؟ Irony Mark

Educational toy?

I am at Didacta, the big German Education trade fare, this week. having been at shows from Arabia to the UK it is obvious that there are huge opposites. First, the British education market and the German Education market are poles apart. Here, in Didacta, there are stand after stand of educational engineering products on offer. Structures, mechanics, electronics, all have their own specialised tools and toys. In the UK one can only such things tucked away among the smaller stands as if Britain is embarrassed to admit to teaching such practical subjects. And then there is the contrast with the old and the new technology in education. The lions share of space is taken up by the huge book publishers that make the German curriculum texts. Each of the publisher stands are a small village in their own right, while the new technology like software and computers are just plain 20 square meter stands - obviously technology is still nowhere near a power in education here (or anywhere else for that matter). Whatever one may say about the rest of society - the computer revolution has still not even scratched the surface of education.

And finally the picture on the right is an example of a little German humour, placed prominently in one of the display cases of a manufacturer of medical models of human body.

You know this market is controlled by a mafia… If I take one to court he will just send the judge 10 prostitutes and case over.

One person complaining about how hard it was to run a business in an Arab country that will not be named.

This is typical of the attitude many Arabs have about the “freedom” for capitalism in this region. Generally, American and European companies can deal with piracy and plagiarism by getting their embassy to lean on the local government to make sure justice is done - but for medium to small local companies it is like a jungle out there. For companies that do not like to use cronyism or outright bribery it can simply be impossible. This is one of the factors that hampers innovation in the Arab world. With the economic crisis - the world needs new vibrant markets to restart growth. Arabia is critical here as the potential for development here is huge. But without good laws and their transparent application there is simply no way this will happen.

All Europe catches a cold. So said Klemens Wenzel von Metternich in 1820. And the sneeze in America is being felt here in its own way. It has slowly dawned on me that several of the really big Gitex stands are simply gone. Sony used to fill a whole hall - gone. Microsoft had the largest of all the software stands - gone. i-Mate - largest of the device manufacturers stands - gone. Siemens - gone. Also some of the stands were odd such as one which was a company that is a chain of electronics shops in Dubai - as if they needed to fill the space. Then there is the odd embarrasing gap:

Gap like that have not been see at previous shows. If some of the companies pulled out - no one told the visitors because Gitex was still buzzing with people from as far away as Kenya and Egypt. It seems to me that the big companies are expecting a storm to come and are backing off early.

In other news Apple will be launching the iPhone in 3 Arab countries com January. Apparently Egypt has them already but they are stuck in a warehouse because the Egyptian state bans mobile GPS devices. I saw many people with a hacked iPhone and all had a very poor Arabic implemnetation patched onto it for $30 extra. Unless Apple get their act together with proper Arabic support all the phones they sell in the region will either be gre marketed or hacked and this will seriouly undermine their distribution channels and even even control of the market.

I leave you tonight with this nice photo of the tallest building in the world taken from the Gitex car park!

One thing you will not read about in any of the news reports on Gitex is Iran’s plans for the expo. Their approach has ben quite different this year. Last year was lots of small stands little Iranian tech companies selling half-baked solutions that probably only would work in Iran. This year was something else. A large open-plan space with lots of sofas and the slogan “Come to the Opportinities”. Basically saying stuff the sanctions, come to Iran, and lets do business. One exhibitor I spoke to said that he was asked to quote for 100,000 laptops. How much of this is a real for trade and how much is just to annoy the Americans I don’t know.

My favorite part of the whole show is to wander round the Chinese and East Asian stands and look at the wild and wacky gadgets they come up with. There is, always, the company that makes the most blatant 3rd-rate rip off of apple iPhone and iPods and the silliest web-cams that you can possibly imagine.  But 1st prize for wildest and wackiest gadget goes to the company that makers of the “Emotion Baby” USB flash drives:

These are tiny flash drives and come in Happy white (4Gb), Surprised blue (8Gb) and Sad pink (2Gb).

More interesting was this Korean company on a tiny 3 meter-wide stand that produces a 3D television:

It is a 42″ High definition LCD TV that works in the same way as the 3D movies you get at the cinema - it requires polarising glasses. But the results are truly, jaw droppingly, amazing. Ladies and Gentlemen I have seen the future and the future is 3D. Once the big film companies extract all the revenue they can get from BlueRay, you will see, the next big thing will be 3D. In 5 to 10 years everyone will want a 3D-capable LCD television in their living room. There are currently only 2 movies available for theseTV’s - a rather relaxing aquarium and one Korean medieval drama, But bear in mind Pixar will be producing all their future movies in 3D. Once people get used to these films in the cinema they will want them at home.

Phew - long day! Gitex is the biggest trade show in the whole Middle East. It is no CEBit but none the less it is big. First day of Gitex is always “fun” first there is the long queue outside the show because of extensive security. Then there is nothing to do from 10pm to 1pm becasue vistors are not allowed into the show.

