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omarkassim

226 karma · joined January 7, 2010

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omarkassim··on Dubai Billionaire's Tech Startup Takes on Amazon
3 weeks, but who's counting.

Also, the codebase wasn't thrown out. Some bits definitely were (we had a fair amount of legacy given 7 years), but large parts of the same team (e.g. SVP of Product, VP of Engineering) that built our product by and large designed and built the product that noon launched with.

omarkassim··on A demonstration of browser events used to monitor online behaviour
I love Domainr, https://domainr.com/about/tlds
omarkassim··on Passport Index 2016
Dubai and by the extension doesn't require any sort of exit permit to leave the country unless you're giving up your residency at which time, you go through a pretty painless visa cancellation process. Very free movement given our strong aviation culture and infrastructure.
omarkassim··on Why You Don’t Want to Give Financial Information to All of Your Investors
Brilliance.

I'd suggest snagging Bothsidesofthesandwich.com and translating the rest of Mark's content for consumption by the rest of the world. You clearly have a knack for it.

omarkassim··on CloudFlare SSL Issues Again
Ouch. I'm sorry to hear that. Given that we're located in Dubai, we seem to generally be routed via your Singapore data centre.

It would be nice if HTTPS traffic for paying customers was re-routed automatically to an alternative location.

omarkassim··on JadoPado InstaSearch with Algolia
Nice one! Our team had a great time building the experience at JadoPado.

A couple of weeks to change out search completely, get full faceting as well as additional indexes to support everything in Arabic.

I continue to be blown away by Algolia and it's potential.

omarkassim··on Torpedo – Share files, passwords, and more with self-destructing private links
An alternative for pure text is One Time Secret, https://onetimesecret.com/
omarkassim··on Show HN: Manage servers easily online with Commando.io
Any particular reason for not supporting Linode?
omarkassim··on French startups disrupting the way you experience fashion online
I suggest checking out KnotStandard, http://www.knotstandard.com/
omarkassim··on 2012 Personal Annual Report
Could you include a beard length index next year? I'm not certain, but it definitely looks like it grew out somewhat over the year.

I'm all for a proper beard!

omarkassim··on PayMill, Stripe clone, rolls out silently across Europe
I was blown away by that too. Then it made sense considering it's Rocket behind it!
omarkassim··on A growing respect for the Samwer brothers
I'd have to agree. We saw this very recently in the Middle East & Turkey as well.

Out in Dubai it hurt us in terms of talent drain at crazy prices from a number of well established local firms. Their marketing spend helped to grow the local and regional e-commerce market (and still does via ventures that are still operational), but the nature of some of their exits when shutting down has ended up forcing consumers and other stakeholders to re-consider whether to trust e-commerce start ups and businesses in general. Not ideal when the sector is still very nascent.

Coverage: Wamda: http://www.wamda.com/2012/08/rocket-internet-to-exit-turkey-... http://www.wamda.com/2012/09/goodbye-mizado-hello-jumia-insi... Venture Village: http://venturevillage.eu/rocket-internet-to-shut-down-turkey...

As an aside, JP Morgan has put in a significant amount of money recently into some of Rocket's ventures: http://venturevillage.eu/lamoda-jp-morgan-zalando and http://venturevillage.eu/jp-morgan-rocket-internet-the-iconi...

omarkassim··on How to watch the Olympics, live, from the United States
I'd highly recommend this option. Tried them out a couple of months ago and the service is brilliant. Multiple Exit IPs and unlimited bandwidth including torrents takes the cake.
omarkassim··on Show HN: Collections for Mac, now with Instagram Support and a Revamped UI
Just re-downloaded. I love the new icon, I think that swung it back for me. Beta 1 was hurting my Dock.
omarkassim··on Todon't app
Unfortunately the sign up process (without knowing what I was signing up for) forced me to add this to my todon't list.
omarkassim··on Amazon launches as Junglee in India
In some North Indian dialects, the word Junglee literally means "Crazy Person". Seriously.

