Kindles - The Luddite View

Cover via AmazonI have been arguing at some length with young friend Eilidh about the merits of Kindles. As many will know, I am something of a Kindle fanboy, but Eilidh (the older sister of godson 'The Jack') has been holding out in favour of the smell of an honest book.  Eilidh and The Jack have been down in London staying with us over a weekend of blue skies and visits to steam railways and aerodromes and the argument has been raging throughout the idyll.

Eilidh's Parthian shot was delivered after her departure for the train taking her back to Scotland - a fleeting knock on the door and delivery through the post box ensured I had no chance to refute her outrageous claims this time around.

So as she has gone to such lengths to have the last word, I shall present her argument here for perusal  by the intellectual elite that occasionally sees fit to ramble past these parts.

Eilidh's Ten Reasons Why Books Are Better Than Kindles

1. You can't get a signed copy of a Kindle book.

2. You can't get picture books on a Kindle.

3. You can't get First Editions.

4. You can't read in the bath or the poolside in case it gets wet.

5. You can't break the spine.

6. You can't make paper aeroplanes with a Kindle when you're bored.

7. You can't light a fire with a Kindle in an emergency.

8. You can't give all your old Kindle books to the charity shop.

9. I can't get Kindle books from the Alloa library.

10. Books smell good, Alex, face it! :P

She is, of course, quite wrong...

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

Image by Hummy via FlickrYou may have noticed a distinct quietness breaking out around these parts recently. This is mainly due to the fact I'm on leave and having an unusually analogue break in the sunny UK. And, yes, I am loving it.

Among other aspects of my analogueness, I've been taking a peek at the upcoming London Book Fair, which will see London's Earl's Court packed with tank-tops and smoking jackets as literary salons and bookish discussions break out all over the place like slow-moving, if terribly brilliant, fireworks. One option open to page-filling peeps is the Digital Conference, which appears to me to entirely miss the point by charging £355 for attendance (while, of course, the digital world would mount an event with likely better content for free and with unlimited access). The conference appears to be discussing topics that lie somewhat behind the curve ("Business as usual – but different. Publishers are having to change their traditional business models in order to survive and thrive.") , but then I may just be getting ahead of myself. It's also the most expensive gig at the whole LBF - selling on fear, perhaps?

In the meantime, my eye was caught by a proud link to the United Arab Emirates' country profile in 'Global Publishing Markets'. Apart from the profile being positively ancient (2005? Why on earth would I be interested in the shape of the UAE's publishing market fully six years ago - and four years before the Emirates LitFest started charting its transformational course?), it does rather tend to write off the role of the regional market in favour of the more high profile and accessible UAE.

Anyway, I'm just sniping (and, arguably, rambling). If you're interested in book fairs and likely to find yourself attending the Sydney Writers' Festival on the 16th May, do take a shufti at pal and bestselling debut author Phillipa Fioretti's workshops, "Where Preparation Meets Opportunity: Creating Writers' Luck" - it's linked here.

Dehumanising or Brilliant Advertising?

Image via WikipediaThere's an interesting image in today's soaraway Gulf News that isn't posted up on its website (well, I couldn't find it anyway). It's on page 36 at the bottom and it's captioned 'Moving Boards'. Under the headline is a night-time picture of four unhappy-looking people walking past a busy street café with big, flat digital advertising boards strapped to their backs. The first in line certainly looks as if the thing is weighing him down - his half-lidded eyes and listless demeanour don't speak of a man having fun. But then how many of us think our idea of fun is being made to parade around the streets with large digital advertising screens strapped to our backs?

I first saw this idea applied in Jordan a couple of years back and was appalled by it then. I though the sandwich board man was an image of recession, or a nutter proclaiming the end of the world is nigh. But to find people being used like this to tout advertising messages simply strikes me as abusive.

According to Gulf News' well thought-out caption, "The moving boards with its (sic) mobility, visibility  and human interaction has big potential to increase public awareness." What? Human interaction? Where's the interaction between the disinterested diners and the four shambling men being made to parade Etisalat's advertising messages around on their backs all night? They're not interacting, they're merely beasts of digital burden.

Or am I being a silly, mealy-mouthed, do-gooding, pinko commie liberal?

