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Facebook Has Surveyed People About Their Ramadan Shopping & Media Habits
Eager to learn more about the influence of the coronavirus pandemic on the shopping and media consumption habits of people during Ramadan, Facebook’s insights and research division, called Facebook IQ, and analytics firm YouGov published a marketing guide called Ramadan: This is the Joy of Discovery, which features key insights from their survey.
The survey was conducted between May 23 and June 13, 2020, and it included 17,758 participants. “Approximately 1,500 interviews were completed in 11 countries, with samples that were representative of the adult online population across age, gender and region in each market,” write Facebook IQ and YouGov in their marketing guide. “For the global average data cuts in this guide, we focused our analysis on the eight markets where Ramadan is celebrated by the majority of the population.”
The most important insight is that the pandemic has fundamentally changed how people shop. Among those surveyed, 42 percent are planning to spend less time shopping in stores during Ramadan, choosing to shop online using their mobile devices instead. This is a major opportunity for marketers, who need to offer a seamless experience throughout the purchase journey to increase their conversion rates and sales.
During Ramadan, nearly half of all survey participants agreed that they spend more time on their mobile devices, and 8 in 10 said that they don’t put their smartphones and tablets down even while watching TV, including members of Gen X and Baby Boomers. One of their favorite activities around Ramadan is discovering shopping ideas, researching things to buy, and, of course, purchasing items.
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The first shopping peak happens just before Ramadan, in mid-April, and the second shopping peak coincides with the start of Eid. Even though 39 percent of shoppers start planning their purchases about a month before celebrations start, only 20 percent have completed shopping when Ramadan begins.
For more insights like these, read the full marketing guide, which Facebook kindly published on its website.
News
UAE-Built Falcon-H1 Arabic Leads LLM Benchmarks
The lean Emirati-built language model beats larger global systems and puts Arabic at the center of training.
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute has released an Arabic-first large language model that tops global test boards, an uncommon edge for a region long served by English-centric systems.
Falcon-H1 Arabic comes in 3B, 7B and 34B versions. The flagship posts 75.36% accuracy on comprehensive Arabic tasks and ranks first on the Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard. It also outperforms Meta’s Llama-70B and Alibaba’s Qwen-72B while using less than half their parameters. The smallest model beats Microsoft’s Phi-4 Mini by ten percentage points on equivalent benchmarks.
Arabic remains hard territory for AI. Flexible word order, dense morphology and constant switching between regional dialects and Modern Standard Arabic leave many global models missing context or tone. Academic research has pointed to a shortage of annotated datasets for dialect and informal speech. The impact shows up in classrooms, call centers and government portals where Arabic chatbots lag their English counterparts.
TII trained Falcon-H1 Arabic on formal writing, dialects and culturally grounded content. Beyond scores, it handles practical use: long conversations, reasoning rather than literal translation, and inputs of up to 192,000 words — enough for medical records or legal filings.
“The aim is innovation that is accessible, relevant, and impactful,” said Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary-General of the Advanced Technology Research Council.
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Arabic is spoken by more than 450 million people across over 20 countries, yet has often been treated as a secondary language for foundation models. The UAE move signals a push to flip that logic and build Arabic-native stacks rather than wait for global systems to improve.
Falcon models have led their categories since 2023. With H1 Arabic, TII is offering free access via chat.falconllm.tii.ae for developers, media, healthcare and public-sector users looking to automate in natural Arabic.
As the region continues to invest in sovereign computing and data localization, the addition of Falcon-H1 Arabic adds a powerful tool built for the native language, instead of an afterthought attached to an English-trained system.
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