Empire Builder allows the player to become one of history’s best architects and raise
an ancient empire from the sands. In the game, players will meet a series of powerful
pharaohs and help them in building an empire along the lush Nile River. In 30 fun
and challenging levels, players will not just construct some of Egypt’s most famous
monuments but also experience the rise of an ancient civilization.

“Empire Builder is an excellent building simulation game that gives players a taste of
the Egyptian heritage”, said Anila Andrade of 99Games. “The game also educates the
players on different kinds of pyramids and monuments as they build them in historic
locations in Egypt”, she added.

Key features of Empire Builder are:

– Play through 30 challenging levels
– Meet 10 powerful Pharaohs and complete their assigned missions
– Build houses, ports, schools, temples and a variety of other buildings
– Buy, sell and haggle to earn more gold
– Unlock new building plans as you progress
– Play Imhotep’s Challenge mini game for special rewards
– Activate 10 Amulet power-ups to help complete levels
– Use your magic staff to banish mummies and eliminate locust plagues
– Supports Game Center achievements

Empire Builder provides the first 6 levels for free, and allows you to download
additional levels through In-App Purchase.

(first draft – still needs edit) In late 2010, A man named Mohamed Bouazizi, running a small fruit stand in Tunisia set himself on fire as both a protest and a desperate cry against the brutish and tyrannical regime of Ben Ali and the total lose of what little dignity and hope he had to support his family after a police officer basically attacked him and his little fruit stand.  Although successful in bringing economic growth to the country, only a small percentage of those connected to the state enjoyed the fruits of this economic growth.  People living in the outlying areas were still poor, repressed and basically abused by the state and their collaborators.  In previous years and small event like this would have gone unnoticed.  But with the expansion of access to the internet, Tunisian blogs, mostly outside the country, the population was beginning to learn more and more just how corrupt their government was.  The WIKILeaks release of US diplomatic evaluations that seemed to corroborate this point of view only further inflamed the population.

Protest began to popup all over the country and although there was plenty of hacking attacks on both pro and anti government sites, and a number of bloggers and even a rapper was arrested; at no time (as far as I know) were the internet taken down, social media sites blocked and cell phone service taken down as seen in the Iranian protest.  Although the normal pattern of controlling the media, blaming outside influences, violent repression and vague promises were executed, this time the regime was simply too hated, too corrupt to withstand the ever growing number of those dissatisfied with the government.  After 28 days, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled the nation.

All of the events in Tunisia were followed by people all over the world. Especially those in Egypt who have been living under there own autocratic state controlled by Hosni Mubarak for the last 30 years.  As with Iran and with Tunisia and other states, the people began to communicate with each other through social networks like Twitter and Facebook about what the people can do if united and perhaps that same revolution can take place in Egypt.

When Wael Ghonim started his Facebook page to bring light to Khalid Sayid’s beating and death; people started to add images and videos to this Facebook page coming to 1/2 million followers. Soon people used this page and others to organize protests… and people started to show up.  Taking pictures and video’s; the word spread further.

Soon bloggers and socmed users were calling for protest and strikes against Mubarak.   As fast as Tunisia erupted, Egypt was faster.  The word spread and people were congregating next to the Nile river in an area called Freedom Square.  The Mubarak administration has also watched what happened in Iran and Tunisia and initially blocked certain website just as in Iran, but people got around it user proxies, just like Iran.  After this did not work, he took it a step further and shut down all web traffic and mobile traffic.

Access to Twitter and Facebook was blocked.   In 24 hours it was announced on the Google Blog, the search giant has teamed up with the incoming SayNow team and Twitter to create a simple speak-to-tweet service for people currently engulfed in the turmoil in Egypt.  From the Google post..

It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.

As the protests continued the typical recipe that all dictators seem to follow was concocted.  They started to send thugs to repress the protesters, arrested those that were speaking out.. Through the state controlled press the blamed outside agitators and then made veiled promises to reform. However, the protesters would stand for nothing expect the resignation of Mubarak.  Under internal and international pressure, he finally reopened the internet nodes and stopped blocking mobile devices. Finally an announcement was made that he would give a speech and ‘demands will be met.’  During his speech; instead of stepping down he still insisted he would stay in power and offered more reforms.

