Long Live The E-Gate Card! Oh...

passport. (Photo credit: kappuru)

The E-Gate card is dead. Honest, it's in Gulf News and everything so it must be true! Immigration has installed a nifty new scanner at Terminal 3 of Dubai International Airport that'll scan data from machine-readable passports and combine this with biometrics to give an instant 'no touch' entry system.

Up until now, if you didn't want to join the long, shuffling queues at immigration and have your passport filled with inky stampy things, the E-Card was the way to go. Although not for me, sadly, as the system decided to start refusing to read my thumbs a couple of years back, even after I'd gone up to the E-Gate centre and had 'em rescanned.

It's actually been ten years since the introduction of the 'old' E-Gate card system.

I've used these new scanners at Heathrow and they're fast - certainly within the 15 seconds GN mentions. The scheme is to roll them out to all of Dubai's entry points after a two month trial at Terminal 3. They use facial recognition technology to compare a snapshot of your mug with the one stored in the chip in your machine readable passport.

It's a pretty advanced move for the UAE - while over 170 countries now issue machine readable passports, fewer issue chip-enabled 'e-passports' and only six countries are using 'heightened biometrics' such as facial scans, fingerprints or retinal scans in their border scanners. It's soon to be seven!

Where Did Nokia Go Wrong?

Steve Jobs shows off the white iPhone 4 at the 2010 Worldwide Developers Conference (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ratings agency Fitch has just this minute cut Nokia's stock to junk bond status, reports Reuters. Five years ago Nokia was the undisputed world market leader in mobile handsets. Today it's routinely referred to as a 'struggling Finnish handset maker'.

Where did it all go wrong? How on earth can you take global market dominance, a near-faultless track record of innovation and product excellence and a loyal base of customers around the world and simply blow it?

The answer is Steve Jobs and a small issue of perspective.

Jobs saw the mobile as a computer. Nokia saw it as a telephone. Nokia was working on making your phone smarter, Jobs was putting a content access device in your hands. Even Nokia's early N series phones tacked a keyboard onto a phone, a bit like a mobile One Per Desk rather than using the powerful combination of smart access device, applications and content wrapped up into a flawless user experience.

For me, the rot truly set in when Nokia first started shipping 'smart phones' that could link to its Ovi store and download apps and stuff. The store was pretty much empty for a very long time indeed. Nokia seemed to miss the whole idea that the mobile was to a handset manufacturer what a SIM is to a mobile operator - a cash cow. Ovi could have been an open platform for application developers and content owners. It should have been.

On June 29th 2007, Jobs took to the stage in his turtleneck sweater and launched the iPhone. Nokia's executives must still have been laughing when, in September, Apple sold its millionth iPhone. They must still have been laughing when Time named it Invention of the Year in 2007.

Apple's iTunes and Jobs' app-centric approach created a revolution. Nokia, in common with mobile operators around the world, persisted in a circuit-switched mentality. When Google joined in with Android, the writing was on the wall. They started fitting the brass handles when Elop announced Nokia was ditching Symbian a year before it was ready to replace the operating system with the Great White Hope - Microsoft's Windows, the operating system that never 'got' mobile. Remember Windows CE anyone?

Today, Apple and Samsung between them account for something like 50% of the global smartphone market. And Nokia is a junk bond. Its first Windows based 'phone, the Lumia, has a name that means prostitute in Spanish.

Am I writing Nokia's obituary too early?

What's In Coffee Mate?

There’s a series of ads running on Dubai Eye at the moment in which chemical company BASF extols the wonders of chemistry. And what better way to celebrate the achievements of chemistry than to look at how the marvel of modern food chemistry can be used to create a non-dairy creamer. A conversation with Jordanian blogger and coffee mate fan Roba Al Assi yesterday prompted me to pop the lid on that yummy tasting powder and see just what it is you’re putting in your mouth with your morning coffee. What I found was similar in many ways to Tim Horton’s recipe for happiness, a recipe many people found fascinating.

The first thing we should note about Coffee Mate is that each 3mg serving contains 1 mg of saturated fat and 2mg of carbohydrate as sugar. In other words you’d be as well off dipping a sugar lump in some ghee. The second noteworthy thing is that nobody ever uses a 3mg serving.

