Posted on June 1, 2008 by faisalghori
The QRCE recently announced the start of its 3rd Annual National Entrepreneurship Competition which will award $70,000 (USD) in total cash prizes.
Google will be offering a special $10,000 (USD) award for the best online focused business. The King Abdullah II Design and Defense Bureau (KADDB) is also offering $10,000 (USD) for the best business plan catering to defense and security.
To date the QRCE’s business plan competition remains the regions only technology focused business plan competition.
Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Jordan, Startups, Technology | Leave a Comment »
Posted on May 24, 2008 by faisalghori
In 2006, Abu Dhabi launched the Masdar Initiative, a $15bn project that seeks to “embrace renewable and sustainable energy technologies.”
One of the ways that Masdar Initiative hopes to do this largely through the construction of Masdar City, a zero-emissions, zero-carbon, zero-waste city with a target population of 50,000.
According to VentureBeat:
Although much of that money will go toward construction and infrastructure requirements, Masdar is also becoming a significant force in fostering new technologies. The Masdar Clean Tech Fund has already sunk $250 million into cleantech ventures from its first fund, and is in the process of raising more capital for a second.
The investment dollars are going in large part to ideas for energy generation. The planned power supply of Masdar is to be split between several sources, with solar providing the majority; a 500 megawatt solar thermal installation a 100MW solar concentrator project (which funding has not yet been announced for) are in the works. Research is going into thin film, and the city will play host to a solar photovoltaic manufacturing plant.
However, another 500MW will come from a plant fueled by hydrogen, Al Jaber said in his speech. The new city will provide a rare opportunity to test out utility-scale use of hydrogen, which is estimated to be decades away in this country.
The initiative has also launched an eponymous Masdar Clean Tech Fund that seeks to invest $250mm .
Filed under: Development, MENA | Tagged: Abu Dhabi, Clean Tech, UAE | Leave a Comment »
Posted on February 1, 2008 by faisalghori
Social entrepreneurship is all the rage these days – save the world and make a buck at the same time – who can argue with that? It’s popularity in months past has been widely bolstered in part due to Muhammad Yunus’ success at Grameen Bank. Now Nicholas Kristof is writing about it as well.
While most social entrepreneurship ventures are based in the U.S. and focus towards the developing world, there are few that have emerged from the developing world itself. This one comes from Jordan:
One of the social entrepreneurs here is Soraya Salti, a 37-year-old Jordanian woman who is trying to transform the Arab world by teaching entrepreneurship in schools. Her organization, Injaz, is now training 100,000 Arab students each year to find a market niche, construct a business plan and then launch and nurture a business.
We often don’t hear of such news coming out of the region, but Jordan is nearly exceptional in this regard and has taken great strides (some unrealized) towards investing in its only asset: its people. The YEA has also done a lot to support and bolster entrepreneurship in Jordan and the region. (We covered them earlier here).
Filed under: Development, Entrepreneurship, Jordan | Leave a Comment »
Posted on February 1, 2008 by faisalghori
It’s no surprise that the stability of the internet is not the same in the Middle East as it is in the U.S. or Western Europe, but this latest incident continues to highlight the fragility of internet connectivity in the Middle East. When an errant ship’s anchor can disrupt internet service to large parts of the Middle East, that does not provide for desired stability in having an economy that’s bolstered by ICT
Neither of the cable operators have confirmed the cause or location of the outage but some reports suggest it was caused by a ship’s anchor near the port of Alexandria in Egypt.
As Middle Eastern businesses continue to come online, issues such as this reinforce the desire of others to remain offline. Worse yet, it harms the regions image of having reliable infrastructure for ICT development.
Filed under: Internet, MENA, Technology | Leave a Comment »
Posted on November 25, 2007 by faisalghori
As TechCrunch recently highlighted, Paul Francis, a blogger, has compiled a dataset of Facebook users through an advertiser tool on Facebook that “facilitates audience targeting.” The entire data set can be viewed here.
The tool shows a total of 42,966,780 members in the top 31 countries. The U.S. leads with just over 18 million users, followed by the UK (6.8m), Canada (6.7m), Australia (1.9m) and Turkey (1.6m).
Forty percent of U.S. users are male, compared to 36% overall. Men looking for love may want to try Ireland or China, where 73% and 72% of users are female, respectively. Other than the U.S., which has the highest percentage of males, the lowest percentage of female users is in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, UAE and Egypt. (Italics are mine.)
Of MENA countries leading the list of Facebook users is Turkey. To some extent that can be explained by the fact that Turkish, like English, is written in the Latin alphabet. Following behind Turkey, are Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Again, unsurprising given that the aforementioned countries remain the largest markets for technology companies targeting the Middle East.
There are a few take-aways that can be extracted from the data:
1) Facebook has shown tremendous growth in the greater Middle East
2) The largest markets for technology in the Middle East remain Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE
3) As can be observed globally, the ME is no different when it comes to the demographic slant of women on Facebook
Filed under: MENA | Leave a Comment »
