Madam Ghost Village Pano

Google being brilliant or scary, you call it. If you have an Android mobile and you're online, then take a number of snaps by rotating yourself, Google will generally recognise it's a panorama, stitch it and send it back to you. The shot above was from our weekend fossicking around Madam's 'Ghost Village'...

They did this stunner when we were a-hiking up in the Mourne Mountains a few weeks back. If you think about it, the processing power to analyse the volume of images uploaded to every Android mobile in the world and determine which ones would make a pano is alone a stunning thing...

Google's like Kate Bush's yoyo that glowed in the dark... what makes them special makes them dangerous...

https://youtu.be/pllRW9wETzw

That's all folks...

Beirut - An Explosive Thriller And The Dynamics Of Free Vs Amazon Advertising

Warning. Very long post about book marketing.

So here's the skinny. In Mid-March, I dropped the price of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and Olives - A Violent Romance to FREE on Apple, B&N, Kobo et al.

This then forced Amazon's Amazing Algorithms to 'price match' the books and make them free on Amazon. This is not something Amazon lets you do otherwise, only letting you make a book free for 5 days per quarter if it's enrolled in Kindle Unlimited and therefore exclusive to Amazon.

Note, as per my previous post on this, you have to change to the 35% royalty to do this, otherwise Amazon gets shirty.

Amazon's big machines decided to chop Beirut and Olives in the US store (.com) but only Olives in the UK store (.co.uk). The volumes are markedly different: 30 free Olives downloaded in the UK compared to 700 in the US.

As of today, Beirut is now free in the UK store. You can go here and get it. Do please feel free to share the link on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or another other platform where you think your followers, friends and family might enjoy a fabulous international spy thriller packed with guns and bombs and babes and stuff. [endplug]

So what has all this 'free' told us?

For a start, people have found Beirut a lot more attractive than Olives: 3,000 downloads compared to 700. As you can see from the covers side by side above, the title and cover of Olives don't really cut the mustard. Not sure what I can do about that, to be honest. However, it would appear Beirut got a bit of a lift up on some unseen list or another, because its early trajectory was amazing, speeding it to #1 free thriller on Amazon.com for a few halcyon days.

What has the knock-on effect been? A handful of Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy sales have been bubbling along, 14 copies in April and so far 4 copies in May. Sales of A Decent Bomber and Birdkill have also slowly started to lift (6 and 7 copies respectively). However, Beirut's downloads have slowly declined, dropping from a relatively steady couple of weeks at 30-50 copies, then a couple of weeks ranging from 15-30 copies and now running at 5-15 copies per day.

There have been a couple of additional reviews of Beirut and Olives alike on Amazon, 4* and 5*, thank you. But the maths is amazing - almost 3,000 downloads to drive 10 book sales and two reviews.

Generally, as my books have got better (IMHO), their sales numbers and therefore number of reviews has declined. Which is wonderful, really.

Amazon Advertising

I've also been running an advertising campaign for Birdkill on Amazon over the past week. This has been interesting, particularly compared to the experimental Twitter campaign I ran. I have kept relatively quiet on other platforms to better isolate and judge the results and impact of the Amazon campaign.

$100 of my hard-earned spent a while ago on Twitter was targeted not so much at keywords as at followers of a number of book promoters, publishers and book recommendation accounts. That resulted in 29,707 impressions and 90 clicks. I think I sold one book, so we're doing better than McNabb's Law of Clicks would have us believe should be the case.

I thought Amazon advertising was likely to be more impactful. Here, you're targeting people at the moment of browsing and purchase and you can target by genre. If you think about it, that's nigh on perfect. It's like being on someone's shoulder in a bookshop with the ability to whisper, 'That one. There. Birdkill by McNabb. Do it.'

Amazon lets you serve up a number of ad formats, placing the ads on other book pages, newsletters, into Kindles and so on. Like Google's Adwords, you bid for your clicks. In my genres for Birdkill, (Literature & Fiction: Action & Adventure; Mystery, Thriller & Suspense: Conspiracies, Mystery, Paranormal as you ask) the bidding was in the range US$ 0.40-0.50. In reality, I had to raise my bid to $0.55 to start getting impressions and eventually raised it to $0.60. My average cost per click has come in at $0.53.

The bidding works just like Google: your bid is accepted above the second highest bid, rather than just topping all bids.

So far, we're not quite done yet, Amazon has yielded 22,057 impressions, 118 clicks and two book sales and we're about 60 bucks into my budget. That's better than Twitter and again better than McNabb's law of clicks, but it's a pretty impressive catalogue of fail - Birdkill is a well packaged book and to see 118 clicks turn into 116 bounces is pretty depressing.

There has been no appreciable impact in the sale (or download) of any of my other titles since the campaign started. Unless you count one copy of Space...

