‘I Hate Those Silent, Unmoving, Boring Films’ - Salman Khan

Salman Khan has stormed the box office again—this time in absentia. Just before the release of Bodyguard, the superstar had to leave for the US—a surgery for trigeminal neuralgia, a nerve disorder of the face, awaited. Recovering in New Jersey, he took time out for a short, late-night chat on phone with Namrata Joshi. Excerpts:

Did you expect Bodyguard to get this huge an opening?
No, I didn’t. I knew we had made a decent film but the reactions of the people have been overwhelming.

What do you think worked for the film?
Every film has its own destiny. We made Bodyguard with dedication, worked on every aspect of filmmaking. It’s nice to know that I am on the same page as the audience, that I am not alienated from them yet. It’s when the audience doesn’t understand you that fear sets in.

Wanted, Dabangg, Ready, Bodyguard.... Does it put pressure on you to deliver a hit every time?
It puts no pressure. It just makes me work harder. We put enough time and effort on a film. After that, it’s just matter of waiting and watching.

There has been criticism that your films depend only on your star persona, nothing else....
I don’t believe that at all. I played a simple, humble man. I wasn’t flamboyant or over-the-top. The Tsunami comic character was as big a crowdpuller as my Lovely Singh in Bodyguard. Five-six characters in the film were given equal importance.

After the so-called multiplex films, you seem to have brought back the flavour of single-screen masala films....
I work on films I would want to see as a viewer. I like action-based films with romance and emotion. It’s great if all this can be woven into one screenplay, and not forcibly. Even if I experiment, it’ll be in the genre of entertainment. I don’t like those silent, unmoving, depressing, boring films. Neither does my audience. People want to see heroes on big screen. They want to be like them. They see normal people on the streets anyhow.

When do we see you back in action?
I’m resting a bit now. I’m going to Dublin on September 10 to shoot for Yashraj Films’ Ek Tha Tiger. But I’ve been told not to do action sequences for a while.

The Absolute Quest of Truth

By M H Ahssan

Man is imperfect in every aspect of life - physical strength, span of life, fulfillment of desires, knowledge of the world, and control over nature. This awareness of imperfection descends the moment the life begins. And so does the craving for absolute strength, life, fulfillment and control. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the truth that there does not exist any ‘Absolute’ excepting the ‘Law Of Continuous Change’ is rarely realized and more rarely accepted. And the existence of this ‘Law of Change’ itself negates the existence of any ‘Absolute’.

By its very definition an ‘Absolute’ is that which never changes. And continuous change being the unchangeable law of nature, there cannot exist an ‘Absolute’ in the nature. Man being part of this nature cannot attain ‘Absoluteness’ and so he invents in his imagination the existence of other world with supernatural beings having supernatural powers. These imagined ‘Absolutes’ are not same for all religions or all persons because they have been invented at different times by different persons with different motives. The form, definition and attributes of these ‘Absolutes’ in different religions and philosophies differ and that itself is a proof that they are not Absolutes. Even within the same faith some completely incompatible beliefs are regarded as cardinal truths.

One unshakeable belief in almost all religions is that God keeps record of everyone’s actions and everyone must face consequences of one’s deeds; while, at the same time, it is also believed that God will condone those misdeeds if one worships God and earns his mercy through prostrations, offerings or subsequent good deeds.

Scientists have also come across some ‘Absolutes’ in the Nature, but they have always found them unattainable. Actually one ‘Absolute’ of Nature is the existence of the Law Of Uninterrupted and Unstoppable Change. But the existence of this law ensures non-existence of any other ‘Absolute’ in nature. Scientists, through mathematical calculations, have come across some concepts, which, for their inability to comprehend them fully, they have termed Absolutes - Infinity, Absolute Zero in ‘Time, and Temperature’, Absolute Mass, etc. Let us consider them one by one.


Infinity surpasses the limit of human comprehension. It is like the concept of origin and end of natural world. With intent to perpetuate human rationality man calls this world to be infinite with regard to its origin and end. Mathematically speaking anything divided by zero amounts to infinity, but this does not lead to any comprehensible number.

Absolute zero temperature is a comprehensible number, but believed to be unachievable. Similarly in theory absolute mass can be achieved by moving anything at the velocity of light, which is again considered impossible to achieve.


Surprisingly absolute zero temperature (-273 degree centigrade) and velocity of light in vacuum (300,000,000 meter per second) are finite numbers, but scientist have come to conclusion through mathematical calculations that they will lead to infinite coldness and infinite mass in matter; hence they are unachievable. Hence scientists obviously believe that infinity (or absoluteness) are non-realizable concepts. (Personally I suspect that such finite numbers should be achievable. In my opinion future will unravel some phenomenon which will lead us to the fact that this temperature and speed are achievable but at that stage the matter will convert to energy or some other similar form, to which known laws of matter may not apply.)


The other worldly ‘Absolutes’ like God, goddesses, ghosts, heaven, hell, soul and continuity of life, reincarnation etc. have no verifiable basis and are figments of imagination of fertile minds.


The humane qualities of truthfulness, charity, kindness towards all animals, faithfulness, etc. are completely relative and vary in definition, scope, effect and utility in different circumstances. Hence they are not absolute too.


As rational human beings we should not forget that we live in a relative and ever-changing world where absolute cannot exist. We should not be cheated by those men or concepts which claim existence of ‘Absolutes’ and control over them. But rationality always keeps scope for improvement through scientific enquiry.

Staunch atheist and the most eminent scientist Albert Einstein had written:

“If something is in me which can be called religious, it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

Spurring the market for high-tech home health care

By M H Ahssan

A daunting array of financial and operational barriers is holding back growth. What can be done?

On the surface, technology-enabled home health care should be thriving in the United States. The country’s aging population and the transformation of acute illnesses such as heart failure into chronic diseases mean that the number of patients is growing. In addition, new medical-technology devices could help keep patients at home rather than in costly institutions, such as assisted-living facilities or nursing homes—leading to potentially big savings for the health care system.

