Herve Cuviliez: Entrepreneur - business angel in the Middle East

I was in Amman, monday/tuesday to meet people working in the industry and to better understand the digital middle east market.

I met Samer, he is trying to organize the first bloggers conference in the Middle East.

The idea is to get together all the middle east and foreign bloggers in a place for a couple of days and share through round table, conferences and open discussion.

so if you are a blogger, please register on iblogimedia.com, if you have any input regarding the conference, please contact Samer: samer(at)jazarah.net, if you want to be a sponsor and help your industry to grow, you are more than welcome.

I just spent a year travelling in the middle east (Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Jordan, Lebanon,…) and I even moved recently to lebanon. I’ve met a lot of people in the industry there.

And I was impressed by the market evolution in a year.

• Internet penetration is booming (21,3% penetration with 32% in Kuwait or 38,4% in the UAE) more on Internet world stats.
• Mobile penetration and usage is even more impressive (150% in the UAE), see my previous post on this: Mobile innovation, start looking at emerging countries.

On the startup side, things start to be organized and new projects are released every week. here is some good sources of information:

• Arabcrunch.com is dedicated to profiling and reviewing Arab originated startups.
• Startuparabia.com is talking about Arab startups and entrepreneurs
• The twitter of PV Tribal DDB is giving daily news about internet and mobile markets in the region.

On the funding side, things are still a bit messy but one good initiative need to be be named. It’s the ABAN (Arab Business Angels Network) and they organize a meeting every quarter with for 4-6 selected startups + some guests.

My opinion? VC’s should start considering this market with a population of 200 millions people, a strong growth, and a huge appetite for new technologies.

Without disclosing any secret, guess where my next project will take place.

I just noticed this morning a local (middle east) ad on my facebook. I started chasing for some more. And here is my findings: Telecom, Banks, Online Service

I heard too many time that blogs and social networking are for kids not for real business, it’s good to see that’s things start to change.

So it might seems nothing but having some middle east advertisers considering facebook in their media plan is a great “moving in the right direction” sign for this region.

Note: Facebook is social network #1 in the middle east, 2nd is myspace

With a price ratio 1:20 comparing to PCs and a vaste majority of the population living with few dollars a day, it’s a no brainer to understand why mobile penetration is 10 times bigger in emerging countries.

For that reason, we will see mobile innovations coming from those countries in years to come.
Want signs of this?
South Africa is about to release a voting system through mobile for local, regional and even national election.
Bangladesh mobile operator Grameen Phone has gave information access (information is key for a farmer, for example. It’s helping him to know to where and when to sell his production instead of relying on local resellers) to poor people through 16 millions lines.
M-banking is the future of banking in Midle East & Africa (Etisalat has released last month a mobile wallet)

I see more and more mobile innovations coming from Africa (see dreamoval), middle east and of course India & china.

Kill cliches about tech innovation always coming from developed countries and remember

from the necessity come the creativity

If you know any others innovations there, please continue the discussion by leaving comments