Here are the Birdkill ads in the various formats Amazon supports, all auto-generated out of the base data you supply them - you don't have individual control over each creative:

 245 x 250

Didn't know those paltry two reviews would show. Five stars, mind, which is nice, but not enough reviews really. Funnily enough, that doesn't seem to have affected the CTR (Click Through Rate to you, mate), which has been just over 0.5%.

270 x 150

I like this one best of all. Those reflections are right classy...

270 x 200

300 x 250

402 x 250

980 x 55

And, finally, I is in ur Kindle...

It's worth bearing these in mind when you look at your advertisement format and the text you're planning to use... The 'astounds and horrifies' line did quite well on my Twitter campaign, which is why I decided to re-use it here. Do people want to be 'astounded and horrified'? Who knows? All this stuff is merely trial and error. If it were a science they'd teach it in school.

And so at the end of a two month campaign of experimental free offers and advertising campaigns targeting keywords and followers on Twitter (as well as messing around with a lot of organic Twitter targeting: ads.twitter.com/user/yourusername is a powerful dashboard for measuring the impact of tweets) and a genre-targeting campaign on Amazon, I am none the wiser. Although arguably better informed.

If you know anything wot I don't, or have any new angles on the above, please do feel free to share.

And don't forget to drop an Amazon review when you've read your free books!

Twitter Ads, Book Sales And Promoting Birdkill

You know I've got a new book out, right?

Right.

I've been playing about a bit with analytics and Twitter ad campaigns. I'm a big fan of Twitter and thought it would be interesting to see what I could get up to in terms of promotions and generally try a couple of things out. I've run Google adwords campaigns in the past and was particularly interested to see how Twitter stacked up against Goog.

Twitter offers a pretty powerful set of dashboards allowing you to analyse your tweets, as well as run promotions to audiences you select. There are a number of ways of slicing and dicing this, by behaviours, interests or contextually based on actions. You can also target other people's followers, which is a bit 'Google' - at the same time mighty handy and also a little creepy.

Generally, book promotion tweets invite lower engagement rates unless they mark real milestones or events or contain some element of wit, news or opinion. Nobody would be surprised to know that 'buy my book' doesn't really cut it.

Timing is also... everything. First thing in the morning, elevenses and evening tweets tend to do better. And so do book tweets that follow a wider non-book tweet, typically an interesting content share.

I ran a campaign over the past weekend which targeted a range of key words, principally 'read' and 'book'. I limited it to the UAE, US and UK and ran it over two days with a total budget of $100. The campaign was based around two tweets and two 'cards', which are a graphical element with a link displayed. Here are those very cards:

Each card graphic is 800 x 320 pixels. So each ad gives you a call to action opportunity with a tweet, a graphic and a clickable link. It's quite a neat wee package. The above turned into the below when I'd finished with 'em:

 The above got $79.29 of my spend, generating 25,970 impressions and 126 clicks.

This one got just $20.71 of my spend, but generated 13,690 impressions and 35 clicks.

Both ads performed similarly, costing around $0.60 per click. So in total my two-day campaign generated 39,660 impressions and 163 clicks to my Amazon page.

What happened? I hear you asking. How many books did you sell over this period?

One.

And I can't even be sure that one came from Twitter, because Amazon doesn't offer the same sort of analytics to authors. It shouldn't really come as a surprise, it's pretty consistent with McNabb's Law of Clicks actually.

I'm running a second campaign now, which targets a number of local UAE handles connected to reading, literature and culture with a much wider selection of creatives. That's costing more per click but getting more clicks per impression. Generally, I found Twitter easier to get my head around and more diverse than Google, but to be honest I'm not really a dashboard kind of boy...

And I'm clearly just playing around here, but there's room to explore a great deal more, leveraging different routes to find, attract and convert readers. That all costs money, of course, and at $100 for one book sale, I can see the route to bankruptcy is not only paved with gold, but also quite comprehensively greased.

Are the messages wrong? The creatives goofy? The targeting atrocious? These are all subjective and yet the dashboards available mean you can refine these, testing what is working and what isn't, increasing your success rate with each iteration. What fascinates me is how 163 people clicked on a link to Amazon and didn't click on 'Buy now'.

Anyway, it's been interesting and I'll continue to play around with it all. I hope the above is useful to someone, somewhere. And if you have any comments, views or insights, you know where to find me: @alexandermcnabb...

Book Marketing - The UAE, Stunts And Social Glue...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have, as you may have noticed, a blog. I also have a number of followers on Twitter, Google+ and a few people occasionally keep in touch on Facebook and Instagram. I have an 'author website', which I happen to think is quite natty. And I have a mailing list of quite a few people who have given me permission to share stuff about books with them. You can join them, if you like, by using the simple, easy to use form to the right of this post.

