Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Off To ArabNet I Go!

Two years on from the first ArabNet Digital Summit in Beirut and the world has changed. I don't know that ArabNet can take the credit for that, but organiser Omar Christidis can certainly take credit for knowing when to start a serious regional digital conference with a focus on startups and 'the digital opportunity' in the Middle East.

As I posted at the time, the first ArabNet Digital Summit in March 2010 was something of an eye-opener. With low expectations confounded by a very high standard of event, ArabNet showed that there was undoubtedly a flowering of talent, innovation, interest and investment in the region's digital industries. The second ArabNet a year later cemented that, although a daringly expanded event did expose a couple of organisational weaknesses. That didn't really matter, the highly ambitious agenda was expanded to include a developer day event, the two day core conference and a community day. The ArabNet team went on a road trip around the region, literally taking a bus from country to country and arranging presentations, workshops and the like with the aim of uncovering, even fostering, the region's potential startups.

This year, the ArabNet Digital Summit is a five day event - the popular Developer Day has been expanded to the plural, the two day conference remains at the core of the event. There's a one day 'Industry Day' (taking place concurrent to the second Developer Day), which aims to examine how digital technologies are transforming a number of vertical industries in the region. It's a smart idea, because it means taking an approach to technology that is necessarily made relevant to each of the industries the day serves, which include healthcare, banking, travel, education, and government.

Then we have the two day ArabNet conference, the 'Forum Days' which include a number of keynotes, panels, workshops and the much-loved 'Ideathon' (pitch a startup idea from the stage) and 'Startup Demo' (Startup pitches its work and seeks funding) competitions. There's a third competition, as well, for agencies to case study their digital campaigns.

As usual, I'll be there causing trouble. I'm moderating a session on Industry Day, 'Social Media and Customer Relationship Management' and then during the main forum, I'll be presenting on how companies can, in fact need to, 'Take back your content' - how companies are going to need to plan and execute content strategies in this world of 'discoverability' we're carving for ourselves. Then I'll be moderating a panel on 'The Future of News' which will be, if I have anything to do with it, a real bunfight.

Apart from the stuff I'm doing from the stage, I'll be doing the usual at ArabNet - meeting smart and interesting people, learning about what's happening around the region and soaking up information and best practice from the speakers onstage.

See you there!

Here's the Spot On ArabNet page, BTW!

GeekFest Sharjah - It's A Wrap!

GeekFest Sharjah is over and it was fun. Official.  There are so many people to thank, I'm just going to get on and do it. To Nick Rego who made GameFest happen, selflessly giving up his evening so that other people could play silly dancing games, to Ali and the brilliant origami workshop team from JUKI, to the speakers and especially those (Nick, Rasha, Qais, Alexandra, Hanan and others) who braved The Impossible Journey from Dubai and in the process discovered the traffic has changed and a twenty minute drive in slow traffic is perfectly bearable when there's a GeekFest at the end of it. Rupert Bumfrey, very much the catalyst behind GeekFest Sharjah happening, gets a nice perspex award and all. To TechnoCase mobile types Nokia, supportive as always, another bright, shiny thank you.

The talks, as usual, were popular, fun and engaging, starting with a live music performance thanks to creative community website TripleW, which was different! Qais Sedki entertained, Alexandra Tohme provoked and I showed a 1937 movie about Sharjah Airport which rarely fails to fascinate watchers. Catalin Marin's post-processing workshop went down a storm - his stuff is always popular at GeekFest and he's got quite a fierce reputation among PhotoGeeks for his technical wizardry but also for his readiness to help others and share his knowledge. The team from Sharjah Museums came by and shared the amazing diversity of exhibitions and cultural programmes they're working on, which was lovely. They also brought chocolate, which is always appreciated! For what it's worth, I have been consistently delighted and impressed by the youth, commitment and enthusiasm of the Sharjah Museums people and if you haven't had a look at what they've got to offer the culturally interested visitor seeking a number of interesting day trips, you're just plain daft.

To Giuseppe and the team from Al Maraya go the biggest vote of thanks, they worked hard to help everything get off the ground with style and put up gracefully with the unstructured mayhem that is UNorganisation. I did try to warn them...

