Gitex Technology Week 2009, Dubai – Impressive!?

Yesterday I visited the Gitex Technology Week expo in Dubai. In all the years I have been attending the event, which is held in the World Trade Centre in Dubai, have always been a good experience. First of all getting to the venue would be very difficult with the traffic coming from all emirates into the venue. Parking was an issue. The Trade Centre is located in Sheikh Zayed Road, one of the most busiest roads in Dubai and the centre of business. So traffic even on normal days is more compared to others. Getting a parking takes more time than visiting all the stalls twice! Finally getting out and going home unimaginable!

This time around, thanks to the recession, getting to the venue and parking was a breeze. Parked in less than 15 minutes (usually around an hour)! Luckily my cousin Saboor brought along a couple of free passes. It costs 40 dirhams for a ticket to enter.

The exhibits here were GITEX Business Solutions, GULFCOMMS, MEFX 2009, Consumer Electronics and Global Conference. The GITEX Shopper is held in the Airport Expo in Dubai. The first thing that struck me was the crowd, or was there one? Most of the people looked like exhibitors. My guess is that apart from the local residents, we didn’t have many visitors from outside.

There were many exhibitors as usual, but nothing much exciting at all. Nothing new to showcase from them. Same technology repacked several times and marketed. It is more of exhibitors trying hard to push their stuff through to the consumers. The big corporates trying to showcase their services as usual.

Some of the interesting exhibits that caught my eye.

The Chinese seemed to dominate the market. Nearly all the products seemed to be Chinese even though they were exhibited by other countries!

CruizCore MSID – is a motion capture and input device used for entertainment applications. http://www.cruizcore.com/e_index.html. It is as small as a coin and has features similar to that of a Wii.It was used in a game in this exhibit. It was used for a game similar to that of a Wii. It had a dongle attached to a laptop which had the game installed and the game was played similar to a Wii. Nice. I don’t need an expensive Wii now. I can get something for the same effect at a much lower cost. Applications will soon enter into this category.

Another interesting product was the Charston Intelligent Teacher. It is a product on which a book is kept (books provided by the same company). Then using a pointing device, information on the page is pointed at and the respective line/work is recited. The most exciting part was that there is also a Quran provided. Using this product we can learn how to recite properly and also compare our voice (which can be recorded with this device) with the voice of any of the reciters provided. It also costs only USD 200. Not bad actually. For more details pleas visit http://www.charston.com.

The number of mobiles entering is the market is huge, especially from China. Chinese mobiles come in all the top brand models including Nokia and even the iPhone! A lot devices for reciting the Quran like mobiles and mp4 devices are there.

There was also a laser machine in one of the exhibits. I had my name etched on my mobile! Cool! Just typed my name, put my mobile under the laser and pressed Enter – voila in a few seconds my name!

Freebies was down to a minimum! Sad! Overall this was an effort to try to revive the market and the economy.  Even though everyone seemed positive, the energy was not there and people are still vary. We should always stay positive and think of the better times ahead. Well done Dubai.

Official website – http://www.gitex.com/