Reading Time: 7 minutes The MIC in MIC Ventures is not short for Mission Impossible, Cruise. But it could be. Khaled Zeidan, the managing director of MIC Ventures, could easily have a second career modeling cool shades, and the chosen mission of MIC Ventures, should it succeed, will bring life to a sector whose true potential in Lebanon has…
Predictive analytics and TMI syndromes
Reading Time: 10 minutes Too-much-information (TMI) syndrome is a chronic affliction of contemporary existence. The affliction is growing, without an app that can alert us to its threats and update us on the speed with which the disease of big data is invading ever more of our lives. Other IT buzzwords with mystifying potentials are artificial intelligence (AI) and…
Outside of the Silicon Valley bubble
Reading Time: 4 minutes In the sweltering July heat, entrepreneurs from around the world were in Beirut pitching to join the Endeavor network. Founded in 1997 as a non-profit support network for entrepreneurs (focused on Argentina and Chile), Endeavor is now assisting founders of young companies in 27 countries around the world (including Lebanon since 2011). In 2012, the…
Unicorns with humps
Reading Time: 4 minutes When venture capitalist Aileen Lee first employed the term “unicorn” to refer to startups valued at or above $1 billion, she intended to stress just how uncommon a creature she was describing. In a November 2013 post that spawned a Forbes list, Lee identified and analyzed 39 “US-based tech companies started since January 2003 and…
Bolstering Lebanon’s game development
Reading Time: 8 minutes With a touch of the screen, fat bunny bounces his way up the vibrantly colored mountain terrain, munching on the occasional carrot. Press too long or too little, however, and splat goes bunny into the mountainside – game over. Like many mobile games, Fat Bunny’s concept is simple, yet its gameplay addictive. It was launched…
Securing the entrepreneurship ecosystem
Reading Time: 5 minutes It’s 3 a.m. Despite your family’s “no Internet after dinner” rule, your smart, web-connected refrigerator is rebelling, repeatedly attempting to load the same site. The mustard is not trying to catch up on the news, your ice box has become a zombie in a hacker’s army – a botnet, in industry lingo. While the so-called…
Start me up
Reading Time: 6 minutes EXECUTIVE interviewed French Ambassador Emmanuel Bonne via email about French contributions to Lebanon’s entrepreneurship ecosystem as well as his country’s assistance to Lebanon. E In terms of the economic relationship between the two countries, we’ve heard the French government will be helping to fund and build Smart ESA (École supérieure des affaires). What added…
Is Lebanon’s startup ecosystem sustainable?
Reading Time: 5 minutes When I was first introduced to Beirut’s start-up ecosystem in 2011, AltCity was refurbishing its first space, the Seeqnce experiment had just launched, MEVP was one of the few venture capital (VC) firms investing in Lebanon, Endeavor was just opening, and Wamda and ArabNet were nascent. Fast-forward to 2016 and Beirut is a different city…
Rafiqi: your new friend
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You are what you wear: Brahms Chouity
Reading Time: 3 minutes