ArabNet - Getting Started

Image via WikipediaI went to ArabNet in  Beirut last year with very low expectations indeed. Despite my deep fondness for Beirut, it's not a city I have traditionally associated with effective regional conferences - this would have been the first I had ever attended. I suspect that attitude is at least a product of the creeping UAE-centricity that affects so many people living here, Dubai in particular.

I also had reasonably low expectations regarding the objectives of the event. Over twenty years of working in the media and communications business here, much of that focused on the technology and telecoms industries, I have long seen a lack of innovation and entrepeneurialism - and what there was all too frequently crushed by software piracy and the often remarkable inertia of decision makers who always seem to find 'no' so much easier than 'what the hell, let's go with it'. We have so long been a retail market, too - we import everything from food and toys to ideas and software. We're massively risk-averse, a condition that is exacerbated by the criminalisation of failure in much of the region. And education, particularly in the GCC, has all too often been seen as a formal process of learning fact to obtain qualification - rather than leading to centres of innovation, research and development.

There have, of course, been some notable exceptions. But they remain exceptions rather than the rule.

All of this doom and gloom were dispelled for me by ArabNet. I spent much time wandering around with a stupid grin on my face. Over a thousand smart people in a room, speakers who had something new and fresh to say (apart from the Lebanese Minister of ICT who just doled out flaccid, worn platitudes in a wasted opportunity, just one of many that I am sure he oversees) and a mixture of youth, optimism and energy together with older, wiser heads bearing cheque books - they were all there, funds, angel investors and venture capitalists. Someone commented that this was the Middle East's dot com boom, only ten years too late. And I have some sympathy with that characterisation.

ArabNet's just around the corner - it's taking place again this year, from the 22nd-24th March. This year it's expanded to become a four day event, a two-day conference, a developer day and a 'community day'. It's billed as 'the biggest digital gathering in the Middle East' and I'd tend to support that billing, although Jordan's ICT Forum probably contends for the title. The event features an 'ideathon', where startup ideas are pitched in two minute chunks - the top three voted by the audience winning seed capital grants and also a 'startup demo', five minute pitches by startup businesses to gain early stage investment. The activity has been supported by a 7-country roadshow held by the team from event organiser IBAG, which provided workshops, mentoring and consultation with over 1500 young entrepeneurs from around the Middle East.

ArabNet is a highly connected event supported by a phalanx of bloggers, Twitterers and the like. One highly amusing aspect of last year's event was the 'Twitter walls' either side of the stage, which transformed the nature of presentation and debate on the stage. The smart young things at IBAG turned it off for the Minister's address...

Seeing this level of digital entrepeneurialsm in the Middle East is still a delight for me and, rightly or wrongly, I do see ArabNet as a sort of inflection point - there had been startups before and funds before, but the bringing together of so many last year in Beirut was a first. I have never had so many conversations with digital startups as I have over the past year, ranging from copycat websites derived from ideas that already work in Western markets through to innovations that are unique to the region. I do see this as a trend, and a strong one at that. And it's exhilarating purely because there has been such a dearth of this kind of thinking in the region in the past. You can find out more about ArabNet here.



My expectations for ArabNet this year are consequently set absurdly high. Let's see...

Kriss Kindle

Cover via AmazonWith Amazon's Kindle down to $139 for the 3G enabled version, you'd almost be mad not to. So I did - I put it on my Christmas list. Amazon still doesn't support the sale of Kindles to the UAE (or the greater Middle East as far as I'm aware), so I had to use (client plug warning) Shop&Ship, the service from Aramex that gives you convenience addresses in New York, London and Singapore so that you can buy your stuff locally there and ship it over by courier. Two days and Dhs99 later and it's just arrived.

Amazon's lack of support for Kindle in the Middle East is nothing short of scandalous, particularly here in the UAE where there is abundant IP protection - abundant enough for companies like Microsoft, Sony and Paramount to open up offices and other investments here. Between Amazon and Apple, which still doesn't support the UAE or, as far as I know, broader region with iTunes, the vast majority of 'e' content is denied to all but the few 'haves' - in fact the last Spot On/Effective Measure survey showed that something like 74% of online shoppers in the UAE are expatriates - those with access to overseas accounts and addresses can buy content and goods online more easily than those without.

With the emergence of tablets and readers as a very real market force in other markets (Amazon has been serving more Kindle books than hardcover books since June last year. Christmas day last year saw Kindle books outselling all other books) and the growing market for tablets as more devices are introduced by manufacturers keen to ride the tablet/reader wave, we're going to see enormous demand for content. If it's not met, our market is once again going to get dragged behind to lag on the wrong side of the digital divide. Oh, and of course, denied access to legitimate content, the market will take to using illegal channels. As someone who has long been deeply involved in IP advocacy campaigns, even I couldn't blame 'em.

There's an argument that it's time this is taken seriously at a governmental level - there are now a number of actions that need to be taken with increasing levels of urgency in order that the current lag in the application and use of technology in the UAE and wider region do not start to truly hamper this society in standing alongside other advanced world societies in terms of the way that information is formatted, accessed and shared. We need to focus on content creation, on opening up Internet access (and lowering the ridiculous cost of broadband), on building e-learning initiatives, incentivising entrepeneurialism (and de-criminalising business failure) and opening market access to international players and platforms.

And we need Amazon and Apple to open up to this market - over 99% of mobile apps were served by Apple last year, a market worth over $3 billion. This year Gartner reckons the mobile app market will be worth $6.8 billion and that Apple will retain something like a 75% share. Amazon dominates the market for books, with over 700,000 titles available on Kindle.

And. They're. Not. Here.

FNC Committee Slams TRA, Telcos Bigtime

Image by bbcworldservice via Flickr

We pay 85% more than Turkey, 85.5% more than Ireland and 83.1% more than Sweden for our broadband. This should come as no surprise (consider that the Japanese pay $0.27 per megabit per month for broadband and these other figures look positively benign). What is, perhaps, a surprise is that the news comes to us via Emirates Business 24x7.

A special committee reporting to the UAE Federal National Council has found that prices of telecommunications services are higher than those in several Arab and European nations refuting, according to Emirates Business 24x7, “The common perception that telecom charges in the UAE are low...”