Instead, the full potential of the technology-enabled home health care market remains to be tapped. In the United States, home care accounts for about 3 percent ($68 billion a year) of national health spending. The market is increasing by about 9 percent annually,¹ solid but hardly booming growth, especially since labor (mainly nurses and aides) accounts for about two-thirds² of the expenditure and home-monitoring technology represents a small fraction of it. What’s holding the market back? We observe a daunting array of financial and operational barriers, including the misalignment of incentives between payers and providers, the need to demonstrate a strong clinical value proposition, and the problem of designing attractive, easy-to-use products that facilitate adoption by patients.
Technology holds a central role in expanding the market for home health care. Historically, most of its infrastructure and equipment consisted of durable medical products: walkers, wheelchairs, wall rungs, safety rugs, and the like. That infrastructure enabled basic home care but could not substitute for the more sophisticated capabilities of specialized care settings, such as on-call nursing in long-term-care facilities. In recent years, however, new home care technologies—Internet-enabled home monitors, apps for mobile health, and telemedicine—are bringing aspects of advanced care into patients’ homes. These technologies are finding a place in all parts of the globe.
Expanded technology-enabled home care offers a promising pathway to bend the cost curve for ever-growing health care expenditures. Independent of the economic benefit, the moral value of enabling older members of society to live in grace and dignity in their own homes, with a ripple effect on their caregivers, is arguably the most important—if unquantifiable—benefit of home care. It will move ahead, however, only if stakeholders develop more equitable reimbursement models that create greater incentives to participate in the technology-enabled home health market. In addition, medical-device makers must focus on technologies that are easier to use, have a real impact on patients’ conditions, and make it possible to measure results.
An understanding of these issues is important for all stakeholders: medical-device manufacturers, insurers, doctors, hospitals, and government regulators seeking to optimize investments in home health care. With the market growing, and expansion opportunities available both domestically and internationally, this is a promising time to be in the business of home care technology.

Where technology-enabled home care can help

The goal of technology-enabled home care—the delivery of health diagnostics or therapeutics in a patient’s home—is to prevent or reduce the need for institutional care, alleviating the financial and emotional burden upon society and individuals. Its central thesis is that some chronic illnesses can be treated through monitoring and interventions in a patient’s home rather than in higher-cost institutional settings.

Of course, the 65-and-over age segment forms the bulk of the home care population and fuels the market’s growth. These men and women experience care primarily in four settings: their homes, assisted-living facilities, acute-care facilities (hospitals), and long-term-care institutions, such as nursing homes or skilled-nursing facilities. Clinical or economic factors propel patients from one care setting to another. The shift from homes to assisted-living facilities is typically driven by a gradual decline in cognition or physical capacity, from homes or assisted-living facilities to acute-care facilities by events such as fractures or heart attacks, and from homes, assisted-living facilities, or acute-care institutions to long-term-care institutions by movement across a financial or clinical breaking point (for example, bankruptcy or a diagnosis of dementia or other chronic illness).

The most important value offered by technology-enabled home care is preventing or delaying the shift of patients to acute- or long-term-care settings. Technologies used in home care cannot address all the potential factors underlying such shifts—for example, trauma from a car accident lies beyond their reach. The medical conditions that can be addressed successfully by technology-enabled home care meet three criteria:

• They are chronic—persisting for years rather than days or months.
• They can be prevented or addressed by protocols—repeatable and standardized step-by-step instructions executed by nonphysicians.
• They are nonintensive—there is no requirement for round-the-clock attention or human monitoring.

Diabetes, hypertension, congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and fracture prevention³ are high-prevalence medical conditions that satisfy these criteria. They are important disease targets for current and future technological advances in home care.

Choosing the right business model

To date, technology-enabled home care in the United States has succeeded in only a few settings: most notably, integrated payers and providers such as Kaiser Permanente (through its KP OnCall subsidiary) and US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centers (through the VA’s Care Coordination/Home Telehealth program). There is increasing evidence of the value of such programs. A 2008 study of Telehealth found that hospital admissions dropped by close to one-fifth, while its cost was up to two orders of magnitude lower than that of alternatives.
Given the potential savings, why do home care technologies have such low penetration? We find that eight key success factors, falling into three categories, must be satisfied simultaneously for a model to be commercially viable. Entrants into the home care technology market should cast a critical eye upon their offerings to verify that all eight success factors have been satisfied. Failure to meet even one can cripple an otherwise-promising business model.

Financial factors

1. Alignment between payers and providers. Episodic hospitalization reimbursements for congestive-heart-failure patients, for example, are misaligned with hospital-based technology-enabled home care programs: every patient successfully kept at home means less revenue for a hospital. A critical reason for the success of integrated payer–providers (such as the VA) in technology-enabled home care is their capitated reimbursement models—by patient per year, so each patient who avoids hospitalization represents a boost to the bottom line.
Stakeholders, particularly payers and providers, must cooperate to ensure that incentives for relevant technologies are aligned. That means either creating new reimbursement models, such as direct payments for the use of home care technologies, or adapting existing models, such as bundled reimbursements that cover a comprehensive set of clinical activities across care settings.
2. Remunerative. A home care technology’s return on investment must be clear to patients and, where different, to purchasers. Personal-health-record software aimed at individual patients, for example, remains unpopular because each user must enter a great deal of information manually in return for ambiguous benefits. On the other hand, at-home glucometers, which measure the concentration of blood sugar, have succeeded because the value to patients is simple, clear, and immediate.

Effectiveness factors

3. Having significant impact. A home care technology must affect a patient’s clinical course of care; conversely, if it merely provides information that cannot change the course of disease progression or treatment, its value is negligible. Monitoring the weight of a patient with congestive heart failure, for example, effectively alerts clinicians to an imminent worsening of that condition. The at-home interpretation of new chest pain experienced by recovering heart attack patients is not useful, because the appropriate course of action is to go to the hospital—no matter what.