The turnout wasn't stellar, about 70 people pitched according to Mariecar from Gulf Today (being a journalist, she counted them), although that's how many we catered for in a pessimistic food order - an interesting result given the GeekFest announcement post on this very blog notched up over a thousand page views.

They've decided they all want to do it again in late May, but bigger and better. I'm looking forward to that, because GeekFest Sharjah had a strong cultural and artistic vibe to it that was unique and refreshing.

Strangely, tonight I got home to an email confirming GeekFest Jeddah, previously postponed, was going ahead as a two-stream event (geeks and geekas) in mid-April. There's a GeekFest Beirut in the pipeline, too.

And no, I didn't talk about Olives. Well, just the once...

Olives Reading In Beirut

Gloop 2 - The Dust Rides Out

Sawdust (Photo credit: ganatronic)

It's still there, the fine dust suspended in the air. It's worse over in Fujairah, apparently, where visibility is own to 500 metres and flights from the emirate's tiny airport have been disrupted.

You know those boards you get in hotels that look a little like a washboard, with the rows of felt runnels accepting letters pushed into them for events and the like? We were delighted when we dropped into Fujairah airport for a 'nose' to find those boards being used for arrivals and departures. That's how small Fujairah airport is.

It's all very Mission Impossible Four, isn't it? Which reminded me this morning of the pal who worked on the set of the film - the sandstorm scenes were made possible thanks to two metre high fans and a whole load of specially imported Hollywood sawdust.

Yes, sawdust. Sand doesn't show up on film cameras (neither does 'real' rain, BTW, they have to use rain machines to make super-heavy rain) so a very fine sawdust is used instead. They had to fit AC filters to the car radiators to stop them 'brewing up' because they quickly became clogged in sawdust.

To tell you the truth, I'd be happier with sawdust. This fine stuff is getting  everywhere and I've got a tickly throat. Hundreds are apparently presenting themselves at various hospitals around the country with respiratory problems.

Gloop

It's everywhere. A thin layer of incredibly fine dust has coated any exterior surface. The car was a light grey colour this morning and we drove out into a strange otherworld, the tiny particles so small they're suspended in the atmosphere like a mist.

People scurry past, handkerchiefs held up to their faces, eyes squinting. The ghostly atmosphere bears down on you, the dusty gloop everywhere. As drive inland it gets worse, the blanket denser. Everything's greyed out.

Apparently the gloop is sand from Saudi Arabia, blown here by the seasonal weather patterns, highs and lows conspiring to whip the sands of the huge desertscape high into the air, the finest particles scattered in a corona across the Northern Gulf.

We've had the damndest weather this year, high winds a couple of weeks ago followed by a warm snap that saw temperatures hitting a most unseasonal 35 Celsius, giving way to high winds last night and now waking up to this soupy atmosphere clogged with powdery sand particles in suspension.

Can't wait for the frogs and locusts...

Got Any Lebanese LIRA?

Pound for pound, the Lebanese LIRA is the daftest regulation you'll see in quite a while. It's yet another example of a government trying to define the role of online media as it struggles to manage the potential of unfettered human thought and opinion being freely shared, following hot on the heels of the American near-disasters we know so well as SOPA and PIPA. Once again, it shows legislators are hopelessly out of touch with the dynamic of that shifting, changing thing we know as the internet.

The Lebanese Internet Regulation Act requires owners of websites to register with the government. interestingly, the draft law was proposed at the start of a month where the region's most vibrant and important annual forum for the online and digital industries, the ArabNet Digital Summit, is to take place in Beirut. Debate on the regulation has been postponed for further discussion by the Lebanese cabinet, giving the public time to make its views known (not that anyone will be listening, I conjecture).

LIRA attempts to take the Internet and squeeze it into a square peg shape so it'll fit the Lebanese press law shaped hole. Any owner of a website would have to register with the Information Ministry and websites would be governed by the conditions imposed on journalists, media and broadcasters by the Lebanese press law, the law specifically mentioned in the new regulation is Press Law 382/94, which is the audiovisual media law - a law that, as far as I can make out, merely modifies and re-ratifies the existing 1962 press law. It does seem like a very lazy way of saying "See the press law? It holds true for the Internets as well, people" which, as we all know, simply won't cut it.