There are a few people out there who review books who have enjoyed my previous work and so have been keen to review the latest. That is a small and steadily growing resource of people who are treasured because they represent a network effect. A review tends to reach a wide audience and have the benefit of providing recommendation.

This, then, is my 'author platform' - my very own marketing machine. All of these people have, for one reason or another, given me permission to talk to them. Not all of them want to talk to me about books, a lot have been attracted by my ranting and other unstable behaviours. And so when I do talk about books, I see a drop in blog traffic and, with an increasing frequency of promotional tweets and posts, provoke a mixture of reactions from disinterest through to mild amusement, bemusement and, when an unseen line has been crossed, even mild irritation.

The balance here is clearly to try and provide interesting, thought provoking or amusing content on these platforms to increase engagement and stretch the elasticity of the Line of Follower Irritation. When it comes to book marketing, I am clearly without morals. And while I'm not quite reduced to screaming 'Buy my book!' in the faces of strangers, there have been times when I've thought about it. The trouble is, of course, people don't automatically go away and buy books just because they're asked to or told to. Oh, how much simpler my universe would be if that were the case! No, there's something else that makes us click on that 'Deliver to my Kindle' button. And I wish to God I knew what it was. I don't even recognise it in myself as a stable or discernible pattern of behaviour.

It's interesting to see how little strength there is to 'social glue', as well. People will 'like' at the drop of a hat and generally make nice, supportive noises. But getting them to take an action, beyond a click, based on social media interactions is not easy - or even a known, defined science. We basically do a number of things we think might result in that (engagement and all that stuff) and hope it's worked. Clicks are not a measure of action - as I've explained before.

Without a doubt, word of mouth has a huge role to play. Reviews, as I have mentioned above, take the form of recommendations* and so have the power of word of mouth - but I haven't seen them create notable spikes in sales. This is hard to track in terms of physical book sales because physical book distribution is such a slow and placid process. On Amazon I get day by day data and analysis and so can see spikes when they occur. They're usually of a binary nature, by the way. I'm not quite in the hundreds of books a day game!

But my experience has been that people, even when they have thoroughly enjoyed, even 'loved' a book, don't necessarily go around berating their friends about it. And a single recommendation isn't enough to send people jetting off to the nearest bookshop, either. Scale has a huge amount to do with it. If you see a positive review, have a friend or even two recommend it and then see it on display in the bookshop, then you may well act. But any of those in isolation will likely not do the job. My personal theory is the average punter will act on a book purchase after five 'touches' - and then only if the last touch is while they're actually in proximity to a BBO - a Book Buying Opportunity.

It's that scale that is the issue, of course, in the UAE - where, incidentally, much of my 'author platform' is located. The market here is relatively small (Olives - A Violent Romance sold out its run of 2,000 copies and is considered consequently to have done really very well here) and also underserved by all the major platforms - Amazon won't play here, Google and Apple have limited offerings and B&N and Kobo are non-existent. And people here will buy my books from me at signings and other events, but they'll tend not to buy a paperback from Amazon to have delivered here.

Which is why at last year's LitFest, I sat next to Orion's Kate Mills and explained that, as a self-publisher, I was weary and recognised that I actually could really do with the scale that an operation such as hers offered to reach into a market like the UK where I cannot, for all my 'platform', reach. It's there where the scale lies that brings quantum effects into play and starts to launch books towards the exosphere. Of course, in order to make that stellar journey, the book has to have 'that' quality, the something that has people interested enough to pick it up, flip it around, scan the blurb and go, 'Hmm. Sounds interesting. I'll give this little puppy a spin.' Or whatever it is they say at that sublime and subtle moment when a complete stranger decides to exchange value for your book...

Meanwhile, I'ma gonna keep plugging away on the A Decent Bomber pre-order campaign. Once November 5 is past, it'll be all about reviews and events. Up until then, I'm quietly nagging people to email their friends to ask them to email their friends with a link to the book. Because in the world of 1,000,000 clicks to get one sale, network effects are king, baby.

See? I got through a whole post without linking to the pre-order A Decent Bomber link on Amazon.com! Oh...

* Unless they're stinkers, of course! I have so far in the main avoided these, although I do say this with the feeling of mild dread that accompanies pronouncements such as 'I've never had a car accident in my life...'

Strange Searches Ride Again

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Search engines are funny things. There they are, making billions of dollars out of giving you what you're looking for on the Internet and here I am, clearly screwing up that process for a small but frustrated number of searchers.

Sure enough, some people get what they're looking for - and there is a constant stream of people finding out what's in Tim Horton's deeply egregious French Vanilla coffee as well as crappy, additive-packed products like Pringles, Aquafina, Big Mac Chicken Nuggets and their (mostly really gross) ilk.

