I had a great week reporting from Jordan, which has easily the best community of startup tech companies in the region. Comparisons to Sillicon Valley are extremely premature, but it was very cool to see some of the pieces fitting together.
One interesting thing that I haven't had the chance to write about in the newspaper yet was El Hassan Science City, which combines a good technical university with research centers, startup incubators and investors, all on a single campus in Amman. As an attempt to replicate that great Sillicon Valley combination of academic, business and investor, it is something I really hope policy makers here in the Gulf are keeping their eyes on.
In case you didn't catch them, here's the stories from the trip that have been published so far:
- Ikbis, the Arab YouTube, is now profitable and looking for a new round of investment
- Accelerator Technology Holdings, which runs the venture capital fund IV Holdings, is launching a new business that will be a hybrid investor / venture capitalist in the mobile technology space
- A longer feature on the how and why of Jordan's unlikely, but totally impressive, startup community
- A few stories from the Arab Advisors telecom convergence conference in Amman: Chaos in Iraqi telecoms (see sidebar), governments told to stay out of the mobile industry, and debate over how to best bring broadband to the 80% of the Arab world yet to have a connection.
I met so many interesting, impressive people in Amman, each of them with a story that deserves to be shared. I hope to get a few more of them into the paper in the coming weeks, but it would also be great to see more media in the region paying attention to the emergence of local tech entrepreneurs, not just in Jordan but all over the region.
Sure, multimillion dollar deals between governments and massive American tech giants are easier to report (press releases, well organised media relations, etc) but in terms of what they mean for the future of this part of the world, they are the tip of the iceberg. Like any sector of the economy, small businesses are the base of the technology pyramid, and the Middle East needs to employ tens of millions of bright, university educated young people in the coming decade.
If knowledge-based industries fail to take off, it will be very bad news for us all. Watching the places where they are taking off, and working out how that can be replicated across the region, is something I hope a lot more people start doing.
