• Home
• /
• Local business

In5: Primed for takeoff?

In time, one of them may turn out to be the next big thing.

Through regular selection rounds, In5 has been picking the most promising Dubai-based startups to join the incubator and grow their businesses at its Knowledge Village campus.

In5 has helped the fledgling businesses with administration, setting up, finding mentors and funding, and sparking collaborations.

The startups themselves say the arrangement has been instrumental in letting them focus on their core businesses — of building something new.

Dubai Internet City managing director Majed Al Suwaidi tells Khaleej Times that promoting and fostering innovators, such as at In5, will be key to turning Dubai into an exporter of knowledge and innovation.

At what stage of growth is the typical startup at In5?

Today we have lots of different kinds of companies: the guy who has an idea; the guy who has a company and is trying to build it; and the guy who has already built it and is now trying to take it to the next level.

You have all kinds of people here. And that gives it an interesting twist. If you are at an advanced stage you can teach others, or share with others the hurdles you have passed by. If you are a new startup then you can share your ideas with someone at a much more mature stage.

So it all works together by how you add value to each other. That’s the biggest thing.

It will be interesting to see where they will be in a few months.

Most people would have been working with each other before. We’re just formalising that relationship into a location-based concept.

Earlier they would have been talking in a coffee shop, and they could have met at an event four months down the line. But the formal kind of relationship where you can just go to your next-door neighbour and say, “I have an issue” wasn’t available. They weren’t in one location.

How is an initiative like In5 important for Dubai?

Any economy is built on startups.

Some economies are 80 to 90 per cent made up of small and medium companies, which are creating lots of jobs, creating opportunities, and creating things.

Today, Dubai has reached a certain point where it’s [imperative] to harness all these knowledge workers — these people with ambition and ideas, to [help them] progress forward.

Dubai is a very ambitious city, and when it comes to the location itself, it’s all about how can we be better, the best? And how can we be the best unless you have bright minds creating new enablers and disruptive models that could hopefully change how people think?

For us In5 is a continuation of our initial mandate, to develop a knowledge-based economy here. We’re taking that mandate to the next level.

Earlier we attracted people into the zone; now we’ve finished attracting: attraction is happening now. Now we’re going to the next level: how can we make it even better and easier for people to create new companies?

Export, instead of importing knowledge.

The potential for growth within the region and the amount of money that’s earmarked by governments, at least within the closer region, is huge. Opportunities that you could gain out of these small companies are immense. You never know how big these businesses could become in the next few years.

Why should a startup choose to build its business in Dubai?

Dubai’s brand name is a strong thing. The government’s approach toward this is a major factor: the government’s approach toward being transparent, being more perceptive about business, and bringing the right kind of people.

Not only talking about these but actually jumping into it. That in itself says something: put your money where your mouth is. Things actually happen here, so opportunities are being developed here. The infrastructure that was set up over the past 10 years — and the way the government conducts business — has shown confidence to the market.

Whether it’s in tourism or business, I think it’s the same: people are happy with the offerings that are on the ground, they’re happy with infrastructure that you have in the city — which is competitive with any infrastructure around the world.

Today we are at the initial phase of this process. You have bright people here. The basic statistics: you’re talking about 75 million people visiting a single mall. This gives you an indication that people are here.

Now you just give them the opportunity to be able to create new business ideas and opportunities as part of this technological growth that is happening in the region.

How does In5 fit in with the wider Internet City?

The cluster idea started with DIC here and it’s basically a theory that has proved to be a very successful one for Dubai. Let’s talk about Dubai — I don’t know about anywhere else in the world — but at least for us it has been shown a huge success.

Today people see us as one of the number one business locations around the world because of this clustering of businesses — which brings all the right kinds of knowledge into one location.

It ignites sharing, development, inventors, collaboration — it helps people learn more, share more of their knowledge, understand what’s happening in the world. This keeps people on the front foot.

There have been many learnings over the last two years. Understanding how this [startup] ecosystem works. Understanding the main players. Who are the people who move this kind of industry? How can we actually collaborate with them and give them an opportunity?

To the investor who’s actually going to spend his money into a business, taking this risk — we’re helping him too. We give him added-value benefits that will make his decision-making process easier.

---

5 ventures now hatching

Shopgo

Muhannad Ghashim, CEO

“You can set up your store in three working days if you have your content ready”

The process is made to be as simple as possible: log on to the website, pick a theme, and you’re pretty much good to go — any brick-and-mortar retailer can be set up with its own online shop.