And there are quite a number who find their sojourn here truly useful, believe it or not. I know, I know, I'm amazed myself. But thousands have landed here and found, for instance, the secret to how to switch off the trackpad on a Samsung S5 Ultrabook - I am truly glad to have helped so very many of my fellow sufferers. And many searchers for Sri Lankan gems have found my 'buyer beware' post, which is a good thing, I would submit.

But others haven't been so lucky...

Here follows a compilation of some of the stranger recent visitors to this dusty and neglected backwater of the Internet.

Subsy onche emarat
You never know, you might win a game of 'Internet Era Trivial Pursuit' with this. Nokia's head office in Finland enjoys the IP address 131.228.29.81. Which is how I know that the person searching the World Wide Web for 'subsy onche emarat' works for Nokia. Other than that, and the fact this blog is the second Google result for the phrase, I am utterly baffled. What on earth was he/she looking for?

Food adultery
This one seemed funny until I found the post the searcher found and, clearly finding it amusing at the time, I had actually headlined it 'food adultery'.

Tent Grand Hyatt Dubai octoberfest shirt
It's an oddly specific search string, isn't it? It gets you this here post from a search on Bing, sadly not the first result. However, I had totally forgotten the post and it brought back memories of an ancient - and glorious - promotional fail.

tim hortons french vanilla ingredients
*little first page win dance*

mkene fishermen in  lotoboka
It's not that someone searched Bing for this odd - inexplicable even - phrase. It's not even that they landed on the blog by searching for it. It's that when I repeat the search, Bing or Google, it returns no results. SO HOW DID THEY GET HERE? Doodeedoodoo doodeedoodoo...

faking girl sudani dubai uae
Look, I don't mean to be rude, but if you can't spell it, I don't think you should be allowed to do it. The charmer searching for this got to this post, which I am glad to say was no help whatsoever to him, but did amuse me greatly as I had forgotten it.

paper,printer,ink to print fake money
I love this one. The putative commencement of an international criminal's career, cut short not by enforcement agencies acting on his/her clearly larcenous search history but by said criminal finding instead of the clear instructions he/she sought, this blog. How that happened, I do now know, because searching the first ten pages of results on Bing, I couldn't find the offending post myself!

best way to stop my etisalat frm consuming so much dataplan in a very little time
Clearly an unhappy customer. The answer, of course, is turn off data on your mobile. You're unlikely to find any answers here, of course...

dubai faking girls sex pics
This delightful person a) can't spell and b) works for (or has access to the network at) Lutheran General Health Systems in Chicago, Illinois. The visit came from 168.235.196.136, see. Not very Lutheran as searches go, is it? 

Googled!

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You're like my yo-yo

that glowed in the dark.

What made it special,

made it dangerous.

Kate Bush, Cloudbusting

When you're using Gmail and send someone a mail saying something like 'The quotation is attached' and you forget the attachment, Google pops up with a wee dialogue saying 'Are you sure you want to send this email? Only you've forgotten the attachment, you dufus.'

Which is sort of cool and, certainly the first time it happens, sort of pulls you up a bit at the same time. This 2008 three-part video series, about inviting Google into your life is, incidentally, remarkably prescient.

On leave in the UK, I started to notice Google doing 'stuff'. I was getting wee notifications letting me know that Google had 'Auto-Awesomed' pictures I was taking on my mobile. But it wasn't until I got back that I got a BlipVert telling me that Google had made me a 'Story'. It was illustrated with a photo I'd taken of my 18 month-old niece.

I clicked on the link and watched with growing, sick fascination as a line on a world map led from Dubai to Heathrow and photos I'd taken - 'moments', apparently - started appearing in a day by day sequence, each locationally tagged and accompanied by a placename and map. Then a red line led from Wales to Hilltown and I got to see all my Christmas snaps, from the present opening frenzy (and subsequent cacophony of not one but TWO Elsa SnowGlow Dolls singing 'Let it go' to the accompaniment of small girls marching around with one hand, for some reason, waving in the air) to walks in the woods, parklands and seaside, including a red line to Castlewellan, where we spent a frozen afternoon getting enjoyably lost in the 'Peace Maze' to be found there. Google had 'Auto-Awesomed' a photo of a duck I had taken, which I had posted with a note (in a slightly scared sort of way) on Google+ - my note had been automatically added to the image in my 'Story' as a caption. Our trip back to Heathrow was another red line on a map before my New Year snaps and then 'The End'.

Like so much Google does, it both impressed and scared me. Even this 1.0 version is pretty slick, but I can see where we're going with this and, well, I'm not sure about it if you know what I mean. Goggles can identify books from their covers, landmarks from their image. Google knows when you were born, where you are now, where you've been - what you're doing and what you like. It can serve you with contextual stuff to enrich your life. It can help you with that illness by inserting itself into your DNA. Google welcomes you to the hivemind. Now, just do your bit to help feed the Queen, drone...