4. Actionable. Merely observing or flagging an event is not enough; a home care technology must be accompanied by some way to take action—through a device, a nurse, or the patient—when an intervention is required. A nursing intervention prompted by alarming weight gain in a congestive-heart-failure patient is an effective action; displaying a stand-alone Web page with a chart of recent weight gain by a patient, leaving it up to him or her whether and how to do anything, is an ineffective one.

5. Timely. The home care technology must be sufficiently rapid and reliable to be useful in guiding decisions or initiating interventions. An always-on accelerometer, for instance, quickly detects a fall. A daily automated phone call to check on a patient at home to see if a fall occurred does not.
6. Closed loop. A technology must contain a “closed feedback loop” to measure progress against goals and to verify whether effective actions or treatments actually occurred. Without such a loop, a technology’s value cannot be proved, measured, or optimized. A technology that enters a patient’s after-treatment physical-activity levels directly into a provider’s electronic medical records through a wearable device has a closed feedback loop. A technology that enters a patient’s physical-activity levels into a stand-alone system requiring a separate provider login has an open one. Without seamless processes, feedback data may be overlooked or ignored. To fulfill a closed loop, a home care technology must be tightly coupled with processes and tools to ensure that measurements reach their intended recipients in a timely and easily viewed way.

Accessibility factors
7. Usable. Technologies must be available and understandable to the right users at the right place and time; poor user interfaces or immobile physical locations can doom business models. A wireless blood pressure cuff at home is easily usable, for example; a fixed blood pressure kiosk in a retail pharmacy is significantly less so. Further, if a technology has been tested only with tailored populations or under special conditions (such as clinical trials) it is important to verify that it will be scalable to larger populations and real-world conditions.
8. Repeatable. A technology must be used frequently—typically, at least daily—over the course of a chronic disease. Infrequently used technologies do not generate good habits among home care consumers and are eventually forgotten or ignored. The daily measurement of body weight on an electronic scale by congestive-heart-failure patients is repeatable. On the other hand, a device that performs an annual eye exam for diabetic patients works too intermittently to be compelling for home use.

What the future holds

The environment for home care technology is likely to change in the coming years. Greater adoption has two key drivers.

Health care reform

At a time of general fiscal stress and specific concern about billing fraud, public or private payers are unlikely to increase funding or coverage for home care. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the 2010 Affordable Care Act, for example, will pare a cumulative $39.7 billion from federal home-health-care reimbursements over the next decade.⁶ Payers are more likely to pursue various forms of capitation (payment per person rather than, say, per service) and shared-risk models, in an attempt to give providers an incentive to subsidize home care technologies and services.

Misalignment between buyers and beneficiaries is an important brake on the penetration of home care technologies. They are likely to benefit if reform efforts successfully accelerate the alignment of incentives—for example, through the creation of Accountable Care Organizations (groups of coordinated health care providers) or bundled payments between payers and providers.⁷ Indeed, the spread of home care technology has an especially strong potential to accelerate under such a scenario because care pathways that rely on skilled labor—pharmacists, nurses, and doctors—are most vulnerable to labor shortages and to eventual augmentation by technology-driven approaches.

Increasing the evidence base

As multiple technology-enabled home care pilots, at public and private organizations alike, have rolled out over the past decade, data accumulated on both sides of the ledger for clinical value and returns on investment. In some cases, technology-enabled home care pilots have produced compelling successes; in others, they have done less well.

Fraud remains a looming concern in home care; the US Government Accountability Office reported “estimated improper payments for Medicare of almost $48 billion for fiscal year 2010,” including expenditures for home oxygen and other home health claims.⁸ To qualify for coverage from payers or to generate incentives within insurance for individuals, home care technologies may also offer new avenues to address home care fraud, in addition to improving patients’ health and quality of life and saving money.
We see substantial growth potential in technology-enabled home health care. An aging population and an increasing chronic-disease burden point to a large and growing market. But home care stakeholders must get the reimbursement models right and ensure that the technologies coming to market truly make a difference for patients and the bottom line alike.

Why multinationals struggle to manage talent?

By M H Ahssan

A survey shows a strong correlation between financial performance and best practices for managing talent globally.

Managing talent in a global organization is more complex and demanding than it is in a national business—and few major worldwide corporations have risen to the challenge.

A McKinsey survey of managers at some of the world’s best-known multinationals covered a range of sectors and all the main geographies. Our findings suggest that the movement of employees between countries is still surprisingly limited and that many people tempted to relocate fear that doing so will damage their career prospects. Yet companies that can satisfy their global talent needs and overcome cultural and other silo-based barriers tend to outperform those that don’t.

We’ve long observed that global corporations grapple with a more difficult talent agenda than their domestic counterparts—partly because they need to share resources and knowledge across a number of business units and countries, partly because of the especially demanding nature of global leadership. To find out more, we undertook in-depth interviews with executives at 11 major global corporations and separately invited senior managers at 22 global companies to participate in an online survey investigating how effectively they manage their talent. More than 450 people, ranging from CEOs and other directors to senior managers, including human-resources (HR) professionals, took part in the survey.

The responses confirmed impressions from the interviews that companies now struggle on a number of talent-management fronts, such as achieving greater cultural diversity, overcoming barriers to international mobility, and establishing consistent HR processes in different geographical units.

Despite the value companies claim to place on international management experience, the senior managers who took the survey had made, on average, only 1.5 cross-border moves during their careers, as against an average of 2 for managers at the top-performing companies. Interestingly, we found that the respondents had also moved, on average, 1.7 times between different divisions within the same geography but only 1.3 times between different functions—another sign that movement from silo to silo is still limited.

Participants cited several personal disincentives to global mobility, but one of the most significant was the expectation that employees would be demoted after repatriation to their home location. “Overseas experience is not taken seriously and not taken advantage of,” commented one senior manager. “Much valuable experience dissipates” because companies have a habit of “ignoring input from returnees, and many leave.” The quality of the support for mobility a company provides (for instance, assistance with housing and the logistical aspects of a move) also plays a decisive role in determining how positive or challenging an overseas assignment is for expatriates.

