Software Business in the Middle East

I came to the stand on the exhibition of one company that might be our partner or competitor – it depends. The guys at the stand seemed to be very busy talking to each other, so I decided to make an experiment and see how much time they would need to notice that somebody is at their stand looking at the product materials and clicking on the button here and there on a demo computer.

They noticed me after 15 minutes. Several other visitors came to me with their questions during that time assuming I am a part of that company. It seems to be a nice idea – if your competitor does not pay much attention to the visitors, you can stay their talking about their product disadvantages

Today is the last day of Arab Health 2009 exhibition. The conference Information Technology in Healthcare takes place at the same time.

One of the topics discussed on the conference was e-claims in Healthcare, the way it is implemented in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Person who was supposed to lead the e-claim workshop suddenly changed his plans, and I was asked to prepare this workshop instead within a few days.

The workshop lasted for about six hours – I never thought I would be able to speak for so long. I guess I used my talking limit for one month, so I will keep silent for a while

Here are presentation and workshop plan in case if anyone is interested in healthcare e-claims topic.

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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