MENA Opportunities

Foodblessed is a local hunger relief initiative run by a group of volunteers with a passion and will to fight hunger in Lebanon. They state: "our mission combines environmental and social responsibility. We work with strategic partners –including food and non-food companies- through recovering surplus food from events, organizing food drives, and fundraiser events to collect food (which includes surplus perishable food and non-perishable food items) and distribute it to local non-profit partners in need. While we help other non-profits, our efforts divert food wastes for reuse and better serve under privileged communities. A win-win-win model!" Foodblessed, a pioneering local hunger-relief initiative in Lebanon (and the region) was confounded in 2012. It addresses the issue of hunger in Lebanon via establishing a platform between the different parts of the society (namely Private and Civil Society) whereby Corporate Social responsibility and food salvage/rescue go hand in...

MENA OPPORTUNITIES ® (MO), the "less is more" online platform focused on the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region just rocketed to over 1,500,000 pageviews/month just 6 month after the platform’s launch. Offering curated content on money, finance, investments, technology, media, real estate, funding, startups, entrepreneurship, management, news and much more… MO has been the fastest growing MENA website since its inception, locking in over 5,000% month over month growth! It now is one of the most read with ambitious expansion plans in the making. MO’s Managing Director, Ms. Sandra Homsi commented: “I believe that we have hit a sweet spot in the MENA market: young (and less young) executives who want a quick brief on what’s going on in MENA with a good dose of wit and creative content. Our “less is more” approach fits their busy agenda whereas we do not post news events but rather “food for thought”, cool infographics, compelling top 10 lists and the likes... We have...

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Today, Facebook announced the acquisition of WhatsApp, the largest acquisition of any venture backed company in history. Started in 2009, the Company only raised $8 million and today is used by 450 million users globally across their mobile devices per month. Another remarkable stat is that - it only has 50 employees and never embraced the advertising model, only recently starting a $0.99/a year subscription model. Being a Facebook shareholder, only time will tell if this acquisition ends up being a smart move for them. But, here's a list of companies that have been around for a lot longer than WhatsApp and as of today are worth a lot less. Interestingly enough, all of these companies listed below have tangible goods - things you can touch and feel with solid profitability. WhatsApp on the other hand has a massive user base. Only time will tell what is important. Congrats WhatsApp on a great exit. You've officially made history today and are an inspiration to many entrepreneu...

Some of the GCC states have come out with their 2014 budgets and that too with record surpluses. This reflects the relative stability of oil prices at higher levels and which has fuelled the standard of living prevailing in these societies. The increased budgetary spending ranges between 4.3 and 5 per cent, and reflects the implementation of major new projects, the diversity in public services offered and the consistent emphasis on infrastructure development. It could be that the volume of actual spending would exceed by the end of this year the estimates announced at the beginning of the year due to the rise in financial obligations. In earlier years too, the actual spending has overshot projections by between 5 to 19 per cent. The UAE’s budget announced for the year is Dh46 billion ($12.5 billion), with the exception of local budgets, while Saudi Arabia announced a standard budget of 855 billion riyals (equivalent to $228 billion). The declared budgets for Oman and Bahrain are $5...

President Obama has three significant Middle East diplomatic initiatives underway, treating, respectively, Iran's nuclear weapons program; Syria's deadly, exhausting conflict; and the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Into these negotiations, Obama and his administration have poured enormous amounts of American prestige, time and effort. Although rarely considered collectively, these three efforts constitute a significant strategic package for a White House that all too often hardly bothers with foreign policy. These initiatives truly reflect Obama's view of America's international role: His is a world of rhetoric and talk, not power. Thus, Iran has not feared U.S. military strikes against its nuclear weapons program, and now, as a result of November's interim agreement in Geneva, it does not even fear international economic sanctions. Neither the Bashar Assad regime nor Al Qaeda terrorists in Syria see any prospect of material U.S. intervention. And th...

Israel is investigating the alleged hacking of at least one computer secured by the country’s army-backed cyber defence unit in recent weeks, an Israeli security official briefed on the affair said on Tuesday. Hackers penetrated at least one computer belonging to Israel’s defense ministry in recent weeks and 14 others from private Israeli companies via malware delivered through rogue emails, according to an Israeli cyber security firm. Aviv Raff, chief technology officer at Seculert, said on Monday the company detected malware that had penetrated a computer used by Israel’s Civil Administration, which controls traffic of people and goods at the borders of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, allowing the attackers to control the machine and to access any computer in the same network. “They can do what ever the machine can do,” he said. “If this was a machine in the civil administration that allows them to provide entrance permits to certain people, the attackers could do that as well....

