GeekFest Dubai 2015. We're BACK Baby!!!

GeekFest Dubai is back with a vengeance and I have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with it. 6PM on Saturday 13th June at Impact Hub Dubai is what you need in the old diary.

What is GeekFest? It's an event my old mucker Saadia Zahid and I put together after drinking too much coffee a few years back. It's sort of designed to bring online people together offline with as few rules, restrictions or people telling you what to do as possible. Think of a Montessori TED organised by Anonymous and you're sort of getting there. We became so wrapped up with letting the whole thing descend into chaos, we even referred to ourselves as UNorganisers. The event's not supposed to be disorganised, but it's not supposed to be organised in the sense that you're channeled places or have to deal with people shouting brands at you or having expectations of you. You want to come in a geeky t-shirt? Fine. You want to Cosplay? Fine. You don't? Just as fine. You want to be late? Fine. Early? Fine. Get the picture?

GeekFest went regional, with events taking place all over the Middle East. Beirut, Jeddah, Damascus, Cairo, Amman, Sharjah even! And then we stopped doing it. Simple as that.

The team at startup funky workspace hangout place Impact Hub - Diya Khalil and Sara Saleh - missed the good old days when Geeks Wandered The Earth and decided they wanted to get down and geeky again, which is just fine by me, so I gave 'em a copy of the Geekifesto and left 'em to it.

Impact Hub has many of the aspects that made Old Shelter so good for GeekFest. It's got a central space as well as breakout rooms aplenty, food and drink and, of course, copious Wifi. The team there have been beavering away and have come up with the following Smörgåsbord of delicious delights to tempt and tantalise your tastebuds. I've included reminders of what each element is in italics!

GeekTalks

15 minute talks from people who care too much about stuff to be considered normal.

The Internet of Things

Elias Jaber

Social Media Clichés

Aby Sam Thomas

Revolutionising Finance with Bitcoin

Tarik Kaddoumi

Simplifying Freelance Journalism

Mohammed Parham

TechnoCases

Displays of new technology backed by people that understand what the hell it is that's on show...

3D printing from DaVinci and The3DBee

Drones from Parrot

Hadoukenido retro gaming from Mohannad Ashtar

The Hop Away Game App from Hybrid Humans

The Oculus Rift from Spark Bits

ArtStuf

Artistic events and happenings, new ideas and inspirations from pencil squeezers.

Middle East Comic Con is bringing a fistful of artists to pack 'Artists Alley', whatever that is!

BeanBag Workshops

Ongoing 'how to' workshops for self-selecting audiences of people on, well, beanbags...

3D Printing by Doodlebare

Educational gaming by Hybrid Humans

Animated film making featuring new movie Hujan Dan Hijau from Emirati animator Mohammed Fikree.

Eats

Food on the night

Spontifora (which sounds interesting, in a sort of 'grows on the world in Avatar' sort of way) and There Will Be Crepes

Music

The Big Picture Art Platform presents live experimental sound from Kapital7

Now I'll warn you fair and square - the event's already looking over-subscribed with some 470 guests registered to the Facebook event (Impact Hub's capacity is about the 250 mark), so it might get a bit jiggy in there. But what the hell, go on down and have a blast anyway. Although mightily tempted to be there in my authorial velvet smoking jacket telling everyone how much better it was back in my day, I find myself with a packed weekend and shall therefore leave it to people younger and smarter than I to attend...

Impact Hub is to be found here.

Apropos Nothing (Or How I Became The UAE's First Self Publisher)

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I first got involved in publishing, I was introduced to a strange world of new terminologies and arcane practices that were in the process of being transformed by technology.

You'd write your words and then print 'em out from your PC, 'marking up' the text for the typesetter, showing fonts, point sizes, leading and any special effects or characters you wanted in the text. You'd also give them the column size. They'd send back 'galley' - long rolls of typeset copy that had been output onto bromide (photographic paper). All of this would be designed to fit into a 'page grid'. The make-up artist would use boards ruled with blue lines to show that grid, pasting the 'galley' from the setters into the pages using roller-ed hot wax and, latterly, 3M's obnoxious 'Spray Mount' aerosol glue. Both had the advantage of being re-positionable immediately after application but firmly adhesive shortly after. Spray Mount was horrible stuff, creating clouds of fine gluey mist. You could only imagine how bad it was for anyone not using advanced breathing apparatus. Our makeup guy used to wrap a scarf around his head, which made him look like a New Romantic terrorist.

Images would be sized to fit into the grid and then bunged into envelopes and attached to a copy of the made up pages, which would be 'marked up' again for the printers - this tint here, that colour background there. You had to give 'em the CMYK of any colour you wanted or percentages of tints. And then the whole papery lot would be sealed up in a large packet and dispatched to the printers to be 'camera-d' and made into four huge steel plates. These were affixed to rollers and then coated in printer's ink, pressed onto sheets of paper in four, eight, 16 or even 32 page sections. Really big presses could do more, 64 or even, one Dutch press we used also did Yellow Pages, and they had a massive press that could do 128 pages.