I was still turning this stuff over in my mind when Dina, the organiser of the MENA.Online.Literature.Today conference in Cairo, emailed me my ticket to travel there this weekend (the conference, postponed in December, is on again at the Townhouse Gallery this Saturday & Sunday). Her mail contained little more than 'Attached is your flight' and a PDF from the travel agent with the flight details.

Yesterday I went to Google Calendar to update a meeting. And I found my flight had been added as a calendar event. By Google. From the email content. Airline, flight number, time and booking code all noted.

I am under my desk typing this as we speak. I am dressed in tinfoil and have a colander on my head to stop them reading my brainwaves.

(I may also be doing a little 'I found an excuse to put a gratuitous image of Kate Bush on my blog' dance.)

How To Drool A Frog - More Weird And Wacky Searches

(Photo credit: thms.nl)

I occasionally dip into Sitemeter, the natty little analytics widget I don't use very much, to see what people have been searching to land themselves on this mouldy sub-corner of the Interwebs. I took such a dip today because I couldn't really get into the swing of writing for a while and decided to play a bit until the fancy once more took me to recommence my story of The Simple Irish Farmer, which is my WIP of choice.

I found that not a few people are clearly concerned about whether or not they put plastic in Subway bread - in fact thousands of them have Googled the topic and found themselves reading my take on the whole thing - their searches for truth leading them here. I find it very odd that a silly little blog like this can not only rank so high in search, but draw so many searchers for both this and the Tim Horton's French Vanilla Coffee is junk post. I am similarly pleased to say I have offered succour to thousands of punters who have been tearing their hair out at Chuck Norris the Trackpad on their Samsung S5 Ultrabooks.

Similarly, Sri Lanka Gems is a popular search term - and to my mild shock, my post about the gem and spice sales scams of Sri Lanka is number six result on Google. In the world. I mean, how mad is that? "Gemstones Sri Lanka" gets the same result, which I guess has Klout running around saying I'm influential about gemstones. A subject about which - I hasten to add - I am pretty much utterly bereft of knowledge let alone authority. A similar mind-boggling search anomaly is to be found in the phrase, "where did Nokia go wrong" which features this post on the first page of search results. And that's bonkers. Truly.

Somebody in Pakistan searched the Interwebs for the interesting-sounding "picrs sixi porn salik 17 21" which just led him here, which I am willing to wager a considerable sum was not the result he had in mind. Or even she, come to think of it. Apparently, online onanistic fortune favours the literate. And another rube got here by Googling "marage night fack movie". Were they after a fake movie or a fu... oh, never mind...

Search "online onanistic fortune". It's mine, all mine, precioussss...

Someone else was looking for a cartoon character curry - searching for "tom and jerry masalas", presumably to accompany a nice Daffy Duck Dosa. The searcher, rather worryingly based at Nokia's corporate headquarters over in Finland, got here instead. I say rather worryingly because you'd think they'd have a future to concern themselves about rather than playing about on Google looking for silly curries.

Another person arrived at La Blog by Googling "salmon farming in saudi arabia".

It's Yemen, dunce.

Then there are the surreal. I mean what did you think you'd get when you slammed "www.indianheroinafack blogspat.com" into Google? Blogspat. Love it. Interestingly, the 'perp' works for the Miller Brewing Company in Wisconsin, Milwaukee and was using a crappy old Nokia 5.0 browser. They got this for their troubles...

My favourite of this particular batch was the search term 'How to drool a frog' which really makes the mind boggle just a tad, but led its searcher to this post about HSBC's drooling incompetence. Which wasn't, I'm sure, what they were after. And no thank you, I don't want to know what they were actually looking for...

Any of them, come to think of it.

Final GeekFest Dubai REUNION Lineup Confirmed. Shock Horror.

JAY WUD PLAYS GEEKFEST

The Red Bull team is coming to GeekFest Duabi REUNION and they're bringing Jay Wud to play a free gig from 9pm. For those of you who haven't heard of Jay, his band opened for Guns And Roses in Abu Dhabi last year and you can hear his music using this here handy link.

The Red Bull Wings team will be at GeekFest too. Geeks with wings! Whatever next?

UBER

The Limo That Comes To You app company Uber is giving away the first Dhs100 of your trip to GeekFest Dubai REUNION! Deets linked here!

GEEKTALKS

From 8-9pm we have four talks and they'll be kept to a tight time schedule by a bunch of metalheads waiting to come on stage, so we've at last found an appropriate replacement to the timekeeping discipline introduced by Monsignor R. Bumfrey!

The talks are:

8pm Money For Nothing: EUREECA
So you've got nothing but a great idea. How are you going to raise the cash you need to make it work? Not the banks, they're useless. We all know that. From VCs? They'll take all your equity for pennies. What about crowdfunding? Or better, what about crowdfunding backed by equity participation? Eureeca.com is the first equity crowdfunding platform offering a global solution. People give you money, you give them equity. Eureeca's speaker explains how it works - and how it's already worked for young UAE startups who needed cash to make that idea a reality.

