GITEX exhibition gate.

Many exhibitors and visitors I spoke to at Gitex 2014 on Tuesday said that fewer spaces appeared to be occupied than last year, but that there is a better presentation of stands and products. Was it because of the many robots running around? Well, anyway, it supports DWTC’s expectations that the number of visitors will be 50,000 less than last year.

But while numbers may be smaller, there is certainly no shortage of announcements. This morning a number of companies chose to do this through loudspeakers, as well as short presentations at their booths.

I did not realize until Day 3 that the halls are divided by sectors. For example, government agencies are all in one hall, while telecommunications operators and e-government are in in different halls. This makes it a long way moving from one hall to another, but should be one’s exercise for the day.

I was proud to see that the Saudi Export Development Agency’s stand is bigger than Germany’s.

The Chinese solutions company ZTE announced the launch of a range of payment solutions, such as phone POS (point of sale), photonic and DTV (Digital TV) payment products.

The concept of Smart City is felt all over Dubai, and so at the GITEX. Dubai is seriously heading in that direction turning everything under this concept.

Today, the Dubai Smart Government Department (DSG) announced that it has implemented the second phase of the smart employee app on smartphones and tablets for Dubai about 200,000 government employees.

The idea of this app is to cover administration such as leave management, absence and attendance records, payroll, team hierarchy and search for employee. In addition to other services such as alerts, writing notes and user customization of some aspects of the app.

Today, there were few government announcements, among them TRA UAE’s Telecom-munications Regulatory Authority who released an updated version of its online encyclopedia UAEpedia. The new UAEPedia is designed as a collaborative information base on the UAE. The new website builds upon the well-known Wiki open-source model, allowing controlled collaboration across the public and private sectors to contribute and enrich the content.

The second government-side announcement came by the UAE Ministry of Environment and Water and du about a new app launched that aims to educate people on how to track their emissions. The app, which will be available for free on iOs and Android by the end of this week, will help users calculate consumption of power, water, transportation, waste and carbon emissions.

Third government announcement was by Dubai Smart Government (DSG) who has registered around 34,000 users in its MyID service — that allows the public a sign-on to Dubai government entities’ services, integrated with the Emirates ID card.

 
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