That Was The ArabNet That Was

(Photo credit: carrierdetect)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you there next year!

Confession: Spot On was an ArabNet partner

ArabNet - The Dubai Digital Summit

It starts tomorrow - ArabNet's Dubai Digital Summit - three days of conference, workshop, developer competition, roundtable and other information sharing stuff. It's a pretty packed agenda - there are over 120 speakers (including li'l ole me) and there are expected to be upwards of 800 attendees gathering at the aesthetically interesting Atlantis Hotel on the Palm.

The three-day conference is at the core of a number of other activities, including ArabNet's 'Digital Showcase'. This excellent initiative gathers over thirty young digital companies from around the region and provides them with a platform to show their wares at ArabNet - and includes brokered meetings with media buyers, banks, telcos and other business enablers. There's also the final of ArabNet's developer competition which will bring together winners from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Jordan in a final face-off to crown the best developer in the Middle East. My money's on the Jordanians...

The actual conference consists of three tracks - a Forum Track and a Workshop Track - then on day one a Startup Track and day two an Industry Track, which splits into verticals and is more 'solutions' oriented and day three a Roundtable Track. Someone with a highly advanced sense of humour has put me moderating the banking panel on the industry day, which should provide a few laughs if nothing else...

There are four industry round tables taking place in the Roundtable Track, which will tackle key issues in the development and expansion of the Middle East's digital industry. I'm chairing the one on advertising, "Growing digital adspend", which should be interesting as the invited attendees for what is intended to be a productive brainstorming session represent all sorts of interests - mainly vested! - in the way this important sector is developing in the region.

As anyone who's been to ArabNet in Beirut will attest, there's a 'vibe' to the event that is truly infectious, a coming together of smart people who share a passion for something that is at the heart of exhilarating and often breakneck change and transformation. There's a grin-inducing cocktail of dynamism and innovation in the air.

So all in all it promises to be a busy, intense and fascinating week - and if you are interested in mobile, online, digital, social or anything touching the online and digital industry in the Middle East, you would be mad not to be there*.

Oh, and you can catch my presentation on addressing the 'content crisis' at 5pm on Wednesday and see quite how neatly I manage to wave in the inevitable plug for Beirut - An Explosive Thriller.

* Disclosure - Spot On is the PR partner for ArabNet but as you'll all know by now, this blog has never represented my day job. I'm bigging up ArabNet because I'm a fan, not because I'm shilling for them.

One Small Day On Twitter

Image via CrunchBase

I gets a text from the bank that likes to say 'flibble' telling me YouSendIt has billed my card for $49.95. I am not best pleased at this as it's the first I hear of the matter.

I'd signed up to their premium service last year when I had some big files to share, but the company has since  standardised on another platform and so I have no need for the long-forgotten YouSendIt.

I nipped off to their site to undo this transaction only to find that I can only cancel my subscription at the end of the current cycle (ie 2014) or immediately. But cancelling walks you through screens of 'please don't go' and says nothing about refunding my card. In fact, clicking on the 'cancelling and refunds' link takes you to a video that shows you how to cancel. And that's it. Nothing about refunds at all.

Comments are enabled on the page, which has a number of wailing voices threatening dire threats about their refunds. And no sign of an answer. I am man in front of a very big wall indeed and there's no sign of a human anywhere.

Contact Us gives you a sales number and a location map. No email addy. I wander around the site for a while and eventually lodge a support ticket, but I've got the message by now. My money's a-goner.

Disconsolately, I fire a tweet into the ether:

I get the feeling getting a refund from YouSendIt of the sum billed without notifying me is going to be a long and wearisome task...

Imagine my surprise to get a response from YouSendIt's social media community manager, Kathleen: "Not at all - I'll help you out, can you DM me your email?"

Within minutes my support ticket was answered with reference to Kathleen's conversation with me and an assurance my refund was being processed.

It was smooth, neat and assured customer service and once again a reminder you can't outsource customer service on Twitter as effectively as managing it with in-house smarts and direct access to the CRM. What I found interesting was that it was only necessitated by the fact the renewal system and the website had both failed me. Tell me before you bill me and give me the option of not renewing or give me a 7-day opt-out window on the site. The answer to my problem could - and should - have easily been automated and the need for an intervention in the first place averted.

IMHO.