That's about it. There's absolutely no attempt to understand the dynamics of the Internet, let alone even defining what a 'website' is - does this law apply to blogs? Only to owned domain-hosted websites? Mobile Apps? Facebook pages? Twitter?

It'll be interesting to see if Lebanese information minister Walid Daouk will speak at ArabNet and, if he does, how he'll be received. There has been a very lively hashtag, #STOPLIRA, pinging around the Twitterverse for a few days now and it's likely quite a few of the 1,500 digital innovators, specialists and leaders who'll be attending will have some helpful hints and tips for the minister. As it is, the ArabNet organisers turn off the Twitter wall for the keynote session in which ministers traditionally like to tell the audience of web-heads how the Internet and youth are important to our future. You wouldn't want to be reading what Twitter says about that kind of thing, you really wouldn't...


A translation of the Arabic language regulation is to be found on Joseph Choufani's blog here.

Submitting Your Novel To Agents

Submission
Going down, down, dragging her own
Submission
I can't tell you what I found
The Sex Pistols

Calm down, now. This is a book writing post, not a music one.

Submitting to literary agents is all part and parcel of the wonderful world of writing books. Having received something like 250 rejections, I think I've got quite good at it over the years. The process is obviously of interest to a great many people in the UAE, certainly judging by Luigi Bonomi's two sell-out sessions on getting an agent at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, as well as the audience questions during our 'First Fictions' panel session.

In fact, I'm still getting questions from people, so here's a potted guide. The usual caveats - I'm just giving my own views here and I'm not necessarily the best person in the world to give advice to anyone about anything, but here it is anyway.

What agents ask for

• The first 50 pages of your book printed single sided in Times 12 point, double spaced with a 0.5cm paragraph indent, not hardbound (ie slide bound or even held together with an elastic band). Each page should include the page number and the title of the novel and name of the author.
• A synopsis, no more than two pages
• A covering letter
• An SAE

What Internet savvy agents ask for

• An email with a query, synopsis and first ten pages in the body of the email, no attachments.

or

• An email with the first three chapters and synopsis as attachments.

I would generally approach any agent via email first and had actively started avoiding 'postal submisions only' agents by the time I signed with my agent.

What you need
A novel
A synopsis
A blurb
A query letter
An SAE
An international postal coupon
An Internet connection
A thick skin and a good dollop of self belief

A novel
Ideally, you should have a whole novel. Some people tell me Luigi suggested you might like to write just the first three chaps and submit to see how it goes, but I can't see that working. If an agent comes back in response to your 'partial' and asks for a 'full' you're just going to muff it by trying to write a book in a couple of weeks. Getting those 'first three' chapters into top condition requires, IMHO, the experience and editing knowledge you'll gain from writing a book.

You need around about the first fifty pages of your novel, ideally ending somewhere sensible, so if that takes 46 or 52 pages, never mind. Check them for stupid mistakes, read them out loud as if you're giving a reading to a book club and correct the text. Print it out and go through it with a red pen. Ideally, upload it to a Kindle and edit it again. Then leave it for a few days and edit it on screen. It.must.contain.no.error.

A synopsis
Distil your novel down to a few pages, then print it out. Tell that story from scratch, doing your best to make it compelling, colourful and yet true to the movement of the plot. Do not lace it with 'in character' dialogue or phrases, keep it a straightforward piece of storytelling that clearly shows the KEY elements of your plot and story as a readable, flowing document. Now cut it. You should end up with it cut down to two pages.

A blurb
Imagine you're writing the dust jacket of your book. Write it up just like that, to focus on the key 'hooks' your book has to offer. Make the language compelling. Again, read it out. Imagine it as tweets - cut out any word you don't need in there. Make it elegant. Make me, the reader, want it.

A query letter
Agents like you to play it straight and don't award marks for individuality, humour or in-character stunts. There are lots of examples of query letters on the interwebs, but the best approach is to get straight in there with a two-paragraph (max)description of your book, (Olives is a stranger abroad story set in Jordan, where journalist Paul Stokes falls love as he finds himself caught up in a series of explosions that seem linked to him) followed by a short description the target market for the book, a bit about who you are (which ideally is in some way relevant to the topic/content of your book) and a signoff. You're looking at a page, max a page and a half.


