It's GITEX Time Again...

Image via WikipediaAs The National points out today (very kindly quoting me babbling on about the show) in its GITEX story, this will be my 23rd GITEX. I should really stop counting... I've done ancient geek reminisces about GITEX posts before, like this one right here, so I'm not going there again.

This year is the show's thirtieth birthday. There was much talk about GITEX being 30 last year, but they jumped the gun a tad. The miracle is that it's still with us at all - all the other great horizontal computer shows barring Hanover's CeBIT have tanked. Comdex is no longer with us, the Which Computer show died years ago, along with many others. Why have CeBIT and GITEX survived?

One part of the answer is that both are essentially government owned shows that have a wider agenda than just filling exhibition space. GITEX also fills pretty much every hotel room in Dubai and acts as a great showcase for new companies looking for a Middle East base or to expand their sales/distribution network to the region. That government support also means not necessarily having to face the grim realities of commercial pressure quite as much as a private sector organiser - particularly over the past three years when, like CeBIT, GITEX had lost a number of large, high profile exhibitors. But both shows have seen a return to form this year, in GITEX' case thanks to a concerted effort by the organising team behind 'GITEX Technology Week 2011' to package things up attractively for exhibitors as well as to add stronger vertical elements that made it more interesting for companies to attend.

There's also the resurgence of technology in business to thank. The IT industry had grown stale, innovation was no longer compelling companies to invest in technology and the great rollout of technology as we all bought our little slice of the internet had slowed. IT vendors discovered that slapping a new number on a CD in a box didn't make us all rush out to buy the New New Thing.

Now, buoyed by mobile, tablets, the cloud, social media and other innovations, technology is becoming sexy again. People are looking at new stuff and, what's more, investing in new stuff. Dubai has always been the regional centre for the technology industry and has always been very much the 'shop window' for sales organisations targeting the Middle East. It's been that way ever since technology companies first started to open up regional offices - generally, the decision on location was taken by the person handling the region who was often the person who would have to come out here to live. Given the options, virtually to a man they chose Dubai as the most pleasant place to live. And so the technology industry came here - a process that took place some ten years before Dubai Internet City was conceived and launched. When DIC came along, they just all moved up the road.

When I first moved to the UAE, my old pal Bob Merrill, the GM of Ericsson Saudi Arabia, told me (in his Southern drawl), "You're going to Dubai for three reasons, son. Golf, women and hooch. Why, I could take your Dubai and put it here in Sitteen Street Riyadh and we wouldn't even know it was there." He had a point, although I think you'd notice Dubai if you plonked it in Sitteen Street these days!

Many of the companies who set up shop here first encountered the region through either attending or exhibiting at GITEX. If you were obsessive enough, you could trace the process and see how many exhibitors have stuck to Dubai over the years and added technology to the city's list of re-export businesses. How many executives, in fact, who have turned up to the multi-hall extravaganza that is GITEX - a show, if the truth be told, that has always been bigger than its market - taken one look around and said 'We gotta be in this market, boys'? Over the years I have personally witnessed a great number of them.

GITEX is good for Dubai, which is why they'll never let it die. This year will see whether the re-invention of this most venerable of computer shows will provide the right mixture of showcase and meeting point to drive it forwards. And whether the new found burst of innovation in the technology industry will continue to make it relevant once again.

Steve Jobs. Tossing A Pebble

Image via CrunchBaseThis will get lost in the ocean of comment on Steve Jobs. It's almost pointless writing it, but sometimes you just have to jot the moment down.

There's little doubt Steve Jobs was an arrogant bastard. I've never met him (the closest I've got to true techristocracy was Ballmer) but the absolute certitude shone through in everything he did. Yet his drive and utter self-belief drove the people around him to create some wondrous things. I first encountered The Apple IIe microcomputer when I went to work for a startup computer music company back in the UK. That machine, the fruit of Jobs and partner Steve Wozniak's early 'home brew computer club' innovation, helped to create a revolution. It brought millions of people into the information age - it was the first 'proper' personal computer system. In 1981, Apple was to welcome IBM to the desktop computer age with its cheeky and iconic advertisement, followed soon after by the iconic Macintosh, launched with Ridley Scott's iconic TV spot.

