The Blog from Xische & Co.

On Twitter 5th birthday, our chief Danish Farhan was invited to weigh in on Twitter and it’s growing relevance in business and politics. The segment also features one of Time’s 140 most influential Twitter users Sultan Al Qassemi, and Emirati commentator Mishaal Al Gergawi.

To get straight to the 5:00 minute mark to get to the Twitter segment with Sultan, Mishaal and Danish.

Working with one of the most interesting brands in the UAE — the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) — was a spectacular challenge on many fronts. The Xische team was invited to pitch competitively for the DIFC’s digital account. Our remit was to help visually and structurally reflect the shifting focus of the organisation moving forward. We suggested a holistic review of the brand communication, digital strategy, social media footprint and the website ofcourse. (more…)

This morning, Xische attempted something completely untried in the design thinking process. Here’s how the story goes: Our friends at Alchemy Films ran a project last week with the students of GEMS World Academy in Dubai, teaching them film-making with Flip cameras. The project was to showcase each of their lives through short features. These videos would then be shown to children from underdeveloped areas in Bangladesh as part of another initiative. The project needed a brand name, identity and a website. We decided to experiment and challenge the way typical branding gets done. (more…)

So there’s two reasons to do this timelapse video of our offices in Dubai. 1) Ever wonder what 30 minutes at Xische’s Dubai Media City office look like? Well you need wonder no more. 2) We wanted to test the iPhone fish-eye lens we lapped up from PhotoJojo.com a few weeks ago. Here’s what it looks like. Pretty neat huh?

Soundtrack courtesy of Mr Beethoven of course.

Just in case you haven’t already heard, bloggers in Arabia unite today to show solidarity to a fellow blogger — Mark Makhoul — and his plight in an epic turn of events in response to a not-so-flattering review of his experience at Kuwait’s newly opened Benihana restaurants. The franchise holder of the restaurant posted a delusional response and promptly issued a lawsuit against Mark and deleted all comments shortly after coming under fire by bystanders. (more…)

On August 5, 2010 we announced our win of the Qatar 2022 World Cup Bid digital account. Two hours ago, we were gobsmacked to realise that our little bit had a role to play in a historic turn of events — Qatar was just announced the host of the FIFA World Cup in 2022.  Since its quiet inception, the bid website and social engagement had garnered well over over half a million supporters as of this morning. Unexpectedly, within the hour of the announcement, the website dramatically went down due to unsurmountable traffic.

While we are perhaps still reeling in from the decision of the FIFA Committee to bring one of the world’s most loved tournaments to the Middle East, we sit proud and humbled. To know that we played a role — even if with a pixel or two — in creating history, is an extraordinary sentiment. Go Qatar!

November is turning out to be a spectacularly techie month for us!  After the wildly viral barcode invitations we produced for TEDxDubai this year, we’re excited to follow it up with an Augmented Reality experience for our clients Jotun this week. See if you can spot the expression of most visitors’ faces!

Or take it for a spin right now here: www.jotashield.com/experience

Two days from now, Facebook is speculated to release its new product – an Email service. A user-base of well over 500 million people is strong reason to believe that Facebook Mail will have a massive adoption rate unlike any other email service we have ever seen. (more…)