An SAE
Increasingly, agents are taking email submissions which saves a load of wasted time, paper and money. It'll cost you about dhs60 to send a wodge of 50 pages of novel and an international reply paid coupon (together with an envelope addressed to yourself which will eventually contain the photocopied rejection slip) so it's no small beer once you get above ten agents. So I would definitely query agents that take email submissions first.

Which agents to approach?
You can go through the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook for agents - try and do it intelligently and find people who represent books similar in theme, genre or essence to yours. Here's a useful free listing, but it's a wee bit out of date now and I'd buy into the W&A thing, honestly.

Look at their websites
Agents will ALWAYS have submission guidelines on their websites and you should follow these. Don't waste time and energy putting together a package that doesn't meet the guidelines of each agent, because they'll just bin submissions that don't comply. Don't forget, agents get anything up to fifty brown envelopes full of hope every single day.

Use white envelopes.

If an agent's guidelines seem unusually onerous or ridiculous move on. Don't kill yourself jumping through hoops, there are plenty other agents in the sea.

Many agents will respond to a well-written query by email (use your blurb as the core of this) and many will accept an online submission from the UAE based on that query - do try this before posting off packages, each 'yes' you win will save you the price of a copy of Olives to gift a member of your grateful family.

Don't follow up
It can take three months for an agent to respond to a submission package. Do NOT phone them to chase your submission. They don't know who the hell you are, you're just another parcel on the great big pile in reception. Your rejection will come in time, don't worry.

When you get rejected
If you get a rejection with any feedback in it, count your lucky stars. This marks you as unusual and you should take it as a huge positive sign. Take the feedback on board and resubmit - including to the agent who gave you the feedback. Don't be in a hurry to do this, take your time - and make sure you've really taken that feedback to heart.

When you get a 'full' request
A full read means an agent has enough interest in your work to spend time and/or money on your work - they'll likely have 'readers' who charge a fee to read work and give an editorial report on it. This report will not be shared with you, although you might get a couple of lines of final feedback with the 'no'.

However, you might also get a 'yes'. This is, believe me, a very good moment. Savour it, roll it around in your mouth, then swallow gratefully. It's not the end of the process, your agent's got to find a publisher and that's a whole new ballgame. But you're pretty much through the gate and standing, blinking, in the inner keep...

GeekFest Sharjah 1.0

UPDATE since the original post we've added an origami workshop by JUKI, a Technology Showcase from Nokia, an exhibition of digital photography by Azimuddin Mohammed and the world's first Indian poetry mobile application - these and GameFest details are added in below.

It’s been a slow train coming, but GeekFest is coming to Sharjah! Every GeekFest around the region has had its different ‘feel’, and Sharjah’s no exception. We’ve got art, culture and creativity at the core of the event, which promises to be a very large amount of fun and it's developing daily, too!

So mark your diaries, set your calendars and trip your alarms for 7.30pm on Thursday 22nd March AD!

First a thanks to Mr Rupert Bumfrey, who was instrumental in actually getting the event up and running, as well as doing more organising (this will surprise few who know GeekFest) than I did.

We got talks, we got workshops, GameFest and we got ‘things happening’ and there’ll be updates as we move forward, too, because there's more stuff happening every day.

The really good news is the The Al Qasba Food Festival is happening the same night at Al Qasba and we're looking forward to integrating the two events to Feed The Geeks!!!

GeekFest Sharjah 1.0 is being held at the Al Maraya Art Centre, which is on the first floor of Al Qasba in Sharjah, relatively easy to get to from Dubai even with the Thursday traffic taken into account. There's a map at the bottom of this post.

I can tell you now, GeekFest Sharjah is an Olives Free Zone. No signings, no readings, no talks about books, no books on sale. Nothing with a stone in. And certainly nothing stuffed with pimentoes.

GEEKTALKS

Taking place in Al Maraya's fabby bean-bag cinema, which is similar to the 'old Shelter' cinema space (a tad bigger, if anything), the talks as usual start at 8pm and each lasts 15 minutes sharp!

If Music be the Food of Love, Play on!
Rasha Omer is Marketing and Content Manager at creative community website TripleW, which encourages people to upload their music, photography and film for others to enjoy and sample, with three strands to the site catering to these areas – all titled ‘makshoof’ (in the open). The idea isn’t free content or pirated content – the idea is sharing talent, building reputations and exposing potential. Rasha will be talking about the site, its aims and about the burgeoning creative community TripleW is hosting. There will be music.

