According to Oliver Studd, during the height of the financial crisis in Germany, it was the locally owned community banks that didn’t need a bailout. For Oliver and his team at Valhalla Network, we will always need banks and access to banking services. This isn’t to argue that either, in their current state, are fit for service: this episode begins with a blistering introduction into how a modern bank actually works.
Saba Homami is CEO and Co-Founder of PROES, a French deep tech company based out of Grenoble which is producing a new generation of Radio Frequency technologies. With an MSc in Physics alongside her business partner Jules, the company recently won a national award in France and at CES Las Vegas. RF technologies underly many of the innovations in 5G, IOT and Cybersecurity that we’ve discussed on the UAE Tech Podcast in the past. How do these devices talk to each other? What are the challenges wit...
Leo Dovbenko is CEO and Co-Founder of YallaMarket and YallaHub, an aggregator providing ecommerce fulfillment and warehousing services. What’s interesting about Leo is that he began his journey training as a software engineer, but found his real passion working in bars and swish restaurants as a student at Uni. Pretty soon he was working with big brands, and managing larger locations. As so often on the UAE Tech Podcast, this is a story of taking a slightly different path. By combining experienc...
Legends of Bezogia is an Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORG) combining tokenomics, NFTs and competitive ranked gaming with the blockchain. That means players can invest in a Bezoge avatar, mint magic blocks, sell in-game items and become part of the Bezogia community.
The UAE has long invested in cybersecurity, hosting globally significant conferences and attracting talent in this space for at least the past decade. At the same time, the field of cybersecurity is shifting as the sophistication of the digital economy matures. Satista estimated that the digital economy will grow to $53 trillion US dollars next year, up from 13.5 trillion in 2018.
As the global economy faces a period of sustained economic uncertainty, we talked about Cashew’s early mission, the importance of forming partnerships with banks and larger institutions and why expanding into markets such as KSA or Oman, makes the UAE an increasingly attractive destination.
‘Yap’ means ‘Pay’ backwards. It’s a neobank established in the UAE, working on a move to KSA, and offering a range of services for B2B and B2C clients. The company markets itself as a financial technology - not a bank.
The idea is called “cCommerce”, or “collaborative commerce.” According to Investopedia, it means “the optimization of supply and distribution channels to capitalize on the global economy by using new technology efficiently.
The Crypto Winter has created market volatility for a wide range of actors, and also revealed how aspects of the old economy and the emergent economy are intertwined. Lennix Lai is head of Business Strategy and Ops at OKX. Previously, he had a background at companies such as JP Morgan, AIG and CASH Financial Services Group. When he joined OKX in 2017 his role was to reverse engineer many of the services found into traditional finance, and offer them in DeFI. Today the addressable market is far l...
Mark Aruliah is Senior Policy Adviser at Elliptic. He joined the podcast to provide a helpful 101 on the blockchain analysis industry, and the challenges and opportunities regulators are facing behind the scenes.
Dr. Rolando Zubiran is Global Head of WEB 3 & Metaverse Services for RRD, or R. R. Donnelley & Sons, an American Fortune 500 integrated communications company. Rolando refers to this as “Meta-Marketing 2.0.” As our identities merge with online worlds, he believes that the way we envisage the economics and society of the future will be made possible not simply by the technologies we deploy, but by the stories we use to comprehend and shape the world around us.
Thirty years since Lawnmower first aired, I asked Brett how the metaverse of our own time mirrors the Sci-Fi stories I grew up with as a kid. Will AI creator tools allow billions to summon their own simulated realities? How will artists imagine and construct what Brett calls “storyworlds” using technologies that are incredibly advanced, but also really human - and fallible.
Ahead of his workshops at GITEX, we caught up with Professor Xi Chen from NYU Stern for a discussion on how technologies are converging in ways that are impossible to predict.
In a way, data has become a dirty word. It doesn’t necessarily need to be. A new data economy is emerging on the blockchain, in which users can provide access to and possibly derive profits from data they control. But what would these new data markets look like? What industries will be the first to adopt? Will internet browser cookies one day be a thing of the past? This week we’re talking with Bruce Pon of OceanProtocol, on data as a new asset class.
Alex Bornyakov is Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine on IT industry development, and head of the Diia City project. In this episode Alex provides background on Ukraine’s digital transformation, which was already continuing apace before the war. As Ukraine descended into conflict and physical locations such as government offices and centralized data-centers fell under attack, things like digital citizen services and cloud-storage became even more critical.
Muhannad Ebwini has been working in online payments in the Middle East from almost the beginning. In this episode we chart the story of payments in MENA and KSA from its early origins during the .com boom, to the increasingly cashless society of today.
