ner of the hall, at the Student Lab section, 10 university teams from across the region competed to showcase their innovations for the first time. Students from An-Najah National University in Palestine won first place for their Android-based home automation application that’ll help handicapped people negotiate tasks around the house with a single click. They received a cash prize of AED30,000 to help make their idea a reality. Other notable entries were an automated phishing detector and a mobile app to connect users interested in voluntary work. The buzzwords at the event were security, cloud computing, mobile apps and big data, with conferences and seminars aplenty revolving around these over the week. IT research and advisory company Gartner predicted that the Middle East and North Africa would experience one of the highest global growth rates for public cloud services, increasing from 2012 to 2013 by 24.5% to $462.3 million. At Cloud Confex, industry experts from the region’s influential companies participated in panels, demonstrations and interactive network-
ing sessions to illuminate the opportunities and challenges of cloud computing, and explain best practices to maximise Return On Information. Diego Arrabal, Director, Middle East Sales, F5, said: “As an increasing number of organisations in the Middle East incorporate cloud computing and new flexible data centre architecture into
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