A Spoonfull of Coffee Mate Contains:
 
Glucose syrup
Arguably the precursor to controversial cheap sweetener high fructose corn syryup, glucose syrup is a concentrated commercial sweetener made by treating the starch in vegetable crops such as corn and maize (Sourced from the US, read this as genetically modified corn). Corn syrup is sweeter and cheaper than cane sugar.

Hydrogenated vegetable oil (may contain coconut, palm kernel and/or soybean oil)
This is where that saturated fat comes in – and don’t forget that 3mg (or a level teaspoon) of coffee mate contains 5% of your recommended daily intake of saturated fat. As a guideline, you could drink half a cup of whole milk to get the same saturated fat hit as three milligrammes of coffee mate. I do love the ‘may contain’, too. Oh, and the soybean oil is probably from genetically modified beans.

Palm oil is a nasty little ingredient I have written about extensively before. It’s a crop responsible for major deforestation of the Indonsian rain forests because it provides a cheap, stable at room temperature, fat much beloved of food processors. Expect to find it lurking in biscuits, ice creams and all sorts of processed packet sauces, mixes and other foods.

Added to that, this (already very high in saturates) oil is ‘hydrogenated’, which means it’s been heat-treated with hydrogen to change its composition – basically turning the unsaturated fats in the palm oil into saturated fats, known as trans-fats. Trans-fats are controversial and many manufacturers and retailers (including the UK’s Marks and Spencer) are acting to remove trans-fat content from the foods they sell after a number of studies linked trans-fat consumption to significant increases in the risk of heart disease.

Sodium Caseinate (a milk derivative)
This is an odd ingredient, as it is permitted by the US FDA to be an ingredient in 'non dairy' creamers, and yet is, as it says on the tin, a 'milk derivative'. Casein is a protein found in milk and this ingredient, which is a thickener and adds a 'dairy taste' to products, is obtained from fresh and/or pasteurized skimmed milk by acid coagulation of the casein. The mix is then neutralised using sodium hydroxide and powdered. Yummee!

Dipotassium Phosphate
A stabiliser, tagged by the US FDA as ‘generally regarded as safe’ which never quite sounds as good as ‘safe as houses’, does it? It’s used to keep the powder powdery. Other uses of dipotassium phosphate include as a fungicide and pesticide. Interestingly, its use as a pesticide on food crops in the US has not been approved. But it’s safe, right?

Sodium Aluminium Silicate
Apart from finding its way into your daily cuppa as an anti-caking agent, this ingredient has been approved by the EU as a game repellent. Which is nice, no? A lovely cup of deer repellent to start the day!

Monoglycerides, Acetylated tartaric acid esters of mono- and dyglycerides
Also known as E472e. Mono and diglycerides are fats, used to extend shelf life, add a creamy flavour and help to bind other ingredients together. There's a lot of debate about them as they have appeared on food labels in place of hydrogenated oils, although they're a sort of new name for an old friend as they are, themselves, hydrogenated in the production process. The latter ingredient is sometimes referred to by the more friendly acronym DATEM.

Artificial Flavour, Colour
Nothing natural here, then...

So there we have it, the full skinny. Now you can nip off and slide a spoon of processed sugars, saturated fat, pesticide and deer scarer into your cup of instant coffee and know it's doing you good!

The Unbearable Lightness Of Clarity

dubai international airport (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Clarity is, apparently, being sought by the educational sector regarding quite what the Ministry of Education meant when it clearly mandated a unified holiday for all schools in the UAE.

I posted about this one last week and feel obliged to point out at the time that I spotted a strong whiff of Clarity To Come. GN's story today shows journalist Rayeesa Arsal clearly being given the runaround in her own mission to obtain clarity - a ministry spokesperson apparently sent our Rayeesa to Dubai's KHDA (Knowledge and Human Development Authority) who, brilliantly, "refused to comment on the announcement saying clarification should be sought from the ministry as the announcement was made by them."

The story goes on to quote an official who declined to be named saying "it is most likely that Asian schools are not part of the decision". However, just in case you started to think this was beginning to get clearer, the story goes on to mention a source from the KHDA who is unaware of any exceptions to the ruling.

