Oh can you imagine…..with a tax-free business climate, great central geography, access to existing and emerging markets, great weather, multicultural workforce, a fairly liquid environment…and combine that with a real interest in making it both easier to setup a start-up PLUS working with global payment gateways providers to maximize options for e-commerce start-ups and you end with even more reason to launch a tech start-up here.
An amazing to the Burj Khalifa last night in Dubai.
I wanted to give my take on Ravit Lichtenberg’s RWW’s post “10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2010″ and give a Middle Eastern spin.
1. Social Media Will Become a Single, Cohesive Experience Embedded In Our Activities and Technologies: “While I do agree that “everything we do will be gathered and streamed together, allowing people to view their world of activities as if it were projected in front of them, open to change, review and input at any point in time from any device or online tool,” this applies only to those people that actually opt-in to multiple services that then aggregate that activity. Otherwise, as the majority who seem to confine their social media activities to Facebook, their activity will be aggregated and collectively streamed in totality based on the structure of the site. Facebook has recently defaulted to open this means that more and more people will be publicly sharing, and since Eric Schmidt doesn’t give a damn about people’s privacy, then the Google behemoth will also exert publication preference on people as well. We will be more open whether anyone asks us or not. The statement that, “Users will access content from any device or platform, co-create and mashup their photos, videos and text with traditional content while interacting with each other” is wishful thinking since the majority are not creators and remixers, but viewers and perhaps commenters. Social Media in the Middle East is even further behind in terms of the participation hierarchy, so interaction around mashups will just be inching into the region by the end of 2010 for early adopters.
The time is right to create value at the sme level, create an ecosystem that incubates startups, make Dubai a globally-attractive place for top minds to start their new technology businesses, and create new momentum for Dubai outside the declining property boom and alongside the draw of tourism.
Last week I attended the event “Best Practices in Entrepreneurship Policy (BPEP): An Arab Regional Conference of Practitioners & Scholars” put on by the Dubai School of Government. The topics included the lack of insolvency laws in the region, policy and regulation for entrepreneurship, educating entrepreneurs, funding and investing and good governance.
Arabic language sports site kooora certainly has traffic. It is the most visited sports site in the region (so it seems). The question is: what do you do with that traffic? If you are into altruism, you put your time into making a great product/service that people enjoy and which provides value – without the intention of…
The Social Media Strategies Conference is on for next week in San Francisco. This is an event for Social Media Managers, Community Managers, Corporate Comms, Advertising, PR, Marketing and even for Recruitment Pros. Its interesting to see the inclusion of Recruiters in this list. As the tagline goes, all of the above job profiles are certainly…
The kings and queens of invention from our collective past all started with a vibrantly vivid vision of what they thought to be possible before they ever dwelled at length on what it would take to make it possible. These mavericks of imagination had wild imaginings that led to remarkable realities. In fact, the great…
Some say that you can never go home. Returning to a place once familiar – months or years later – is always a return to a place that is no longer entirely the same home that you knew, and you are no longer entirely the same person who knew it. Some say that you can…