It became all about icons. Jobs saw the work going on at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) and immediately grasped it was world-changing stuff. Xerox, in a moment of monumental knuckle-headedness, didn't and closed the lab. Jobs hired the talent - and so did Gates. The two were each others' nemeses, both utterly driven men who knew they were right. It's just that Jobs ended up being righter. But now he's dead, so it really doesn't matter, does it?

PARC was where the WIMP (windows, icon, menu, pointing) interface was developed. Before PARC, all computing was text based. The world of mice and arrows brought a graphical way of interacting with computers and Jobs was the first to realise the significance of this new approach. Apple released the cludgy Lisa and then the stunning Macintosh. I remember my first encounter with a Mac, the little box with a screen in it happily reciting 'Simple Semen met a peeman' for me. The early text to speech software was not always brilliantly successful. But, again, Apple was way ahead of its rivals in even supporting such technologies.

Oddly, for a company that has always shunned any direct involvement in the Arab world, Apple was also a massively influential company in Arabic language computing and graphics. It would be years before Microsoft matched Apple's Arabic language capabilities - and by then, every publishing house and graphic design studio in the Arab world was Mac based. It wasn't to last: the Mac's strong domination of design and desk-top publishing was eroded by the sheer weight of the Microsoft/Intel alliance and the IBM PC architecture. Scully came, Jobs left and Apple started its long, inevitable dive towards the heart of the chapter eleven sun.

Cast into the wilderness, Jobs pursued his certitude and created NeXT, a high-end workstation system with its own innovative operating system. Too expensive, too 'out there' for its time, it failed and yet the NeXT operating system was to be acquired by Apple and form the heart of the Mac OS X. Incidentally, the World Wide Web was developed on a NeXT system by Tim Berners-Lee, the man who put the hole in the toilet seat that was the internet.

In his forty days in the wilderness the graphically-obsessed Jobs also acquired the animation studio that was to become Pixar, selling it on to Disney for a cool $7.4 billion. He was many things, but our Steve was rarely hard up. You can perhaps start to understand how he got by on that famous $1 salary as Apple's CEO.

But his crowning glory was his return to the company he co-founded. Jobs' triumphal return to Apple must have felt like the ultimate vindication to the man who had all the answers all the time, but the company was on the very brink. In 1997, Apple was the Sick Man of Computing and it was arguably Steve's old enemy Bill Gates who saved the day when he pumped $150 million into the seemingly lost cause that was Apple Computer Inc.

And then Jobs did something wonderful. He turned Apple into the world' most successful company. Starting with the iMac, going on to create the iPod and then the iPad, Jobs' mania for graphics and design were translated into products that were to revolutionise the way we consume what used to be called culture and today is called content. The iPod decimated the music industry, taking Apple from being a computer company into the mass consumer market. The iPhone toppled Nokia. The iPad has redefined the way millions of people consume information and entertainment. From a no-hope bankrupt, Jobs turned Apple into a company so successful its cash reserves eclipsed those of the US government.

The man who popularised icons, first with the Mac then with the iPhone and the iPad, Steve Jobs was himself an icon. His increasingly gaunt figure, wearing his trademark black turtle-neck sweater and jeans, became synonymous with smart, funky, minimalist innovation. I truly believe he is one of the most influential figures of the last century, a man whose impact on our society and culture will be felt for many years to come.

But I still think he must have been a total git to work with.

The Daily Mail Blows It. Big Time.

The UK's Press Gazette gleefully reproduced yesterday the screenshot of the year. The Daily Mail, the right wing conservative UK newspaper, ran the Amanda Knox verdict story on its website. Except it ran the wrong story. Knox was, of course, acquited.

The Press Gazette story is linked here. I do commend it as rather fun.

The Mail realised its awful mistake and took the story down after a couple of minutes but the internet she do not forgive lightly. The botched story became a news story in its own right, with even the Washington Post weighing in and enjoying the Mail's humiliation. As it happens, The Sun also blew it but nobody mainstream seems to have got a screen grab before the piece got taken down. These guys did, though.

