Nota Bene

My previous post about Cairo turned out a bit gloomy, so let me lighten the mood with something upbeat! Today’s post is all about the Grand Egyptian Museum, aka the Giza Museum ->

This place is absolutely mind-blowing.

Read on…

Something important has happened – though you might have missed it…

The third version of our Research Sandbox has been released!

Hmm. Hardly jaw-dropping, right? But it still matters – big time. Let me tell you why…

What is it?

What’s a sandbox? Let me start with the very basics…

How can you tell if an object (file, web resource…) is malicious? The simplest way is to run it and see what happens. If it steals passwords and card data or encrypts files and demands a ransom – there you go: it’s malicious. But “sucking it and seeing” is hardly a great idea given the damage such infections/encryption can wreak.

To safely test a suspicious object in a controlled environment, we created a sandbox – a sort of virtual petri dish where malware can reveal its true malicious colors while we observe it under a microscope.

Read on…

“Busy, busy – as a bee: that’s me!”

Yes, I could have been a poet, but I’ll settle for… globetrotting (partner-)conference-bingeing CEO!…

For yes – you’ve guessed it – I was at yet another partner conference the other week. This came hot on the heels of a real busy schedule in Egypt, after which I was teleported over to the UAE (more precisely, to the small Emirate of Ajman, here) for our annual partner conference for the Middle East and Africa region.

This was our eighth regional conference in… the region (having started in 2017, but we had a few pandemic-related breaks). And how we’ve grown! This time we were joined 110 partners from 67 companies across 20 countries. For some the flight to get there took eight hours, while for others – the local partner – it was just five minutes in a taxi!

Anyway – welcome!…

// And thanks for making just the one typo in the welcome sign :-) ->

I wonder if they had typos over there? ->

Read on…

Hi folks!

Sitting here in Cairo airport with half-an-hour till boarding, I’ll take this opportunity to share some of my key impressions during my quick stay in the Egyptian capital – especially since they match the thoughts of my travel companion, NK, who’s here for the first time. Thus, there are three (agreed-upon!) main takeaways: one positive/encouraging, two – not so much…

The positive/encouraging? The huge number of construction sites in Cairo’s suburbs. There are new buildings going up everywhere in various stages of completion.

The “not so much”? First – how folks drive here: total bedlam and chaos. Second – the older buildings. I’ve written before about these high-rise brick ghettos, but now I can finally share my own pics; last time I was too taken aback to be able to snap such… abominations…

My snaps were taken while we were being driven along Cairo’s ring road, which in some places cuts straight through residential areas as an elevated second-level roadway. The views out the window look like this:

Read on…

It was somewhat sad saying goodbye to Singapore and its wonderful airport, but duty was calling so off we flew again…

So where next? Oh… that’s where! ->

Cairo – here we come!…

Read on…

Airports around the world come in all shapes and sizes. Some are huge, some are tiny; some are packed with folks, others are roomy and almost empty. Some are efficient and some – not so much. But the brightest, cleanest, most comfortable, and most luxurious airport in the world is the one in Singapore: Changi Airport.

Everything moves real fast here – even though the airport itself is gigantic. It’s spacious, comfy, and not crowded – even though it’s one of the top-20 busiest airports on the planet.

And it’s just plain beautiful:

(You can find tons more pics online)

And that’s exactly how it should be – for first impressions matter. Airports are the “front door” to a country. And Singapore clearly gets this perfectly: the welcome couldn’t be warmer, and when it’s time to leave – you don’t really want to.

Read on…

Last week, the first ever GITEX Asia was held in Singapore – and I just had to be there…

Not that the original GITEX, which has been running since… 1980 (!) in Dubai every year, is disappearing or anything. It’s just that it’s getting all the more global – or should that be more local, given that Dubai is also in Asia. Confused? Don’t be! The more GITEXs the better is all you need to know!…

So what can I say about this newbie expo? Overall it was pretty modest: the venue wasn’t huge, and it featured only several dozen companies – a hundred tops. Not many big-name players, either. And in our field, it was basically just us:

Read on…

I’m not a fan of red-eye flights heading east – for I can never get even a half-decent sleep on the plane. And if you’re flying around Southeast Asia, sometimes the turbulence gets so wild your whisky splashes out of the glass (can’t be having that, obviously). It was a few years ago when I figured out that daytime flights eastward are way nicer for someone who loves deep, quality sleep. But unfortunately, most airlines prefer flying west during the day, and east only at night. And since I don’t like throwing away hard-earned cash, private jets aren’t even on the table as long as scheduled commercial flights are available. So yes – I just have to put up with it…

Especially rough is when, like several days ago, it’s kinda between a night-flight and day-flight: our departure from Moscow was at 5pm, flying around eight hours to Shanghai, which means landing around 1am Moscow time – early morning local time. Who’s gonna sleep at that time? Especially since, starting somewhere above Kyzyl, turbulence kicked in big time. Grrr. Then, to top it all off – the weather in Shanghai was gray, wet and miserable ->

Still, things brightened up by the time we were coming in to land in Singapore; phew! ->

So what’s with all the ships? They’re all lining up to dock. Singapore’s one of the world’s key “sorting stations” for maritime trade. I guess it’s just a lucky spot on the map: everything on the route between Europe via India and heading to China/Japan and nearby countries (and the other way) passes through the Strait of Malacca and past Singapore.

Read on…

Ok folks… time to share my impressions of the places we stayed at during our January trip through Latin America…

Overall, everything was excelente! The only trickiness came on the Inca Trail: we had to spend the cold nights in sleeping bags in tents, but, given the lack of hotels up there, what else could we do? Still, the amazing huge meals we were served on the Trail made up the tents thing; but back to the excelente bits…

Naturally, in urban locations, we tried to stay in decent places – if there were rooms available: unfortunately, we only made the final decision to go on our LatAm-2025 trip about a month earlier, so accommodation wasn’t always available (also: permits to climb Huayna Picchu, next to Machu Picchu, were already sold out). The moral: book everything well in advance!

In both urban and even rural areas you can find quite decent places to stay. Here, for example, is the courtyard of our hotel in Cusco, in the Spanish colonial style:

Read on…

Part 0: Introducing Altiplano: first an appetizer-intro

Next up, southwest of the Uyuni Salt Flat – the Altiplano Plateau and the Bolivian section of the high-altitude Atacama Desert. We had only two days to explore these imposing landscapes, and to cram in the maximum amount of uncrammable experiences we had to switch to our now-familiar “tourism till you drop” mode. Even still, that turned out to be way too little time for such a vast territory – especially considering the slow pace on roads that barely qualified as such. To explore everything thoroughly and walk at a leisurely pace, you should really reserve at least three days. For there’s plenty to see: highland plains dotted with multi-colored volcanic cones, salt and freshwater lagoons with pink flamingos, bizarrely-shaped rock formations, hot springs and bubbling geothermal fields. A truly worthy destination! Let’s go!…

Our route went like this (the original’s here) ->

Read on…