Refuting a common perception among the mentally deranged, perhaps chaps, but I think you’ll find that the rest of us know perfectly well that we’re being gouged on an intergalactic scale by a cosy duopoly buoyed by a compliant regulator.

The EmBiz story reports that telecom prices across the OECD are, on average, 66% lower than in the UAE. The picture’s even more depressing when you look at the prices business users are paying for broadband – 91.1% more than Morocco, 83% more than Ireland and so on. In fact, prices in Europe are, on average, 95.1% lower for broadband connectivity.

The committee has concluded, in telling words, that “...in the past three years there has been no benefit from competition for consumers.”

In fact, the report hands out a pretty comprehensive drubbing to the TRA, pointing to the effective monopolies that the two telcos have established over certain areas, the lack of subscriber focus in regulation and generally accused the TRA of “failure”.

It’s a no-brainer that low-cost, high speed, highly available broadband is a critical element in supporting economic development in the Internet age. Jordan reacted to that need, expressed at the Dead Sea Forum in 1999 with the privatisation of Jordan Telecom, a move that started the country’s march towards being the region’s most competitive telecom market and where significant economic value is being generated by a dynamic and burgeoning Web-based technology industry. Egypt has seen blisteringly fast adoption of broadband and, once again, is seeing significant and growing economic value being generated through its online capabilities.

The UAE, once the leading telecom market in the Arab World (and actually pretty far ahead of the rest of the world at one stage – the UAE was 100% fibre-optic before the UK, for instance) is fast dropping behind. We’re paying too much for broadband at both the domestic and business level and it’s hampering adoption and innovation. We’re seeing an increasing number of Internet-based innovations (including, but by no means limited to, VoIP) being used as a business advantage elsewhere while our operators continue to cling to circuit-switched pricing models at the expense of their customers' business competitiveness.

Low-cost, high speed Internet access could, and should, be a major advantage being offered to businesses wishing to set up in the UAE to serve regional markets. And it's not - it's actually a major disadvantage. A trading economy, the UAE’s businesspeople can’t even use mobile data services when they’re travelling overseas because roaming data tariffs are insanely high. And those mobile services are going to become increasingly key to us all.

It’s good that the FNC committee has highlighted the massive discrepancies in value, despite the operators’ claims that they’re price competitive and great that its work has resulted in a resounding wake-up call for the regulator to be more subscriber focused.

Will anything change as a result? I remain, as always, optimistic...

(Interestingly, the committee found that 6,629 complaints had been logged about Etisalat’s mobile service quality, against a whopping 57,062 complaints about Du’s mobile service quality – a number made even more impressive by Du’s lower subscriber base.)

Mum, What's An ArabNet?

ArabNet founder Omar Christidis together with Samer Karam, Sana Tawileh and with the others on their team, pulled off a major coup – the first event in the Middle East that aims to foster web-enabled businesses and put start-ups together with investors and the other ecosystem participants they need to thrive and flourish. Alongside this, the conference aimed to investigate the issues, opportunities and future of doing business in an increasingly Internet-dominated Arab World.

The ArabNet conference in Beirut takes place yesterday and today. I attended the first day and so I can only comment on that – but I’ll be watching the Twitter feed (The tag is #ArabNetME) with great interest.

I’m by no means overdoing it when I describe ArabNet as a triumph. It’s actually a number of triumphs rolled into one. First and foremost, it’s a minor miracle that this event was put together so brilliantly and in Beirut, to boot. Sorry, chaps, but Beirut has not exactly carved its name recently as the place for important regional conference events and yet ArabNet has clearly shown that Beirut is not just a viable but a brilliant venue for them.

The event was impeccably organised. Having headed up teams doing stuff on this scale, I am only too aware of what a huge and difficult job it is. The technical setup, the exhibition area and the management of the entire staging and flow of the event were world class  – and so was the event itself. Great speakers included Aramex supremo Fadi Ghandour who was nothing less than inspirational in a mashed-up Anglo-Arabic after-lunch ‘graveyard slot’ address that had the audience standing, sitting, laughing and clapping – when they should by rights have been sleepily digesting. Some people had been whingeing on Twitter in the morning sessions that they thought the conference should have been held in Arabic – Fadi’s solution was to speak in both, with sentences that flew from East to West with brio and wit that must have had the poor old translator's head spinning.

Showing incredible wisdom for such a young team, the ArabNet guys masked the Twitter-feed displays to either side of the stage during the keynote session when a succession of important gentlemen spoke. The Lebanese Minister of Comms was indeed so incredibly important that he could only spare an audience of 1,000 highly online entrepreneurs and web-professionals from around the Middle East two minutes (and I do not exaggerate) out of his, we were told pointedly, busy schedule. He lost as many hearts and minds as Ghandour had previously won, his brief speech nestled cosily in a keynote session that, for me at least, resonated perfectly with a similar address I had heard given by Michel Murr at Termium over ten years ago - with nothing added and nothing taken away.

Twitter was not kind, and rightly so. ‘The Internet is important,’ was one of the many aphorisms that instructed us all. The howl of outrage was neatly masked by the ArabNet logo displays, but we could all see the feed on our screens. Which showed how totally disconnected the terrible old men up there were.

Lebanon has just about managed to cobble together one meg ADSL access – a somewhat pathetic achievement that was echoed in the conference room as more and more people snapped open their clamshells and tried to get online. Internet access slowed to a snail’s pace and yes, despite this, ArabNet trended Twitter globally for over an hour. Having said that (and being pleased for all concerned), I am increasingly worried at this new version of the Middle East’s old obsession with The Guiness Book of Records. People, it doesn’t have to trend to be important or relevant.

The day flew by – one session, the IdeaThon, had five new startup schemes sold to the audience by their progenitors in two minute pitches, while the afternoon Startup Demos session pitched ten up and running business schemes in need of investors (‘angel’ or otherwise). These pitch sessions provided great entertainment, were an inspiring display of innovation and gave a very clear indication that this region is now emerging, perhaps blinking a little, into an age of Web-enabled business.

The only part of the day that dented my enthusiasm and optimism more than the keynote session (note to Omar and team – you can ditch the suits next year and we’d none of us mind one jot) was the ecommerce panel. Badly led and therefore lacking inspiration or challenge to meet, it was as frustrating as watching someone wall-hanging yoghurt. Twitter was, once again, not kind and the general feeling in the room was up there for all to see – “please make this stop”.