The problem is that Indian and Pakistani schools start their academic years in April. This is compounded, as I pointed out last week, by schools already struggling to follow international curricula and also make allowances for the needs of international families (for instance, English schools will tend to have breaks at Christmas and Easter, major holiday periods in th UK). For this reason, 'international' schools have always had different, and frequently much shorter, holidays to the 'Arabic' or local schools under the Ministry of Education.

Meanwhile, while we await clarification, we can take comfort from the fact that the Emirates Identity Authority, which has so often in the past provided us with entertainment and wave after wave of Announcements Subject To Clarification, has quite clearly announced the final - and this time they really, really mean it, honestly, no kidding, take this one seriously because we're one messing around - deadline for applications.

They're hardcore about it this time. No more Mr Nice Guy. The final, final, final deadline is May 31st. Go past that, Aisha Al Rayesi of EIDA tells Gulf News, and you'll be fined Dhs20 per day up to a maximum of Dhs 1,000. It would be churlish to bring up the original deadline of January 1st 2009 at this late stage, wouldn't it?

Shiny Happy Poop

Bucket-headed dog (Photo credit: Paul Kidd)

"That'll be two hundred dirhams, mate."
"What are you on about? I'm just enjoying my shiny! Two hundred dirhams for what?"
"Dogs, that's what. We've introduced fines for having dogs off the leash and not cleaning up their poop. So give me two hundred dirhams."
"But I haven't got a dog!"
"What's that over there, then? Scotch mist?"
"Well, it's a dog, but..."
"So. Two hundred dirhams. I'll take cash or we'll just add it to your cooling bill. Of course, if you don't pay it, we'll cut off your electricity and water..."
"But who gave you the right to introduce and levy fines? You're a property developer, not a legal system!"
"As well as your cooling."
"But that's not my dog."
"Well I don't see anyone else around here, do you? So it's your dog, matey."
"I want to appeal!"
"There's no appealing this. Blimey, you're a callow one, aintcha? You can appeal if you're dealing with a properly constituted legal system, but this is a series of totally arbitrary regulations foisted on you by a property developer. Not that we'd ever say that in public, you understand."
"So whatever happened to 'dare to dream of a new future of freedom and choice' and 'iconic living that expresses your individuality'?"
"Oh come on, nobody takes that stuff seriously. Anyway, we never expressly said you could keep dogs at all. You should be glad we're tolerating your odiferous canines."
"I keep telling you, I don't even have a dog! This is outrageous! My Shiny never had the bathroom you promised, you keep putting up the maintenance fees, then you tell me what colour I can paint it and tell me which telco I have to use. You stopped me hanging a flag off it for the world cup and refuse to allow me to change the exterior. You even tried to tell me what newspapers I can read. This is just more abuse of my rights by a developer that seems to think it owns me! All in the name of FREEhold?"
"Now don't go giving me attitude, Sir, or I might have to invoke the abuse of development company staff regulation that allows me to mace you and then take your car away."
"But that's not even my bloody dog!"
"Think we're Peter Sellers, do we? Right. I'll add it to your cooling bill. Oh dear, oh dear."
"What is it now?"
"It's just done a poop. That'll be another two hundred."

(Shiny posts passim)

The Olives Blog

I just thought I'd mention there's a guest post over on The Olives Blog by Jordanian blogger and gal about town Roba Al Assi. It's linked here for your comfort and convenience.

Cheers!

National Paints Flyover Closed. Argh!

Dried green paint (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've always wondered what effect having its brand associated with such a negative thing as an infamous cause of awful traffic congestion has had on National Paints.

Ever since it was built, the roundabout and flyover next to the National Paints factory have been known as 'National Paints Roundabout'. It's a charming tradition here that landmarks are frequently known by the company nearby - so we have Mothercat roundabout (after the Mothercat construction company), BMW roundabout and so on. These names are so much more colourful than the official names, particularly in Sharjah where all roundabouts are called squares. This caused a teacher friend of ours of twenty years' residency considerable pain and was, we think, a contributing factor in her decision to up sticks and go back to Blighty.