So how could such an awful mistake happen? Well, as the Press Gazette piece points out, newspapers do prepare materials in advance - obituaries are written for celebrities while they're still in rude health, waiting for the day they peg it. And papers will also do 'yes' and 'no' pieces for highly anticipated events with only two possible outcomes, such as high profile trials. They're called 'set and hold' pieces. It's one of a number of journalistic practices that are not widely known and would cause some concern amongst a reading public used to depending on papers to tell the truth and deliver... are you ready for this... context and analysis.

Sure, but all the same, why were they in such a rush to push the button? Well, I rather suspect there's a new pressure on them, the pressure of social media. The first word the judge uttered was 'guilty' but that was to the charge of slander. The second word was actually the one the world was waiting for. The Mail and The Sun, under the pressure to show it they are still relevant as a news source online, both leaped into action too soon - the very thing that makes journalists get sniffy about Twitter.

We're being told all the time we can trust mainstream media. That's ever less the case as dubious practices come to light and as that media scrambles in an undignified rush to try and beat all of us eyewitnesses to the punch. They're better off not trying - but cleaning up their act and truly delivering added value to the voices of the people who are there at the time.

Of Books

Image via WikipediaThere have been a couple of recent moves in the Wonderful World of Publishing that may be of interest. Bloomsbury has launched its own e-book and POD imprint, 'Bloomsbury Reader', while in the US, publisher Perseus Books has launched a new company to publish e-book and POD editions for agented authors called, snappily, Argo Navis Author Services.

The main difference is that Bloomsbury is only targeting out of print books where the authors' rights have reverted, while Perseus is definitely more focused on the living.

Bloomsbury, JK Rowling's publisher, has done a deal with The Rights House (made up of mega-agency PFD and Rights House Talent) to publish a number of titles and launches Bloomsbury Reader with some 500 titles on Kindle, with other platforms to follow. The biggest name in the first tranche is Edith Sitwell, although Evelyn Waugh's brother Alan features (he was a scandalous bestseller in his time). Just in case you thought you were in for some quality bargain reads, by the way, think again - the books will be priced at $8.99. That's stiff for an e-book of an out of print work, in my humble.

The Perseus move is perhaps more relevant to today's authors. The company will be offering an e-book and POD service, publishing to multiple e-book platforms and offering marketing and distribution support while only taking a 30% cut. In the Argo Navis model, the author remains the publisher while Perseus is the distributor. Perseus has already signed with agency Janklow & Nesbit, is talking to Curtis Brown (according to the New York Times) and is in discussions with a number of other agencies.

So what does this all mean? Well, in the Bloomsbury case, we have a traditional publisher reviving a number of classic out of print works and making them available using the new efficiencies of e-books and POD. That's only a good thing, although you'd wonder why more publishers haven't gone this route already. With agents and publishers alike (Don't forget Ed Victor has already launched a 'reverted rights' e-book and POD imprint) looking to backlists and out of print titles, we're going to see an awful lot of 'old' books flooding the 'new' platforms. It's already hard enough for authors to stand out - it's about to get an awful lot harder.

It's perhaps interesting that with the future of publishing being so crammed with uncertainties, so many publishers and agents are looking to the past.

The Perseus move is much more interesting. In focusing on agented authors, the company brings a qualitative guarantee of sorts to the books being offered by its service. The percentages on offer are certainly eye-catching ('traditional' publishers are offering 20-25% of e-books, which most agents are arguing should be 50%) at 70% in the author's hand (less, presumably, the agents' 15%). But the platform is reportedly offering a 'basic' marketing service for free and will offer more advanced marketing services at a fee. In this, Perseus is going to have to do a lot to justify quite what value it offers authors over services such as Lightning Source and CreateSpace.


Meanwhile, Amazon has just announced availability of the most basic Kindle (Note NOT the 'Fire') in the UK at a whopping £89 - at today's rates that's $138!!! It's $79 in the US. How they can justify that is truly beyond me...

Strange Searches

Image via WikipediaEvery now and then I take a peep at Sitemeter to dredge up some of the stranger search terms that have landed people with a moist 'plop' in the middle of this soft, bloggy piece of ground.

Search fascinates me, and not just because it's becoming an evermore important part of the old day job. It's the little wrinkles in search I find amusing - and not the least of these is the way in which 'do no evil' Google prioritises search for its own products - a Blogger blog gets way better results than other platforms on Google, but less so in Bing, for instance.

