Our News

Our friends at X2A Consulting are organizing the first-of-its-kind agile methodologies conference in Egypt, and we are proud to give support to that great effort. Find out more!

We recently redesigned the SOS Music Festival site to coincide with the seventh iteration of that event, which will be held on February 29th at the Chinese Garden (Nasr City, Cairo). You'll need to fill a questionnaire to get your invitations, so get moving!

The beginning of a new year is always a busy time. I hope it started in the right direction for all of you! This year, we have plans to enlarge the scope of the OC TechSeminar, with a little help from our friends and partners. More on that later, but for now we are happy to announce an exciting topic that should be of interest to many of you.

PRESENTATION ABSTRACT

Speech recognition is the most natural human interface to work with computers and mobiles, we will present a technology overview of existing speech recognition technology focusing on Arabic language and its applications and future trends and impacts.

THE PRESENTER

Dr. Maged Nofal has more than 13 years of experience in the fields of Arabic speech recognition and Arabic text to speech. He holds a Bachelor's, Masters and PhD degree in Telecommunications Engineering from Ain Shams University. He has established NesrSoft, a company specialized in embedded Arabic speech recognition. He also worked in companies like Lucent, IBM, Sakhr, ITWorx and ITSoft.

PRESENTATION OUTLINE

• Speech recognition technology overview
• Definitions of speech recognition technology
• Applications of speech recognition
  • Existing technologies
  • Products
• Future trends

Attached to this article is the Adobe Acrobat file of the presentation.

SESSION TIME AND PLACE

The session will take place next Tuesday, February 12th 2008, starting 6:30pm *sharp* at OpenCraft. Light snacks and refreshments will be served.

See you all there!

Attachment	Size
Nesrsoft Technology Overview-OpenCraft.pdf	1.61 MB

As part of OpenCraft's commitment to contributing to ICT4D and software localization, Abdel-Karim Mardini from OpenCraft is participating in The second workshop of the Pan African Localisation project, "PAL2" which is being held in Tshwane, South Africa, on 5-7 November 2007.

PAL2 is the third workshop on localization in Africa that is funded by IDRC, following the first Pan African Localization workshop in Casablanca, Morocco (13-15/6/2005) and The Pan African Research on L10N Workshop & Localization Blitz in Marrakech, Morocco (24-27/2/2007) which OpenCraft also participated in.

Yes, you're reading correctly! As part of our mission to inform *and* intellectually stimulate, we are very pleased to offer you a session about the fascinating world of nanotechnology. Fascinating and promising: just a week ago, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to two researchers who used nanotechnology to radically reduce the size of hard disks. Our presentation will focus on fuel cells as another application of nanotechnology, one that provides clean, efficient energy. Your geek appetite should be whetted ;-)

PRESENTATION ABSTRACT

An overview of fuel cells including basic principles, history, types and applications as well as technical and commercial challenges will be addressed. Nanotechnology will be defined and explained including representative applications of nanomaterials. Production methods of nanomaterials will be discussed. You can now download the presentation in PDF format.

THE PRESENTER

Sami Mardini is currently Vice President of Business Development at Superprotonic in Pasadena, California; a VC backed Caltech spinout developing a new class of fuel cells. Sami has previously been Marketing Director of NanoGram, a VC backed nanotechnology company in San Jose, California. Before joining the technology start-up world, Sami was VP of Global Sales at Tyco Electronics Power Systems after a long career at the Energy Division of Raychem Corporation which was acquired by Tyco Electronics. Throughout his career, Sami has developed and successfully commercialized electrical products globally in the industrial and utility markets. Sami received a B.Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from the American University of Beirut and an MSEE from Ohio State University. Sami has lived in Egypt, Lebanon, the U.S. and Hong Kong.

SESSION TIME AND PLACE

The session will take place on Tuesday, October 23rd 2007, starting 6:30pm *sharp* at OpenCraft. Light snacks and refreshments will be served.

UPDATE

You can now download the presentation in PDF format.