Start to end, the whole process was very analogue, but the Gods of digital were already starting their insidious and increasingly disruptive transformation. Our typesetters were using Linotronics, machines with green screens that automated typesetting, which had previously been a highly skilled job that called for a four-year apprenticeship. A proper 'hot metal' compositor could hand justify text by eye as he hammered the keys to drop the type into place in grids. The phototypesetter cleared these skilled men out of Fleet Street almost overnight, but also did a great deal to 'democratise' publishing. Now smaller, more agile publishers could create publications without having to use the unwieldy, expensive (and unionised) typesetters.

I arrived into publishing just as desk top publishing was becoming viable. Now we could run type into grids on the screen. We could send a whole page, already 'made up', to the setters and get back a full page bromide. We didn't have the technology to scan colour images, the printers still had to do that, but we could make up our own boxes to size and attach our images. Proofing was a pain, watching a tabloid page printing out on a dot matrix printer was like watching the world's slowest kettle boil. We were pioneering users of the technology, as it happens, becoming the first publisher in the UK to go 100% over to desk top publishing. We used Ventura Publisher, running on DR's GEM user interface over MS-DOS. And by golly it was clunky - but it did the job.

I told our typesetter, Phil, what we were doing. He'd have to get machines to output our pages. Rubbish, he said. You haven't got the skills, the understanding of type. You're not compositors. How could you compete with the quality of work a trained comp can output?

I had to take my pages to his competitor, a man I didn't like who had set up a DTP output bureau. Within the year, Phil (with his £30,000 Linotronic machines) had gone bust. It was my first experience of the wonders of disintermediation. I have been boring audiences at conferences for years with this: Quality becomes irrelevant where technology improves access.

And so it was I arrived a few years later in the UAE, back in 1993, with my publishing house in a cardboard box. A PC was all I needed - and a bureau that could output pages from Quark (I had moved on from Ventura by then). When they tried to shut me down, they could not for the lives of them work out how one snotty wee Brit could produce publications all by himself. The Ministry was looking for the massive infrastructure behind me required to produce magazines, the writers, the graphic artists, the makeup guys and so on. I was the best they could come up with and clearly wasn't quite as impressive a catch as they had in mind!

I suppose that was my first experience of self publishing in the UAE. I'd never thought of it like that before...

GeekFest Gets A Website. And An Oculus Rift.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So you know what a website is, but what the hell's an Oculus Rift? Good question!

First the website. It's massively overdue, but then so's stuff like streaming the talks which just takes too much co-ordination, organising and general caring about things for us to get involved with. But now GeekFest finally has a website.

www.GeekFestME.com is the place to be.

It's the creation of UberGeek Aqeel Fikree, a talented website builder, photographer and bison wrangler. Right now it's an archive of things from GeekFests past, but has the potential (should this be deemed desirable) to act as a central repository for things GeekFest, from content derived from the various events through to community contributions, news and the like. It's really about what (if anything) people want to make of it. You can hit Aqeel up at @AkeelFikree or using the contact form on the website if you have ideas, content or contributions to make.

GAMEFEST MADNESS!

Now on to the Oculus Rift. 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.

That's all in addition to the GeekTalks, TechnoCases, flowing Red Bull and a free rock gig from Jay Wud. I mean, what MORE could you want for a Wednesday evening?

PLEASE don't forget we're collecting old notebooks for poor Sri Lankan medical students!

Here's the PDF map. 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.

Diana And Downfall

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I hadn't realised this, mostly because I'm not really into films to the point where I only ever watch them when I'm flying Emirates, but the new and critically panned film Diana which was premiered last Thursday, was directed by none other than Oliver Hirschbiegel. Here's the trailer.

Oliver Whowhatable? German film director Oliver Hirschbiegel is perhaps best known as the genius who gave us Downfall, the film that spawned the meme that is 'Hitler finds out about...'.

You'll likely remember the meme even if you haven't seen the whole film. Hitler raves at his closest aides, racked by Parkinsons, bitter, furious and clearly already defeated. The gag is that it's in German, so all you have to do is add funny subtitles and you've got a hilarious backdrop for dialogues such as Hitler finds out there's no camera in the iPod Touch or the monumental (over 8 million views) Hitler finds his XBox Live account has been terminated. The meme takes us to Hitler's reaction that Twitter is down and, of course, his reaction to the iPad. There's even the rather chucklesome Hitler is fed up with all the Hitler rants.

Someone somewhere is going to get a thesis, by the way, out of the fact that every single one of these have awful spelling or grammatical errors in the subtitles. The Internet, it would seem is highly amusing but woefully illiterate.