And so on, via the Beirut-Amman joint Twestival, to the gala dinner – which was splendid. Tragically, the day having been incredibly long, I suspect a few hundred chocolate desserts (the end of a five-course menu) got trashed.

ArabNet was everything we had hoped for and more. Like the iPad, it’s not the end of the road but a first glimpse at where the future is headed. In well over 20 years of being involved with this region’s technology industry as a commentator and communicator, I can honestly tell you I have never seen such energy and hope for the future as I saw at ArabNet.

All they have to do now is brush aside the terrible old men and get the cost of broadband down, access speeds up and improve the availability and reliability of connectivity in the region. If anyone came away from ArabNet without the clear impression that this one single investment in infrastructure is vital to the future of the region as a viable economic force, then they were either daft as a brush or a Minister who was too important to be engaging with young entrpeneurs and innovators. Or both.

More fool them.

(A million thanks to ArabNet Conference Cartoonist Maya Zankoul, whose first pic of the day was an illustration for this post! Her cartoon above is licensed under a Creative Commons license. Another cool thing about ArabNet has been the assiduous support of a number of  bloggers, Twitterers, a cartoonist and a smart live feed too!)

Piracy's Death - Innovation's Birth

Image by Joriel "Joz" Jimenez via Flickr

The first headline I ever penned as a writer and journalist in the Middle East was for a column in 1986. I was quite proud of it (be gentle, both I and the market were young): "Software Piracy Waives the Rules".

Ever since then, the theft of intellectual property has held the Middle East market back - both in software development and in other innovations involving probably the region's greatest potential asset (oustide oil): intellectual property.

Call me optimistic, but I do believe there is a new wave of innovation washing the shores of the Middle East and it's being driven by a generation of people who have decided to explore the potential that the Internet opens up. I'm very much looking forward to ArabNet in Beirut next week, where we'll be able to see for ourselves just how that process is shaping up and perhaps gauge how strong and viable the movement is.

I have watched innovation get squashed in this region for much of my time here, a constant sadness to me. I watched the first generation Arabic software companies flounder (great innovators such as SaudiSoft, Sakhr and Nafitha sent to the wall by endemic software piracy that ripped the foundations out of their businesses and forced them out of the consumer software markets) back in the 1980s and I have watched piracy defining the market ever since - software, music and television alike - to its detriment.

Over the past twenty years, the region has been very much a consumer market - with piracy being a constant barrier to anyone considering the high cost of entry in developing, say, applications software. There have been a few highly notable exceptions to this, mostly Jordanian but also Egyptian and Lebanese -  mostly involved in creating bespoke software for international markets. But innovation - software innovation and business innovation based on pretty much any form of electronic content or property - has been stifled by the piracy of intellectual property and the unwillingness of regional governments to effectively enforce the IP legislation that is in place in every country in the region now.

I've posted before about my interest in how the very many social relationships that have opened up around the region are playing a role in bringing people together - social networks, together with the physical events they are triggering such as Tweetups and even GeekFests have allowed people to share ideas and approaches and generally helped to speed an ongoing process that is being driven by a large number of organisations and initiatives that are helping to foster entrepeneurship in the Middle East - from NGOs such as The Queen Rania Centre for Entrepeneurship and the WEF backed YallaStartup! to private funds investing in new business ideas such as Middle East Venture Partners. It just takes a glance at the ArabNet website to see that there's something very definitely going on here

The wonderful thing is that now there is a new freedom: the Internet has brought a new class of web-based businesses. The one overwhelmingly marvellous thing about 'the cloud' (the idea that you can use web-based applications and services to do the stuff that you used to do on your own computer) is that you can't steal it. Software piracy is a thing of the past. People can now develop in the Middle East, for the Middle East, and actually look to gain viable revenue from their work. And users in the Middle East can pay a reasonable monthly fee for access to services - or get them for free where business models are based on free access to consumers through raising alternative sources of revenue (A la Google).

All we've got to do now is get the region's telcos to wake up and smell the coffee - embrace online business models rather than clinging to the last shreds of circuit-switched thinking. Bringing down the price of broadband should be an absolute priority - because right now the Middle East has the potential to do what IP theft has stopped it doing for decades - make money out of the intelligence of its people.

The Unbearable Inevitability of Disruption

Image via Wikipedia

I started today off taking part in the Dubai Eye Radio Apple iPadFest. The launch last night has meant that iPad has trended Google consistently for the past 24 hours, beating Obama’s State of the Nation address into as low as 6th place. The buzz on Twitter, blogs, radio stations and TV has been phenomenal – and it was nice to see Sky News cut live to the announcement and then lose the link, totally flubbing the story and cutting to Milliband and Clinton droning on sanctimoniously about Yemen instead.

Given, then, that it’s international iPad day today, I thought I’d expand a bit on something I said yesterday. Granted, it’s an element of the McNabb catechism, but I think it’s core to the million dollar question for people who write books – will people use this thing rather than a book? Could I see myself doing that?

The catechism bit is this: “Quality becomes irrelevant when technology enables access.” This has been the case consistently over the ages. The first example that I can think of is the invention of the printing press. The movement of knowledge around Europe in the Dark Ages was laboriously slow, illuminated manuscripts painstakingly copied by monks in scriptoria and jealously guarded from those ‘unfit’ to have access to such a trove. These books were beautiful, true labours of love that were illustrated in amazing detail, both as illustration of the text as well as illustration to give form to concepts and ideas contained in the content.

The Book of Kells

Then William Caxton pitches up without so much as a by your leave and invents the printing press. Suddenly anyone could make multiple copies of books, let alone posters and leaflets. The significance of the invention for governments, let alone the Catholic Church, was tremendous. The quality of the print was lousy by comparison, but that didn’t matter. Technology had improved access.

An early Caxton print
 

Each major leap forward in technology since has had a similar effect, the telegraph, the telephone, wireless and so on. Each time technology improved access, quality didn’t matter. Would I prefer a lovingly written letter on fine vellum telling me that my daughter has had a healthy 8lb baby three months after the fact? Or a terse telegram printed out on strips of paper in block capitals?