100 Reasons Why The Internet Is Cool. Reason 82. Crowd Investing.

So you've started a digital business and you want to take it through to the next level without giving away all your equity to an greedy angel investor or venture fund. You've got some options - you would win a reality TV show, for instance, or perhaps even look at crowd investing. Or even both!

I first met LouLou Khazen Baz last year, we worked together on a project to position the company she and co-founder Rima had dreamed up, Nabbesh. LouLou was in the interesting position of having won the Dubai One TV show, 'The Entrepreneur' - in which startups competed to be the winners of a Du-backed prize of a cool million UAE Dirhams in cash and half as much again in 'kind'.

She won the show, which gave Nabbesh much-needed funds to see it through to its next stage of development. In interviews, LouLou was always noting - having herself worked for a VC - that the longer you can keep going without asking the market for money, the more value you could build in your business and consequently keep when the sharks lovely investors come knocking.

Nabbesh is a skills marketplace - an online exchange where people can post their skills and talents and then others can hire them for those skills. So if you want a bunch of developers or copy writers, designers or a tennis coach, Nabbesh is the place to go. It means you can hire talent from the Levant or further afield - or from home - although there is some debate as to the legality of freelancing in the UAE, Nabbesh is also somewhere where people with trade licenses can offer their wares too.

Nabbesh has just signed up with PayPal - that's the business model: the business partnership between talent and hirer takes place over the site and it skims a slice off each transaction. The model works elsewhere in the world, Nabbesh wants to localise the service for the MENA area.

So now LouLou has taken something of a brave step - in that she's put her need out in public - and sought funds through crowd investment platform Eureeca.com - take a look here for the Nabbesh proposition. Note you have to sign in to Eureeca before you get all the info. 

The really cool thing is she's already 25% 30% of the way there, one day into the campaign...

Sharjah - Radar Down

(Photo credit: brizzle born and bred)

As eagle eyed observers will recall from earlier posts, Sharjah has been suffering from a mysterious and expensive spate of radar shootings.

Someone has been regularly taking out the traffic radars on the Mileiha Road - the arterial route that leads from the notorious National Paints parkabout all the way out to the delightful East Coast littoral of Khor Kalba across on the other side of the Hajjar Mountains. It's a delightful drive, BTW - and you can pop across the border to Fujeirah for a bite to eat for lunch before coming back, say, over the Masafi/Dhaid road.

This morning's drive to work took me along the road from Sharjah Airport to junction 2 on the aforementioned Road To Mileiha. That connecting road contains, among many other things (including a co-op and loads of huge palatial villas) two radars.

Standing by the second one was a copper and a couple of puzzled looking blokes. The radar on the northern carriageway (one of the expensive new models) had been pretty comprehensively smashed. If that was a bullet, it presumably means the perp's still at it. Now all we've got to wait for is Gulf News rehashing that quote they use every time they report on a new radar 'kill':

“We are collecting evidence from the spot and will soon nab the person who committed the crime. We will find out what motivated him to commit such a crime.” He goes on to add, “The person responsible for shooting the radar will be arrested soon. “He will be punished according to the UAE law.”

It's no laughing matter for Sharjah's finest, by the way - that's now a total of 15 radars ruined and, at Dhs250,000 apiece, we're talking about almost four million Dirhams. To give it a sense of perspective, that's almost four days' revenue from the RTA's Sharjah-bound Salik gates!!!

When they catch him, the radar shootist is undoubtedly in for the high jump in no small way!

Hooch, Booze, Sid And Eth

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This genteel post over at super-smashing expat blog The Displaced Nation started a chat on Twitter today about the demon drink, particularly as relates to its consumption in the country Americans, for some reason, like to call 'Sordi'.

My first exposure to expat drinking habits in the Krazy Kingdom came in 1986, just after Her Majesty had intervened in the case of a number of 'nuns and strippers' who had been lifted by the gendarmes after a party in Jeddah had been busted in an action that ran contrary to accepted norms. Usually, the police knock on the compound gates, the watchman tells them to hold on a minute and rings around to tell everyone to jettison their stash. Result: squeaky-clean compound and a lot of very happy fish.

This time around, they dispensed with the niceties and (if memory serves me right) about fifty expats were facing eighty lashes each for consuming alcohol. I don't remember if there was any additional punishment for dressing as a nun or a stripper, but I have always had a fond image of the chase across the desert sands in my mind's eye. After Brenda got involved, they were merely deported - and deportation, rather than the traditional punishment meted out to Muslims, became the norm in such cases.