Confessions of a Manga Geek
Qais Sedki, married Emirati father of two, willingly gave up a career in information technology in order to pursue a passion to put entertainment to good use.  His vision was to provide original classical Arabic content, professionally produced graphic novels in Japanese manga format in order to instil a love of reading.  He set up Pageflip Publishing, an independent Dubai based publishing house to self publish his debut title, Gold Ring, which won the coveted Sheikh Zayed Book Award For Children's Literature in 2010 making him the first Emirati author to win in any category of the international prize.

Qais will be talking about manga, what defines it, its origins, and will be sharing his experience of trying to make a difference through reading. There will be cartoons.

A new level in art
Responsible for digital strategy at Ogilvy One, Alexandra Tohme is a Geeka with a fascination for community development, collaboration and the power of crowds working together to do better stuff. March is the month of art. Art Dubai, Sikka Art Fair and the statement that Dubai Properties Group has partnered with Dubai Culture to deliver an "Outdoor Art Project" at Business Bay
(see http://www.ameinfo.com/292544.html )

Alex's idea is taking public art to the next level using technology to enhance the experience. In her talk she wants to give her ideas on using augmented reality, gamification and soundscapes to deliver the next generation of art and hopes to inspire the audience to work with her on an ambitious new project. There will be collaboration.

What was Sharjah like in 1937?
One of the most memorable living documents of Sharjah’s pre-oil history is the documentary film Air Outpost, made by London Films for Imperial Airways in 1937 and focusing on the desert airport of Sharjah – complete with ‘fanatical Wahhabi Muslims’. Among many other claims to fame, this important film is the first ‘proper’ documentary as well as laying claim to be the first ever corporate video.  His interest sparked by obtaining an early copy of the film in the 1990s, Alexander McNabb has long studied the Imperial Airways story and will share the incredible tale of the network that linked an Empire. There will be a screening of the film and there will be popcorn.

TECHNOCASES

Old 'friends of GeekFest' Nokia will be on hand to talk about mobiles, maps and all things app-related as they showcase the latest from Planet Nokia and the Nokia team will be around to answer your questions, chat to you about what they're planning and generally join in the fun.

GAMEFEST

Comes to you powered by those nice chaps at tbreak and megamers - we'll once again be hosting some sort of screaming fragathon for the hardcore gaming nuts (bring a laptop) while the chaps have promised to bring some more general public friendly gaming fun of a more Kinect sort of nature. Please, once again, do not feed the gamers. They get a healthy diet and really do have to learn not to bite.

WORKSHOPS AND STUFF

10 Tips for Shooting with Retouching in Mind
Renowned photographer and digital manipulator of things Catalin Marin – as well as the man behind uber-popular photoblog Momentary Awe will be conducting a 45 minute hands-on workshop to look at how you can optimise your digital photography to make the most of the sophisticated retouching tools today’s digital artist has to hand. Places for this workshop are limited, so please do hit Catalin up on Twitter and reserve your seat!

The Great GeekFest Sharjah Origami Workshop
The team from JUKI, the Japan UAE Kizuna Initiative, will be on hand to share their origami skills in a workshop designed to harness your creativity, tantalise your tastebuds and satisfy your senses! Learn about the art of origami and how to make something more interesting than paper planes with your own two hands as well as taking a chance to talk to the JUKI guys about their fund raising for victims of Japan's tsunami and earthquake.

The Book Shelter
Has its home at Al Maraya Centre - so bring your old books to add to the Book Shelter collection and feel free to take a bunch of books away with you! There'll be a reading corner on the night for committed bookworms.

We're just in the middle of confirming more workhops and a number of other things, events and happenings, so watch this space!

Orientalism
In concert with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Sharjah Museums is hosting an important exhibition of the works of orientalist Owen Jones, the Victorian architect and designer whose studies of the AlHambra led to the flowering of orientalist art and brought influences and ideas to influence British design throughout the C19th. These ideas percolated throughout the century and can still be seen in the works of later influential Victorian artists such as William Moore and trickling into Art Deco.

