Software Business in the Middle East

I have assured myself once again that making a good presentation is not an easy task. Otherwise, how to explain the fact that I fall asleep from the majority of the presentations I have seen so far?

There was Health Insurance Conference finished a few days ago in Abu Dhabi. The main problem during 90% of all presentations was fighting with sleepiness. I think that speakers who make such boring speeches would be kicked out without any free lunch.

But the organizers of the conference did actually a very good work. The huge advantage was that each speaker got maximum 20 minutes to talk about his or her topic. It helped people to keep themselves awake even if it was very boring presentation sometimes. Also, as a small thing, the folders and pens giving away to the participants as presents were of the excellent quality – this is something not very common in this part of the world.

As I noticed in both UAE and Saudi Arabia, the local conferences have couple interesting things. Almost any conference ends with the announcement that it was a successful event, thanking everybody for making it such a success. I always have hard time to understand what the criteria of conference success or failure are.

Also, all conferences end by giving presents to the speakers. It might be, for example, a nice looking ship model or glass medal with a speaker’s name on it. This time we got a ship as you see it on the picture above; click on it to get a larger one. It looks nice, really, and it is very heavy one

The conclusion is – if it is so hard to make a good presentation, you have to learn how to make your speech interesting and exciting to differentiate yourself. Any ideas how to do it?

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Middle East Medical Times magazine has published the interview where I talk a little about our experiment with statistics on prescription errors in UAE. The article looks nice, especially its title

It is also a good example of marketing in case you don’t have a budget for it. This is really a win-win situation: the subject is interesting for the magazine and your company might benefit from such publications.

Here is a pdf file if the link cannot be opened.

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One of the persons I met on the exhibition was a guy from Ministry of Education of Saudi Arabia, department of E-education. He took my business card, but when I asked him for his card in return, he told he didn’t appreciate the paper business cards, so he used to use e-cards. “Now”, he told, “I will send you my e-card. Just give me your phone number” . Then he pulled out his mobile from his dishdash … ops, the battery was dead. It’s a pity, but kind of funny.

Really, how much do you depend on your mobile and your computer? The battery is off, and you have no way to check your address book or your tasks in Outlook. I had situations few times when my mobile was completely dead and broken, and I had no way to reach my address book backup. It was very strange feeling: from one hand I felt like I’d lost the connection to all people I knew, but from another – it was like a short vacation.

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