PITAPAL, Chris Schroeder, has wrapped up both his visit of the Middle East and the series of women in the Arab Startup community. Check out the last half below as he describes how the diaspora and cultural experience intersect with the tech world.
Read the first half of Schroeder’s series “The New Middle East: Women at the Center of a Startup Ecosystem” here.
By: Chris Schroeder
Source: PandoDaily
The New Middle East: Women at the Center of a Startup Ecosystem – Part 4
It’s pretty hard to think of a great consumer facing platform that isn’t, by its nature, social. Should it be surprising, then, that coming off of the Arab Spring uprisings, so often coordinated and communicated through Facebook and Twitter, women entrepreneurs in the Middle East look at consumer-facing platforms and social networking from a unique perspective?
Yasmin Elayat certainly does. Born and raised in Silicon Valley and the daughter of a successful tech entrepreneur, she visited Egypt throughout her childhood each year for three months at a time. In 1997, when her grandfather in Cairo passed away, she and her family decided to move to Egypt. In 2001, studying computer engineering at Santa Clara University at the time, she transferred to the American University of Cairo. Her passions of marrying computer technology with storytelling and interactive design took her later to NYU for a Master’s degree. But the protests in Tahrir Square…[click here to continue]
The New Middle East: Women at the Helm of a Startup Ecosystem – Part 5
When leading Middle East platform to empower entrepreneurs wamda.com held its “Celebration of Entrepreneurship eCommerce” gathering in Amman last June, people packed in by the hundreds. The Middle East is an enormous consumer market with money to spend, and signs of a land grab are everywhere.
Local juggernauts like Souq.com, and countless other startups and retailers are launching online. Germany’s juggernaut Rocket Internet recently doubled down with JP Morgan in Dubai with the Zappos-like Namshi, and… [click here to continue]
The New Middle East: Women at the Center of a Startup Ecosystem – Part 6
I have been the beneficiary of some remarkable lessons in this series… [click here to continue]
Note: Christopher Schroeder is a Washington, DC and New York-based entrepreneur, venture investor and former CEO of the online content and social platform start-up healthcentral.com, which he sold last January. He has been published by the The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Fortune, and several other media outlets. You can follow him here on Twitter. He is working on a book that will review the entrepreneur environment in the Middle East that will be coming out in Spring 2013.