Wittering About Twitter

Image via WikipediaTwitter remains a very powerful communication tool indeed - in fact, I'd say it's getting more powerful by the day. One thing I had noticed recently is that this blog is getting more traffic referred from Twitter or Twitter clients than it gets from Google Search, which is something of an inflection point, I think.

Now I'm hardly about to make claims about Twitter being bigger than Google based on the trickling traffic to a marginal little blog in the middle of nowhere. But I did think the event worth noting.

Twitter is a great medium for pimping content - whether you're pushing your blog, your ebook or the article you just posted for a newspaper, it lets people share the links and, where the link is interesting, the power of the retweet will ensure hundreds, then thousands of people will see it within seconds flat. I've made the point before, specifically over here at the Spot On blog, that retweets mean exponential growth in the number of eyeballs exposed to a message. Because of the nature of Twitter in the Middle East, still at an early adopter stage, that audience tends to be strong on communicators, media people and journalists.

I don't always remember to tweet links to posts but there are a couple of aggregators that do, so there's usually a link or two to the blog floating around on Twitter somewhere. One result of this Twitter traffic has been the fact that people frequently comment about blog posts on Twitter. Which I find slightly odd, I have to say...

Of ArabNet

I just thought I'd post a quick update about ArabNet - many others have posted a great deal more about the event than I could and probably made more sense, at that...

I went to the event with high expectations and they were, in the main, met, matched and knocked out of the field. This is now established as a crucial regional event and one of two or three that are truly not to be missed if you care about the online, digital, mobile and innovation businesses. I didn't attend the first day of the event, the Developer Day, because I stopped being an 'under the bonnet' kind of guy back in the 1980s - instead we lolloped up into the mountains for some tourism before lounging around Beirut taking in the sights.

The first day of the two-day ArabNet Shift Summit started off with a keynote session from Ministers and the like. This, I avoided. I attended it last year and may attend it next. But once every two years is enough. I'm told that someone Ministerial promised Lebanon 20 MegaWatt broadband, which sort of explains a lot of things including, perhaps, why there was no Internet access in the hall for much of day one. The irony of this is obviously exquisite, but hard to appreciate when you've got documents to send and video footage to upload, let alone a Twitter account to feed. One daft omission was there were no power cables to the classroom style seating in the room, which meant those of us old-fashioned enough to be using a laptop were pretty well banjaxed quite early on. This was something ArabNet had got right last year, you can only assume it fell victim to the vastly extended scope of the event as a whole. Both the Internet and power plug issues were fixed for the afternoon sessions - a lovely example of how an event management team that's aware of what Twitter's saying can react fast and put stuff right.

The Ideathon pitches (a new idea pitched in two minutes to the crowd) were immeasurably stronger than last year, with a number of viable and exciting ideas being put across really well. One presenter (let's not forget these guys were mostly first-time presenters) stumbled only to be clapped on by the crowd. It was a real feel-good moment.

The event ran very late indeed, to the point where the Startup Demos, meant to be in the morning session, had to be put back to the afternoon. This also meant that the whole process of splitting the hall into two for the afternoon breakout sessions would have to take place after lunch, too. The Startup Demos are pitches for early finance from businesses that have already commenced operations and are given five minutes each. In the event, many got way more than this (at least, that's how it felt) but again the quality of stuff we were hearing about was way in advance of last year - some really, really cool ideas came across and I'd find it hard to single out any one Startup Demo as unworthy of funding.

My favourite Startup Demo was undoubtedly Jordanian online bookstore Jamalon, which is building a viable regional book publishing, delivery and fulfillment business that is mindful not only of the challenges of 'e' for publishers, but actually represents a viable and well-conceived solution to this and also to the issue of fostering content creation and a stronger reading habit in the region. This one, I felt, could be important. Some old pals took to the stage, too - the ishopaholic team were there, sharing the app that had seemed so engaging when we played around with it on the Dubai Today show a few weeks back.