By the way, give this a try: http://www.duckduckgo.com - it's an alternative search engine I got turned onto after reading a post on Narain Jashanmal's blog on how he's managed to go Google free.

Because of the Google Treatment, I sometimes find this potty little blog hits way above its weight in search. In a few instances, I'm very glad indeed - many thousands of people have read my posts on what's inside Pringles, Subway's 'wholemeal' bread and Aquafina water, and that's pretty much down to search.

So here are a few recent 'oddities'...

how much is a 1 gb data from etisalat  
Dhs 249 per month, mate. No problem, a pleasure.

what is the use of emirates id
When you find out, dear searcher, please do drop me a comment and let me know...

is food labelled in the emirates
For some reason I imagined this searcher, from Norway, is thinking about exporting his moose paté to new markets and has a very long way to go indeed before he 'gets' the UAE market...

how to pronounce gitex
This search led to this here post where I carefully, albeit with a mildly worrying obsessiveness, show readers how to pronounce GITEX. It's JEE TECKS by the way.

cows aorta
It is a source of some pride to me (surely there's some sort of badge you should get for this) that in all the world's Internet, thanks to this here post about the Dubai Sustainable Transport Award, I 'own' this phrase. Yes, folks, out of 174,000 possible search results, Google thinks I'm the most relevant of the lot. And they are terribly, tragically wrong...

subway bread plastic
This is one of those posts that has been read by many people. Again, it qualifies for a Tufty Club badge, because it's number one in search. If you want to know why Subway's wholemeal bread contains rice, caramel and an ingredient that would have you imprisoned for 15 years if you used it in Singapore, you too can click on this here link.

Is it any wonder people have it in for bankers?
I'm not sure what's more wonderful - the fact someone googled this phrase or the fact it led them to li'l ole me and this post about why I hate my bank - its call centre in particular.

dorothy miles choueifat
I try and post reminiscence posts as scarcely as possible, but the past sneaked into this one about using Nokia Maps. We'd decided to name the GPS NufNuf after Dorothy Miles' dog (she was the director of the International School of Choueifat, Sharjah) so now if you googles dotters, you get this slice of total irrelevance.

Pringles Controversy
Third search result - it's amazing how powerful consumer voice can be on the internet - I mean, this is hardly the Huffington Post, is it? It's an out of the way backwater blog by somebody of no particular interest to the vast majority of people. This search leads to this post about what they actually make Pringles out of (Don't click! Don't click!). But it doesn't take you to Pringles. Oh no...

Schematic Bicycle
This is an interesting one. It's an image search hit - I use a smart doohicky called Zemanta which searches for copyright free images based on the context of posts and lets you paste these into your post (it also does some other clever stuff around tags and links). So I linked to this Wikipedia image for this here post about why I hate my bank's awful radio ads and now on image search I 'own' the image and searches come to me. I don't know how or why this works, but hundreds of people looking for the Book of Kells have been bored by my views on publishing instead. Similarly this search for 'IBM minicomputer' gives very high ranking to this blog rather than the original image (linked in the post) to IBM's actual archives. Image search is, I guess, just that much harder to figure out!

World’s Worst Web
This is actually fair do's - I'd assert that some of the sites in this post would be global worst practice contenders...

Lebanon: Will The World's Worst Web Get Better?

Gulf News filed a Reuters report today on moves to improve Lebanon's internet access. The headline alone made me laugh, "Lebanon unveils faster, cheaper internet amid political bickering'. That's one of those 'Man found dead in cemetry' headlines. Nothing happens in Lebanon without political bickering.

Lebanon, as those who know it will attest, is a beautiful country of rich soil, glorious countryside and home to a fascinatingly diverse people capable of great cleverness. Beirut can be sophisticated, sexy as hell and enormous fun. It is also home to crushing poverty. And it's all strung together with public infrastructure that sometimes defies belief. From the rocky power grid (power cuts are still commonplace) through to the state of the roads, you're often left wondering quite how so much physical, intellectual and financial wealth sits alongside such tottering examples of failed governance.

Listening to the Ministerial addresses to ArabNet is helpful to reaching an understanding of this, I find.

Lebanon's internet is cited in today's story as being the 'world's worst... the country is always much lower down the rankings than many less developed nations such as Afghanistan or Burkina Faso.' The story goes on to recount, in shocked tones, how a 1 Mbps connection in Lebanon costs Dhs 279!!!