The rise of social networks has shown just how much people like to express themselves. Feelit, as the name implies, is one social network that takes people’s feelings very seriously. Saudi co-founder Mohammad AlQadi feels strongly about feelings: “they are a global language in a world filled with tech and politics,” he says, “so we want to connect emotions to every day things.” So he followed his feelings all right, dropping out of college to launch Feelit in September 2013, with co-founders Dima AlOthaimeen, AlBara' Hakami and Omar AlEisa. The iOS app, which recently won the ArabNet Startup Demo in Riyadh, is easy to use. After signing up and choosing a gender, users will have to pick a feeling from the wheel. Whether it’s sad, happy, bored, sleepy, angry, or in love, they then choose to either squash that feeling or embrace it. If they squash ‘bored’ for instance, they’ll get funny videos. A problem, though, arises from the fact that the content is crowdsourced. I noticed w...

Entrepreneurs tend to insist on doing everything related to their startup themselves, often without realizing that there are solutions that might help reduce their workload and save them time to be able to focus on the most important tasks. Strategic alliances arise between companies through formal understandings and formulas that allow them to exchange business benefits. Such arrangements are beneficial to startups; the entrepreneurs who insist on doing everything on their own may miss out. Late last year, Aramex, Google, PayPal, and ShopGo jointly launched EZStore, an e-commerce platform that offers discounts on payment gateways, logistics, and advertising. The four companies signed the partnership to target conventional offline retailers who wish to enter the e-commerce world in the Arab region. This is a good example of a strategic alliance between companies. “Alliances can reduce costs and the duplication of efforts for entrepreneurial ventures and startups, and allow at the s...

Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., the world’s most profitable lender, said it will consider acquisitions in the Middle East as part of plans to boost earnings from the region by 50 percent this year. “We’re looking to see if there are acquisition opportunities,” Zhou Xiaodong, chief executive officer for the Middle East, said in an interview from the lender’s Dubai offices. “It’s a good strategy. Part of the reason why ICBC grew so fast in Hong Kong is because of acquisitions.” ICBC is seeking to triple overseas earnings by 2016 and targeting more business with Middle Eastern companies after previously focusing on the local units of Chinese firms in the region, Zhou said. Profit from the Middle East amounted to $33 million in 2013, he said, and the bank plans to open retail branches in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. ICBC lent $600 million to regional clients including Emirates airline, Qatar Airways and Dubai Electricity & Water Authority in 20...

As a result of the country’s bruised economy, Turkish startups are struggling, just one year after The Economist anointed the country’s startup scene as The Boom on the Bosporus. Yet at the same time, there's been more activity in the past week, when it comes to Turkish companies receiving investment and looking to enter new markets, than we've seen in a few months. As the Turkish lira weakens, companies that focus on international markets have been seeing action. M-commerce technology company Pozitron was acquired by UK's Monitise, and new gaming company Gram Games recently secured $600,000 USD in investment, led by HummingBird Ventures, to scale a new strategy game targeting Saudi Arabia. Hummingbird also previously invested in Turkish game developer, Peak Games, which acquired Saudi gaming developer Kammelna in 2012. The fact that these companies are targeting the Arab world - whether due to the weak Turkish economy or simply as part of their international expansion ...

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American actor Sean Penn will be honored by a Jewish advocacy group for his contribution in saving a wrongly imprisoned Jewish man imprisoned in Bolivia. The group, called This World: The Values Network, will be presenting its 2014 Champion of Jewish Justice to actor Penn at its Second Annual Champions of Jewish Values International Awards Gala on May 18, in New York city. Jerusalem Post columnist and well known as America's favorite rabbi, Rabbi Shmuly Boteach, mentioned Pen's efforts in a piece entitled, “Sean Penn, My Unlikely Hero.” The piece explained the efforts the actor made to aid in the release of Jacob Ostreicher, an American entrepreneur and Orthodox Jew, who was arrested in Bolivia in 2011 and held in an inhumane prison under brutal conditions. Although Boteach says he “disagreed vehemently with Penn in the past on a range of issues, he did something recently that blew my mind, and, in the spirit of gratitude, I must acknowledge it.” According to a statement f...

Yesterday, MENA OPPORTUNITIES' (MO) registered subscribers (members) were treated to a 399$ gift to celebrate MO's record statistics and the platform growth to over 500,000 organic readers/month and 1,000,000 taking into account intensive social media sharing! In response, we received a massive amount of "thank you" emails from delighted subscribers caught by surprise by this sudden and precious gift. We hereby would like to thank back all those who took the time to thank us for the gift and tell them that such valuable gifts will continue to be part of the privileges of registered subscribers (those who registered for FREE by simply entering their email address in the subscription black box on the site)! To those who haven't officially subscribed, we extend our heartfelt invitation to do so for FREE as soon as possible and start enjoying the privileges that go with the subscriber status. The FREE invitation will not remain free permanently as we are exploring...

