Day 5 - Back to the Smart Village

Today we kicked off our more official side of the trip, visiting a number of businesses just outside of Cairo in the Smart Village we briefly visited earlier. The Smart Village is roughly the exact opposite of Cairo proper. Located about a half hour away from downtown Cairo (or an hour in traffic), it's 3 million square meters of contemporary buildings, green parks, lakes, and franchised shopping and dining. Nothing is older than 5 years or so, and everything is sleek, shiny, and techy. Here are some of the buildings:




The first company we met with was Telecom Egypt. To picture the kind of company this is, imagine Verizon or any other massive land line phone provider in the US. Now remove any and all competitors, and pretend cable was never run anywhere. Basically, they have a complete monopoly of Egypt's telephone and internet delivery over copper. With over 60,000 employees, they are traded on the stock exchange but owned mostly by the government. Their biggest problem is figuring out how to spend their massive reserves of cash and how to compete with the coming cellular internet boom. Solution? Buy over 45% of Vodafone Egypt, which we also visited. Here's the guy who spoke to us. His job must be real hard...


We had a great time visiting the Vodafone folks. Although the US doesn't know Vodafone too well, they're a powerhouse global cellular provider and pretty much represent the opposite of everything that's wrong with American cellular companies. They have an extremely positive approach, and you could tell the employees were excited about working there and enjoyed the environment.

Cell phone service in a country with almost no concept of credit makes for a much different market than the US. Cash only transactions, no contracts, and extremely high numbers of low income and illiterate phone users who do nothing but play with every possible function of a cell phone all day routinely challenge and surprise the Vodaphone folks. People buy cell minutes for 1 pound (25 cents) at a time. They use complicated morse code-like intentional missed calls to relay common messages - ie. one ring hang-up means meet somewhere, two ring hang-up means meet somewhere else. Vodafone programmers released an undocumented feature where you can request minutes from a friend if you need to make an emergency call - 90,000 users were using it in the first 3 hours simply by word of mouth. And my personal favorite - one guy figured out if he attached his bank account to his phone bill, then transferred all his money to another account while he made a call, he could continue with his call for hours without being charged. Unfortunately he tried to blackmail Vodafone with the info, which didn't work out so well.

Our other visit was to Xceed, one of the first modern call centers in Egypt built to compete with the supercenters of India. Guess who owns them? Yep, Telecom Egypt, of course. Our guide was a fast talking, born-and-raised New Yorker who managed the personnel of the site, and it was pretty impressive. 1,600 internet-ready desks with smart phones, queue lists, depth statistics, and 100% recorded and archived phone volume of 3 million problems a month. The center is 24/7, 7 days a week, always on, always crazy. We watched the Microsoft section in action, specifically the Xbox 360 help line. The pitch is that Egyptian workers have a clean accent when compared to Indian call center workers, while working for similar wages. To this ear, I'd say "clean" was pushing it, but it was certainly an improvement. Maybe they'll give India a run for their money in the coming years.

Another interesting example of how working in another country presents new problems is with the female workers - any shift that ends during evening hours requires the company to drive the women home, taking them from the door of the office to their front door. Every female in the company, every odd-houred shift. I will add that there was a surprisingly high percentage of women working there (we were there during the day, obviously the desired shift for women) - but it was well over 60%.

The final stop of the day was to CultNat, a government sponsored institute for maintaining, restoring, and documenting the history of Egypt. It's supported by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, which is also conveniently located in the Smart Village. They had a number of cool technology tricks to show us, including a 9-projector wide slideshow, a complete online version of all the historical locations in Egypt complete with 3D walkthroughs and videos, and some recreations of famous relics, like the sand clock below.

And that was it for the Smart Village.

The evening sadly found me without my camera, but I'll hopefully add some pictures before long. We found a local with a membership to a nearby sports club and went with him to watch the Cairo/Alexandria football (soccer) match. It wasn't much of a game, but Cairo pulled it out 1-0 in a defensive struggle whose only goal came in the first few minutes. The city pretty much went nuts in celebration, and our friends took a group of us out on a boat ride down the Nile. There are some good pics of this in one of our cameras, so I'll post them soon...

Next up, the city of Alexandria. Oh, and the tally jumped again, with two more falling to the dreaded pharaoh's revenge. It's a bloodbath at this point.