Errr. Hello, GN? That's about what we're paying here in the UAE. A one meg DSL line is Dhs249 a month, 2 Mbps costs a whopping Dhs349 a month and you'll pay Dhs549 for a 16 meg line. If you want the highest available speed from Etisalat, you can get a 30 Mbps 'Al Shamil' line for a mere Dhs699 a month. That's $191.5 to you.

I'm not even going to mention that the Japanese home gets an average 60 Mbps line at a cost of $0.27 per megabit month. Not even thinking about going there. Oh no.

Now the promises being made (because the story is, tragically, predicated on a promise not an actual physical delivery of service) are that Lebanon will get a minimum access speed of 1 Mbps for $16 per month. That would bring it in line with markets like the UK. I genuinely hope the promise (made to Reuters by Lebanese telecoms minister Nicola Sehnawi) comes through - although Ogero might have something to say about that - for two reasons. First and foremost so my friends in Lebanon can stop gnashing their teeth and throwing laptops against the wall in frustration. The selfish second reason is that it would add pressure on the TRA to finally act and bring down the ridulous broadband prices here in the UAE - prices that are undoubtedly a key factor contributing to hindering the adoption, use and the growth of the economic opportunity derived from technology in the UAE today.


(The image at the top of the post is one of my favourite things, BTW. It's the first sketch of 'the Internet')


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A Holiday In Estonia

Sorry it's taken a while to get around to this, but I've been busy/coming painfully back online after the summer.

We decided to go to Estonia this summer for a few days by ourselves. We've been married twenty years (cripes!) and reckoned we deserved some 'us' time. Unusually, we didn't bother to research it or in any other way look into where we were going. We had the vague notion it would be something like Prague (a city we both love lots) and just, well, booked it.

One of Sarah's parents very kindly gave her a coffee table book on Estonia. We didn't even open the cover until we'd got back.

So you can see we richly deserved to end up somewhere awful. Instead, we ended up in a city we will always look back on with fondness and delight. Tallinn is truly, wonderfully, jaw-droppingly glorious.

Estonia was, of course, part of the Soviet Union, until the people took to the streets in 1991, held hands and sang. The 'singing revolution' ended up with an unbroken line of people stretching from Estonia through Latvia and Lithuania. The Soviets took one look at the whole crazy lot of them and threw up their hands, said 'sod this' and went back to Russia. One of Tallin's quaintest museum ideas (sadly quite badly executed, but still worth a wander) is 'The Museum to Soviet Uselesness'. It's a marvellous revenge

We stayed at the Telegraph Hotel in Tallinn's old town. The walled medieval city is a UNESCO Heritage Site liberally dotted with museums, craft shops, galleries and restaurants. The Telegraph is very funky indeed, although lacked a decent bar/lounge/guest area. That and the fact they hired out their garden to a corporate gig, which rather meant guests had nowhere to go that day but the restaurant or the scattered seats in the lobby that forms the only 'bar' area - I did find that an odd decision. The restaurant, the 'Tchaikovsky' is pricey by Estonian standards, (You'll pay about 160 Euro for two with drinks) but the food was tremendous.

Happily installed in our Shrine to Funkiness (well, apart from the awful plastic 'old fashioned' phones in the room), we set out on what would be four days of just walking around Old Tallinn, dropping into churches (the most secular nation in Europe, most of them have been deconsecrated. One of them is now an 'Irish' pub!), walking the medieval walls, shopping and mooching around museums.

We were left with the impression of Estonians as being a rather endearingly potty people. They seem fiercely individualistic and proud of their own quirkiness. Something like 60% of the country's population lives in Tallinn, the rest in a country that appears given over mostly to forest and agricultural land. The food we had was never less than excellent, whether we ate lunch in cafe bars on the street (Beer at a couple of Euro a pint. Brilliant. And Estonians don't know what a 'measure' is - I had some of the largest Martinis of my life there).

