A couple of weeks ago, TIME Magazine published an interesting article called “10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now” with as introduction “The global economy is being remade before our eyes. Here’s what’s on the horizon.” The article is very much focusing on the US - after all TIME is a weekly American newsmagazine - but our region also came up in the article with “The Rent-A-Country” trend. As it is economically not viable to grow food in the desert, leaders from Saudi, Kuwait and Qatar among others, started up relations with countries like Indonesia, Cambodia and the Philippines to grow food. Just click on this link to read more about it.

Are we going back in time, back to the colonial empires?

Not sure whether you’re familiar with MRA, but we are attending their Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois, between June 3-5, which is one of the must attend research conferences in the world, next to the Annual ESOMAR Congress. MRA stands for the Marketing Research Association, and is based in the US. It will be our first time, as Maktoob Research, but we will let you know whether it is worth attending or not!

I recently read a research report about government websites being too complicated for users. The majority of the users seem to have difficulties finding their required page on a government website. As I am very often experiencing the same problem, I thought it might be interesting to put a poll on the Maktoob.com website, asking users whether they feel the same way. The results showed that the majority of the users - exactly two thirds - indeed sometimes get lost on government websites (66%). 

Although the internet penetration in the UAE is already at 60%, these results show that citizens are still not being fully supported online by their local governments, whether police, municipality, or other government information and services portals.