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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 April - 3 May 2000 Issue No. 479 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 April - 3 May 2000 Issue No. 479
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Portals here, there, everywhere
By Amira HoweidyIf the second annual Gitex Cairo IT Exhibition featured any debut of significance, then it must be the emergence of a hitherto unprecedented portal trend. Arabia On-line, the leading Arab Internet company, is now Arabia.com and a portal, offering users its bilingual Arabic/English and customised services. Another 'portal,' Masrawy.com, was launched on the exhibition's first day.
Masrawy.com, though, which copies the design of the search engine turned-portal Yahoo!, merely offers stock exchange news in English, Arabic news headlines, free e-mail and external links.
And to coincide with Gitex, orientation.com, the American network of country and regional multilingual Internal portals, launched its Egyptian, Arabic-enabled portal.
Dot.coms such as Otlob.com were also making debuts at Gitex. Otlob, the Egyptian on-line take away service, lists more than 200 restaurants across the nation, ready for e-orders. According to one of its marketing personnel, present at Gitex, Otlob.com will be expanding regionally.
The recently launched Dubai Internet City was given the full treatment at Gitex, with Dubai's Crown Prince, Sheikh Mohamed bin Rashed Al-Maktoum, joining Prime Minister Atef Ebeid and Information and Communication Minister Ahmed Nazif in opening Gitex last Sunday. Cooperation between Egypt, the region's largest computer user, and Dubai, with its hi-tech preparedness, is imminent, observers say. Moreover Egypt, which is preparing the launch of three "smart villages" in Sixth of October, Alexandria and Shorouq city before the end of this year, made a point of promoting the new concept during the exhibition. At a future stage, said Ali El-Hefnawi, an advisor to Nazif, the country's "smart villages" will be linked together, hopefully transforming Egypt into an advanced technology hub.
Despite the first time presence of companies from Hong Kong, Jordan, Malaysia, India, Spain, Holland and Switzerland, the exhibition attracted a much smaller audience than last year. COMDEX, another IT exhibition, is scheduled for next month, a fact that discouraged several companies, including Compaq, from exhibiting at Gitex this time.
But the government wasn't wasting any time. This is, after all, the first Gitex to be held following the formation of the Information and Communication Ministry last December.
Last Monday, Nazif and Rowland Griffiths, Regional Director of Cisco Systems, signed a memorandum of understanding between the Egyptian Government and Cisco Systems -- the leading worldwide Internet networking company -- to train 1,000 Egyptians in the latest net-working skills within a year.
RITSEC (Regional Information Technology and Software Engineering Center) and NTI (National Technology Institute) will also be officially announcing their creation of Regional Networking Academies as part of the Cisco Networking Academies programme.
The other important debut was that of Hyperion Solutions, the UK analytic applications company which will be distributed in Egypt through RAYA. "Obviously we've come to the exhibition because it was set up by the government and it is putting a lot of money in the IT sector so that it can develop the business and help the Egyptian companies develop their IT infrastructure so that they alone are better businesses," Hyperion's Paul Cheshire told Al-Ahram Weekly.
Dot.coms are making their debuts at the Gitex exhibition held in Cairo
photo: Ayman Ibrahim
On the sidelines, Arab and foreign computer companies displayed products new to the Egyptian market
The Bahgat group presented its latest product, the 'Goldi Hi' family computer models powered by Intel Celeron processors. It also displayed the 'Goldi Pro' computer models which operate with processor speeds as high as 800 MHz. The Bahgat Group also advertised the production of the first Egyptian computer screens -- the Gold 14, 15 and 17 inch monitors.
In addition to computers, Bahgat Group manufactures and markets Internet software. According to Ismail Noureddin, the group's marketing and sales department manager, his company's main objective behind participating in Gitex is "to conclude deals or initiate new business relations with Arab and foreign companies".
DTK Computer used the event to launch its new notebook Fortis Pro 6120. The ultra-slim and light weight notebook supports the latest Intel PIII 700MHz, is backed by Intels 440Bx chipset and configured with 64MB on board SDRAM, expandable to 256MB.
Sakhr Software Co demonstrated its web-enabled, server-based Enterprise Machine Translation solution in a conference held during the exhibition. The solution includes four main services -- a server-based automatic translation, a general domain dictionary, a glossary of terms, and a file translation service.
Server-based Automatic Translation is achieved through the Sakhr Machine translation engine. It enables any user on the Intranet to automatically translate any sentence or paragraph from English to Arabic by either typing the text directly or cutting and pasting it from any other application.
But Gitex Cairo remains a would-be major exhibition. Despite the leaping growth rate of Egypt's IT market, it is still in need of a more solid hi-tech infrastructure and flexible, IT-oriented laws. This, observers say, explains the inclination towards regional cooperation to complete and balance market needs. A case in point is the Dubai Internet City hub which, boasting the latest technology, remains in need of Egypt's rich human resources and large consumer base.
Related stories:
Seeking one per cent 16 - 22 September 1999
IT industry flocks to Egypt 1-7 April 1999
Regulations hinder telecom sector 4 -10 February 1999
COMDEX comes to Egypt 28 May - 3 June 1998
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