Software Business in the Middle East

According to the latest news, Google has recently opened its first office in Dubai. It’s nice to see the confirmation of your own thoughts from Google representatives. As Google’s official said, “It is just starting here, the awareness both of Google and the awareness of online. <…> You have early adopters who are really doing well and understand the opportunities, but the majority today are not online - from a marketing point of view - and in the case of many small businesses here, not online at all”.

Couple years ago when I just arrived to Dubai and was looking for the opportunities to start developing our own product, I was really surprised from not being able to find similar sites to what I used to use back at home. Those I had found had really terrible design. Just a few samples.

Buy or Sell a Car

Example one and example two. Nothing has been changes for the last two years.

Yellow Pages

This site looks more or less OK now. Couple years ago it was awful.

Real Estate Sites

Real Estate is booming now in UAE and it’s really strange that you will have pretty hard time trying to find any good site with the majority of offers on the market. Individual companies like this one has their own search, but that’s all. There is no one single web portal where you can go and search for the property and see all its pictures available.

Software Catalogs and Sales

Sites like Tucows are not presented at all.

Official Company Home Pages

Just a few examples of several organizations’ home pages:

• Ministry of Health (old version)
  
• Online training company
• One of the hospitals in UAE
• Large chain of pharmacies in Saudi Arabia

Some of these web sites look like they’re done as a home work by somebody’s son or daughter who’s a first-year student in Computer Science College. From one hand it is really sad that companies that are doing well have such poor web sites, but from another hand it opens a good opportunity for those who will offer good design to all these companies in this region.

But design is just one thing. Another thing is that you are able to start a lot of different Internet projects in the Middle East right now because there are a lot of niches that are still not occupied. There are several points you would consider in this business:

1). It is important for Arabs to have a personal contact. They like to have a look at the product and touch it before they buy.

2). People here are afraid to pay by credit card over the Internet. Like myself eight or nine years ago.

3). You have to be patient enough before your project start earning some money. It will happen when normal people in this part of the World will start using Internet services on daily basis. So be patient and bring enough cash to survive until you start earning on your Internet project.

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