It had to happen: “Blogchain” - that’s blog, not block-chain - is a decentralized Substack competitor seeking to combine Web3 infrastructure with good writing. Built using IPFS and NEAR, the system hopes to free writers from the problems that have bedeviled Web2 creator platforms: politicization, unfair algorithms or writing for ad revenue, and not customers. Even getting paid will hopefully be easier, with crypto wallets. Of course the debate surrounding digital publishing isn’t simply technica...
Melanie is founder of the ‘Word of Mouth’ protocol and a ‘collaborative event’ which connects creators, founders and artists. The event is called ‘Superverse.’ It recently made a notable impact in Dubai, where it succeeded in deepening an already promising relationship between the city's tech industry and creative class.
Michael Gord started talking about Bitcoin in High-School, which seems both inconceivable and opportune. From there he started FinTech clubs at McGill, Bitcoin Canada, and later the blockchain association of Canada. At one point the world’s first Bitcoin Embassy in Montreal, was based ‘2 blocks away’ from where he lived. Today, Gord is co-founder and CEO at Assets International, which according to the website “provides institutions with exposure to its premier Global ecosystem of cutting-edge bl...
Threefold describes itself as “layer 0 infrastructure for an open source P2P Internet owned by humanity.” Rather than an Internet based on centralized web servers, expensive cloud storage facilities and geographically BI-FUCATED bifurcated access, their team are creating what they call a “new planetary network.”
Professor Latif Ladid serves as chair at the 5G World Alliance & President of the IPv6 Forum. In this episode he provides history, context and a deep technical understanding of how IPv6 will quietly change the Internet in the years to come.
Today we’re talking with Angad Chadha, CEO of WizzFinancial India. According to Angad a “recent study by , I believe, Oliver Wyman and JP Morgan” says “the total remittances of money that moves across border (and this is across all segments, not just the consumer I’m talking about business and government), is in the range of about $25 billion a year, which is 25% of global GDP.”
From Vedic-Bitcoin deities, to a 2017 Tesla minted as an NFT and driving around the streets of Dubai; Finnish artist VESA is at the epicenter of a rapidly evolving art market and creator community in the Middle East. He rose to prominence through a body-painting of Bollywood actress Veena Malik in 2013, and began to explore the world of Bitcoin and Crypto-art not long after.
he one hand, they run one of the world’s largest VR parks in Dubai, with a new park opening soon. At the same time as operating these VR rigs and location based theme parks, they have a team of game-developers building licensed properties for well-known brands like Hasbro.
Eliran Elimelech is VP of Strategic Partnerships at Startup Nation Central, an independent non-profit connecting business, government and NGO leaders across the world with Israeli innovation expertise.
Today we’re talking with Ashton Woolfe, Managing Partner at MohrWolfe and project lead at Crypto Fight Club. Ashton grew up with games like Tekken, Mortal Kombat and Soul Calibur; games designed purely for having fun, during a time when in-game economics simply weren’t possible. Increasingly, in-game monetization is not just possible but popular: the Free2Earn gaming space is booming across Asia. It’s potentially making an appearance in AAA games across the United States and Europe later this ye...
Al Anoud Al Hashimi is the founder and CEO of The Futurist Company, a project management company working in renewable energy, fin-tech and agri-tech. While the UAE has a thriving technology ecosystem, the country needs greater domestic R&D capacity, and is exploring ways to invest in longer-term ‘deep-tech’ projects alongside academia, and the private sector. Here one industry that doesn’t always get the attention it deserves, is agriculture. Tune in for a discussion with Al Anoud on Agri-Te...
Anthem's story personifies a key inflection point in the history of western finance. He was raised by his adoptive father, the precious metals pioneer, James U. Blanchard III, who helped restore Americans' right to own gold and also founded a rare coin and bullion company, Blanchard & Company - at one time, the world’s largest. Named after an Ayn Rand book and an Austrian British economist, Anthem sees himself as carrying out his father’s legacy on the blockchain. His contribution, as he per...
Slowly but surely, game design principles are merging with NFTs, crypto currencies and decentralized forms of governance. But will it be enough? Can Web3 standards prevail, or is a multipolar metaverse order of incumbent giant platforms and decentralized rebel hinterlands on the horizon? We spoke with Yingzi for some early insights into how the gaming community may shape the metaverse.
Today we’re talking with Dirmand Daltun, CEO of csquare.ai & project lead at DeepSquare. Joining the discussion we also have Arnaud De La Chapelle, an industry tech leader who has worked with IDEMIA and VFS Global at the highest levels, here in Dubai. Deepsquare is a European based project to make high performance computing distributed and privacy enabled, on the blockchain. The data-processing center, based in Switzerland, runs on renewable energy. The heat generated by the center will be c...