I moderated two sessions after lunch, one on mobile and one on group buying. I had a lot of fun myself and so far there have been no written complaints or lawsuits, so let's assume they went well enough. The panelists, like the speakers we had heard in the morning session, were people with authority, background and something to contribute - a real treat in these days of commercially-led conferences filled with sales pitches and corporate rhetoric trotted out by sales execs trying to sound like they would know an innovation if it smacked them on the back of the head. No, these speakers were quality - although if TechCrunch's Mike Butcher had told us how very busy and important he was once more, I was ready to storm the stage.

I was running out of time, fast, however. That morning, I'd got a call from a distraught Sarah - the new waterproofing on our villa roof had been done so well that even the drain had been waterproofed. Nothing like men taking pride in their work, is there? She'd noticed this when next door's water tank overflowed and dropped some 200 gallons of water directly into our house. Clothes in storage, furnishings and all were soaked, much of the house's contents had to be moved to safety and Sarah was joined by life-saving pal Derek in witnessing water pouring down the walls of the back bedrooms, guest bathroom, kitchen and study. I felt the only thing a chap could do from Beirut was fly back early to join the happy clean-up operation and so I missed day two of ArabNet.

However, I didn't miss the dinner/party which was fun (although I did find chatting to pals and contacts to a background of full-on rappers was 'interesting') and inevitably led to our favourite hang-out in Gemmayze, Beirut's Temple Bar. It was fun. Messy, but fun.

The long and the short of it is that ArabNet was once again brilliantly organised, with a few minor hiccups creeping in because of the vastly ambitious scope of this year's event, and is a must for anybody - and any company - interested in the Middle East's fast-growing digital economy. A caveat - Spot On was involved in supporting ArabNet's PR efforts, so I could be accused of bias in these views.

There's a very real sense that innovation-driven businesses are starting all over the region, at least partly influenced by the new sense of responsibility and opportunity being felt in the light of the events taking place all around us today.

That new sense of aspiration and ambition were in the air at ArabNet and it's a heady scent...

Twestival Dubai 2011

Twestival Dubai is taking place once again and, once again, I'm going to be in Beirut and miss it!

It's all happening at the Leisure Deck of the InterContinental Hotel, Dubai this Thursday, the 24th March at 7PM. Once again, telco Du is sponsoring the event and will doubtless have something up their sleeve corporate to top last year's flogo flying, beanbag chilling experience. It's all part of the global network of Twestivals all taking place on the same day - something like 150 cities around the world are participating.

Twestival is an unusually social event where people who talk pretty much every day online get the chance to meet, greet and generally Tweet together in analogue. It's all aimed at raising money for a charitable cause, in this case the Dubai Autism Centre. You can only love the whole scheme and, if you're not off to Beirut, turn up and have an evening of joy. If the people turning up reflect Dubai's Tweep demographic, there'll be a lot of smart people, quite a few funny people, some opinionated and angry people and one or two complete nutters. Everything you need for the ideal party, in short! :)

You can register for the event at this here link here.

Chaos, Ajman Style

Image via WikipediaI pootled off to Ajman City Centre this morning to get some bits and bobs. Imagine my surprise to find the road diverted at Gulf Craft, the big flyover on the Ajman/Umm Al Qawain Road has been totally sealed off and is surrounded by acres of red and white striped concrete blocks, flapping safety tape and bollards. The diversions are enormous, utterly counter-intuitive and the signage has been organised by someone who obviously believes in some arcane school of thought transference rather than anything as mundane as clear written communication.

The result is a most marvellous chaos, a cross between Wacky Races and the Gumball rally as drivers try and Get In Lane (without really knowing which lane to Get In), jostle for position and change their minds at the last minute when they realise that the signs that say 'Centre of the City' don't actually mean 'City Centre', they mean the centre of Ajman. Every now and then, bemused-looking policemen have been deployed, presumably just so there's a witness to what chaos looks like when slathered thickly on a substrate of chaos before being topped with chaotic, Brownian hundreds and thousands.

Eventually I slow down for one particularly nasty snarl-up of bemused and increasingly irritable drivers (some of whom have by now become quite familiar to me) to call out of the window, using my finest Ten Word Arabic, at a policeman.  He shrugs his shoulders and laughs, agreeing that this is all 'too much problem'.

So there you go. Avoid Northern Ajman. It's a total mess.

