Chances for IT Industry in Palestine
Two weeks ago a friend of mine sent me an email asking me for ideas to do IT business in Gaza. I’m not an entrepreneur but I have opinion about it, I might be right and I might wrong but I decided to share my thoughts that sent to my friend my it will be beneficial to someone else.
Before starting any business in Gaza or any place in the world, you should study the available local resources. Gaza lacks a lot of things; electricity, water, food, transportation, etc…. But it very rich with something unique; its people. Yes, the type of Palestinian people is very unique. Why is it unique? because these people are born to be engineers, how come? well, everything is a challenge and any one wants to survive has to come with brilliant ideas that overcome all the barriers we have. For example, if you want to do simple thing like cooking go for a Palestinian home in Gaza and see home many alternatives they have! they cook on gas, electricity, wood, old cloths if available, gasoline, and many other things I cannot count. This is just to cook a nice dinner. Now these people not only came with more than one solution for the problem, which is an essential part of being an engineer, they also making trade-offs on a daily basis. Let’s go back to our cooking example, every Gazian home has at least three types of the cooking methods I mentioned and for each meal on the day the family has make a trade-off on which method to use to cook. The choice is based on three factors: Availability, Cost, and Time. These are the principles the people go for four or five years college to learn but we learnt by practice sine we are babies.
From all this and many other every Palestinian learn to be an engineer with a great passion, determination and no fear from failure. If someone failed in doing something, giving up is not an option but trying again and again with learning valuable lessons form each failure so we become better on every new day.
I think that what makes the Palestinian people one of the best educated people in the region, despite all what they are facing. For example now in Gaza people have electricity for less than half of the day in average, but the internet penetration rate is 60%!
I think the best product that we can produce in Gaza is innovation! yes innovation is a very valuable product and it’s more rare than gold! IT industry are the best match for marketing innovation. It doesn’t need huge resources nor capital of investment but it needs brilliant well trained people.
Now back to my friends question, he was really excited by Google’s visit to Gaza and he wanted to do something related to their products so I limited my answer to areas were Google products can be used(Maybe in the future I will blog about a broader business chances in Palestine). Here is and edited version of my answer to him
For the ideas, I cannot tell you specific ideas but I can help by giving some thoughts on directions where to invest:
- Focus on small ideas that target community needs, you cannot change the world with on application. By this I mean think about things that people would use everyday, for example small Android apps that organize your daily consumption of calories are successful though it’s very simple (I’m not telling you to write app for daily consumption of calories but just an example)
- Google now focusing on having more market share on the Internet advertisement on the Middle East, I heard that advertisements market in the middle is 10 billion dollars per year while internet advertisement is only 100 million dollars. So any idea related to advertisement on the Middle East they will be interested on.
- Try to think about integrated experience, like apps that the user would use from a smart phone while going to his work or school, then when he is at his office he will use the same app but from a desktop, and when he is at home he will use the same app from his HD TV (look at Google TV). The technology to build such applications is not that hard, but the hard part is coming with ideas and apps that the user want to use on the first place. Take social networking as an example, everyone interested to update their status and check out their friends status updates thats why people having Facebook app everywhere from their cellphones to their desktop and now even on their TVes.
- Expensive product doesn’t work. To get money you have two options. First making your product for free and using advertisements as source for revenue. This is more suitable for web applications targeting any kind of devices (cellphones, TVes, Desktops). Second, is having more than one small app and selling it for low prices (less than $2) but focusing on selling a very large number of it.
- Think global, Gaza is not a big market but we have access to the internet that’s mean you can sell your application to anyone on the world. This sounds scary sometimes for startups in Gaza but they can do it only if they belived in themselfs.
Hopefully this friend and others succeeded in their efforts in making Palestine a better place. Again, I’m not an expert I’m just another Palestinian guy who have an opinion about the subject.
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