There’s another example from an earlier post here, but my favourite comes from last time Apple pulled a stunt like this. I, like many other people, bought a CD player and started buying CDs instead of vinyl. The quality was so much better, banks of 16-bit analogue to digital converters straining away to sample sound at a staggering 44 MHz to give a 22 MHz playback – higher than the human ear can hear (the 44/22 relationships is thanks to the Nyquist criterion. You don’t want to know about that, trust me). I bought the ‘you can hear the conductor put down his baton’ sales line and our house filled with racks of CDs, the cassettes and vinyl getting dusty in the attic.

Now I’ve ripped all my CDs and play them on our iPods. The process of ‘ripping’, compressing a CD track to an MP3, causes a reduction in quality. Worse, I listen to most of my music when I’m driving – using a little radio thingy that plugs into the cigarette lighter. So my reduced quality sample (reduced high end as well as dynamic range) is now played over a radio link (further reducing both) to give me an audio experience that is worse than chrome cassette.

Do I care? I do not. I have access to all my music in one handy player (well, three, if I’m honest).

The qualitative argument made by publishers is of the quality of writing. Quality is a funny word (it is impossible to define, according to the key character in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), we have quality of product, quality of mercy and a million other qualities. The key to the ‘will people adopt e-reading’ debate is not quality of writing – it’s the quality of experience. We see reading as essentially tactile , you know, ‘I like to curl up a warm sofa with a good book’ but that’s just force of habit. We used to see music in the same sort of way, we were attached to good old vinyl and didn’t like those cold little silvery platey things.

Believe me, reading a book on a computer screen is a real bitch (anyone who’s been through the authonomy mill knows that all too well). But we already read more on screens than we do on paper each day. And we write books on screens, too.

The convenience of an e-reader that is readable, that turns pages fast and that gives us access to books, newspapers and anything that the Internet can chuck at us is, I believe, just about enough to start the ball rolling. I’m not saying we’re all going to be using readers by the end of the year, but I believe that tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people will.

This will have any number of effects. One will be that there will be more authors able to reach wider audiences. Another will be that people will have access to a wider choice of reading material from more ‘voices’ than ever before. Another will be that authors will make less money on average, although have the potential to make more money than before. And another will be, as I said yesterday, that publishing will be changed forever. Quality, as the publishing industry has it, will suffer to a certain degree as everyone who thinks they can write a book shares their awful scribbling (I blush when I read my first book, Space, now. It got the old authonomy gold star and it is very funny but it’s an awful mess of a thing). But that’ll even out as imprints emerge that build reputations around offering new, good quality writing.

We called the iPad disruptive on the radio this morning. And disruptive it most certainly is. Sure, the Kindle was first. But the iPad looks slicker, a great deal more usable and with an iTunes-like back end it's likely going to set the market afire.

Internet Worse Than Smack Shock Horror

Image via Wikipedia

I know, I know. Barely a post in two weeks and now here I am flooding the damn blog. But Gulf News today contains so much joy that I feel I have to share...

A story on Internet addiction graces The Newspaper That Tells It Like It Is today. 'Forget H1N1, it's all about the smartphone virus sweeping across universities these days' squawks GN in an article that reveals many shocking truths about today's young people, including the fact that they are looking up questions in class using their BlackBerries. Good God! What is the world coming to? What we need around here is a good dose of National Service, I'm telling you!

The piece (linked begrudgingly here) contains a neat questionnaire designed to test whether or not you are addicted to technology. It contains telling, brilliant questions specifically crafted to test your levels of addiction to technology such as, "Do you stay online longer than originally intended?".

I propose an alternative test. Read these questions to your children and loved ones and mark down their reactions. Do look for signs of lying, such as shifty eyes, rubbing noses, being foreign and masturbation.

If you answer 'Poonloop' to more than three of these questions, you may need help. Do feel free to consult Dr Kimberly Young, whose questionnaire in Gulf News inspired this infinitely more useful and sensible list of questions.

1) Do you want to grind broken glass into your eyeballs if you are kept away from Twitter for more than 24 hours?

2) Do you use the Internet rather than traditional media for the following purposes:

• To wrap your chips in.
• To pack breakable items when moving house
• To clean glass.

3) Do you believe anything you read on the Internet which is not substantiated by Gulf News?

4) Do you send and receive e-mail regularly? Do you feel inadequate if other people get more 'spam' than you do? Have you ever replied to a Nigerian's business proposal?

5) Do you think that 'spam' is a) An unsolicited email b) A type of processed meat?

6) If you cannot for some reason access the Internet, do you lollop around drooling and screaming out random swearwords at scared passers-by?

7) Have you ever talked to a girl on the Internet? Did it make you feel good or give you a feeling of momentary satisfaction followed by unbearable, suicidal guilt?

8) Have you ever lied to anyone about how old you are over the Internet?

9) Do you think putting 'tw' in front of words is funny?

10) Have you ever destroyed someone's life using the Internet in a cold-hearted crime of premeditated identity theft?

A Beautiful Failure

Image via Wikipedia

My post earlier this week about the days of makeup and SprayMount drew a couple of starry-eyed comments from fellow ancients who could remember the smell of galley being pasted down onto board, which was lovely. But a link I got from Nieman Labs yesterday night really made me stop and think about these things. Bear with me, this might just be relevant somehow, in some way.

Digital design agency Information Architects took part in a pitch to redesign Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger and lost the pitch in what they describe, rightly IMHO, as a ‘beautiful failure’. They had applied ‘new world’ design thinking to a newspaper. And golly, what an interesting set of ideas they presented. Their piece on it is linked here and I do recommend a read.

Newspaper design has long been predicated on the need to control the readers’ eyes, big bold headlines scream important story, type is arranged to give the reader a progression through the page, elements are balanced so that readers’ eyes find information in a logical, flowing way. Typography is used to denote importance – a bold cap in white space draws attention, an italic caption under a picture is an element we recognise and expect. In fact, if the text floating immediately under a picture weren’t a caption, we’d be wrong-footed by the discontinuity.

But Information Architects did a brilliant thing. They designed their newspaper as a paper for a digital age reader, recognising the fact that our habits, our expectations of the format of content, have changed.