Ibrahim El Salahi, the picture maker, was born in 1930 in Omdurman, in the Sudan. He is best known as the pioneer of modern African art, whose seminal work ‘The Inevitable’ has been called ‘Africa’s Guernica’. El-Salahi aimed to blend Arabic, Nubic, Coptic and European elements with one another and was one of the first modern artists to incorporate Arab calligraphy into his works, using it both as a means of communication and as purely aesthetic form.

Fatima Musharbak, Noor Karmustaji and Asma Makram from the Sharjah Museums Department will be on hand along with displays of work from the Owen Jones and Ibrahim El Salahi exhibitions, both of which open next week.

Azimuddin Mohammed
Poet, writer, Freelancer artist/ designer, photographer & creative director – musafirs (Mohammed Azimuddin) will be showing slideshows of his work, a combination of images from and around Sharjah as well as studies from further afield.

Mujeeb Jaihoon
Indian poet Mujeeb Jaihoon will be demonstrating his innovative 'poetry app', iJaihoon at GeekFest - it's available on Apple and Android and is the world's first app for Indian poetry! More here!

The Map Of  The Place Of The GeekFest

View Larger Map

If you need any other information, just shout! Here's the Al Maraya website, too! You can follow @geekfestdubai on Twitter, btw, or find us on Facebook here.

Social Crimes

Image via CrunchBase

It must be me, but Gulf News seems more and more crammed with court reports than anything else these days and they're certainly coming thick and fast. From the Afghan charged with slashing a Range Rover tyre in a bid to steal $4m ("I am not guilty. I didn't use any sharp tool to puncture the tyre. I never tried to steal anything" he told the court, channelling Vicky Pollard) to the Bangladeshi kidnap and brothel case and the employee demanding Dhs3 million compensation for his false dismissal, the tales of crime and counter-crime are certainly stacking up. Today's paper also features two 'social crimes'...

Notable among the other tales of wickedness are the continuing Twitter trial, the man who's been held since February 19th for Tweets that cursed Dubai Chief of Police, Dhahi Khalfan Tamim. Claiming he's being held in solitary confinement, coerced and pressured, the man lodged a special plea to have the police chief attend the court and give a statement. The plea was denied and judgement in the case will be issued on April 1st. Someone's got a sense of humour.

Another court report in today's packed schedule deals with the worker and housemaid whose 'love flowered after they met on Facebook' and who are consequently being charged with having consensual sex out of wedlock. This is something taken seriously here in the UAE and they're being jailed for two months and then deported. Apparently the couple chatted for two weeks on Facebook and then fell in love, the consummation of this passion taking place at the housemaid's sponsor's villa and, although Gulf News doesn't mention it, presumably their subsequent interruption by a scandalised sponsor wondering what all the noise was.

Give people technology and they find all sorts of interesting and different ways to use it, no?

Publish to Promote: The EAFOL Self Publishing Workshop

This is for those happy souls who attended my workshop on self publishing and promotion at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

For a start, here's a link to the PDF of the presentation I promised y'all. It's over here for your downloading.pleasure.

Here's a blog search for articles on self publishing I've posted in the past.

Here's a link to the 'How to write a book' post I mentioned.

Here's a sniffy post on Territorial Rights.

Significant things I mentioned were editorial services from Bubblecow - Mr Gary Smailes runs this respected editorial shop and you can ask him about the name, not me. My editor on Olives was Robb Grindstaff.

Amazon's Kindle site, Kindle Direct Publishing is simply www.kdp.com and the conversion software you need is MobiPocket Creator. For booky books (and for the record, esteemed moderator Paul Blezard made a rare slip with his Russell Brand gag, Brand's biography was 'My Booky Wook') you can use Createspace (www.createspace.com) and for other ebook formats, www.smashwords.com. These aren't by any means the only options and do feel to explore (and recommend in comments) other platforms. They're simply the ones I used.

Do, of course, feel free to buy a copy of Olives and check if the quality of self published books is 'up to it' - and if you think it's not, by all means feel free to let me know, I have no problems with having that discussion, honestly!

I'll happy respond to questions in comments or at @alexandermcnabb, of course. Thanks for being there, paying all that money and not throwing tomatoes and things!

Alexander