It's perhaps a testament to the power of actor Bruno Gantz's portrayal of Hitler and the realism of this rant scene that the meme has run like this - in fact, the studio tried to stem the tide of parodies with a takedown attempt, but in the end you can't turn back the sea. There are hundreds of the things out there, more still - over three years later - being added every day with each new event that someone, somewhere cares about enough to slap a few subtitles on that little piece of film history. Some of the best, original clips succumbed to the takedown. Many are, of course, merely lame. But they generally still have the power to bring a grin to your face.

Much of the humour comes from the fact this man is the most reviled figure in human history. The idea that he wants to tweet about his dog dying, that the AT&T network's no good or any of this stuff is part of its brilliance. But it's the best thing to do to evil, really: laugh at it, no?

So now Hirschbiegel has created a film about Diana which the critics have queued up to have a pop at. The Guardian's reviewer noted that sixteen years after that car crash, Diana has died a second awful death and the gag, albeit a tad obvious and even mildly obnoxious, neatly sums up London's reaction to the film.

I can't wait, personally. I can't wait for the parodies to start. I wonder if they'll have German subtitles?

Meanwhile, do feel free to share links to any notable 'Hitler rants' in the comments!

That Was The ArabNet That Was

(Photo credit: carrierdetect)

It's been a hectic week, hence the lack of posts. The ArabNet Dubai Digital Summit sucked down more time than I'd ever have thought it was going to - but what a time it's been. The week's flown by in a whirlwind of panels, chatting, eager startups and blethering about all things online.

Not even HSBC's decision to mount an insane war against their SME customers, reported upon excellently by the Al Arabiya English website, tempted me to post. Truth be told, there just wasn't the time and anyway, what could be possibly said that would make any sort of sense of a bank unilaterally shutting down business accounts in the United Arab Emirates with just 60 days' notice - just before the summer and Ramadan coincide to ensure 60 days' notice is insufficient?

Even HSBC's assertion that it 'remains committed to the SME market' wasn't enough to break the ArabNet spell. Although now looking back on the story that comment still provokes wide-eyed astonishment. We've wiped out the Marsh Arabs but remain committed to all indigenous peoples. Right.

I got to have a little gentle fun with banks myself at the ArabNet banking solutions panel, when Graham from Radical outlined some of the cool stuff his company had been doing with banks internationally and the very brave Pedtro from Emirates NBD took to the stage to speak for the Middle East's own banks. Perhaps starting the panel with the assertion that all Middle East banks are rubbish wasn't terribly PC of me (I realised my introduction to the topic had turned into a spittle-flecked rant only when the audience started to turn into a mob hefting burning brands and demanding to march on the monster), but I thought if we could all agree that basic principle, we could then move on and not spend an hour throwing custard tarts at Pedro.

And that's the way it worked out, generally - but I came away from the session with the feeling that people like Pedro are fighting against legacy systems and legacy-minded management, while banks in other parts of the world - leaner, meaner and generally more competitive - are providing some really smart digital services. You wonder what's holding us back and then something like HSBC vs SME happens and you realise that yes, it is pretty nigh hopeless.

I enjoyed many of the talks and panels I attended at ArabNet, there were few 'duffers' in the mix which was a blessing - and with three tracks on the go, rare was the moment when something interesting wasn't happening somewhere. Skills marketplace Nabbesh was raising money on startup crowd investing platform Eureeca, Wally got Dhs 1.5 million funding for its blisteringly smart expenses tracking app (it scans receipts and lets you track locations, venues, expenditures and the like), Restronaut took everyone out for dinner (the latest brain-child of Make Business Hub founder Leith Matthews) and private car booking service Careem offered everyone a free ride. There was a lot of stuff going on, I can tell you.

I had the dubious honour of being the last speaker at ArabNet Dubai and so was surprised to find a packed room in front of me - that's a testament to the engagement and commitment of the audience at the event. There were a few grumbles of 'three days is too long' but I'm not so sure, myself. It wasn't a stretched out agenda by any means. Anyway, I spent fifteen minutes gibbering and railing at the audience in tongues, the usual shamanistic display of erratic behaviour. And then I got to lead a panel on women's content and branded content. 

With one client and three publishers on the panel, it was always going to be hard to get a good challenging debate moving - and the publishers were determined not to have the fight I was so keen to goad them into, so the panel was a tad tamer than I'm used to. Tragically, we didn't have the Twitterfall displayed on the stage monitors, so couldn't see the howls of outrage taking place on the projected screen behind us. As the panelists talked about why marketing managers didn't understand women in the region and why women's content was Chanel and handbags, a furious cry rose from the significant female element in the audience who felt women were, well, worth more than that. I couldn't see it and so the opportunity to square the circle between audience and panel was lost.

And then, in a trice, it was over. The developers' awards saw Lebanon taking the trophy and a couple of hours later, the Atlantis conference centre was back to being a vast expanse of strange nautical primary colours and Dubai was filled with little pockets of partying geeks and, no doubt, a very relieved and exhausted ArabNet team.

See you there next year!

Confession: Spot On was an ArabNet partner