Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Dubai Tech Nights
Today I attended a session of Dubai Tech Nights, it was announced today that it’s been running successfully for 6 months now,but it was my first and definitely not the last, here’s why.
The most notable part of the whole session was the great audience, it was great to see so many professional under one roof dedicating their time to make it happen.
I cant remember the gentleman’s name,but he represented RIT University Dubai and shared with the audience the expansion plans and how his university is doing in general despite the unfavorable conditions.
Then a Emirati Phd student told his about his thesis on Small and Medium Business that he wants to hear from the CXO of 1000 companies in Dubai so then he can take their concerns and opinions to propose them to the Government.
Another fellow Emirati who happens to be a writer showed a book that he has written which basically tells the story of 6 Emiratis that he interviewed and how they made it big, one of them is Saeed Harib of Freej. The idea of writing a book came to his mind when he reached people to take an initiative and how he was given ready excuses by those that he approached.
Another interesting thing to hear was about the startup Nahel.com that offers online shopping in the UAE, the gentlemen talked about his company, what are their strengths, why they decided to launch it, what’s the business model, the target audience,what are the challenges they are facing, how he manages delivery etc, it was interesting to hear it and a lot of great questions were asked during his talk.
Then there was a presentation by Matt Glen from DLA Piper on Legal protections as an agent for fueling technology innovation, the gentleman explained the difference between a invention and a innovation, what’s an NDA from a legal perspective, the procedure for filing a patent if you are an inventor, what are limitations and your rights as an inventor. How do you define Intellectual property etc. He said that an Invention is something that converts money to an Idea and Innovation is something that takes an idea and converts it to money :)
Then there was the networking session over pizza and cold drinks, I met some interesting fellow DTN members and missed a lot others that I’m hopefully going to catch next time.
