Headed For Cairo

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It's been over seven years now since I was last a visitor to The Mother of the World (and, actually, that trip was itself my first for eight years. So you could say I was a little out of touch). A lot has happened since - Tahrir and all that for a start. I used to spend more time there than in Amman; we had an office in Garden City, the serene and beautiful area of old French colonial houses just off the Nile. I used to spend a great deal of my time shuttling back and forth. I was always fascinated by Cairo - its vicissitudes are the stuff of fairground rides: the highs and lows are never less than dizzying.

I remember being at Amman's QAIA, transiting on my way to Dubai back in the '80s, listening to a group of Christian tourists headed to Cairo. They were a snippy, ancient little lot and two or three of the men were jostling for dominance in the way only the English can: "With the greatest respect, Jolyon, I think we should be better rewarded worrying about quite where our luggage is..." and all that. They settled down to pray and I listened in, marvelling at their strange, Pythonesque faith. "Oh Lord, take care of us as we set out for Cairo, particularly Phyllis who is having trouble with her feet. Let us not have our bags stolen or drink anything with ice in it or otherwise get upset tummies."

Not that the risk of the latter is anything to sneer at. I have been miserably ill thanks to Cairene food, which is (unless something has changed in all those years) almost always 'interesting' at best. My constant travelling companions were always Immodium and Buscopan. I remember one Comdex Cairo a chap out from the UK who had brought an attaché case (I kid you not) of Jacob's Cream Crackers which, together with bottled water, is all he would allow past his lips for fear of The Cairene Revenge. All went swimmingly until the last day of the show when he injudiciously allowed a business partner to buy him a Pepsi. It had ice in it.

BLAM. He went down faster than a goat hit by a Pajero.*

I'm going back at the end of the month, thanks to a kind invitation to attend a conference taking place at the famed Townhouse Gallery, 'MENA. Online. Literature. Today.' The nice chaps at Townhouse seem to be under the misapprehension I have something to do with literature, can string together a coherent sentence in public and won't burn the place down.

They're clearly in for a terrible shock.

The conference aims to review the state of Middle East publishing, from the structure of the current publishing market to disruptive effects such as self publishing, small presses, ebooks and online publishing platforms. It'll also look at areas such as online governance, activism and censorship. It's a fascinating initiative and I, for one, am looking forward to encountering the various players and their viewpoints at the event.

I'm looking forward to it tremendously, wondering quite what I'll find compared to the city I knew and loved/loathed way back then.

* You might think that's a strange, Dan Brown-like choice of metaphors, but I have hit a goat with a Pajero and can assure you they drop fast, baby.

ArabNet's Coming To Dubai!

It's not often you find me parroting one of Spot On's announcements on the blog, but that's just what I'm about to do. The ArabNet Digital Summit, the regional digital conference forum event thingy, is coming to Dubai. The Beirut-based event has already spawned offshoots in Cairo and Riyadh, as well as a number of roadshows and other regional events. Now organiser Omar Christidis has decided to split ArabNet, recognising the diverse roles played by different parts of the region - Dubai, pretty much by default the Middle East's shop front for all things digital and media, is to host the conference component of ArabNet. The event will take place on the 24th-26th June if you want to mark your calendar.

That's a pretty smart move in my humble opinion*. It's long been a great truth that while the Levant is the cradle of IP creation and innovation, the GCC is the big market prize and the UAE, Dubai in particular, is where the sales operations belong - and, of course, where pretty much every regional ICT company is headquartered. Not only that, but Dubai is also home to many of the publishers and broadcasters who make up our regional media.

The event will be a three-day summit, with days devoted to start-ups, vertical industry content and developers respectively. Given that ArabNet Beirut has grown over the past three years to become easily the preeminent digital event in the region - and yes, I admit to having been originally surprised that an event of such quality took place in Beirut - putting the same thinking, strong content and agenda and organisational skills into a Dubai based event should result in something pretty special.

