This week’s editorial musings from magpie’s nest
Tonight’s busy Lots of good things happening today (thursday): Candice Lin’s installation opens at the Jameel, there’s an open mike night at the Fridge (spot Dubai’s next big thing?) and a PowerPointless at the Courtyard (always very funny), and we’re midway through the current Laughter Factory tour – it’s Abu Dhabi tonight.
Look ahead The Jameel’s Creative Career Days is back, a useful intro to careers in the creative sphere for kids, students and parents. The reinivented Sophie Ellis-Bextor should deliver a fun evening at Dubai Opera. The exceptional (and exceptionally scary) Woman in Black is well worth booking; LA Dance Project is bringing its much-garlanded Romeo & Juliet Suite to Dubai; and in November there’s Martin Garrix at the Atlantis and Lang Lang (with Disney) at the Etihad Arena.
Trim the top of Google You may have noticed that the first few results from a Google search are usually ads and AI-based irrelevancies. Seems it’s possible to avoid them and get straight to the good stuff; just add &udm=14 to your search, so “how do you clean a fabric sofa &udm=14” and Google will (usually) omit content known to be AI-generated or advert-heavy
Pay-monthly rentals A property rental and management business called Keyper has launched a Rent Now Pay Later (RNPL) Marketplace for Dubai; it gives tenants the option to pay their rent in 12 monthly instalments (via a credit card) – no need to fund a hefty year-up-front prepayment. Hooray! Currently there are just over a thousand properties listed, ranging from AED 3,500 pm (studio in International City) to AED 257,834 (four bed villa in Jumeriah Islands). Browse here.
Draw ahead Canva surveyed more than 3,700 business leaders from 12 countries (which didn’t include the UAE, as it happens) for its Visual Economy Report 2024 (link here). We’re going to be looking at this in some detail, but the headline seems to be that a whopping 82% of them have used AI-powered tools to produce visual content in the past year.
More predictably, given that it’s Canva who ran the survey, 77% said communicating visually has increased business performance in one way or another (basically accelerating content creation, more engagement, and/or better collaboration).
The report itself is a decent enough advertisement for Canva, too, though some might prefer a simple downloadable non-interactive non-animated PDF. They’d be well antwacky, of course.
A game for the weekend Which came first of the two factoid images? Find out here
Brainache remedy We asked which six-letter girl’s name would begin this list: ——, had, inland, ran, man, pain. It’s Olivia; these are all words than can have another letter added to the front to make a country (and the sequence is alphabetical).
Things we didn’t know, no.94 On average, 23% of the world’s households don’t separate their waste into recyclables and compostables, says the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll (part of the Gallup World Poll). We’re particularly bad, with 53% of UAE households binning their waste without separating it.
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