When we went with JadoPado (jadopado.com) (which equates to "fatty"), I thought I was going with something funny, but this is on a whole new level :)

omarkassim··on Announcing Amazon SES Management Console
Mmm. Unfortunately the console doesn't really offer much at this point. A few nice charts and you current sending limits. I'm assuming the guys will continue to add to this in the upcoming weeks.
omarkassim··on Show HN: Codecademy.com, the easiest way to learn to code
This is an absolutely fantastic idea and is really well executed.

What I find to be even greater is that as you run through the thread of comments, zds is responding to feedback and then going back to Codecademy.com to actually incorporate it on the fly.

It's 10 hours since this was first posted and I just read some comments on "you should be able to skip registering until later" and it's already available when you get to Lesson 3.

A great way to listen to and incorporate the right user feedback into your application quickly and effectively.

Really good stuff!

omarkassim··on UpFor: built by Twitter employees to "change the way you hang out with friends"
Guys - Your Typekit CSS is being served up insecurely and is throwing up a mixed mode issue in Chrome 11.0.696.68.

May want to change it to serve over https instead.

http://use.typekit.com/k/meo5ntk-d.css?

And a little bit of insight on what exactly the service does / plans to do before forcing us to hit that Connect with FB button would really help.

omarkassim··on Piper Jaffray: iPad 2 totally sold out, 70% to new buyers
Any plenty to grey market re-sellers globally.

It's almost like Gene's team completely forgot or decided to forgo the very large global grey market that exists.

omarkassim··on Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.
Thanks for being upfront about it - finally!

I understand where you're coming from - I wouldn't expect this to take priority. I do however continue to think that having a delete feature / account closure feature is fundamental to any SaaS application today - especially one aimed towards businesses.

What continues to frustrate me is being told that you as Yammer are unable to actually carry out this process yourself. That doesn't make any sense to me - you have access to your servers don't you?

I think there's a gap in what Support is saying and what any slightly technical user knows is possible - even if the "feature" isn't available on the front end.

omarkassim··on Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.
This is one of my frustrations. You as the company should be able to go in and remove that network - it's for your company at the end of the day.

It's like having a LinkedIn or Facebook page - you should be able to exercise some control over it, including removing it should you wish to.

omarkassim··on Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.
A feature is what ever you make it out to be by definition. You could call a text field or a button a feature if you wanted to.

I just think that closing your account is something more fundamental that being what we traditional think of as a 'feature'.

omarkassim··on Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.
Should closing an account really even be considered to be a "feature". It should just be there - a basic building block of every application.
omarkassim··on Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.
Just wanted to add this in:

Scott Balentine (CSM), Mar-03 10:29 am (PST): Hey Omar,

At Yammer, our relationship is with our users. All data, whether from a free or paid network, cannot be deleted by Yammer. This would violate our Terms of Service. You as an Admin of a paid account can delete any data on the network. Like you said before, the data is owned by you. Since this data was not deleted before I downgraded you, I will re-upgrade you for however long you need to delete the data in your network at no charge to you. As a paid network, no individual users will have to delete anything at all.

You can delete messages using the "Delete" link under the "More" menu at the bottom of each post.

Let me know if you need anything else.

Scott

-- Delete each message manually. Please.

omarkassim··on Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.
I would give a free non-commercial (or in better words, a non corporate) service this leeway - as a user I haven't paid for it.

But as a paid service - where you've been a paying customer for many months - and a service that is targeted towards corporate customers this should just be a given.

The run around about user data belonging to users and so on is just ridiculous. Yammer helped us to create a corporate network, where the data belongs to the company - so when we want to leave it should be as easy as signing up - hit delete and you're done.

It doesn't matter if their systems retain the data for a few weeks and batch delete it later.

I'm sure that if a larger customer expressed this, they would bend over backwards to accomodate. Just feels like they're screwing the little guy.

omarkassim··on Delete Button. Yammer take a hint.
I think the whole delete your account and in this case your network was motivated by having a tremendous amount of private company information on there. Some of it was harmless, but if given the choice it would be better that it were removed from the servers of what is a third party at the end of the day.