First week of using Samsung showed I was very wrong in my assumtions that I needed a “simply calling phone”. Below are just a few examples of the features that made my experience using Samsung not very good:

• Time of calls – sometimes I call back using the time of the missed or received call. Samsung simply does store the time of calls. Sometimes it’s not clear if that’s another missed call, or the same from yesterday.
• Repeating Alarm Clock – bad thing is that Samsung’s alarm clock rings only once. If you didn’t wake up, the phone will not repeat the alarm again. It’s very easy for me to oversleep, especially if I went to the bad late at night.
• Saving sent SMS in the Sent folder - nice feature, missed it a lot.
• SMS Editor – such features like starting a new sentence from a capital letter makes life easier. It seems to be a standard now in all phones, but not in my Samsung.

All above are not a big deal, really. But as soon as you get used to such small nice things, it is difficult to live without them. Nowadays I travel a lot and I need to have access to my e-mails from any place, so I got BlackBerry Curve 8900 to see if this device helps in my daily work.

To move our company to another Free Zone, we would close first our old company in Dubai Internet City. One of the condition for company closure is to get audit letter that we do not have debts and other issues that might prevent company to be closed.

I asked one accounting firm to send us a quote about how much the auditing would cost. They said $2,000. I replied it’s too much. They said $1,800. After several e-mail exchange the price went down to $800 the same day.

How those guys set their prices?

Normally, companies are not allowed to get office space outside such Free Zones like DIC. But in August 2008 we got a call from Dubai Internet City that we would get an office outside the Free Zone, because it would take another 3 years in the waiting list otherwise. For the office outside we would pay 300 dirham per sq. ft. having minimum 1,000 sq. ft. That’s kind of four times more expensive than promised. Oh, and having one nice condition - payment would be done one year upfront - 300,000 dirham as one payment before we sign lease agreement.

It’s nice business for the guys selling office space (well, it was nice business until the recession), but it was no way we would pay such huge amount of cash upfront. So the question was where to move the company to because otherwise we would not get our license renewed.

First we considered Ras Al Khaima Free Zone. It’s kind of 100 km from Dubai, but since they got a nice business center in Dubai, who cares where we got our license from.

RAK Free Zone has an excellent sales staff - they answered all our questions in details, they advised what to do in what order and how to make sure that company operations are moved smoothly. If you have no special reason to have your license issued by one of the Free Zones in Dubai, I would recommend to look at the option to get licensed in RAK Free Zone.

Then it just happened that I heard about Dubai Biotechnology and Research Park (Dubiotech). It’s another Free Zone in Dubai intended to hold companies working in medical and healthcare domains. They didn’t have any description if they could hold companies working with IT healthcare, but their sales team said it’s OK. So we decided to go for Dubiotech instead of RAK FZ.

Dubiotech has simply amazing team. Many things were solved by phone, or simply sending them e-mails stating that I agree to some points and they could go ahead with them. Even my visa was transfered from DIC to Dubiotech during 19 hours only - this is something I almost didn’t hope for thinking I got to postpone my trip.

Finally, now we hold a license issued by Dubiotech. They got plenty of brand new office spaces, and all of them have furniture. The facilities in their business center are excellent and I just hope they won’t increase their rent prices in the near future.

Last year they employed ex-military guy to work as a manager. The guy thought that company source code was in danger and implemented a few source code protection “smart” ideas:

• None of developer computer has Internet connection at the moment. There is only one machine having Internet access, but that machine is not in a company computer network.

• USB sockets are disconnected.

• There are plenty of video cameras in the office; all top managers can see what anybody does any time.

I had really hard time to believe it is all true. But the fact is, within a few months the company got 60% of its staff only – I can imagine it is not easy task to motivate yourself working in this environment.

Generally speaking, I think that the problem of source code stealing is a kind of assumed problem. To make your product successful, you need something else besides the source code. In our drug database the stealing of source code is simply useless – the main point is in drug information. Even if drug information is stolen, you need to make sure the updates are coming regularly; otherwise you can not safely use the software. It is similar to licensing your software – those who want to steal will steal anyway. But you will spend a lot of time and efforts making more advanced protection. And potentially you might make troubles for your paying customers who got issues activating the product.

What do you think – the problem of stealing source code is real and serious, or it is just a fake used by certain managers for total control over the company staff?

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

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.

Last autumn we got an idea of a product that might be installed on a customer site having 1 to 20 concurrent users. We’ve been always working with Windows based applications and never with Web based, so we though why not to use this chance also to learn asp.net making our first Web based app. It might be a good experience, as we thought.

Searching the Internet we found a few web app generators that could generate a source code based on your database. IronSpeed looked as the best option, especially with their tables-in-table features. For example, you have table Customer and child tables for orders, payments and complaints. With such nice feature as table-in-table you could generate a web page to find a customer and for each customer record you could see separate tab with, let’s say, the customer’s last five orders orders, then a tab with five last payments, and a tab with five last complaints.

Everything looked excellent on IronSpeed’s screenshots. I have to admit that this software really has excellent design templates, so the generated pages looked really good.

The problem is that such nice feature as table-in-table is not available in a trial version. Neither have they money guarantee period, so you could get you money back if you don’t like the software.

But it seemed IronSpeed was pretty well-known company on web based program generators market, and I thought that people would not sell crap for about $2,000 (xa-xa), so we bought a license.

The software looked very nice. It generated everything I asked for with all table-in-table stuff. I changed one table-in-table – it looked excellent. Changed the second one – wait, the first one became as it was generated by default. Well, I changed the first table-in-table again. Then I changed the third table-in-table, and guess what – the first two became as they were generated by default. All my changes were gone or got completely messed up.

Finally, my project started showing .Net errors complaining that I used some variables without first initializing them, and it became simply impossible to work with the project.

During one month, after talking to IronSpeed support, I generated my program a few times, but I was not able to make it working properly. Maybe I was stupid enough not to admit some IronSpeed courses or webinars, but I assumed that software for such price would at least remember my changes and not mess up my web pages.

At that time I got e-mail from IronSpeed sales guy asking me to share our success story with them – he assumed we made another kick-ass product using their software. I told him about our situation telling him I was dreaming to get rid of this software. He answered they do not return any money back but agreed I could sell my license over ebay or somewhere else.

It’s just our experience, of course. IronSpeed has impressive list of customers, so I guess people like the product. Maybe, they do not use all the features, or they do not try changing table-in-table stuff a lot. Or we were just such unlucky.

But from now on:
1. If trial version of the software does not have the features I am looking for – no buy;
2. If company does not have at least two weeks money back guarantee – no buy.

Finally, we switched back to Win based development, and I actually have no idea when we will try doing something web based next time. Sad.

Have you ever had similar situations when you just wasted your money for nothing?

Seriously – what kind of cheating is it, just another money-laundering?