Big news of the day - noticeable by their complete absence is Microsoft. Biggest trade show in the region and they are simply not there. Its usually its the biggest stand in Gitex (after Sony). I think they are skulking in their big Dubai offices hiding from the army of enraged users coming to give them grief about the flop that is Vista..؟

Google were at the show, however … for the first time ever! Albeit a small stand that seemed quite embarrassed that it did not know what it was there for. There were a few iGoogle posters and various photogenic Google employees being photographed by different sections of the media. Anyway had a chance to chat (between interviews) with their regional manager Mr. Husni Khuffash. He assured me that Google wanted to do everything to get more Arabic content on the web in the region. He then gave me his business cards (impressively printed on “100% post-consumer waste recycled paper”) and promised that he answers every single email that is sent to him. So let us put that to the test. His email address is …. Ok only joking.

Panasonic had the obligatory largest LCD television in the world. This time it has grown to a whopping 150 inches. My little iPhone camera cannot fully do justice to how big that is - but it is so big it is getting silly. I mean it wont even fit through the average palace door let alone fit in a room that is smaller than a cinema.

Quote of the day comes from my sales manager: “OK we made all the contacts we need lets not bother to turn up fo the rest of the show”. Erm I dont think so..

The day ended with the exhibitors party. One of my favourite events - they always lay on the best buffets dinner anywhere and then there are the belly dancers - we are in Arabia after all. The down side was that everybody had to sit through the “T3 Arabia Gadget Awards”. With obscure awards like “Most anticipated gadget” (what??) and “Best productivity device” it was pretty heavy going.

No sign so far of anything like an econonic slowdown here. The show is chock full of stands and lots of visitors from all over the region were milling around. The closest we got were the jokes the announcer at the Gitex party used to break the ice.. “What is the difference between a pigeon and an investment banker?” …

So this is my first post from Dubai about to go to my company stand - hope to post from there. If you ever get the chance to go to Dubai on a Friday evening. Don’t. The immigration hall was packed, I have never ever seen it so full. And that was nothing when compared to the wait for a taxi. The taxi queue overflowed into the scrum that is the people meeting new arrivals. How anyone is supposed find their way home is beyond me.

When I finally got into a taxi the driver explained the problem. Apparently the new terminal at the airport has just opened and the taxi company ordered most of its taxis to wait there instead (looks good for the visiting dignitaries). So there was a queue of 200 taxis at an empty terminal and 200 passengers waiting for taxis at Terminal 1. grrr.

I have been a Google junkie for some years - never venturing too far from that familiar blue page. But, I was setting up a friends PC and I wanted to install the free version of AVG anti virus software. I had the default Windows XP with the default Windows browser that defaults to Microsoft’s Live Search. OK - being lazy I just went straight to the search window and typed “AVG”. This is what I got:

The first link is from an AVG reseller, some download sites, and coming in at no. 5 is a link to the part of the AVG web site that I was not looking for - one that only shows the paid-for version of AVG. So after clicking fruitlessly for a couple of minutes I did the same search in Google:

Immediately, links no. 1 and 2 were exactly what I was looking for. I am not going back to Live search again.

With 80 million users around the world continually searching for the free version of AVG, it should be possible for a serious search engine to work out that “AVG” would mean the AVG home page or to their free software. Live.com got my search amazingly wrong. So what has Microsoft poured their billions into? A search engine that cannot see the blindingly obvious?

One can think so and that would be bad enough but when you can compare instantly Live Search results with the competition it looks worse.  In Live Search the official AVG site is buried somewhere towards the bottom of the page. The link to the free version of AVG - nowhere. Worse, look again at the sponsored links… “AVG.0fficial-Web.com” and “www.Avast-Clean.com” sites that subtly look like the official AVG and Avast web sites but are not. When you compare this to Google and Yahoo’s search results it makes Microsoft look like their Live Searches are not fair but pushing you towards sponsored links.

This maybe excusable five years ago but results like this leave a bad taste in users mouths. It makes you feel Live.com is a cheap advertising operation and not the work of a Fortune 500 company.

I was watching a program on the Amazon (river not bookshop) the other day about a group of scientists measuring the carbon absorbed by the rain forest. Why? So that Brazil can trade the carbon absobed by its trees on the internatonal carbon credit market. On the surface - sounds great - save the trees of the Amazon by selling their carbon. But, it made me think, do we ever learn? Nearly the whole of the international banking system crashed because of trade in complex fianancial instruments that nobody understood and weren’t worth the bytes used to email them around the world. Now they want us to trust the future of the environment on a financial scheme that values thin air and has all the simplicity of a Lehman’s Credit Default Swap. Hmmm… let me think about that one ؟