8.15pm How Google broke search. And what that means to you. SEKARI
Getting ranked by search engine Google is about the right keywords and building lots of links, right? Wrong. That used to work, but now it's last year's thing - because Google just broke search - the giant's new hummingbird search algorithm changes the game and means engagement and quality content matter more than links from loads of sites. Lee Mancini is CEO of search consultancy Sekari and he'll be explaining what's going on and how you can fix your broken search results.

8.30pm Social change and sameness SAMENESS PROJECT
The [sameness] project is a Dubai-based social initiative that facilitates moments of sameness. The "sameness" is in understanding that we are all worth the same amount in our humanity, and the "project" comes through the on-the-ground initiatives like Water for Workers, The Conversation Chair, and We've Got Your Back, that bring the sameness to life. Jonny and Fiona from the sameness project will be explaining what it is, how it works and why diversity backwards is the way forwards.

8.45pm Make money at home doing what you like NABBESH
It's the perennial promise of freelancing, isn't it? And while there's undoubtedly opportunity and need out there, we've also got unprofessional clients, rip-off merchants and the like. So how can you promote a freelance community of talented people willing to exchange skills with employers who need resources and talent now - and keep that community protected and the wheels of commerce in smooth motion? It's a big ask and Nabbesh CEO LouLou Khazen is doing the asking - backed by winning du's The Entrepreneur and a $100,000 investment round using none other than eureeca.

TECHNOCASES

3D Printers UNLEASHED
The wild men from Jackys will be showing LIVE and IN THE FLESH the sexiest printers since someone said 'Can we print Hovis?' and someone else said, 'Sure'...

Green Gadgets
Heard of The Change Initiative? They're green. They're so green you'd be greenly envious of their greenness if you were a Martian. And they've got gadgets. Oh yeah. Fancy the idea of a recycled cardboard boombox, say? This is something you wouldn't want to miss, then...

GAMEFEST

We've got an Oculus Rift and we're gonna use it! This is a hyper-cool virtual reality headset the drooling gamer goons lovely chaps from t-break are bringing to GameFest. It's apparently the latest in puke-inducing immersive gaming gadgets. Apparently there are not only brain-spinning demos to play with but also @MrNexyMedia will be demoing his game in-development, so we're talking cutting edge beta type experience things here!!!

There'll also be a PS3 multiplayer area where people can make complete goons of themselves - always a popular element of GeekFest.

COLLECTING OLD NOTEBOOK PCs

You got an old laptop you don't use any more? Clean it up and bring it along and we'll make sure it gets sent to Sri Lanka where poor young medical students from rural areas simply don't have access to their own machines to use in studying for their exams. I got involved in this after finding out about one such student, then we uncovered another four. Now we have a distribution system set up thanks to a philanthropically minded doctor in Kandy and we can use more machines. So bring that old PC down to GeekFest and we'll make sure it gets a useful - and potentially life-saving - second life. Alternatively, you can always bring those old machines to The Archive and ask for Bethany or Sarah.

FOOD, DRINK, ARRANGEMENTS. STUFF.

There are cafés, there is seating, there is a soundstage (hence Jay and the boys) and stuff aplenty. There is a hospitality area we're not quite sure what to do with yet, but rest assured someone will come up with something.

My books will be on sale there. Clearly.

WEBSITE

Thanks to @AqeelFikree, GeekFest now has a website! Check out GeekFestME.com!

GETTING THERE

Here's the PDF map or you can use Google Maps like so. GeekFest will start, as usual, when you get there (if you come!) but about 7pmish is a guideline if you want to know what time to arrive late after. The talks will start around 8ish.

There's no registration, no age limit, no height restriction or any other form of organisation. If you'd like to come along, you're splendidly welcome. 

If you'd like to perform a plate spinning act, share your collection of left-handed Manga comics or old Adobe Acrobat SKUs or just have a question get in touch with @GeekFestDubai, @alexandermcnabb or @saadia and we'll give you some space and power or whatever you need.

Is Microsoft Clutching A One Way Ticket To Nowhere?

Image via CrunchBase

Microsoft isn't really as smart as people think and it probably isn't as smart as it thinks it is, either. Its fortunes were set by being in the right place at the right time with a piece of operating system software it didn't actually code - it bought it in. Seattle Computer Products' QDOS was to become PC-DOS and, in a moment of brilliance, was licensed rather than sold outright to IBM for the company's new Personal Computer.