Perhaps the most provocative finding from the research was the relationship between financial performance, as measured by profit per employee,¹ and ten dimensions of global talent management. Companies scoring in the top third of the survey (when all ten dimensions were combined) earned significantly higher profit per employee than those in the bottom third. The correlations were particularly striking in three areas: the creation of globally consistent talent evaluation processes, the management of cultural diversity, and the mobility of global leaders. Companies achieving scores in the top third in any of these three areas had a 70 percent chance of achieving top-third financial performance. Companies scoring in the bottom third of the survey in these three areas had a significantly lower probability of being top performers, particularly if the company had inconsistent global talent processes. Although providing no evidence of true causality and lacking a longitudinal perspective, the strong associations between company financial performance and these global-talent-management practices strengthen our belief that these are important areas on which businesses and HR leaders should focus their attention.

Global consistency in a company’s talent evaluation processes is important, because for mobility to succeed, line managers need to feel confident that employees transferring into their units from other parts of the organization meet the same standards that their own people do. Moreover, company support and training is vital to the promotion of diversity. HR managers stressed the need for expatriates to learn more about the culture of the countries they transfer to than just the local language. “If you have to choose,” explained one HR director, “it’s more important to have an open-minded leader than to have someone with the right language skills.”

In our view the key implication of the research is that companies should focus hard on rotating talent globally across divisions and geographies. Not only will this rotation support the development of company talent, it will also promote greater cultural awareness and diversity. The research further examined why some companies are better than others at developing global talent in this way. It found that those with top managers and promotion systems that actively encourage their people to gain international experience—and provide managers with incentives to share their talent with other units—were roughly twice as likely to have effective global mobility practices than those that don’t.

Global companies should consider devoting more resources and senior-management time to liberating talent “trapped” in national silos and more wholeheartedly supporting global-mobility programs. Instilling a common set of talent evaluation processes throughout the world—especially standardized individual performance evaluations—will underpin this effort and build the confidence of line managers.

More and more companies are stepping up their international revenues, their overseas customer base, and their nondomestic workforce. What our research suggests is that many of them need to match these achievements with truly global talent-management attitudes and practices.

A bias against investment?

By M H Ahssan

Companies should be investing to improve their performance and set the stage for growth. They’re not. A survey of executives suggests behavioral bias is a culprit.

One of the puzzles of the sluggish global economy today is why companies aren’t investing more. They certainly seem to have good reasons to: corporate coffers are full, interest rates are low, and a slack economy inevitably offers bargains. Yet many companies seem to be holding back.

A number of factors are doubtless involved, ranging from market volatility to fears of a double-dip recession to uncertainty about economic policy. One factor that might go unnoticed, however, is the surprisingly strong role of decision biases in the investment decision-making process—a role that revealed itself in a recent McKinsey Global Survey. Most executives, the survey found, believe that their companies are too stingy, especially for investments expensed immediately through the income statement and not capitalized over the longer term. Indeed, about two-thirds of the respondents said that their companies underinvest in product development, and more than half that they underinvest in sales and marketing and in financing start-ups for new products or new markets (Exhibit 1). Bypassed opportunities aren’t just a missed opportunity for individual companies: the investment dearth hurts whole economies and job creation efforts as well.

Such biases, left unchecked, amplify this conservatism, the survey suggests. Executives who believe that their companies are underinvesting are also much more likely to have observed a number of common decision biases in those companies’ investment decision making. These executives also display a remarkable degree of loss aversion—they weight potential losses significantly more than equivalent gains. The clear implication is that even amid market volatility and uncertainty, managers are right now probably foregoing worthy opportunities, many of which are in-house.

The survey respondents¹ held a wide range of positions in both public and private companies. All had exposure to investment decision making in their organizations. Nearly two-thirds of them reported that their companies generated annual revenues above $1 billion, and the findings are consistent across industries, geographies, and corporate roles.

More bias means less investment

The survey results were also consistent with earlier findings that biases are common within the investment decision-making process.² More than four-fifths of respondents reported that their organizations suffer from at least one well-known bias. More than two-fifths reported observing three or more.

Generally, the most common biases that affect decisions could be traced to the past experiences of those who make or support a proposal. The confirmation bias, for example, was the most common one—decision makers focus their analyses of opportunities on reasons to support a proposal, not to reject it. Depending on the proposal, this bias can result in decisions to underinvest or not to invest at all just as easily as in decisions to overinvest. Another common bias was a tendency to use inappropriate analogies based on experiences that aren’t applicable to the decision at hand. A third was the “champion” bias—managers defer more than is warranted to the person making or supporting an investment proposal than to merits of the proposal itself.

The presence of behavioral bias seems to have a substantial effect on the performance of corporate investments. Respondents who had reported observing the fewest biases were also much more likely to report that their companies’ major investments since the global financial crisis began had performed better than expected. By contrast, those who reported observing the most biases were more likely to report that their companies’ investments had performed worse than expected.

The biases reported by respondents correlate with the performance of investments—and appear to constrain their overall level, as well. Indeed, respondents reporting fewer biases were significantly less likely than those reporting more to state that their companies had forgone beneficial investments.

Wary executives

Executives also reported a high degree of loss aversion in the investment decisions they’d observed. They exhibited the same tendency themselves, even when the value they expected from an investment appeared strongly positive. When asked to assess a hypothetical investment scenario with a possible loss of $100 million and a possible gain of $400 million, for example, most respondents were willing to accept a risk of loss only between 1 and 20 percent, although the net present value would be positive up to a 75 percent risk of loss. Such excessive loss aversion probably explains why many companies fail to pursue profitable investment opportunities.³

This degree of loss aversion is all the more surprising because it apparently extends to much smaller deals: respondents were just as averse to loss when the size of an investment was $10 million and the potential gain $40 million. Even if it made sense to be so loss averse for larger deals, it still wouldn’t make sense to be as averse to loss for smaller ones, especially considering how much more frequently smaller opportunities occur.