Every day the traffic piles up there, stretching in an unbroken line of multi-laned misery all the way back to the Sharjah Airport Road and even beyond - kilometres of snarled-up, lane-swapping traffic. Every day, tens of thousands of hapless commuters queue up, cars jostling to join any lane that looks like it might offer a marginal advantage over the others, be moving at slightly less of a snail's pace than the others.

At the core of the torment lies National Paints, a most admirable company whose name has become synonymous with horrible traffic jams.

Now Those In Authority are finally acting to remediate the bottleneck - the Emirates Road flyover at National Paints is to have extra lanes added and a long service road will cut down on congestion from joining traffic. the labour camp has already been built (it's behind Sharjah English School) and work will soon commence on what will be a major overhaul of one of the two key arterial routes between Dubai and the Northern Emirates (the other one being the E611).

Which means, from June 22nd, trouble. And plenty of it...

UAE Unifies Holidays - School's Out!

passport stamps from the UAE. Entry via Dubai, exit via Abu Dhabi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

According to today's soaraway Gulf News, school holidays in the UAE are to be unified and come in line with the UAE's Ministry of Education holidays. The move will "contribute to enriching stability of families" the paper quotes the Minister of Education as saying.

Right now, everyone sort of does their own sweet thing. We have the 'public schools' run by the Ministry, private schools run by all sorts of people that cater for different communities and Universities that follow a wide range of international curricula.

Schools in the UAE will re-open in one fell swoop after the summer break on the 9th September, although the academic year for staff will commence on the 2nd September. That's followed by a whopping holiday from December 16th through to January 6th (3rd for staff) and another break from the 31st March to the 14th April (11th for staff). The 2013 summer break will start July 7th and end September 1st.

I happen to be married to a teacher in a British curriculum school - Sarah and her happy colleagues follow the British National Curriculum and their classes are observed and inspected to that standard. The teachers, one suspects, will be torn between exasperation at having to fit so much more into so much less time and glee at getting (even) longer holidays. Schools in the UAE following international curricula already find it a challenge to incorporate the required amount of Arabic language instruction together with the curriculum they follow, but they're going to have a field day trying to fit things around these holidays. 

Worse than that, we have the spectre of a nicely unified mass exodus as everyone dashes for Dubai International to high-tail it out of here. Even with today's 'fuzzy' holidays, the traditional holiday periods around Christmas, Easter and Summer see thousands flocking to the airports and scenes of near-mayhem abound. With the unified holidays, every man jack of 'em will be on the move.

I get the feeling this one might be subject to clarification somewhere down the line...

Back

United Kingdom (Photo credit: stumayhew)

Sorry, I've been gone a while...

That must be the longest 'no blogging' break I've ever had, a combination of a very busy ArabNet (another brilliant event, hats off to Monsignor Christidis and team) and two weeks being pretty much offline in the UK. I also forgot my mobile for the UK trip, which turned out to be a remarkably enlivening event. The only thing I missed was not being able to mess about on Twitter when clothes shopping with Sarah, which would have been in any case rendered inadvisable thanks to Etisalat's ridiculous data roaming charges. I commend two weeks without a mobile to any who care to try it.

For what it's worth, I can report that the UK is already going jubilee/Olympics mad. If you're planning to be in London this summer, don't bother - the cost of an EK cattle class ticket has already gone up by over Dhs 1,000 and car hire is prohibitively expensive compared to other European capitals. God alone knows what the hotels are going to be getting up to.

We flew back on one of Emirates' A380s. I do believe if you're going to fly on Friday 13th you should pick a plane that has cracks in its wings. The experience is undoubtedly superior, the most striking thing of all being how quiet the plane is. A bonus was, as you will be able to guess from the fact you are reading this, the wings stayed in their proper place.

Masafi Recall - Trouble In The Hills?

Impact of water in a water-surface (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Masafi must have one of the worst websites I have seen in a very long time. The company's SEO is so bad it doesn't even make the first page of search results for 'Masafi' or even 'Masafi UAE'. You even get a fail with searching for 'masafi mineral water uae'.

