GITEX Day 1: A Rough Start

The first day of GITEX is over and we all survived, that much I can tell you. GITEX is always crazy but today it seemed much worse than last year. We thought we arrived in decent time to beat the worst of the rush but all good parking was taken so we had to park far away – not fun at all.

We get to the venue and there was some mix-up with registration and badges so it took us longer than necessary to actually get in. For Amed and myself, getting in on media passes, the media registration was a mess. You would think with as many years they’ve run GITEX that they could get this part right but no. It was people pushing, shouting, trying to get ahead, etc. And these are all supposed to be media people. Next to us were two guys from Stuff Magazine who had problems getting in  because they were asked for “press ID” and they could only produce their Stuff business cards. Amed and I had no problems getting in on our IDs and Shufflegazine business cards. Anyway, a guy from the organizers came out and talked to the Stuff people and said, “of course you should get in”.

I’m not sure yet whether there are more or less companies and people at GITEX and obviously it’s too soon to tell. I do know that it seems just as crazy and before if not worse.

Most of the day we spent around the stand of Arab Business Machine (ABM) and Omran made a presentation about how to do cool KeyNote presentations and I did a little thing about iPhone and iMovie. In both cases we just want to give people a quick taste of what they can do so we encourage them to try it out themselves. Tomorrow we’ll have sessions on Google Sketchup and the sessions from today will resume on Tuesday.

The new MacBook and MacBook Pro were on display in ABM’s stand and they are gorgeous, ladies and gentlemen. They’re stunning to look at and they feel very nice to handle too. The battery comes out very easily giving great access to the hard drive/solid drive. In terms of performance I don’t know because I couldn’t get enough serious time to check them out. Our own MacBook is this evening in Memphis, TN, USA, on it’s way to be FedExed to us. I so look forward to start using it and we’ll obviously give you a serious review once I can put some miles on it, so to speak.

I will most likely not visit GITEX tomorrow. Instead I will stay back in the office to do layout of next Shufflegazine. But I’m back out there on Tuesday, giving you more stories.