I have always been a strident ArabNet fan and the company wot I works for, the stellar digital communications agency Spot On Public Communications, is the event's PR partner - just so's you know and don't think I'm shilling you or anything sneaky like that...

Cartoon courtesy, of course, the ever so talented Maya Zankoul.

*BinMugahid nagged about the lack of the word 'opinion'. I gave in. In the good old days, you'd have seen that in Comments, but of course now it's debated on Twitter and Google+. *sigh*

The Last Minute Dick

Image by

http://www.prestonlee.com/archives/67

via CrunchBase

Pal Carrington shared this post from Seth Godin's blog. Just in case you don't know him (cue screams of 'don't know him? Don't know him?' from the neologists and social media gurus out there), Seth Godin is a frequent, respected and much followed commentator on social media, marketing and suchlike. He's a big, major league US business guru.

In fact, there's something of a Seth Godin cargo cult going on out there. If Seth says 'Hey! Stick pins in your eyes to enjoy success on the Social Web', you'll hear the sounds of screaming from all over Silicon Valley.

But I do have to take issue with the Sethmeister over this one. He says:

I hate going to the post office in the town next to mine. Every time I go, they look for a reason not to ship my package. "Too much tape!" "Not enough tape!" "There's a logo!"

The same thing happens with the tech crew before I give a speech. About 75% of the time, the lead tech guy (it always seems to be a guy) explains why it's impossible. Impossible to use a Mac, impossible to use the kind of microphone I like, impossible to use my own clicker, etc. And then, the rest of the time, using the same technology, the producer asks, "how can I help make this work for us?" and everything is about yes, not no.

To get the full effect, you'll have to go to his post - I shortened it.

Now here's where I got the issue. While I agree with the general (and, I thought, rather obvious) point that people who say 'yes' are nicer to deal with, and more successful, than people who say 'no' by default there is, as Berthold Brecht tells us, an exception and a rule.

Nearly every major conference event I have organised, moderated or otherwise been involved with has resulted in the appearance of the Last Minute Dick, or LMD.

The Last Minute Dick ignores all calls for papers, all emails asking speakers to please note down any special requirements and all requests for their PPTs and other materials before the event. The LMD will miss the speakers' briefing the day before because he's way too busy for that kind of thing.

And then he'll turn up on stage with less than an hour to go before the start of the event (always less than an hour, from 55 minutes to 15 minutes) holding his memory key with a 90 page PPT on it that integrates to five embedded videos, requires a simultaneous sound track to trigger using SMTP time coding and absolutely needs us to download and install SWIFF player from the Internet on the stage laptop. His videos will need the newest Vidalia Codec to be installed and support for Flash Version X, where X is the version above the one you actually have installed on the stage system.

He'll also need an intro video to be played from another file that will invariably crash the carefully pieced together sound/light integration that the team has been working all night on to ensure it's stable. It's on a Blu-Ray disk.

He'll pull a full John McEnroe on you when you tell him that you don't actually have Flash Version X.

"Whaat? What kind of two-bit penny-anny dump is this? Call yourself conference organisers? Jeez! Everyone got Flash X! And Blu-Ray? What do you MEAN you don't have a Blu-Ray player set up? I don't need to tell you to get a Blu-Ray player, surely? I mean, every organiser in the world has a spare Blu-Ray player! Do you know how often I speak at these things? Proper ones? In big cities? Do you? Do you? I mean, do you know who I am?'

Yes, I do. And you're a dick.

You can guarantee, by the way, that his requirements will ensure that something goes horribly wrong for the next speaker. And that you'll be around to hear him telling everyone who'll listen what complete gherkins you and your crummy company are for messing up the stage settings like that.

I'm with the guy on the stage, Seth. If you didn't tell 'em you want your own Mac, clicker or wombat on heat up there on stage, he's totally right to tell you 'no' when you pop up demanding it as the gig's about to start. And I'd back him for telling you to get off his stage, too. Because the event's always bigger than the one, lone and invariable LMD...