Dubai is not currently seen as a hub for business conventions, according to Nina Pretorius, vice president of the International Congress & Convention Association (ICCA). Speaking to local business leaders in Dubai, she said: “I think you know that you have to work together, I don’t think you’re there yet.” The event concluded a four-day visit by the ICCA, organised as part of ongoing efforts to boost Dubai’s profile as a hub for global business events. The event attracted groups such as Jumeirah, Emaar and Emirates, and included a programme that focused on positioning the Middle East as a business events hub in the context of Dubai’s successful Expo 2020 bid. Arnaldo Nardone, ICCA president said that the Expo 2020 event could be used as a powerful marketing tool to develop business, but that Dubai also needed to “re-angle itself” to expand in the meetings market and had to learn to treat the tourism industry and meetings industry as “completely different markets.” Hala Ghandour...

An Arab-Iranian poet and human rights activist, Hashem Shaabani, has been executed for being an "enemy of God" and threatening national security, according to local human rights groups. Shaabani and a man named Hadi Rashedi were hanged in unidentified prison on January 27, rights groups have said. Shaabani, who spoke out against the treatment of ethnic Arabs in the province of Khuzestan, had been in prison since February or March 2011 after being arrested for being a Mohareb, or "enemy of God". Last July, the Islamic Revolutionary Tribunal found Shaabani and 13 other people guilty of "waging war on God" and spreading "corruption on earth". The 32-year-old was the founder of Dialogue Institute and was popular for his Arabic and Persian poems. In 2012, he appeared on Iran's state-owned Press TV, where human rights groups say he was forced to confess to "separatist terrorism". According to BBC Persian, officials from the Ministry o...

Somewhere in Oslo is taking place a little revolution in the notoriously secretive hedge fund world. Led by CEO Leo Gasteen and a team of highly experienced professionals, startup EdgeFolio is aiming to disrupt the murky waters of hedge fund data by creating what the team likes to call "the LinkedIn for hedge funds". Indeed, Edgefolio takes hedge fund data and creates social profiles for these funds that are both visible and searchable to investors. The predominant way of selling a product like a hedge fund remains cold calling, which is why Edgefolio is so important. EdgeFolio's ambitious goal is to disrupt how alternative investment products are sold, by allowing the interaction between investor and fund to happen in a scalable and non invasive way. Secondly, Edgefolio will help increase the efficiency of capital raising for hedge funds whilst providing a transparent and sophisticated search and analysis tool for prospective investors. Lastly, owing to the light reg...

The winners of the 2014 Arab Mobile Learning Challenge have been announced at an event in Doha. The winning team, Loujie, based in the UAE, has been awarded $50,000 USD; the second and third place teams, Crowd Analyzer (UAE) and Markabaty (Jordan), won $30,000 and $20,000 respectively. The winning mobile apps were selected from fifteen semi-finalists, narrowed down from 150 entrants from the UAE, Jordan, Tunisia, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. To qualify, mobile apps needed to be relevant to the hospitality, education, entertainment, or employment sectors. Prior to the final round, each semi-finalist team underwent “an intense mentoring program, led by technical and business experts from across the region,” according to a statement. “AMAC was developed to help address the challenges the Arab World faces in relation to high levels of youth unemployment and underemployment…. Some estimates suggest one in three young people are looking for work,” the statement continued. Mark Andrews, regio...

Hsoub, the Nazareth-based web solutions company whose mission is to develop online opportunities for people living throughout the Arab world, has announced that it now handles one billion ads per month. The organization’s advertising arm is not an agency, but a platform that serves to connect advertisers and clients in the hopes of helping foster mutually beneficial relationships. This milestone is an opportunity to get Hsoub PR rep Mouad Khateb’s thoughts on the directions digital advertising may take this year, both for his organization and in the region more generally. While the ubiquitous banner ads have been and will remain to be extremely popular due to the fact that they’re “not restricted in terms of format and don’t require plugins,” Khateb reasons, he expects rich media ads to “become more popular in the coming year.” Rich media ads, he says, are exciting because they are interactive. They're different to banner ads, which require potential customers to click through ...