The first thing that really got me going was that they had put important text keywords in blue. I thought that was amazing. Although, obviously, paper doesn’t hyperlink, we now know what blue means – it means a keyword. Together with their decision to go for a big body text with big leading, this meant their proposed body copy didn’t look like a newspaper. But IA had already realised that: they took the conscious decision to throw out ‘conventional’ newspaper design – the idea that a newspaper should somehow follow rules that made it look like a newspaper.

They did a lot of other cool stuff, too – mixing column formats and using infographics, big pictures and left to right, top to bottom prioritisation of stories, much of which was informed by using a ‘web-centric’ approach to design. But it’s the blue keywords that would have been a ‘beautiful’ revolution.

While you obviously can’t click on the blue words in the paper, IA’s idea was that by scanning these keywords, you should be able to read the basic, core, news on the page in 10 seconds. The paper’s website would mirror these keywords with a link to a series of sub-links arranged chronologically. That’s a huge decision, meaning that the journalist, or in this unfair world the sub-editor, would have to pick out the keywords for the reader – a new skill in itself. And then the web team would have to work with those words to provide depth and context behind them (something you could see a technology like Zemanta taking a role in). It’s an exhilarating idea that links print to web and challenges the way that information is presented, managed and prioritised by the ‘traditional’ medium because it recognises the way we have changed in the way we browse, consume and identify information.

(Zemanta is a cool plug-in I use to provide me with contextual information related to blog posts - it selects copyright-free images for me to use and provides 'autolinks' for posts. I don't usually use the links but I did in this post both to 'blueify' it and also to show how a technology like Zemanta could be used to help automate the production of links for a project like Information Architects' newspaper. Okay, okay I'll be a good boy and get back to the snarky, goofy stuff next week, promise.)

Windows 7 Barf

Image by Esparta via Flickr

I almost managed a week without posting, thanks to Phillipa, but now I'm blowing it.

Twitter has been a-tweet with disgusted tweets linking to a very odd thing on YouTube - Microsoft's 'Host a Windows 7 Party' video.

It's linked here. Watch it before you read on, I would. Get it over with. Content warning - it's very, very, very crap - so don't say I Rickrolled you or anything.

Done? Fine, get your breath back, there's no rush.

Now it might just be that this is a really smart, post-ironic teaser that's going to lead to a really hip Madison Avenue type 'We woz just leading you on' follow-up. If it does that, Microsoft has lost my custom, because I'm really not in the mood to be messed around with by smartarses using social media to prove they're cleverer than I am. Right now, I want brands to start behaving better because I've had enough of being fed bullshit by corporations and just want honesty, integrity and straightforward communication. You jerk me around, I'll invest time punishing you. That's the new deal, guys.

Alternatively, this could just be an unbelievably turgid dollop of woeful, mind-numbingly asinine and utterly inane idiocy of appalling proportions. It could be the most ill-conceived, zeitgeist-missing 'campaign' of all time. Comments have been disabled on YouTube, which is not a good thing as Microsoft would quickly have seen that this was the daftest idea since someone decided to design a car called 'Edsel' - whether it's a 'smart' teaser or a genuine, epically misguided, attempt to get Middle America to hold spontaneous 'fun' Tupperware party style events across the nation.

Hey! Coool! Softerware! Like Tupperware! Why didn't we think of that before? Awesome! Good jooob!

End result? I truly think Microsoft has lost the plot. Marketing was the only thing it did superlatively well.

Where do you want to go today, Google? It's your world, now...

PS: I hated Vista. I wanted to believe in Win7.0...

If My Car Were Windows Vista

If my car were Windows Vista, it wouldn’t unlock without asking me if I’m really sure I want to unlock it. The door would only open once I had confirmed that yes, I do want to open the door and no, I don’t want to play with the little purple dinosaur. Once I confirmed I wanted to open the door, it would then make the sound of a door opening but not actually unlock the door until I had confirmed that opening the door is what I really, really want to do.

It would take 60 seconds to actually unlock. At least.

I would then have to go through the same routine to start it. Every time I select a gear, it would ask if I’m sure that’s the gear I wanted. If I put it into automatic, it would play calming music and its windscreen would display a lovely blue/green iridescence. It would then ask me what gear I wanted. The tiptronic gears would have a delay of between one and ten seconds, while a display would flash a moving gear symbol at me along with the text, ‘Changing gear’.

For no apparent reason and without notice, my car would not move beyond second gear for long periods of time, forcing me to crawl along the hard shoulder. Then it would announce it had finished updating itself and fixing its file system and suddenly take off at great speed.

It would occasionally switch off the engine and, when I had coasted to a halt, ask me if I wanted help to fix the problem I had with the engine. I would have to answer yes, then it would restart and tell me how much it had enjoyed helping me to find a fix. Occasionally it would break down completely and parts would fall off. It would then ask if I wanted to find a solution. When I answered in the affirmative, it would tell me which parts had fallen off. When major parts fall off, it would ask me if I wanted to tell Microsoft about the problem I had caused.

If my car were Windows Vista, it wouldn’t start on cold mornings, hot mornings or mornings when I was in a rush. It would sit in my driveway flashing ‘Not Responding’ on its windscreen. If I took out the battery and reconnected it, then it would start first time every time. Occasionally, calling someone called Task Manager would help, but by no means always and it would take a huge amount of time for him to answer the phone. It would be safer just to disconnect the battery first thing.

When I tried to sound the horn, it would go online to find the right Codec for my horn and then fail to find it. Three hours later, it would go 'parp' for no apparent reason. Refilling it with petrol would be a challenge because there isn't a petrol cap release lever. I would have to sit at the petrol pump until, finally, it would ask me if I wanted to open the petrol cap. It would then play me a 30-minute video in Malay of why petrol is dangerous and only open the cap if I had clicked YES to agree that I understood the risks of using petrol. The fuel meter and reality would be completely disassociated.

Every time I took it for a service, the service manager would tut a lot and talk about critical updates, then keep it in the shop for two weeks for what he calls a ‘service pack’. When it came back, random bits would stop working. I would get messages telling me that the indicator wasn’t working, would I like to have the window opened so I could put my hand out to indicate my direction? If I said no, it would report me to the police for unsafe driving. If I said yes, it would tell me that it had fixed my Optimum Advanced Traffic Directional Warning System and ask if I would like to fix it again next time automatically? If I said yes, next time I tried to use the indicator, it would ask if I wanted to have the window opened so I could put my hand out to indicate my direction.