“We help merchants create their online store without a technical background,” says Muhannad Ghashim.

The hardest step is linking up the retailers with payment and shipping providers, but with Shopgo plugging into partners across the region it can all take as little as three days. For some merchants, cataloguing their content in a digital format can also be an unfamiliar process. But with online shopping taking off, even a traditional “offline” retailer has more reason to take a couple of clicks and enter the fray.

So far, Shopgo has helped set up about 230 merchants’ online stores from 13 countries around the Middle East. Ghashim says the UAE is becoming the startups’s biggest market, followed by Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Ustad Mobile

Mike Dawson, CEO

“After about six months the literacy scores went up four-fold”

Mike Dawson says it was a “typing error” that led him to work in Afghanistan.

He was still at university in the UK and looking to do a stint abroad — but when an application got mixed up, he fell into an opportunity to head up the One Laptop Per Child programme in Afghanistan. The initiative was aiming to put 3000 cheap computers in Afghan schools, but the equipment was too expensive and unwieldy in the Afghan context, Dawson says.

So he adapted the teaching materials for basic $30 candybar mobile phones — “not just text messages but audio and video and multiple choice quizzes”. It was a complex technical puzzle to solve, and the technology is now being extended for use in Kenya, Zanzibar, Zambia, and soon Iraq.

It’s a system that can reach even the toughest environments and makes use of people’s downtime, he says.

Dawson has now moved his business to Dubai, because it was cheaper: attracting talent to Afghanistan was too hard, and even compared to setting up in a Western country Dubai was more convenient and attractive, he says.

Carpoolarabia.com

Guillaume Arnaud, co-founder

“It’s not just about saving money, it’s also meeting new people… and not being alone in the car”

Already, the carpooling “routes” seem to be emerging wherever there is congestion.

“Follow the congestion in the morning and you’ll see the different routes you see on our website,” says Guillaume Arnaud.

Carpooling (which, Arnaud emphasises, is distinct from carlifting — i.e. these are shared rides with no profit to be made by drivers) is taking off in the United States and Europe, seen as a more sensible alternative to highways choked with empty cars. In the UAE, however, cheap petrol prices mean skeptics question whether the rideshare mentality can catch on. There are nevertheless the significant hassles and costs of owning a car, including insurance costs and depreciation.

Moreover, there are unique local conditions that make carpooling a good fit for the UAE, Arnaud says. On the one hand, there are remote residential developments poorly served by public transport — in order words, they currently have no alternative to having to own a car. On the other, there are large corporations in the UAE with thousands of employees all heading to the same address every morning.

iAteForFree

Tariq Ellahi, founder

“If you go there and see that it’s not as nice as we told you, just walk right out. You don’t lose anything”

Tariq Ellahi felt the “daily deals” phenomenon needed a serious work-over. After building up one of the region’s most successful versions of the Groupon model over the past few years, Ellahi has struck out on a new path.

“I felt that daily deal sites are not good for business. They’re not good for consumers.”

His new venture, iAteForFree, is Ellahi’s version of daily deals done right: a refinement based on learnings from the original concept’s pitfalls.

Instead of buying deals online, consumers just download coupons for free and show them at the store — so there’s no binding commitment or sunken cost. All the deals have been vetted by iAteForFree, which means they are, Ellahi says, as much recommendations as they are good deals.

Finally, most of the coupons target two-for-one type of deals. “We’re saying: ‘Try this out. Come along with a friend, and we’ll give the friend a free meal — [because] we recommend this. We’ve checked out these experiences.’ ”

Taskspotting

Nadia Mankani, director of marketing

“The hardest thing we’ve had is convincing customers there’s no catch to it”

When brands run limited-time promotions, time can be so limited that the campaign is nearly over by the time they can check displays and get feedback.

With mobile app Taskspotting, shoppers on their routine errands are encouraged to snap a photo of a display or answer a quick questionnaire on-site, for cash.

Pins of customer “missions” dot a map of Dubai, each representing a piece of data needed by companies, as well as an opportunity for consumers to make a little extra cash. Example missions have included: giving feedback after buying a shawarma (a Dh40 reward for a Dh15 meal), scouting out car showrooms on Shaikh Zayed Road (for which one couple managed to make Dh1000 in one weekend), and reporting back after making some inquiries with pharmacists.

Responses are geotagged and timestamped, and companies gain valuable market research within hours. Taskspotting says the biggest question from clients has been: “When are you going to Saudi?”