How is this even possible? Part of the explanation may be that the website at www.masafi.com has been built using Flash (pretty pictures, SEO disasters). Consumers concerned at the recent media coverage of a recall order issued against the company after a sample of its water was found to have exceeded acceptable levels of bromate will find themselves listening to some cod-Arabic music and watching butterflies flapping around on their screens as they wait for the whole dull scenario to play out (with no 'skip' option, obviously) before some menus fly in to grace the screen with lovely pictures of beautiful things to remind us how very, well, natural everything is. Finally getting to the 'What's New' section tells us that Masafi was the supporting water of the Dubai Film Festival.

Not a word about a recall. Not a crumb for the concerned consumer. As far as Masafi is concerned, It Didn't Happen.

This isn't the first time the Ignore It And It Will Go Away strategy has been followed by the company, apparently. In December 2009, half a million bottles were recalled due to 'visible contamination', yet Masafi's website news section for that period merely reports a new cranberry flavour juice. Masafi's head of marketing told The National at the time the company would publish the results of its investigation within the week following its report (linked above) but there's no coverage of that I can find, no mention of it on Masafi's bug-strewn website and, shamefully, no sign that The National or any other newspaper followed up.

Given I have drunk almost nothing else for the past nineteen years, I'm quite angry. I'm a bit of a nut about water and even wash my teeth using Masafi rather than tap water. I'm rarely to be found without a 500ml bottle of the stuff on my person. I did a report on water for a magazine here once and had various waters assayed - Masafi came through as the real deal. Years later, an analytical chemist friend wouldn't let his family touch anything else after he'd put various waters through the wringer and found Masafi to be precisely what it said on the box. I don't trust other brands, especially those, like Aquafina, that are artifically mineralised waters from 'public sources' (a euphemism for 'tap'). Masafi is a brand I have long trusted absolutely.

And yet when the chips are down and I need a little more information, perhaps a little reassurance, they're making like the Wide Mouthed Frog.

The story appears to have been broken by Khaleej Times, back on the 23rd March. There is some irony to be enjoyed from the fact the news broke on World Water Day. KT's report was on the back of a news story filed on the national news wire, WAM. That story starts with the classic line:

Dubai Municipality said the level of bromate substance found in the bottled water does not include carcinogenic substances that pose direct threat to the health of consumers as the ratio of substance existing in the bottled water is very close to the maximum limit allowed by the Gulf specifications. 

And we all what that means, don't we? In fact, the levels of bromate found in a single sample of Masafi from a batch produced on the 17th January were 11 micrograms per litre. The World Health Organisation recommendation for an upper limit of Bromate is ten micrograms per litre. Although there is no direct evidence that bromate is a carcinogen in humans, studies have provided enough concern that these limits have been recommended. So this really wasn't 'a biggie'. And yet the story has flown around the BlackBerry network and been picked up nicely by Twitter (where I came across it first, in fact), let alone the newspapers. Arguably helping the story to gain traction, Masafi's official statement (as reported by Khaleej Times) was:

“We reassure that Masafi bottled mineral water is safe for consumption and does not pose any health risks. At Masafi, our commitment to the highest quality of our products remains our top priority for our consumers and their well-being. Our products are manufactured and packaged according to strict quality requirements.”

Rule one of issues management in communications? News expands to fill a vacuum.

In case you're interested, and because Masafi's not in a hurry to tell you, Bromate is formed in water when ozone purification (and some forms of chlorine purification) is used, converting naturally occuring bromine into potentially hazardous bromate. Levels of bromine are particularly high in salty water, in fact the Dead Sea is a major source of industrial production of bromine and it's to be found in desalinated water, too. Perhaps interestingly, the UAE's desalination plants had a serious bromate problem, which was apparently addressed, by Abu Dhabi at least, back in 2005. ( This report in Khaleej Times says levels of bromate in Abu Dhabi's desalinated water were up to ten times WHO limits has an ADWEA official stating, "We've solved it" but a post on ADWEA's own website dated 2/1/2006 talks about 'starting work' and 'instituting plans'.)

Yet another example of a head in the sand communication strategy going wrong. And a truly awesome, in my humble opinion, online fail. When there's cause for concern, however slight, today's consumer wants more than silence, obfuscation and corporate mendacity. And we deserve it, too.