A Marriage of Convenience
Middle East Ventures is mentioned in Arabian Business.
“This is nothing short of a sea change for the region,” says Faisal Ghori, a principal at strategy consultancy Middle East Ventures.
Innovation: The Way To Go
MEV is extensively mentioned in the cover story of The Gulf by Rosamund de Sybel.
the Middle East has become an “increasingly important” market, says Faisal Ghori, principal at Middle East Ventures, a Washington-based business strategy consultancy focused on the Middle East and North Africa.
“In the next five years, you’re going to see people taking risks on both the entrepreneurial and the invest- ment side,” says Ghori.
Building Hope: Yahoo! Acquires Maktoob.com
As published in the Wall Street Journal and The Huffington Post
Hope is often in short supply in the Middle East, but that may be quickly changing, at least for the region’s entrepreneurs. On August 25, Yahoo!, the Internet giant, announced that it will acquire Maktoob.com, the Middle East’s largest web portal and online community founded and operated in Jordan. As the very first acquisition of a Middle East-based technology company by an American technology giant, this is nothing short of a sea change for the region. Overnight it has bolstered the region with instant credibility and given its entrepreneurs reason to hope that they too can succeed in creating companies. The acquisition, in short, has fundamentally altered the technology landscape in the Middle East.
Yahoo! Acquires Maktoob.com, 3 Expert Perspectives
Earlier this week Yahoo! announced that it will acquire Maktoob.com (read the press release here).
Below, we speak to Samih Toukam, CEO and founder of Maktoob.com; Emile Cubeisy, Managing Director of IV Holdings; and Khaldoon Tabaza, Managing Director of Riyada Ventures.
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MEV: What does this means for you and your organization?
Samih: This is a great success story for me and the maktoob team. We have worked hard and proved that it is possible to create something good out of the Arab world. We are all proud of what we have done.
Emile: IV Holdings congratulations Yahoo! on its acquisition of Maktoob.com, which opened up broader opportunities for Arab online entrepreneurs and firms. For Accelerator and IV Holdings, this strengthens our conviction in what we have always believed, that Arab entrepreneurs will play an important role in shaping the global internet and interactive landscape. An industry and an opportunity that has always sought validation has found it. For IV Holdings, this is an important milestone, in that it proves to Arab entrepreneurs that if you focus on building true value in your businesses, execute patiently and with professionalism, and go through the full stages of growth, real exit opportunities will emerge. It proves to the wider investment community that real opportunities for value creation does exist in the knowledge-based talent pool in the Arab World, and validates the existence of quality entrepreneurs that can pull it off.
Additionally, Maktoob’s history of working with regional VCs to build itself up towards global relevance validates the importance of our industry’s role in helping Arab entrepreneurs achieve their full potential, something that IV Holdings is a first mover in committing itself to.
Khaldoon: The Yahoo! Maktoob deal is an inflection point for the Internet industry in the Arab world, a milestone that indicates that the online market in the Arab world has reached critical mass, and the start of a new phase for start-ups, VCs, and the industry at large in a region that remains largely untapped in terms of its potential, and that will be one of the key drivers of growth in emerging economies in the years to come.
Now, when the world needs more oil than ever, it’s changing faster than we can keep up with
It’s Still the One
Oil’s very future is now being seriously questioned, debated, and challenged. The author of an acclaimed history explains why, just as we need more oil than ever, it is changing faster than we can keep up with.
BY DANIEL YERGIN | AUGUST 24, 2009
On a still afternoon under a hot Oklahoma sun, neither a cloud nor an ounce of “volatility” was in sight. Anything but. All one saw were the somnolent tanks filled with oil, hundreds of them, spread over the rolling hills, some brand-new, some more than 70 years old, and some holding, inside their silver or rust-orange skins, more than half a million barrels of oil each.
This is Cushing, Oklahoma, the gathering point for the light, sweet crude oil known as West Texas Intermediate — or just WTI. It is the oil whose price you hear announced every day, as in “WTI closed today at ….” Cushing proclaims itself, as the sign says when you ride into town, the “pipeline crossroads of the world.” Through it passes the network of pipes that carry oil from Texas and Oklahoma and New Mexico, from Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, and from Canada too, into Cushing’s tanks, where buyers take title before moving the oil onward to refineries where it is turned into gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, home heating oil, and all the other products that people actually use.