There was first a wave of disbelieve, then disappointment, then full on outrage.  All of this was picked up by the global news organizations which has set up camp with live feeds and thousands of tweets and facebook messages racing through the social network reinforcing that only his abstention of power would satisfy the crowds.  In less then 24 hours; he resigned and left the Presentational Palace.

As amazing as it is that this non violent protest worked, was the speed.  18 days total.  Less then 24 hours from the reading of his speech where he stated he would not leave office, to getting on a plane. The speed and depth of social media as well as main media monitoring of this network has made the normal path of divide and conquer less and less effective. What was interesting is that only about 20% of the Egyptian population has internet access at home and 40% have cell phones so communications were not stopped by cutting off access to internet, but instead inflamed the population even more.by cutting off internet and cell phone, that actually drove more people to the streets and the square to find out what was going on

Although we did not see a successful change of power in Iran, we have seen it in Egypt; and we have seen many other autocratic countries moving very quickly to address (or appear to address) the needs of their people out of fear of another lightly fast revolt powered by social media.

At the time of this writing, about 2,000 demonstrators clash with police in the Yemeni capital Sanaa in the third consecutive day of anti-government protests. Riot police in Algiers dispersed thousands of people who had defied a government ban to demand that President Abdelaziz Bouteflika step down. President Mahmoud Abbas will immediately ask Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to appoint a new cabinet. And in Iran, where we started this article, reports from Iran say several opposition activists have been arrested and international broadcasters are being jammed. The moves come after the opposition called for a march in Tehran next week in support of the protests in Egypt.

As much as it seems that the ‘tools’ of social media was the foundation of the revolutions we have been talking about, and seem to be coming, its not the service of Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Google but instead the change of thinking that these tools have helped evolve.  By allowing people to exchange ideas and information, social media tools have given people a sense of community and strength through the social network.  Once ideas have been shared and a sense of mission has been formed, blocking access to social media only angers people more and let them know that the authorities are afraid.

The story of the network revolution is not over and perhaps by March I may have another update, but right now, with the last 3 revolutions we have seen, its clear that social media is more then just a tool to allow people to communicate but instead a way for community to form and ideas to not only be exchanged, but solidify as a call of action.  The next 2 months should be interesting.

When a state wants a certain message to be provided to its population; it normally instructs to top down communication media; the newspapers, television and radio stations, to reflect that view. With networked communications, this control does not exist.  As such, the only other option is to try to hunt down and intimidate those major nodes within the network or shut the network down altogether.

In the case of Iranian election protests of mid 2009; we saw the first beginnings of Social Media as a tool used by the population and opposition of the state to try to affect change in that state.  After the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, discussion on the illegality of the election began to spread around Iran and the world on various blogs and minor publications.  Soon these turned to protests online which lead to protest in the streets.  The Iranian government did as one would expect, instruct the state controlled media outlets to dismiss the protests as outside agitators and criminals, arrest those they believe to be the leaders of the protests and cut off the phones lines of any supporters.  But they did not cut off  access to social media via the internet and text message. The protest continued to grow and become more organized.  Sometimes nicknamed the Twitter Revolution, because of the protesters reliance on mobile phones and Twitter to communicate; and also the first time a major government realized that social network communications are a very real threat to their ability to maintain control over their population.

Once the authorities realized the threat of networked communications; they started to shut it down, first blocking web sites and email.  However Iran is a highly computer literate country with plenty of hackers in conjunction with hackers and coders from around the world working to counter these measures including attached Mahmoud web site through DDoS attacks.  At one point the only reliable traffic was through Twitter and cell phone.  So important was this traffic that the US ask Twitter not to perform a service upgrade during the protests.  Many bloggers, myself included, would rebroadcast IP proxies to allow the Iranians to get around the website blockade. I even created a small php script that will perform 3 separate Twitter searches and remove the duplicates to help people filter through the deluge of Twitter messages that were generated around the crisis. Its basically a game of cat and mouse between the computer and socmed community and Iran.

In the end, the Iranian regime was successful in quelling the uprising through a combination of shutting down universities, blocking web sites, and blocking cell phone service in conjunction with more conventional tactics of misinformation, force, promises of investigations, and counter rallies.  But is not where the story ends..

End Part 1.  Read Part II here.

Here is an excerpt from the TC post…

As they’ve just announced on the Google Blog, the search giant has teamed up with the incoming SayNow team and Twitter to create a simple speak-to-tweet service for people currently engulfed in the turmoil in Egypt.

Says Google:

It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.