The result was a gravy train for Microsoft, which promptly did the dirty on IBM by licensing MS-DOS to makers of PC clones. Why IBM put up with it is anyone's guess. but by the time Compaq released an 80386 based machine ahead of IBM and took effective leadership of the PC market, Microsoft had its own version of a goose in every pot and a wagon in every barn - pretty much every PC in the world had Windows and Office installed and MS was printing money.

The OS/2 body swerve was a final blow to IBM's dream of getting back dominance of the desktop and was to start the chapter in the company's history where it exited the PC market Jobs' Apple had cheekily welcomed it to in 1981. IBM eventually sold the business - saved, in the meantime, by its ThinkPad laptops - to Lenovo just in time to avoid the current spiralling decline of the PC.

Microsoft was so busy thinking it was smart, rather than being merely an accomplished rider on the PC clone gravy train, it missed the Internet. Entirely. Netscape nearly pulled off its coup - creating a platform for third party software that would disintermediate Windows. But Gates turned MS on a sixpence and brought the company's crushing market dominance to triumph in the 'browser war' that followed. They got in late, but they got in with such venom it appeared they were unstoppable. They weren't.

The win cost Microsoft a punishing - and embarrassing - trial at the hands of the US Department of Justice. Reeling from the whole bruising process, a four year trial ending in 2002, Microsoft found itself fighting a number of persistent enemies, including Sun Microsystems, Oracle and a growing horde of passionate Linux backers - a party that IBM joined with a $10 billion investment in the open source software. By the time the next big thing came, Microsoft missed it as badly as it had the Internet - the trouble was, it wasn't one big thing but several.

Google's IPO in 2004 showed an astonished world how very big the company had grown from absolutely nowhere (today, ten short years later, it's a more valuable company than Microsoft, BTW). Three years later, Steve Jobs launched the iPhone and then Google bought in a piece of software that was to achieve precisely what MS-DOS had achieved almost twenty years earlier for Microsoft. Android.

Meanwhile, Microsoft was busy screwing up Windows in an attempt to rekindle the 'must have this year's version' of the WinTel heyday. The awful Windows Vista stalled adoption, many electing to stay with the stable and 'not broke' Windows XP. Windows 7 rectified the awfulness of Vista, but arguably it was already too late. People were playing with new toys: tablets. And Microsoft had no way to compete with iOS or Android - and no plan to, either.

Why didn't Microsoft turn on a sixpence again? Because it had nowhere to turn - its dominance of the desktop didn't stretch to the new wireless world of smartphones and tablets. And its eventual attempt to face the conundrum is all too clear from the schizophrenic Windows 8.

But it's bought Nokia - and it has the chance now to join the smartphone and tablet market with a better version of Windows that'll put the faults of Windows 8 (which is an absolutely fabulous mobile OS, strangely enough given Microsoft's long history of awful mobile OSs. Windows CE anyone?) behind it.

Only Microsoft hasn't got a huge and successful content-rich ecosystem like Amazon, Google or Apple. And it doesn't have the support of a wide enough base of applications developers. It's got Bing losing to Google, Azure losing to Amazon - too many fights on too many fronts. And too many innovations taking place away from the source of the majority of Microsoft's revenue - the desktop.

Is the party over? Yes. But does Microsoft have a ticket to the next party?

Just A Thought...

Cover of Kate Bush

So I've been thinking about this blog thing for a while. I've enjoyed myself over the years (I've been feeding this little fire for over SIX years now and likely written more words for it than I have for my books!), generally amused myself greatly and anecdotally have gathered I have occasionally provided amusement (and irritation) to others.

Nothing like the amusement provoked by the wicked and scurrilous Pan Arabia Enquirer, for instance, with its gigantic, tottering piles of 400,000 page views a month, but I have managed some mild jollity among a small, selective band of discerning blog readers and a much larger troupe of disappointed searchers for more sensible things hornswoggled by Google into emerging here rather than somewhere more useful.

I never had an objective in it all, as such. For someone whose day job revolves around defining communications objectives and the like, it's been refreshing. A little like GeekFest, I suppose it has been an anti-PR activity that has come by sheer error to have some sort of reputational value, although any reputational plus has been balanced by the alarm and calumny of being quite as frank as I have on occasion been in here. What makes it special, as Kate Bush tells us, makes it dangerous.

I don't mean to alarm you, by the way. I'm not jacking it in or anything like that. But I am perhaps going to destroy any vestigial traffic by spending more time on what has become the most intense focus in my life - books. Or more accurately, narrative.

I'm going to start posting book reviews, for instance. I've wasted them over at GoodReads in the same way a TripAdvisor review is wasted - just another voice in the thousands of contributions. I'd rather have 'em here in my own archive, tell the truth. We'll see where that takes us, but if you want to submit your book for review, I wouldn't expect much sugar-coating from around here.

Oh, I'm going to go on slapping Gulf News for being drooling morons and playing with things that pass by on life's conveyor belt and make you wonder quite what it's all about. How could I not? But I'm doing more and more book stuff in my life and I think that's going to be represented here more.