So it was, just after this had all blown over, I found myself in-Kingdom. A chap called Graham was my first introduction to expat weekends in Saudi. Based in Khobar, he was having a party that weekend, would I like to come along? It was a raucous affair and Graham's villa had a bar upstairs, complete with dartboard and a variety of 'lifted' bar accessories such as ashtrays and beer mats.

There were four drinks on offer: 'white' or 'brown', Dr John's blackberry wine or 'beer'.

Now 'white' was 'siddiqi', Arabic for 'friend'. 'Sid' or 'Sin' to some was basically ethanol, whether produced in a bathtub or by a laboratory for medicinal use (a friend was a physics teacher in Kuwait and used to have to keep the ethanol under lock and key. 'Eth' is a popular libation in that place). Ethyl alcohol, cut 5:1 with water, is a potent drink but doesn't induce a hangover as there are none of the impurities you'll find in less direct forms of inebriative condiment. You can lam some juniper berries into it if you fancy 'sin and tonic'. On the other hand, 'brown' was sid with oak chips added. This made it look like whisky, even though it tasted like methylated spirits that had been dripped through rabbit bedding.

An important life tip. You always test a new bottle of sid or eth (or even their close relative, the wonderful Irish libation poitin). Always. Burn some on a spoon, if it burns with a clear, smokeless flame, you're good. If it has any colour to the flame or gives off black smoke, one sip will have potentially lethal consequences. Please don't try this at home.

Dr John's wine was actually delicious, although very strong and sweet. Unlike the sid, its consumption carried  appalling consequences the next morning. And the beer, as all home made beer in desert kingdoms is, was just appalling stuff. You skip down to the supermarket and buy trays of 'malt beverage' (for a short, halcyon, time, authorities were unaware of what tins of brewer's wort looked like, but they copped on pretty fast. Thousands of expats suddenly presenting themselves at the airports carrying huge tins with 'beenz' scrawled on them in magic marker might have had something to do with it), sugar and baker's yeast. Now you put it all in a dustbin and then place on the roof of the villa for a couple of weeks. Bottle the resulting noxious brew and consume at leisure, ideally chilled to the point where you can't taste it.

The following morning saw me awake and staggering out into the blazing sunshine where my kind hosts were barbecuing T-bone steaks for breakfast and downing kiloton-spiced bloody marys. The strongly emetic consequences of Dr John's wine combined with a hammering in my head and a powerful dehydration that made me feel as if I had been steeped in lime overnight. I couldn't take it. More to the point, my liver couldn't take it. Lightweight that I am, I fled for my hotel.

In the intervening two and a half decades or so, I have frequently found myself in the company of chaps enjoying the illicit pleasures of the grape in a number of places and situations, sometimes in highly imaginative ways. But that first encounter with the expatriated liver remains a clear and formative memory.

An Awkward Brush With Ajman's 'Tea Set'

Teapot (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

They're all sitting back after consuming their Dhs45 ($1,400) a head Chinese meal and chatting about the roadworks around National Paints. The glittering crowd of red-faced, balding men and their wives, all bleached blonde hair and sun-damaged skin, are sipping 'special tea' from silver-rimmed porcelain cups. The conversation turns to local retailer Spinneys and how they've stopped selling Walkers Cheese and Onion crisps again. The mood turns ugly as someone pipes up, "They never have any bloody fresh cream in, either. We have to go to Mirdiff for that."

I'm undercover, a BBC journalist taking in the seamy side of this secretive emirate, the underbelly of the glittering United Arab Emirates. Just a few minutes away from the  marble malls of Dubai, Ajman is home to a significant population of wealthy expatriates working in the oil, real estate and other industries. Many of them enjoy themselves in the whirl of socialising and conspicuous consumption that has come to characterise expatriate life in the UAE.

It doesn't escape my notice that there's something wrong with the tea. The mens' tea is yellow and foaming while the womens' is white. One has ice in her 'tea' - "Vodka an' tonic, luvvie" she confides in me, sipping her tea with a suggestive wink. The black market booze-up is just one of a number of wilful transgressions of the law that these expats undertake in their everyday lives- seemingly uncaring that one wrong move could have disastrous consequences.

"This place has been here for years. Nobody cares about a few cups of tea," Billy, a construction company executive tells me as he smokes his umpteenth Marlboro. "There's a law about smoking in restaurants, too, but nobody cares about it."

