievement in the Kingdom, the region and around the globe. It is set to open in September. As an independent, merit-based institution, KAUST will employ many of the best practices from leading research universities and enable top researchers from around the globe and across all cultures to work together to solve challenging scientific and technological issues.

KAUST’s Shaheen is a 16-rack Blue Gene/P System, which performed at a peak processing power of 185 Teraflops — or 185 trillion floating point operations — per second. It is located at the KAUST core campus in Thuwal, on the west coast of Saudi Arabia. Shaheen has been designed to be one of the most energy-efficient supercomputers globally, which is consistent with KAUST’s high environmental standards.

“Shaheen is the cornerstone of the knowledge-based economy that Saudi Arabia is seeking to develop,” said Majid Al-Ghaslan, KAUST’s interim CIO. “The deep computing capabilities Shaheen can deliver will unite the best of business and scientific computing techniques and will enable us to find the value buried in growing volumes of data and apply that information to solve real-world problems. Through our collaboration with IBM, we are finding it possible to tackle problems of unbelievable complexity — things we couldn’t dream of doing even a few years ago.”

The research project Shaheen is powering — known as the KAUST/IBM Center for Deep Computing Research — will deliver both high-performance computing capabilities to a wide range of academic disciplines at KAUST, as well as enable advanced research and innovation in the computational sciences and HPC field.

Shaheen’s performance and computing capabilities include:

• 65,536 independent processing cores.

• A next generation data center that is able to scale to exascale computing requirements.

• 10 Gbps access to world’s academic and research networks.

Cross-border mobile money transfer

Zain and Western Union will work together to deliver mobile money transfer services in countries in Africa and the Middle East through Zain’s new Zap platform. The Zap service provides Zain customers access to a full range of transactional services from their mobile phones. Customers can interact with select bank accounts, pay bills, top-up or transfer airtime and move money to businesses, friends and family. Zap has been operational in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda for several months, making mobile banking services available to more than 100 million people in East Africa. Zain has announced plans to introduce Zap in 22 markets, including Saudi Arabia.

Western Union has a global agent network of more than 334,000 locations in 200 countries and territories. Once the Western Union service is launched with Zain, consumers will be able to send cash money transfers from participating Western Union locations around the globe in the same way they do today. Zap customers who are enrolled in the service in select countries will be able to choose whether they want to receive their money in cash at a Western Union Agent location or in accounts tied to their mobile phones - their “mobile wallets.”

The service will be introduced in select countries when regulatory approval has been secured. The service with Zain will be operational in countries with significant international and intra-Africa remittance activity.

“Zain’s initiative has the potential to provide millions of people with access to convenient financial services for the first time,” said Gail Galuppo, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Western Union. “The ability to move money with a mobile phone is changing the landscape of financial services.”

Announcing the launch, Dr. Saad Al-Barrak, Zain Group CEO, said, “This service will enable the millions of people who are abroad to send money home swiftly to their friends and families not only in the cities but also directly to the villages across these countries.”

According to independent research from Informa, by the end of 2013, more than 424 million mobile users will be sending money to other mobile users in the same country via their mobile phone, and 73 million will be sending money internationally via their mobile phones. The top three regions – Western Europe, North America, Africa and the Middle East are expected to account for more than 75 percent of the global international mobile money transfer gross transaction value.