If my car were Windows Vista, it would have SatNav. Every time I programmed a route, the system would tell Microsoft where I was going and why. It would only work in Xhosa and a little known dialect of deepest Mongolia unless I agreed to have a Windows Live account, in which case it would work in the language of my choice for precisely fifteen minutes or four roundabouts, after which it would default to Xhosa until I accessed my Hotmail account and agreed to play with the purple dinosaur and accept MS into my life.

If my car were Windows Vista, I’d be highly likely to upgrade to Car 7.0 out of sheer desperation. But I sure as hell am thoroughly road testing the new car this time around. Because if I’d truly appreciated how bad this car was going to be, I’d have stayed with Car XP at any cost...

NufNuf

Image by S and C via Flickr

I was driving over the highlands north of Braemar. It was the first week in January and bitterly cold and wet, the biting rain whipping over the exposed bleakness just turning to freezing. I stopped for the two despondent-looking hitch-hikers huddled together on the side of the twisting highland road. They were rosy-faced with the cold and grateful for the lift as they bustled wetly into the car.

“Where are you going?” They asked me.

“I don’t know,” I answered. “I’m just following the computer.”

There was a sudden silence. I handed them the printout. They both held it, open-mouthed, alternately reading the list of instructions and looking up at me in case I had a knife or something.

“B-Braemar will be fine, if that’s okay?” The braver of the two said. But their expressions were clear – I might as well have announced I could see bats swooping out of the sky as I admired the shapes of their skulls with a twisted anthropologist’s drug-pumped intensity.

In 1988, you didn’t drive around the country cluelessly following a computer printout. Nobody had even heard of Autoroute, let alone Tom-Toms and SatNav. These are the perils of the early adopter. People think you’re a nutter all the time. I’ve learned my lessons the hard way – these days I let other mugs wrestle with the unusable geek-fodder at the bleeding edge of technology.

Last weekend, 21 years after Autoroute 1.0 (no printed maps back then – you got a screen map and a printout of directions) and Braemar, my mobile phone took us to Al Ain. Having just got a new N86 (following two perfectly happy years pooh-poohing early adoption freaks such as Gianni and CJ), I finally got a phone that does 3D mapping, SatNav and locational services thingies. It also does in-car FM music transmitting, Twittering, Facebooking and all the other things that we are told telephones should do nowadays. These things all being over and above the actual speaking to other humans stuff that appears to be going out of common practice with increasing rapidity.

The first thing that amazed me was the process of paying for the mapping application license. I bought a month’s trial, just for the hell of it (I’m like that, I can splurge Dhs32 with abandon – I’m such a mad, impetuous thing!) and the card transaction over the mobile was smooth and problem-free. In fact, I’d actually finished it before I realised this was the first time I’d actually paid real card-money for something over a mobile.

We set off for a happy afternoon’s following the directions of the slightly arch-sounding female voice emanating from my phone on the 180Km-odd hack to Al Ain from Northern Sharjah.

We christened her NufNuf. It’s a long story, but if the Brits have a Tom-Tom, we reckoned the Irish could have a Mick-Mick and therefore the UAE could have a NufNuf. NufNuf was the name of the West Highland terrier that Sheikha sent by private jet from London to distraught International School of Choueifat Sharjah Headmistress Dorothy 'Dotters' Miles after canine predecessor Kirsty was dimensionally transmogrified by a car driven by a careless parent. It’s been a long stint here in the UAE, I know...

NufNuf pin-pointed Jebel Hafeet on the map easily enough – so can I, by the way, but we wanted to see if she had a better route – and so we set off. On the way, we slipped in a sneaky detour to Sharjah post office, which rather led to a minor huff from NufNuf. “Recalculating Route”, she sniffed at us several times as we consistently ignored her advice to turn back in a number of increasingly desperate and highly ingenious ways.

Once out on the open highway and going in the prescribed direction, she calmed down a bit. It was clear that the maps she was using were good, but a little out of date. This shouldn’t be a major problem and you can appreciate that updating maps of Dubai would be enough to turn Magellan insane, but if people are going to go around selling maps of somewhere like the UAE, they need to take the hit and keep ‘em up to the minute.

The other surprise was that NufNuf was au fait with the applicable speed limits. This led to me getting told to ‘Observe the speed limit’, much to Sarah’s smug glee.

The acid test was Al Ain, though. Would NufNuf negotiate that confusing grid of tree-lined roads with their mad roundabouts and flowery decorations? I’ve always made my way around Al Ain with a rich mixture of luck and judgement in an 80/20 proportion – the similarity of many boulevards to each other, the frequent roundabouts and confusing signage make negotiating the charming desert oasis city of Al Ain, as a place you don’t visit often, a real nightmare.

NufNuf breezed it. A tendency to repeat the same instruction three times and more was forgiven when life got hectic and she picked a better route than the one I’ve always used (don’t ask me what my ‘traditional route’ is, it’s sort of 'pass Hili Fun City and continue down the roads that feel right'). She can be a bit literal – she wanted to take us on a road that wasn’t the one that leads up Jebel Hafeet, but that’s OK – she was headed for the mountain itself because I hadn’t bothered searching for the Mercure Hotel that’s actually up Jebel Hafeet. If you search for it, it's there.

I’d have liked the option to pick a location on the map rather than search for hotels and things, but maybe I just haven’t found it. What I did find was that my mobile acts as a perfectly serviceable and useful SatNav, that it doesn’t cost much to keep the maps up to date and that I’d use it for getting around relatively infrequently visited places like Al Ain and Abu Dhabi in future. I’ll be using it in the UK and Ireland this summer, too, you can bet your sweet bottom.

I also found out that the four-hour drive to Al Ain and back with NufNuf assisting (With a long phone call and some compulsive Tweeting, I admit!) will do for a battery: an in-car charger cable is a most desirable accessory.

Mind you, she did talk a lot, did NufNuf. Particularly about that speed limit business...

The Amateur Anthropologist

Image via Wikipedia

I discovered Google Silences yesterday. What’s a Google Silence? It’s when you’re having a big fat old argument with a colleague that’s degenerated from debating solid, intelligent, factually based arguments into ‘Is so!’, ‘Isn’t so!’.

