Pronouncing GITEX

It’s jee tex. Not gheetex or jittex or, God forbid, Gittex. It was originally called GITE (pronounced jeet as in French holiday home), for Gulf Information Technology Exhibition. Some bright spark thought of adding the X a few years on.

It's lie-nux. Originator Linus Torvalds is called lie-nuss. Not Linn Us. See Charlie Brown.

It's router as in trade route. It re-routes signals. Not router as in the rout of the Byzantines or as in grooving tool. Or, indeed, as in hunting for truffles.

Oh. And while we're on the subject, it's Jebel Ali as in Jebbel Alley. Not Gerbil Arlee.

Just so's we're clear...

GITEX - A Dull Show?

It’s day three of The Show To End All ShowsTM, GITEX, and there’s barely an inspiration to share. The papers are talking about the TV screens on display, which speaks volumes. Only yesterday’s Al Eqtisadiah has broken ranks so far and been publicly highly unimpressed in its front page story.

It has to be said that GITEX is looking like a show that is heading fast down the same road as Which Computer, Comdex and the world's other major horizontal IT trade shows. You don’t go GITEX to enter the Middle East market any more (at least not if you’re a multinational key brand). And you don’t do GITEX if you haven’t got a channel but would like one (there are a million other ways to recruit a channel – besides, everyone who matters has an establishd channel). And you surely don’t do GITEX just to stay ‘in’ with the government (that’s just naïve, no?). The increased frequency of today's product life cycles also means that companies are less willing to hold back products to launch at exhibitions.

And so more and more organisations are realising that they don’t actually have a solid reason to spend the very considerable amount of money it takes to put on a display at the show. This is something that could well be construed as a call for the organisers to significantly re-invent the show: and, in my view, it’s going to take vision, creativity and really smart management to keep the GITEX exhibition relevant to pretty much anyone that matters.

The transformation should arguably have started three years ago. I do wonder if they can compress that into the coming 12 months. If they can, then perhaps there’ll be a show worth attending next year.

How ironic, then, that GITEX should become a victim of its own success. Let's hope they rethink it before it's too late.

Rabid Cool Web 2.0 Technology Widget Thing Plug Post

Talking, as we were a short while ago, of searching blogs - here's something that you might like to try out. A number of people are finding their way back to this little backwater by searching for posts they remember, which means (Sherlock, me) they’re not using RSS. I do have some sympathy: it’s really not quite the ‘push button, click and go’ technology that its name, ‘really simple syndication’ appears to claim and although feed readers do make this easier than managing a drop down tab of live bookmarks, I have found a number of those readers to be, well, gnarly really.

Let me introduce you to a rather superior solution which lets you keep on top of your blogs with incredible, elegant simplicity. Netvibes lets you build your own dashboard of blogs and other content sources – anything that has a feed, in fact (including a rather natty widget that lets you keep track of Facebook activity, too – if you’re into that sort of thing…). You can then move them about on the page as you like and you can also keep groups of feeds (Dubai blogs, global blogs, blogs about beards) in tabbed pages, so that everything’s up to date, tidily put away and kept spankingly up to date. You can add the Netvibes widget to your browser (Firefox compatible, which is cool) and that makes adding a feed as simple as hitting the Netvibes logo it installs on your toolbar.

No more typing the names of posts you remember to get back to blogs! No more forgetting the blog you liked the other day! No more missing things happening around you! No more fighting with texty screens of badly formatted information!

No, please. Don’t thank me. Just be nice to a small furry animal today… Or, if you can' find any furry animals, be nice to a Gianni, as it was 'im what turned me onto Netvibes in the first place...