The UAE’s notable firsts

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FIRST TWEETS
Alexander McNabb and Catboy
“Twitter was unblocked in August 2008 and right away a small group of people took to it with a whoop,” recalls Alexander McNabb, a UAE-based publishing, media and digital communications consultant. “It was initially seen as a dating app, which seemed as ludicrous then as it does now.”

While in the rest of the world, Twitter was destroying the news with its coverage of the Iranian protests and the Arab Spring, its early legacy here was the real-life relationships it created. “It took people out of their cultural groupings,” says Alexander. “Suddenly people were chatting away regardless of creed and colour. I found the tide of Emirati opinion was, in particular, interesting to experience for the first time.”

Simon Smedley (Dubai 92’s breakfast show’s “Catboy”) was on Twitter from day one. In fact he signed up long before the service was unblocked. “I was apprehensive at first,” Simon tells ShortList. “But I was quickly hooked and started using Twitter on the show to get more people on-board. In 2011, I started #DubaiMovies about film title puns based on Dubai and it snowballed across the Middle East and beyond. We had over 6,000 hashtags.”

FIRST ICE CREAM VAN
Nathen Furlong founder of Desert Chill
“My brother Dan was at a very hot and busy event in Dubai back in 2007 and being a Brit immediately asked where the ice cream van was,” says Nathen Furlong. “Less than a year later, Desert Chill was born – the regions first ice-cream van. I moved to Dubai to launch the company.”

The idea was so unique to the UAE, a new business category had to be created. “There was no mobile food bracket,” remembers Nathen. “So we had to gain the trust of the authorities to be able to start.” It was all worth it and the breakthrough trail blazed the way for food trucks years later – The Food Truck company was the first to be given a license to roam in 2014.

“I remember my very first day driving through Arabian Ranches and there were so many smiles and plenty of bemusement as an ice cream van playing Greensleeves down the street,” Nathen recalls.

The boys claim another first Dubai first, too: their new app allows you to order ice cream have it delivered to your door.  And the nation’s favourites? “Traditional chocolate and vanilla still outsells everything.”

FIRST ENGLISH-LANGUAGE DAILY NEWSPAPER
Khaleej Times, April 16, 1978
Established by the Galadari Printing and Publishing Company, and with the Dubai Government a major shareholder, the first edition of The Khaleej Times rolled off the presses in April, 1978, with a front-page story about the political situation in Rhodesia.

Five months later, Gulf News was launched. A modest 16-page paper, it splashed with a story about the introduction of breathalysers by the UAE police force. It went through a redesign in 1985. “I was the Business Editor of the new team,” the former Gulf News editor Francis Matthew. “The week of December 10, 1985, was very exciting as we watched the thundering presses print the first copies of our new-look newspaper before it was distributed all over the UAE and further afield for the first time.”

FIRST CINEMA
Al Watan cinema in Nasr Square, Deira, Dubai, holds the honour of the first official cinema in the country. Not that it was exactly a “cinema”. In the 1960s, it showed films outdoors, projecting them onto a white painted wall every night at 9pm. It cost a few Indian rupees (there was no Emirati currency 1973). Hard to get hold of American movie prints meant Bollywood was the genre of choice in the 1960s.

FIRST MALL
Al Ghurair Centre in Deira claims the title UAE’s first “modern” shopping mall. Construction started in the late 1970s and the centre was opened to the public in 1981, delivering a complete entertainment experience – cinemas, shops, four court. It has been remodelled twice in the last 15 years, including a recent AED2 billion expansion that doubled its size.