We also came across a business that had us both in awe from the first time we encountered it: Olde Hansa. This is a medieval eatery in the Old Town, a tourist trap with added tourist trap. It's tacky - medieval style dining with set menus of 'feasts' as well as an a la carte menu rendered almost indecipherable by the gaudy, medieval- style illumination. The staff are all decked out in medieval uniforms, there are no potatoes on offer and everything is spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and so on. They have stalls that make 'medieval style' coated almonds. They have their own honey or cinnamon flavoured beers. It's all as tacky you'd like, aimed directly at the thousands of tourists that throng to the old town (two million of 'em, last year).

We decided to go there for dinner.

A reservation is a must, the multi-storied restaurant is often packed out. It's got the big fireplaces, the long tables, the beams and all that. Again, the staff are all dressed in smocks and frocks, bringing drinks in heavy earthenware pots or roughly blown coloured glasses. The food was fine, oddly enough, big bold and hearty stuff and enjoyable for all that (you get spelt instead of spuds, all in keeping, see?). The service was cheerful and friendly. And the music was provided by players using medieval instruments and playing medieval airs. They're all music students, of course, but by golly they made a fantastic job of it. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves without even one moment's guilty feeling. We ate in a tacky tourist trap and we loved it.

The Olde Hansa girls cooking, bagging and selling an awful lot of nuts.

Olde Hansa also operates a shop in the old town selling its glass, spice mixtures, calico things, soaps and the like. It's very well done indeed - and the way the business is managed and promoted had me taking off my proverbial hat. So much so that I was curious enough to take a gander at their website to find out about the people behind the business. Not a thing - the website's entirely 'in character'. When we opened our minifridge in the hotel to store some of the chocolates, elk sausage and other danties we'd picked up, the nuts were Olde Hansa nuts. It's a remarkable enterprise - and they even have an online shop (I highly recommend the soaps) to catch those tourists again once they get home!

The other two evenings, we ate at the restaurant next door to our hotel, Ribe.Less pricey than the Tchaikovsky (about 120 Euro for aperitifs, dinner, drinks and coffees for two), it offers fine dining that Dubai would find hard to match - and for a fragment of the cost. Here, take a gander at the menu. They delivered on this stuff, perfectly, consistently and with charm. If you ever find yourself in Estonia, eat here. You can thank me in the comments. Chatting to the waiter, we happened to mention Olde Hansa and how we admired the slickness of the operation. 'Yes,' he said cattily, 'but they use microwaves.' Oh, the horror!

The death-defying shot of the British Embassy...

I had decided to build an Estonian angle into the book I'm currently working on, something I'd dreamed up I think before we even made the decision to go. So this meant we had to walk across town to the British Embassy, just to 'case the joint'. Sarah has an odd aversion to letting me photograph embassies and military installations for research, but I got what I needed nonetheless. 

Comfits

It's four hours from Beirut (Air Baltic flies there, I believe) and 40 minutes from Copenhagen (Emirates had just started flying there when we passed through). Even Ryan Air flies there (we flew on an Air Estonia Bombardier and that was fine) - Estonia has many a bar and more than a few dodgy-looking nightclub-cum-cathouses. One thing that amazed us was the thousands of purple-rinsed dears and their doddery parmours being trailed around Tallinn by brolly-wielding tour guides - the Baltic cruise business is big and Tallinn's a popular stop-off. One lot were even wearing stickers with their tour numbers on, presumably in case they wandered in their insenility. Sarah and I made a pact, if we ever get to the stage where we'd consider a cruise, we'll put each other out of our misery.

(And yes, the title of this post is indeed a play on the brilliant Dead Kennedys song and, yes, this was a holiday post and so, yes, I am going soft in the head.)

Who's Afraid Of The Kindle Fire?

Image via WikipediaIt hardly seems worth adding to the squillions of words being written about Amazon's Kindle Fire announcement last night. Engadget's real-time updates were fascinating enough, but this morning pretty much every gadget blog and site is looking at 'what you should know about the Kindle Fire' and analysing what this new thing means to us all. The papers (the serious ones, I mean) are all busily providing their much-vaunted 'context and analysis'.

It's all a  bit of a kerfuffle.