Behind him in the kitchens, Ang Yang Wang labours over a series of sizzling woks. A refugee from Szechuan, she makes a meagre Dhs 8,000 ($45) a month working as a chef in the popular 'China Parlour' restaurant. "I come here for cook these people," she tells me. "They no eat good food, they eat cat."

Puzzled, I leave her to rejoin the party. On their second pot now, the men are laughing loudly. I decide it's time to leave before the scene gets too rowdy and my safety is compromised.

A Shiny Car No More

"Oh hello, it's you. My secretary said it was a Mr Brown."
"I gave her a false name. You were busy for three days solid when I was using my real name."
"She said you wanted to buy a Shiny. But you've already got a Shiny."
"Like I said. You wouldn't see me."
"So you're not buying a Shiny."
"No."
"You're just coming to complain about your old Shiny, aren't you?"
"On the nail, I must say."
"Right. Out with it then."
"You've arrested my gardener for washing my car."
"I should hope so, too. If he was washing cars, he should be an accredited car washer."
"Well, he's not. He's a gardener. But he washes cars on the side. It's been a perfectly satisfactory arrangement for years now and I don't see why a real estate developer is able to dictate who does and does not wash my car."
"We've only got your best interests at heart, you know. This sort of criminality usually starts small, but there's no knowing where it'll end up. Nip it in the bud, we say. Gardeners garden, car washers car wash."
"But there are no car washers. I'd have to take it to a petrol station and pay Dhs30 to get it washed. The gardener washes it every day for a hundred dirhams a month. Why are you even getting involved in the who or how of washing my car?"
"We're the developer. We're responsible for contractors and services."
"But you're just restricting us all the time. You said we could dare to dream and live to love with an executive lifestyle in the heart of the new economic miracle! You said it was about the freedom to live a life of dreams. But I can only have my shiny painted Dubai beige, I can't have my own satellite dish, I have to use your telecom provider, your gardeners, your contractors and your maintenance company. Where are the freedoms? I can't even get my car washed the way I want."
"I'm sorry, but the law's the law. He's an illegal car washer moonlighting out of company hours and we won't have it. You're lucky we don't fine you for employing illegal labour."
"I suppose you'll be telling me I can't plant this tree in my garden next."
"What tree?"
"The new palm tree my gardener's planted."
"Oh, that'll have to come out. He's not an approved gardening contractor."
"HE'S MY GARDENER!"
"I thought you said he was washing your car?"
"He was."
"Well, he'd be a car washer, then. Right lads, come on, back it up. We'll have this thing uprooted in no time! You'd better pop indoors and have a nice cup of tea and calm down. Meanwhile, we'll have your grassy patch back to the approved uniform green sward in no time."

(Blame this story here)

Huffington Post Reviews Blog Shock Horror

When I hammered the best (IMHO) bits of the first two years of this blog into a book for a self-publishing workshop thingy I was giving over at Dubai's uber-funky hangout The Archive, the last thing I thought was that it would aspire to the lofty heights of a review in the Huffington Post.

Well, it has. You can read that very review here.

When you've finished, you can buy the book here for your Kindle or here for your iPad or other tablet. The good news is that it'll cost you the brave sum of $0.99...

Emirates ID. One Card To Rule Them All...

Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is going to be interesting to watch in October. Apparently, by then, the Emirates ID National Identity Card will be used to access all Dubai government services. That's according to a report in Gulf News. The first phase of the MyID initiative will open up 20 government departments to the use of an Emirates ID rather than individual logons and passwords for each government entity.

Which is a good thing, right? Rather than having 20-odd IDs and passwords, you can just whip out your trusty deicer  National ID card and proudly cry, "This is me! Open up your services to me, government department!"

Except that most of us don't need to access 20 government departments. I guess RTA for Salik payments, Dubai Police for registration and naturalisation and immigration for labour cards, visas and Emirates ID cards is probably about my lot. I suppose the NMC and Ministry of Youth and Culture when I'm publishing books. Oh, Ministry of Health for the biennial blood test.

And if they get just that lot together, functional and inter-operating seamlessly with the National ID that in itself will be an achivement. If they get all 20 working by October? I shall be sore amazed.

I'm not saying Dubai can't do it. You should never say Dubai can't do something, because you'll more often as not lose your shirt on it. But then the Emirates ID has amassed considerable form in the "announce now clarify tomorrow" stakes.

We can only wait and see...