Roaming around the halls at Dubai World Trade Centre for Gitex Technology Week, I heard four words repeated over and over: not much going on.
The complaint was voiced most often by journalists, who usually sulk unless the latest fourth-dimensional television or dancing smartphone is being showcased by women in obnoxiously loud outfits with feathers. It’s not just here; I saw much the same inertia at this year’s CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas too.
Tech journalists would stampede over their own mother to get a glimpse of Google Glass, but probably wouldn’t lift a finger to cover the launch of the latest blade server. No one really writes much about technology unless it’s really, really sexy and has a huge following of hyperactive fanboys.
And sexy these days means smartphones and tablets, which means Apple and Samsung. Odds are, every tech journalist and his mother knows that Apple launched the iPad 5 and Mini iPad 2 with retina display last night, but how many of them are writing stories about the latest software in cloud technology?
Precious few, unless you work for a major tech website, but even then, most editors will happily swap a story on enterprise software for the low-down on the latest app. Let’s face it, boring doesn’t stand a chance against sexy in the press. It never has. It never will.
But that doesn’t mean that not much is going on. Just the opposite; I saw more activity around the Intel, SAP and Oracle stand than I did around the Arabian Business Machines stand (ABM is Apple’s authorised distributor for the Middle East region). People were talking about servers, software platforms, clouding computing and all that other boring stuff that smartphones would be useless without. Hopefully, they’re buying instead of just talking.
Because that stuff may not be exciting, but if local – and more importantly, private - companies are serious about installing digital infrastructure, it means exciting things could be happening locally in the near future. Because as much as we love our tablets and smartphones, most of the apps and cloud based servers we runs on them are being run on servers located, well, not here. That’s a problem.
Sure, some notable Western companies have reached out and opened servers and applications here in the Middle East, but beyond the likes of Google and Facebook, the pickings are slim. The majority instead just sit back and “customize” their apps for the Middle East, which means they are waiting for local content to be provided by users, instead of doing the jobs themselves. That leaves massive holes in our digital “reality.”
If Dubai wants to build a truly smart city, it needs a smart infrastructure that allows the private sector to developer software and process data for apps that are locally based. Local companies like Yadig.com, JadoPado.com and a bunch other smaller start-ups are step in the right direction, but we need more, and that means more of the hardware you probably don’t think of as sexy.