Facebook's Growth in the Arab World Is Surging with Demands for Political Change

The use of social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter to organize protests roiling the Arab world has been widely acknowledged. Researchers at the Dubai School of Government have now published research showing why social media played such a crucial role in helping catalyze popular anger that toppled two regimes in the Middle East and continues to rock others.

Launched just before demonstrations began in North Africa in December 2010, the inaugural Arab Social Media Report demonstrates the growth and reach of Facebook among Arab youth: some 75% of all Facebook users in the region are between the ages of 15 and 29 years. An even more telling fact: Facebook added more than 1 million new users in the region since protests began. During the weeks of growing unrest in Tunisia, researchers found that Facebook accounts in the country grew by nearly 10%.

In response to citizens taking to the streets, countries such as Egypt and now Libya have tried cutting off their countries' connections to the Internet. That still doesn't stop the flow of information via text messages sent over mobile networks, notes Simon Jones, director of the Abu Dhabi Men's College in the Higher Colleges of Technology, and a former senior research fellow at the MIT Media Lab. "Mobile phone penetration is higher than computer penetration," Jones says. "Everyone has a mobile [phone]. It's instantaneous to send large numbers of SMS messages to people. You can reach a wider range of people, more quickly. Emails are ignored; web pages might not be seen for weeks, but SMS gets eyeballs."

While it may be easy to block websites, or even block an Internet network, cutting off a mobile network leaves even the government without the capability to communicate, Jones says, a point the protestors exploited. "SMS catalyzed the action," he says. Jones compares the mass protests to flash mobs, noting the modern prank provided an example of how to organize through social media. "For young people, it's a natural way to organize, because they've done it before," he says. "Lots of governments haven't understood that." Regime fear of technology leading to action has a long history, Jones adds, citing the example of Communist Russia and its Samizdat policies that regulated the use of photocopiers. "People have always used the tools available to them," he says, "almost every young person is now connected to some network, whether over the phone or the Internet."

In addition to social media tools and mobile networks, satellite television played a role in providing alternative perspectives about the Arab world, says Lawrence Pintak, founding dean of the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University, and former Middle East correspondent for CBS News.

"Social media was invaluable in networking the activists, in allowing them to reach out to each other, to coordinate and to share images of unrest in disparate parts of Tunisia and later Egypt," he says. "But television was the game-changer. In Tunisia, Al Jazeera and later other Arab networks took the videos posted on YouTube and made them accessible to the masses; in Egypt, social media allowed the activists to organize the Day of Anger, but television brought the masses out into the streets."
Regional bloggers first demonstrated the power of the Internet as a tool of change, Pintak says, noting while some governments understood the potential and risk of social media, "certainly in Egypt the regime was living in the past and dismissed 'Facebook Girl' and the others as children.

"Governments have yet to learn to systematically use these new media outlets," Pintak notes. "A few years ago, a member of the Saudi royal family told me that they recognized that change was coming and that media was a key part of that change, and so they were trying to figure out how to harness the process. So far, they have not done very well. As the reporting of Egyptian television during the crisis showed, Arab governments still don't quite understand that they can no longer control the message nor kill the messenger."

In an interview with Arabic Knowledge, researchers at the Dubai School of Government -- Fadi Salem, fellow and program director of the school's Governance and Innovation program, and Racha Mourtada, research associate -- note that the way social media tools have been used in the past few weeks has forever changed social and political culture in the Arab world. Among the surprising facts the study uncovered, they add, is that Facebook penetration can be high even in countries that restrict use of the Internet.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
Arabic Knowledge: We've seen the toppling of two governments by protestors organizing through social media in the Arab world. Was this expected?
Fadi Salem: I think it was, if you look at the events taking place in the Middle East over the past year. If you look at our report, we highlight some of the countries where people used social media tools to mobilize and engage in civil movements, such as Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, or Tunisia. It was expected that social media would be part of any engagement that took place. But the extent has been surprising. The fact that there were problems existing, and people were discussing them online, made social media the platform of choice. The Arab world lacks channels for youth to communicate their problems. This was a medium people felt empowered in. Maybe if other channels existed, social media would have been less of a platform.

Arabic Knowledge: Given that these social media tools were developed in the West, how have the youth localized these platforms for their use?
Salem: Let's go back to the role of the media and the role of the channels that already exist in society. People for the last 50 years didn't see in the mass media a tool they could use to interact with the government. The media are mostly state-controlled, and people tended to overlook them because of their low credibility. In the Arab world, the average person's consumption of news, the decision-making process based on news, involves going through at least five different sources. You check BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera of course, and the local news. And then based on that, on a specific issue, you consume information from all these sources and you make a decision. So when social media became the platform of choice over the last five years, it was very natural for young people to choose this platform to influence their decision-making [as a tool for filtering numerous sources].

Arabic Knowledge: What were the main factors that led to a broader adoption of these social media platforms?
Salem: In our report we looked into factors such as age, gross domestic product, Internet freedom, and the country in question. For example, one of the surprises was that Internet freedom is not related to the degree of Facebook penetration. Even with countries with lower Internet freedom, they had high Facebook penetration, or large numbers of Facebook users.
Mourtada: We had the youth factor, where 75% of Facebook users are the Arab youth. There was the gender factor, which wasn't the same as the rest of the world. Globally, it is about 1:1 when it comes to males and females on Facebook, whereas in the Arab world, it is closer to a 2:1 ratio, with a lot more men than women on Facebook. We think that has to do probably with factors such as political participation, participation in the workforce, education, and access to health care. This part of the world doesn't have the highest figures when it comes to women's participation in these indicators. The top three countries with Internet penetration are Gulf countries, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain and Qatar. They don't have very high Internet freedom ratings, yet they boast some of the highest Facebook penetration ratings in the world.