It's at this point that the person you’re arguing with goes suddenly and terribly quiet.

Why?

Because they’re Googling the topic you’re arguing. A Google Silence is followed by two possible outcomes.

“Ha! I OWN you, punk!”

Or

“This is a stupid argument anyway and I think we should move on.”

Geek

Image by Larsz via Flickr

Some side effects from this morning's Business Breakfast slot, with no particularly massive point to make, it's just that I found them interesting. But then I'm a geek, no?

Google is the place where 30% of the Internet goes every day - and it spends an average of 8.5 minutes of that day on the site. As we know, those minutes are spent looking for stuff and clicking on the results - including those lovely, lucrative little Adwords. In fact, Google's Q1 2009 revenue was equivalent to the entire US ad spend on print media. Not bad for a few clicks.

In fact, Google's revenue is equivalent to something like 17% of total global TV advertising spend ($123 billion according to Informa). That's not bad for a single provider, no? It's certainly bigger than any single network. Google's pretty good at growing stealthily wealthy, actually.

Ranked #4 globally by Alexa, Facebook currently gets 19% of the Internet's eyeballs every day, BTW. Interestingly, people spend over four times as long there, though - an average of 25.3 minutes a day are invested on Facebook.

The time people spend on Google appears to be a little more productive, however, Facebook's revenues for 2008 were $350 million.

Twitter's revenue - and, indeed, its revenue model remains pure speculation...

Slushpile

The publishing game is a funny one. You’d have thought that writing a book was one of the hardest things you can do, but you’d be wrong. The really hard bit is getting it published.

Most UK publishers won’t even look at your book unless you’ve got a literary agent, although some authors have done it the other way around (Iain Banks, for instance). So you have to send off the first three chapters of your magnificent octopus* to literary agents along with a letter outlining why it’s interesting and a synopsis of the book itself. You also have to enclose an SAE (stamped addressed envelope). Agents are aggressively analogue and won’t respond by email. 98% of them won’t take submissions by email and they are really, really picky about people following the rules, Manuscripts should be double spaced, printed one side, loose bound. Letters should be straightforward and informative, not quirky or different. And so on. Agents make aspiring authors jump through an awful lot of hoops. In the right sequence, too, if you don’t mind.

The putative author is lucky to get any response at all beyond a photocopied rejection slip. Most agents don’t even bother reading the contents of their daily ‘slushpile’ – the 40-odd envelopes that land on the agency doorstep every day. I rather suspect many give the job of going through these submissions to the secretary or an intern.

Some are better than this. But they are in the minority.

So it’s a soul-destroying process. You send off batches your manuscript (or MS as it’s called in the trade) and get batches of copied rejections back for your efforts. If you’re really lucky – and everyone involved will tell you how lucky you are to get this – you’ll get some feedback, a few lines of encouragement and perhaps even a tip or two on improving the book. Writers buffeted by constant rejection receive these occasional flashes of light with an almost pathetic gratitude. And all this, mind you, to get someone to agree to bother representing you and therefore take 10-15% of your earnings.

Enter a bit of Web 2.0 thinking: publisher HarperCollins has launched a brilliant new website called Authonomy. Writers can post their work up on Authonomy, anything from 10,000 words to a complete book, and people can visit the site and read their books. If people like a book, they can put it on their virtual bookshelves, which increases the book’s ranking. Every month, HarperCollins’ editors skim the top 5 books off the pile and take them off to read. Getting an HC editor to read your book is, particularly if you’ve been drowning in the shitty stench and mush of the slushpiles for a while, probably worth a finger or so.

So, new talent gets a chance and the slushpile gets disintermediated. And it will, if others follow this example. On Authonomy, new authors can support each other, read each other’s work and comment, as can readers in general. People can be as critical as they like or as supportive as they like. And, the theory goes, over time good work will get recognised and make its way to the top of the tree. There are also forums on the site where people can discuss writing and publishing in general, plug their books or make recommendations. Not bad, huh?

There are question marks, of course. Isn’t this all a bit demeaning, a sort of literary ‘Big Brother’ where people are scrabbling over each other, all pretending to be nice to each other as they seek out that top five slot? Yes, there are elements of that. Does it replace the slushpile? No, it doesn’t – but it’s a first step for a business that has remained maddeningly crusty, dusty and analogue.

Why do I know all this stuff about writing or even give a damn? Because my book’s up there with over 1,000 others. It’s called ‘Space’ and I wrote it a few years back because voices in my head told me to do it. It’s a wilfully self-destructive and scabrous little thing, intended to make you laugh and to generally behave as badly as a book could behave. It’s also been rejected by pretty much every agent in the UK. Irritatingly, it made all those that read it laugh, but many felt it was too different. I do hate that.

Anyway, do feel free to wander over to Authonomy and have a read of Space. If it makes you laugh, feel free to put it on your bookshelf and help propel me closer to getting an HC editor to read the damn thing.

Similarly, feel free to have a look at Keefieboy’s book, ‘Travels in Xanadu-du’, which is also up there!

* Magnum opus. It’s a Black Addder joke...

Tiny

Here's a gift for you geeks out there.

It's Tiny URL.

Tiny URL lets you add a widget to your browser toolbar and then, when you find a web page you like/want to share, you just click on the widget. Tiny URL then kicks in and converts the URL of the page into, literally, a Tiny URL - a small, manageable one.

Take this stunning triple-nested Klein Jar image, for example:

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/images/I046/10314758.aspx

Becomes

http://tinyurl.com/6qtwa5

Or, even more compellingly,

http://www.amazon.com/Fear-Loathing-Las-Vegas-American/dp/0679785892/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220453012&sr=8-1

Becomes

http://tinyurl.com/6xtjhn

It even puts it on your clipboard automatically. So, no more emails with links that break a line and become unuseable, no more mad, long URLs and no more being unable to slip a link into things like Tweets and Facebook updates!!!

Sorry, the inner geek got out. And yes, I do feel better now...

Cuil

Thanks, as usual when it comes to geek stuff, to the usual Italian gent.