“It’s OK if we don’t see thousands of views on our articles,” says Rama Chakaki, founder and CEO of news site Baraka Bits. “We’re willing to sacrifice views for the long term investment.” Maybe this is a nontraditional attitude for the CEO of a news website, but Baraka Bits is not a traditional news website – especially for one that’s focused on the Arab world. With the tagline “Good News from the Middle East,” Baraka Bits seeks to document and popularize a “simple and uplifting narrative on the Arab region and its people, culture, environment, and religions,” a far cry from the kind of regional stories that are reported on mainstream media outlets. The Arabic word baraka means abundance, blessing, prosperity, good tidings; the word carries similar meanings in Malay, Swahili, and Hebrew. Launched in beta in July 2012, Baraka Bits operates under the same ethical ethos as Baraka Ventures, the fund co-founded by Chakaki and Mahmoud Abu-Wardeh: be agents of positive change, counting no...

The touch app store, the first of its kind to be launched in Lebanon, will also allow Android customers to bill their app purchases directly to their phones, eliminating the hassle of dealing with payment gateways over Google Play, and it will also offer developers a chance to have their apps marketed by touch itself, over various channels. For now, the app store is only available to touch's near 1 million Android customers, says Rayess, but in the future will be developed for Blackberry and Windows applications, to reach touch's smartphone users, which number approximately 1.2 million. For developers, its rates won't differ from those of the App Store and Google Play; touch will charge a 30% commission from developers on Android app sales. The advantage for local developers, says Rayess, aside from direct billing, is the power of touch's app store to help reveal apps to local customers. “On the touch app store, touch will market your app for you. If you have an app...

Nelson Mandela is famous for saying “Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life. While poverty persists, there is no true freedom.” I naturally could not agree more. Eulogies about Mandela’s life, leadership in the struggle for racial equality, and shrewdness in uniting a country torn apart by apartheid will continue to pour in for years to come. Just as he fought against apartheid, Mandela was a champion for those living on the economic margins of our society. To him, poverty was an injustice subjected upon many whose voices are often ignored. During a speech at the G8 summit in 2005, Mandela asserted that poverty, apartheid, and slavery were human-made social evils that could be overcome by our actions. He likened the experience of living in chronic poverty to being in prison: “But in this new century, millions of people in the world’s poorest countries remain i...

There’s been a quiet entrepreneurial revolution in the Middle East that’s been hidden from global eyes by the incessant news about political revolutions and military shenanigans. The slow rise to prominence of the tech business sector and the general move towards more entrepreneurially based economies has seen multiple players focus recently on making the entrepreneurial ecosystems sustainable. The biggest ecosystem building news came from one of the smallest countries. On December 19, the Central Bank of Lebanon launched Lebanon’s first sovereign startup fund at the BDL Startup Workshop 2013. At over $400 million, the BDL C331 Fund is the largest of its kind in the Arab World. 18 Series A & B Lebanese startups pitched to over 75 seasoned investors in Lebanon’s and maybe even the region’s biggest coming together of startups and investors. Nearby in Egypt, honorable mention must go to the country’s first entrepreneurship summit – RiseUp Egypt. Although the event itself happened...

We are shedding some additional light on Berytech Technological Pole today. Berytech is the first Lebanese business development center, providing hi-tech hosting, incubation, training and counseling to SMEs. It has been spearheaded by the Université Saint-Joseph in 2001, and has become a national reference for SME support, overseeing the establishment of tens of start-ups and created more than hundreds of jobs in technology sectors such as IT and multimedia. Berytech helps people on the road to self-employment by assisting existing and aspiring entrepreneurs to identify projects and business opportunities, develop their entrepreneurial skills, and help them access information and funding. The incubation and office modules are scalable, from hot-desks to large self-contained units, responding to different developmental stages of growing companies. Resident companies benefit from a shared infrastructure allowing them to operate from the first day with low start-up costs. Berytech run...

Finding the right doctor and booking an upcoming appointment is a complex task, especially in Morocco, where public-sector doctors don’t take appointmenta, and private-sector doctors are understaffed. When Zineb Yacoubi moved back to Morocco after spending eight years in the United States and Canada, she realized just how difficult this issue was, especially for those new to the community: she didn't know which doctors to go to, and, when she did, nobody will pick up the phone when she called. That’s when she decided to build DabaDoc. Launched in September 2013, DabaDoc allows Moroccans to find a doctor based on the doctor's field, location, and experience; clients can then book an upcoming appointment online (daba means quickly in Moroccan dialectal Arabic). In the United States, the concept has proven successful. Almost five million Americans use ZocDoc each month, and the company has raised a total of USD 9.5 million since it launched in 2007. The model alone doesn't g...