Arabic Knowledge: What has made social media grow so fast in this region?
Mourtada: I don't think there's one defining factor. Obviously having Internet access and being tech savvy is important. Countries with higher incomes generally had higher Facebook penetration too. Just as a trend over the past year, it's been growing phenomenally; the number of Facebook users has grown by 78%.
Salem: One of the primary reasons is that the regional population is young. In most of the countries in the Arab world, the age group under 30 makes up 50% to 70% of the total population. This is the group that feels empowered by the [social media] platform . It didn't start that way -- it originally was a way to connect with others in countries where it is not that easy to connect with the other gender. But then, the usage trends shifted towards more politically active, more socially active ways of use. The trend is visible all over the Arab world. Just scan comments from Facebook profile updates or from Tweets. You will notice the shift from, 'This is what I am doing tomorrow,' to, 'I wish I was in Tahrir Square.' I'm not sure this will last, but we'll see.

Mourtada: We have seen a number of countries where the number of Facebook penetration is actually higher than Internet penetration, so they must be using mobile phones. That was the case in Djibouti and Iraq.
Salem: Also, families are large in most of the countries in the Arab world, so one Internet connection could have five people connected in the household.

Arabic Knowledge: Are there things that you learned that surprised you, either positively or negatively?
Mourtada: One positive thing is that in all Arab countries, the rate of growth of new users to Facebook is huge, for example in places such as Iraq. I believe it had 300% growth over the past year. Even countries with lower rates of Facebook penetration are all getting into the social media movement, much faster than any country in the West. That isn't surprising, since those countries may have reached a plateau, while Arab countries are just beginning to take off.
Salem: One thing I found surprising was the rate of Arab women using Facebook. I was expecting it would be more, not less. I was expecting, given that this is a society where it is not easy to connect with the other gender. But that wasn't the case. Only Lebanon has about an equal number of men and women. In Jordan and Bahrain the ratio of men and women who use social media tools is close.

Arabic Knowledge: Did social media spur these young people to action, or was this unrest simply looking for an outlet?
Mourtada: It's a combination, a perfect storm. All these social and political issues were bubbling under the surface. Then you also happen to have all these social media tools available. These tools were perhaps the catalyst for the unrest, but not necessarily the actual instigator. There already was this social revolution going on, and it just found its outlet. You can't ascribe too much power to these tools, as ultimately the people using these tools drove this revolution.

Arabic Knowledge: When did these tools go from a means of socializing among youth to tools for organizing protest and voicing dissent?
Salem: Take Tunisia, for example. There was a huge shift in the way people used Facebook there. Penetration of Facebook among Tunisians was high, but people used it to socialize, nobody talked about politics, because it was taboo. Suddenly, after the [self-immolation of a 26-year-old Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, last December] the shift happened -- everyone changed their profile photo to the Tunisian flag, posted news articles critical of the government, and organized. The most important thing Facebook allowed the people to do was organize in a way they didn't think possible. Self-organizational movements are not part of the culture in many Arab countries. The state is the provider and the organizer. But even when the government disappeared in Tunisia and in Egypt, people started organizing themselves, not just for political movements but for cleaning the streets, for security to protect their neighborhoods. So when people felt the need, they managed to find these platforms and utilize them creatively.

Arabic Knowledge: In your study, did you determine whether people were using more Arabic or English while on social media?
Mourtada: The impact would have been less [if these social media tools didn't have the capability to display Arabic text]. There was a lot of Arabic use. It depends on the class you're talking about too. The middle class tends to use more English. In order to become popular uprisings, these protests have to draw in the lower classes too, and these people mainly Tweet or use Facebook in Arabic.
Salem: One of the main examples is Rast network, a Facebook group with tens of thousands of followers in Egypt. It basically is a news agency. Its name is the Arabic word for 'scanning' or 'compiling.' For the many of the youth in Egypt, this was the source for information. This group of young people, who are a part of the revolutionary youth, used Rast to collect all the information that the government and all the traditional news outlets were not providing, such as profiles on personalities in the government, and what people were Tweeting about. With the core of the movements being youth connected on Facebook, it was the easiest way to collect and share information. And it was all in Arabic.

It spread just by Tweets and Likes on Facebook. There is no editorial board and they don't publish their own articles. They collect information and repackage it, with links and YouTube videos. They were in the first few days, especially during the Internet blackout, the source of information on what was happening in Egypt. Somebody who managed to get an Internet connection would post a video on YouTube, and it would be linked there, and it was disseminated to the community of supporters outside. It was also followed closely by Arab media organizations.

Arabic Knowledge: How did the protestors translate plans made through social media to actual people showing up on the streets in large numbers?
Salem: In Tunisia, that was the real surprise. In Egypt's protests, there was a case that worked in Tunisia, and they followed that. Tunisia was surprising. There were definitely grievances, and an event, Bouazizi's death, which catalyzed opinion. People were spreading the videos through their mobile phones, through Bluetooth, so it wasn't even the Internet alone. So how did such large numbers of people show up? Look at the number of Facebook users in Egypt and Tunisia. When the report was launched in December the number of Facebook users was more than 4 million users, now it is 5.2 million. We don't have the numbers yet for Egypt on the percentage of growth, but for Tunisia in the first few weeks during the protests, it shot up 8%. That was a huge increase in two weeks. But consider, you have 5 million people on Facebook, probably a big percentage are receiving this information, and every single person will have a real-life network of about five or six people. So do the math: that's about 30 million people who know what's happening. If 1 million were to show up, or even 100,000 show up, it would be enough.

Arabic Knowledge: Still, how did social media propel these protests in a way that other media have not in the Arab world? For instance, Al Jazeera and opposition newspapers reported on protest movements that were ignored by state-controlled media. But you'd never see similar reactions among people.
Mourtada: With social media, there is that personal touch. The people themselves are putting that content out, communicating with each other, as opposed to some media outlet telling them what's going on. With these social networks, the only way you can get the word out to that many people, and get them to organize, is if there is that element of trust between them.
Salem: Consider the profile of the Facebook user in the Arab world. Some 75% are people between the age of 15 and 29. They are part of one generation, and feel they have the same social problems, the same issues with the government, and the same aspirations. So it is one specific group. That's 4 million users in Egypt. But we have two different cases here. Since Tunisia, we had several different calls for 'Days of Rage' in Arab countries. Not all have materialized, such as in Algeria, though it has a high number of Facebook users. In Syria, there was a call, but nobody showed up. But in Yemen and Syria, the number of Facebook users is very low, so that's also a factor.