There's a new search engine in town. It's called Cuil, pronounced 'cool' after the Irish folk hero Fionn mac Cumhaill or if you're American, apparently, Finn Mac Cuill. Fionn gained all the knowledge of the world by sucking his thumb. It's complicated and involves a salmon.

There are some potentially cuil things about cool, including the fact that its results aren't simply link based (ie: it doesn't rank sites higher just because they've got more links to them) but also promise to be more contextually relevant. Search results are categorised where relevant, which means if you search for 'Dubai', you get tabs which include Dubai Hotels, Jobs in Dubai and Dubai Airport. They missed tabs for 'Dubai Traffic and Dubai Rent' but it's already looking like a pretty different approach. Y0u also get a pretty smart drop down menu of categories, including one on 'neighbourhoods of Dubai'.

It's brave enough. I'm old enough to remember a world before the Yahoo! Google duopoly: Alta Vista, Lycos, Webcrawler and a million other search engines once jostled for our attention and our searches. Cuil offers, for the first time in years, something different and an alternative to the leviathan. Only time will tell whether it's going to work out a winner. But for now, take a tootle along and check it out before the servers break - everyone's talking about the Cuil new kid on the block and their servers are already creaking under the strain of all that buzz...

Lifeless

Google has a new 3D 'immersive world' offering called Lively. It allows you to move around as an avatar in 3D spaces called 'rooms', where you can interact with people, chat and generally be three dimensional and immersive.

Where Lively possibly gets interesting is that it combines streams of Google-related stuff: you can watch YouTube videos or view Picasa images within the Lively environment, as well as embed desktop gadgets and post Lively rooms to your blog. The 3D immersive experience, in short, crosses a number of boundaries with reality and gives some possibly interesting new ways for people to access and use content - including music.

It's currently in Beta, but there's a long way to go. Lively crashes Firefox repeatedly, suffers from awful lag and appears to be, well, lacking a point. You'll need to download the (free, of course) Lively client browser plug-in.

And there endeth the Geek post...

Shill

It's not often I shill for clients on da blog, but I liked this thingette from IBM employee Sacha Chua so I've put it here. Later on today, if I'm lucky, a few of the delegates from this year's Arab Advisors Fifth Annual Media and Convergence Conference will swing by to take a look at it, because I'll have pointed them here.

They'll also be able to read the thought provoking article here, which my mate Gianni turned me onto.

Sacha is a self-confessed member of what we old people like to call Generation Y. It's not a term with which I'm particularly comfortable, but then I've heard even worse epithets. I happen to hate, with a passion, 'digital tribe' and even worse is 'digital native'. The idea that someone grew up in a digital world is interesting, but I don't think that labelling and boxing them is desirable or even funny, clever or mature.

As it happens, I grew up in a digital world myself, but a strange and fast-moving digital world where I was filled with round-eyed astonishment at the things happening around me. I grew up in a world where my school didn't know what number base would be the number base of computing, so I was forced into calculating in binary, octal and duodecimal. Crap - hex won out. I learned to use a computer with a card reader, then a teletype. Later on came coding punch tape for CNC turret presses, eight inch disk drives, 20lb portable computers, memory chips the size of aeroplanes and all the rest of it.

It might not have been Facebook, but it wasn't exactly an 'analogue upbringing' either.

Which might be part of the reason why I find it so intensely irritating to have to watch telcos and telecom vendors trying to 'get to grips with the kids'. They'd be well served to just try a little wide-eyed curiosity themselves and start exploring this brave new world we've all been building, rather than just trying to shoe-horn it into old fashioned revenue models from their heady circuit-switched days.

Here endeth the geek session. Back to being silly tomorrow... promise...

Flacks

The UK has a brilliant online technology publication called The Register. It's been going for quite some time now and has built up a massive and loyal base of readers - it's very influential indeed in technology circles. El Reg, as it likes to style itself, is also pretty hard-hitting - it's cynical, sarcastic and irreverent in the extreme. It's also very good at breaking news and very good indeed at taking a long, hard look at the dynamics of an industry in which it is not only specialised, but entrenched.

Which is why it's such a great read.

So when two, presumably slightly flustered, PR people from British telephone company O2 had a conference call to discuss quite how to deal with the Register's treatment of some issues they've been having with bandwidth allocation, the last thing they'd probably want to do is patch in Register reporter Bill Ray to listen to them discussing how they were going to manage him.

That would be stupidity beyond belief, wouldn't it? That would be Darwin Award class stuff.

Perish the very thought...

Cable

It struck me this morning how much this FLAG/SEA ME WE cable outage must be hurting our good friends over at Du Towers given that their network is based on Internet Protocol telephony.

Poor old Du. It must be galling for them not to be able to take over the whole market by slashing prices left right and centre and so not realise one of the main upside benefits of an IP network, while at the same time suffering from the down-side of having an IP network - being horribly exposed to service outages when people drop anchors on your international cable infrastructure.

One of the reasons why the whole country didn't flock to Du when it launched was that the regulator blocked any price competition - mad, when you have an IP based operator launching against a ruggedly circuit-switched incumbent. However, in a perverse sort of way, Du is being paid off for being a not terribly interesting competitor, because it's able to charge circuit-switched telephone rates for an IP network - an absolutely enormous profit margin.

That this state of affairs exists because the regulator is so interested in protecting the vested interests represented by former monopoly and still massively dominant telco Etisalat is undoubted. That it is also artificially halting progress in the market is also undoubted.

However, the fact remains that the Du network is utterly reliant on the Internet to carry its international traffic - and that the recent outages have enabled a quietly gleeful Etisalat to announce that it is helping Du out. Du's response is evident in today's newspapers, a faintly ridiculous slice of blablabla press release announcing that there were now 1.5 million Du customers, which Gulf News for some reason carried faithfully in all its Technicolour puke-inducing glory.

So I called my pal who has a Du mobile and asked how his service had been, rather hoping (I must confess) for a horror story to pop on the blog. But he told me that he'd had no problems at all, that service had been completely unaffected by the recent Internet outages.

As he chatted to me, he started to break up until he was completely inaudible in a sea of pops, clicks and gaps. So I'm not really sure if the Du network has been affected by the cable outages or that's just the service quality he's used to. And I don't know anyone else who uses Du to ask - even though there are, apparently, 1.5 million of them out there...