Sorry if that's not good news - I know book posts and the like kill blog traffic more effectively than the Car Eating Carrion Crow of Cephalon Cinque - but it's sort of where I'm headed and I've become quite fond of my blog, so where I'm headed, I guess the blog'll come too - peeing on the lamp posts and sniffing other blog's bums...

That's all folks...

PS: I found an excuse to put a picture of Kate Bush on the blog. My life is complete...

BlackBerry Down

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As anyone who has heard me chatting on the radio (*ahem* Every Thursday from 12.45 on 103.8FM's 'Lunchtime Live') will attest, I have long been fascinated by the precipitous dynamics of the smartphone market. In the past five years, we have seen shifts in technology and corporate fortunes on an unprecedented scale - no other industry in history has impelled such meteoric change at such speed and with such scope.

Five years ago, Nokia was the world's biggest mobile maker and a dominant force. They invented the smartphone. They had over 49% of the global smartphone market, represented 4% of Finland's GDP and boasted a market capitalisation of over 110 billion Euro. Something like 25,000 lost jobs later, Nokia's stock was rated junk, its market share stood  at something like 3% and Microsoft snapped it up for a tad over 5 billion Euro. Remarkably, the man who presided over what must stand as one of the biggest, fastest falls in corporate history, Stephen Elop, looks set to make $25 million from that sale. He came from Microsoft, spent three years destroying Nokia and now he's going back to a $25 million bonus and a stab at Ballmer's job. No wonder people call him the 'Trojan Horse'.

Over the same period, 'troubled' BlackBerry has also managed to transition from global dominance to failure - although its decline and fall has been more recent, its position protected by its strength in the conservative corporate market. It hasn't finished falling by any means, either. BlackBerry's market capitalisation has plummeted from a high of over $70 billion to under $5 billion, while its user base has actually increased, from 8 million-odd in 2007 to almost 80 million in 2013. That hasn't been enough to stem a whopping billion dollar Q2 loss - or the haemorrhage of 4,500 jobs - 40% of the company's global workforce. This is clearly a company in terrible trouble.

It's the speed of these falls that is so stunning. And the speed of the rises, too. Of course, when Steve Jobs took to the stage back in 2007 in his polo-neck and announced the future of the mobile, many in the industry had a good old laugh. Steve Ballmer, brilliantly, led the giggling. You can still enjoy the Great Visionary's laughter today thanks to YouTube. Nokia and BlackBerry weren't far behind in the hooning. But it wasn't actually Jobs banging the nails into coffins - that took Google and Android.

Google mimicked the rise of the PC by providing an 'open top' standard for multiple manufacturers with Android. Once again, it's Mac vs PC, only Microsoft and IBM are no longer players. IBM had the sense to get out, because it could. Microsoft didn't even see it coming - not as remarkable as it may seem: those with long memories will recall the company's 'visionary' leadership missed the Internet, albeit performing a remarkable pirouette on a sixpence to recover the existentially threatening situation its arrogance and lack of awareness created. This time around, the dynamics are different and Microsoft can't depend on market dominance to bludgeon its way out of trouble. And it is in an awful lot of trouble.

But Microsoft's headlines are yet to come. Today belongs to BlackBerry, the company that's had to write off almost a billion dollars against its unsold inventory of unwanted smartphones, having missed its sales targets by over 50%. Now the company itself is for sale and it's a cheaper buy than Nokia. The question is, who wants 80 million users who are, undoubtedly almost without exception, wondering whether they'll go for the iPhone or a Samsung.

Fascinatingly, BlackBerry was to have rolled out BB Messenger apps for Android and iPhone this weekend just past, but they appear to have totally blown the rollout and have withdrawn the apps after getting hit by over a million downloads, despite only short availability on small regional platforms. Screwing this one up was a real Barbarians at the Gate 'light the smokeless cigarette with a match' moment for BlackBerry.

By the way, following that Mac vs PC history repeats itself analogy, I'd guess that makes Samsung Compaq which famously led the charge against IBM by having the sheer balls to release an 80386 machine before Big Blue and rip the PC market rug from under IBM's feet...

Let It Snow!

Google the words let it snow and you shall be sore amazed, as Google has found a new way to turn us all into drooling morons following on from its amazing productivity-draining musical Google Doodle. Yes, your screen will frost up and you can clear it by holding down the mouse button and wiping the frost away or, if you're in a hurry or scared you might run into something, you can hit 'defrost' and it'll all clear away instantly.

I tried using my national ID card to wipe it away, but it didn't work. Given the current state of affairs, I'll get my chance to try out the card's ice-clearing action next week in the UK.

In the meantime, enjoy playing around with your screen as Google makes another $28 billion out of us all!