The Sand Sea Sailors rally team are good friends of ours. To support them, we created their web site in return for some OpenCraft exposure during their competitions. The picture was taken at the finish line of Pharaons 2007. For some more pictures of the car, check here.

You can check the latest standing on the JVD website here as well as follow the race online. You can also check the latest rally pics here.

UPDATE

Sand Sea Sailors win 4th place overall at The Pharaons Rally! Great job guys! Next stop, Paris-Dakar :).

No we're not talking about football! OpenCraft people (Abdel-Karim Mardini and Karim Ratib) will attend the Drupal conference held in Barcelona this year, September 19th to 22nd. Because we recognize the importance of this great software for our business, we are also co-sponsoring the conference and holding a session about our experience with the system.

UPDATE

We had a blast at DrupalCon. We were also lucky to catch the Mercè festival :-) Our session's presentation is now online, and you can find post-partum thoughts on drupal.org.

THE TOPIC

Two topics relating to Drupal will be presented and discussed in this seminar, followed by an open forum for discussing any Drupal related matters.

The first topic is about Performance Tuning and Optimization and Scalability of High Traffic Drupal sites. Building on experience with high traffic sites using Drupal, we will explore where bottleneck may be, how to avoid them, tuning tips and techniques, and tools for measuring performance.

The second is the Userpoints module and API, and how it can be used to provide instant gratification for users, encouraging them to participate more in a site. We will also cover the API of the module and how it can be used to write really powerful modules that expand your web site's functionality.

THE PRESENTER

Khalid Baheyeldin is an Egyptian Canadian software developer and consultant. Almost a quarter of a century ago, he started programming on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, moving to proprietary mainframes, and then UNIX. Being an open source enthusiast, he naturally took to Linux and the nascent free software movement. A prolific contributor to the Drupal content management system, Khalid is co-founder and managing partner for 2bits, an Ontario, Canada consulting company providing Drupal services.

PRESENTATION AGENDA

• Performance Tuning and Optimization of High Traffic Drupal sites
  • Introduction
  • The LAMP Stack
  • Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP
  • Drupal
    • Database queries
    • Modules
    • Caching
    • Measurement and monitoring tools
  • What can go wrong?
  • Questions, discussion

• Userpoints module and API
  • Introduction
  • Userpoints Module
  • Features
  • Usage
  • Userpoints API
  • Hands on
  • Conclusion
  • Questions, discussion

RESOURCES

The slides for this presentation are available at 2bits. Thanks go to Khaled and the great attentive audience we had. Thanks also go to Noel Hidalgo who recorded it on video. We will be posting it somewhere soon, so check back later.

SESSION TIME AND PLACE

The session will take place on Saturday, August 25th 2007, starting 12:00pm at OpenCraft. Light snacks and refreshments will be served.

The SOS Music Festival is Egypt's first avenue for up-and-coming bands. Its fifth installment will take place on the Egyptian North Coast on August 10th, so head on to the festival's web site to get your ticket! What's it got to do with OpenCraft? Well, the organizers are our friends and we're co-sponsoring this great initiative by developing and maintaining their web site :-)

THE TOPIC

We will present the different software testing techniques that are being used in the industry and referred to in software text books, from a practical point of view. The presentation will include a demo for sample tools used for automating test design based on Control Flow Modeling and on input/output domain analysis.

THE PRESENTER

Omar Kamal has 11 years of experience in wireless telecommunications, software development, training and software quality management. Currently working as a Quality Assurance Manager for Mentor Graphics, he held positions with Lucent Technologies, Hewlett Packard, IBM, QuickTel and Etisalat. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Telecommunications Engineering from Cairo University, and a Master's degree in Business Administration from City University. In addition, he is a Certified Quality Manager by the American Society for Quality.

PRESENTATION AGENDA

• Testing Objectives
• Introduction to Software Testing Techniques
• Equivalence Partitioning
  • Case Study 1
• Control Flow Testing
  • Case Study 2

SESSION TIME AND PLACE

The session will take place next Tuesday, July 24th 2007, starting 6:30pm *sharp* at OpenCraft. Light snacks and refreshments will be served.

See you all there!