Who is organizing this, that's as important as the message. In Egypt, people trusted the group organizing the protests. These organizers had been activists for a year, at least. Whereas in Syria, the group who called for protests were outside the country, and they had low credibility. Nobody knew who they were. There could be other reasons. Maybe the timing wasn't right. There are differences in every country.

Arabic Knowledge: Has Facebook created a social shift in the Arab world? Have cultural norms been disturbed, perhaps permanently?
Salem: Absolutely. Not just cultural, but political norms as well. I would say that in countries where penetration of the Internet and social media is high, the next president, the next government there, will be those who utilize these social media tools to interact with the public. If it's a democratically elected government, it could be similar to how Barack Obama managed to win his presidency. The people who can connect to the youth through these technologies will be the next people in power in these countries.

Arabic Knowledge: Considering the adoption of Facebook as a platform in the Arab world, did you record any concern that it was not homegrown? For example, in Japan, Facebook does not have high penetration because people there are using locally developed social media platforms.
Salem: Unfortunately, the Arab world hasn't produced enough technologies or media channels for people. I know that in some countries, the opinion is, 'Ok, this is from the U.S., we don't know who will be monitoring this.' But at some point, people will not care anymore. If they have a cause that is beyond this, they will not look into who developed the platform.

Arabic Knowledge: So you didn't come across that sentiment?
Mourtada: It didn't seem to be a factor, from the number of Tweets and Facebook messages. People got past that, and it became about communicating, regardless of where the platform was built.
Salem: In the case of Egypt, the previous government tried to convey this message, that Al Jazeera, Wikileaks, Facebook, these are external, it's a conspiracy from the outside. The public didn't buy it.
Mourtada: It's mainly the governments people rose up against that were wary of these tools. It's a testament to the power of these tools.

Arabic Knowledge: Have some of the barriers between classes in the region been eliminated, or reduced, as a result of this collective experience through social media?
Mourtada: It's brought all these people together. You could say social media tools have created a new public sphere, where people can come in and talk about their grievances and social issues. In that sense it has flattened the informational hierarchy and some of the social structures.
Salem: Definitely, the flow of information in these societies became horizontal. No bottlenecks can filter this information. An endless number of connections have been established between people today, and it is almost impossible to block, filter or even monitor all of them. Governments in the region and on a global level are realizing this. Everybody has seen from Egypt's example that you cannot disconnect the information flow, even if you cut off an entire country from the Internet.

Arabic Knowledge: You mention in your report that one of the countries you could not get credible information on was Iran.
Salem: There is an issue with some countries, and that's because of the rules in the U.S. In Iran, Syria, Sudan, Cuba and North Korea, indeed there are embargoes on these countries, technological embargoes. Even companies like Google and Facebook will not enable you to get information, by law, or provide services to people in these countries. Even if they can access Facebook in these countries, they might not be able to download many applications for Facebook, which would affect their number of users. That limits the information available to us also. At this point, now that there is a realization that censorship is useless. Take Syria, it unblocked Facebook, YouTube and Blogspot. The real censorship is now happening from the U.S. side. We're talking about 180 million people in these countries who cannot download a browser, or use an application.

Arabic Knowledge: How do you see regional governments reacting to social media now?
Salem: Governments are realizing this is an opportunity to communicate and connect with the majority in these countries, which is the youth. Some governments are working on this, creating guidelines and putting policies into place to use social networking tools. On the other hand, some countries realize that they cannot control or monitor people as easily as they thought they could. This is another positive thing. Governments will waste fewer resources on trying to control and block these platforms, and instead try to use them to engage with their populations, which will ultimately see their countries better off. That they are taking these measures suggest these governments have accepted the fact that these tools will be here from now on. This is like when the Internet was first introduced in Arab countries. The first response was to control and monitor. The same thing happened with satellite television. That's the normal process, denying, and then accepting…. The next step will be participation. Taking advantage of these tools to connect with the public, and get them engaged in policymaking and decision-making, if not democratic participation.

We'll see how Tunisia and Egypt change their perspectives on these platforms. But I have no doubt that every single country in the world will try to infiltrate these platforms. Some countries have policies in place on how to use, manipulate and change perspectives on using these platforms. Everybody will try to collect information at least on the usage of social media tools, from how people are interacting with those platforms to devising plans on how to change that usage.

Arab Tech Entrepreneurs Forge Links Between the Middle East and Silicon Valley

Adel Youssef had a rising career at Google as the main architect of its location-based software strategy in the Arab world. Yet, he had a nagging feeling he needed to do more to help his homeland.
Last year, the software engineer left his cushy job in America to launch Wireless Stars, an Egypt-based startup where homegrown talent could gain firsthand experience. He hired recent graduates out of the University of Alexandria and became a mentor and a boss. "Just caring about myself and ignoring their need for help was not an option for me," Youssef says. "I just jumped on this."

He's not alone. Youssef, 39, represents a vanguard of technologists trying to cultivate a legion of Arab entrepreneurs through one of the pivotal building blocks of the new economy: mentorship. Silicon Valley-based TechWadi and the Middle East's Wamda recently have introduced social networking sites to connect mentors with Arab entrepreneurs in a concerted effort to jumpstart business despite political instability that has swept the region this year.

Such new models for social networking are evidence of how ideas first conceived to change human interaction on the Internet are broadening beyond their initial scope. Building a platform dedicated to mentor relationships isn't much different than a Facebook page designed to mingle with friends. Although the timing of the initiatives is coincidental, the groups' leaders say they are acting now to help Arabs gain a foothold in a global economy where a laptop and a good idea can prompt life-changing ventures.