Masafi - Greenwash or just a spin cycle?

Image via WikipediaI have been a happy Masafi customer for over 20 years now. I can remember when the stuff used to come in vinyl bottles (Crumbs, vinyl! What were we all thinking back then?) even. A friend who is an analytical chemist did an analysis of the UAE's bottled waters and consequently would only ever buy or drink Masafi.

Me too. It's a brand I have incredible faith and trust in.

Reaching for the green-handled six-pack at Spinneys today, I found myself lifting a jute bag with not six but eight bottles - a green gift from Masafi! Good stuff, chaps. I'm mildly supportive of green things (although have to confess this comes with an almost irresistible urge to flick tree huggers' nipples) and thought this was a good idea.

Turns out the extra two bottles are free. Daft, really, I'd have bought the 8-pack happily. Does Masafi, easily the premium brand in this market (discounting madly expensive imports like Evian or Voss) really face competitive pressures sufficient to necessitate a 25% giveaway and a free jute bag? I'd say not, but then I'm perhaps an unusually  loyal punter.

It turns out when I get home, that they're actually a six-pack that's been shrink-wrapped in 'ordinary' plastic, rather than the normal bio-degradeable packaging. The extra two bottles have been Sellotaped to the six pack. This makes the whole lot very hard indeed to get out of the snug-fitting jute bag, which is just the right size to squeeze eight bottles into. Then you have to unpeel the two taped bottles, which leaves a big sticky band around them. Trying to lift the wrapped bottles, the shrink-wrapping burst leaving me having a wee sweary in the middle of a muddle of rolling water bottles.

It all left me thinking, rather irritably, why didn't they just put the eight damn bottles straight into the jute bag  (which, by the way isn't a 100% jute bag and appears to contain quite a bit of plastic in itself) and save all the wrapping and packaging? Because in the end, the whole bundle isn't very green at all - in fact, arguably less 'green' than the standard six pack wrapped in biodegradable plastic.

I thought it an unusual misstep from a company whose marketing has never been less than deft...

Bankers - A reprise

I think we might get into an iterative link loop here, as this excellent piece on the maladroit gibbering gumboils over at HSBC by the Kipp Report links back to this very self same blog. But hey, don't let that stop you nipping over and enjoying a rattling good read about other peoples' experiences with the bank that likes to say 'Ugh', or noting the large and growing number of Facebook likes etc etc.

I enjoyed doing this little blog search and reading the results. Their wee ears must have been burning over the years...

In related news, I have man-flu and so it's a miracle I've posted anything at all this week.

Reconciled

I am delighted to be able to report my mobile and the car are now reconciled. The last three days have been an absolute hell of long snitty silences on the road. I don't know what sparked this awful long-running marital, but every journey has been a miserable stretch of yawning quietude.

Let me explain. The new car is wired up for Bluetooth, and it works. The last three words are the critical ones. Once you've paired a mobile with the car, you can program in your contacts or just say a number to have the mobile call that number. This is not new, but it's new to my Pajero - and the voice recognition is competent to the point where it never misses. It's sad, I know, but I still get delighted when technology actually, you know, works.

So when you hop into the car and press the little button, a rather fetching female voice says, 'Link system ready. Alex's mobile is connected.' You might say 'Sarah' and then she'll pipe up, 'Dialling Sarah' and you're away.

I have got used to this very quickly indeed - I've never had a competent hands free system - I've tried, and junked, Bluetooth devices before, including the little ear-mounted microwave ovens. So you can imagine when, the other day, the car started ignoring the phone I was worried, vexed and quite quickly in a state bordering distraught.

I tried re-pairing the phone, but they simply refused to try and put things behind them. I tried restarting everything I could find to restart. And eventually yesterday I made one last desperate attempt after spinning my tale of silent woe during a chat with young Jonathan Castle and found an obscure setting in the phone that had somehow been toggled off. I still have occasional iterative feedback loop fail sessions with the Android interface which result in me threshing around in menus and options so many people of my acquaintance have now got used to receiving random calls from me or messages that offer the chance to smite the bungalow with a bratwurst or some such gobbledygook.

So they're talking again and all is well with the world. The relief is not inconsiderable.