Personally, I've been flirting with the idea of a tablet since last year, when I decided to go Kindle. At the time of its release, Amazon's e-reader certainly had its detractors - all of them making like the wide-mouthed frog right now. The Kindle has not only been a brilliant success, it has transformed the publishing and writing world and continues to do so, injecting a great deal of fear and loathing into an industry that has been shaken out of its cosy leather armchairs. At the new $79 price point, it will only continue to do so. The Kindle touch, at $99, adds a touch screen, although it's not a 'full' touch screen, you tap it to move a page rather than swipe it. Which is a shame, as every person I have ever handled my Kindle to has first tried to swipe it to turn the page.

But it's the Kindle Fire that's really got people, well, fired up. The Fire is undoubtedly the one tablet device that is going to challenge Apple's dominance of the tablet market. Not because it's a really cool physical product (although it is), but because it's linked to the world's largest content repository. Amazon not only has millions of books, films and pieces of music to sell us, it has our credit card numbers (and our trust), our addresses and frequently the addresses of our friends and family too. With Whispernet, it is already delivering instantaneously accessible content to millions of people around the world. The Kindle Fire is the device that can access that content, as well as the services Amazon is building around it.

Sure, you can get stuff on Kindle for the iPad, but it's not the same. The Kindle Fire is integrated into Amazon. We're couch potatoes - we'll go for the easy stuff every time. For everyone who doesn't have an iPad right now, the Kindle Fire is a no-brainer at $199.

So where does that leave our, now age-old, argument about wanting to curl up with a good book rather than a slab of electronics? Well, Kindles just became a load cheaper and more accessible. And, at the high end, they got a whole load sexier. That means new consumers, new readers who can choose to download our work as e-books. We've already seen that American 'core readers', those who buy more than twelve books a year, have in the main migrated to e-readers. Now there are pretty compelling reasons for the mass market to follow in their footsteps. It's increasingly the case that in order to reach a wide readership, a writer needs to have an e-book.

It's not very good news for traditionally minded publishers. And it further cements Amazon's unbearably tight grip on the publishing industry. Amazon pretty much dominates the business of distributing books now, between the physical book sales and the e-book market. It is set to expand that dominance exponentially.

Sadly, those of us not born in the land of the free and home of the brave will have to wait a while for our new toys to arrive. Available on November 15th in the USA, the Kindle Fire cannot be shipped anywhere else in the world. And, of course, here in the Middle East we cannot sign up to download Amazon content. Yes, of course there are ways around that - but you're missing the mass market when you're making people jump through hoops like that.

Which is frustrating. As the world migrates to e-readers, the Middle East is left behind in the Paper Age simply because the biggest, most dominant players in the content reader device and distribution businesses, Apple and Amazon, do not give a hoot about the Arab world. And likely never will. Tragically, every move as brilliant and innovative as the Kindle Fire in this industry just widens the gap.

Foiled!

Image via WikipediaYou might remember my bright idea some time ago, of bankrupting HSBC by using the free valet parking service that comes with their credit cards.

I am sad to report I have been foiled. I got a text last week from them, telling me that valet services at MoE, DCC and MCC have been 'discontinued with immediate effect'.

Not so much as a 'sorry', you'll notice, for simply taking away one of the 'many benefits you can avail' when choosing their Visa card.

I'll find some other way of getting them, don't you worry...

The UAE Goes To The Polls

Image via WikipediaThe elections for 20 seats of the 40-seat Federal National Council took place on Saturday using a high-tech voting system that meant the vote was done and dusted by midnight and the new members duly named. I had wondered what the turnout would be like and, using Gulf News' figures on the number of votes cast for each candidate (a total of 19,939 votes cast by the 129,274 eligible voters), the turnout was about fifteen percent.

Voter turnout was higher than expected, Gulf News tells us.

The seats are distributed between the emirates, four respectively for Abu Dhabi and Dubai, three respectively for Sharjah and Ras Al Khaimah and two for Ajman, Umm Al Quwain and Fujairah. The least votes were cast by the voters of Ajman, with fewer than 600 making it to the polls.

The votes were cast at 12 voting centres around the country. "Most of the voting process was smooth and there were no major glitches at the majority of the centres" Gulf News' cover story tells us today, which means there were major glitches at a couple of centres. This cynical reading of the doublespeak is borne up by the quote from the Ministry of State for FNC affairs, who tells Gulf News on page 9, 'The process worked well in general, though we suffered from some technical troubles."

Caviling apart, there appears to have been much widespread happiness at the successful conclusion of this young country's experiment with voting.