Harvesting Knowledge
TechWadi, a nonprofit group fostering economic development in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA), has started an e-mentorship program called MentorCloud. It is a private social networking platform between mentors, investors and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and MENA.

The social network was created by Ravishankar Gundlapalli, chief executive of Parjanya Inc., in Milpitas, Calif. Gundlapalli, 41, has a doctorate degree in fluid mechanics and spent many years helping supply chains in the automobile and airline industries. Now he's interested in intellectual supply chains, connecting experienced elders with eager young talent that could greatly benefit from advice. "America is going through aging," Gundlapalli says. "The knowledge of the 70 million is going out of the door if it is not harvested properly."

He found TechWadi chairman Ossama Hassanein through an online search. Then Gundlapalli sold him on the idea of a Facebook for mentors. The group is among the first customers testing the product in a beta format with about 100 mentors. As an angel-funded entrepreneur, Gundlapalli has created an easy-to-search directory of mentors and mentees and a simple way for them to engage online.
The service is free but TechWadi carefully screens applicants, says Roham Gharegozlou, an associate of Newbury Ventures. "We are not focused so much on 'matches' as on relationships," Gharegozlou says. "Many times each startup will be matched to several mentors, as is the case with all of the companies we are currently working with. Each mentor serves as a point of contact for their own expertise, and since both the startups' need and the mentors' interests change with time, so will the mentor relationships."

TechWadi hopes to have more than 100 matches in the first year of MentorCloud, more than 1,000 within five years. Its biggest selling point is the deep well of technologists it has recruited to help.
The organization has made mentorship the focal point of a number of its initiatives. Its startup coach program in Silicon Valley matches young entrepreneurs such as Youssef with more experienced members of the group. TechWadi also has sponsored two mentorship boot camps, including one last October in Cairo, and a summer startup training camp in Egypt in July.

Gaining Business Understanding
Mentorship has become a universally accepted practice in Silicon Valley where fresh-faced college kids often set off to fashion the next Google without a sophisticated understanding of practical business matters.

Mentors become pivotal in this type of environment because they often serve as trusted confidantes. Unlike seed investors, mentors usually don't have a financial stake in the company. "When you mentor someone you get exposed to this excitement and ideas," says Dania Hiasat, who worked at Mowgli Jordan. "It ignites the entrepreneurship spirit in you."

One May evening, Hassanein, a general partner with the venture capital firm Global Technology Innovation Partners, hosted two dozen young Arab-Americans interested in TechWadi's mentorship movement. Gundlapalli gave a presentation of how MentorCloud works, and guests debated the merits of its potential.

Ramy Adeeb of Khosla Ventures in Menlo Park, Calif., a few blocks from where the gathering took place, encouraged his peers to open themselves to the idea of mentoring. "There is tremendous hunger in the Middle East for mentors," he told the group. "A lot of times you have a corporate program that fails because it was set up just for setting up the program. You cannot blame eHarmony because people get divorced."

An MBA student questioned what he could offer because of a lack of roll-up-your-sleeves experience. "Don't underestimate what you can contribute," Hassanein told him.

When Hassanein offered encouragement, he had the big picture in mind. More to the point, he was thinking about someone like Mohammed Omar El Saadi of Beirut. El Saadi, 27, could be found one recent day at the Knight Management Center on the sprawling Stanford University campus, just a few miles from the headquarters of Facebook, Google and respected venture capital firms.

After earning a degree at the American University of Beirut, El Saadi got a master's degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech. He's on track to earn a MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in the coming year.

El Saadi has gained an immeasurable amount of knowledge useful for starting a business in Lebanon and beyond. He understands the role his generation has to play in reshaping the future. He plans to return to the Middle East with the intent of starting a technology business. "We don't have a right to complain if we're not taking part in that change," he says. "An idea will stay an idea unless you can put some proper business knowledge around that."

"Mentorship is about passing along tacit knowledge, the kind of information one can only get by actually doing something," says Cappelli, who once served as Bahrain's senior advisor on employment policy. "Without a lot of other mentors around, it is hard for budding entrepreneurs to avoid lots of painful and potentially crippling mistakes."

Spiritual and Practical Guides
Christopher M. Schroeder, a Washington, D.C.-based angel investor who served as a delegate in the U.S. State Department Global Entrepreneurship Program in Egypt, describes mentors as spiritual guides with practical sides. He says mentors lend support, help make important introductions and provide a sounding board when innovators feel lost.

"Entrepreneurship is one of the loneliest things on Earth," he says. "You are a little crazy to want to try to do something nobody has done." Schroeder, who has spent considerable time in the MENA region, says mentors often serve the role as a "shrink."

"There's so much rattling around in one's head when doing one of these things," he says. "It's not just about a business problem being solved." It's letting the entrepreneur know she or he isn't alone. "Everything you're going through others like you have been through it before," Schroeder adds.
Youssef, who earned a doctorate degree at the University of Maryland, is discovering just how important this link can be while steering his small company through the shifting sands of Egypt. He knew leaving Google would be a risk, but he had to try it. "Most people think of doing business in Silicon Valley and outsourcing in the Middle East," Youssef says. "I thought we needed to build technology there -- build a business from scratch in the Middle East."

In January, Youssef introduced a location-aware social networking application similar to foursquare, a Smartphone tool that helps friends connect at cafes, cinemas and other gathering locales. He called it "IntaFeen" -- the Arabic phrase for 'Where are you?'

The timing proved uncanny. Within weeks of the launch, the application had become an instrument of political reform that led to the ouster of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. While Facebook and Twitter have been credited for helping galvanize a technological savvy generation of Arabs, "IntaFeen" emerged as an important tool because users knew where protesters were congregating at any given moment.

"People wanted to show they were in the street," says Youssef, whose company is among a handful born out of TechWadi's startup coach program. "It tied messages to location," he adds, noting it encouraged more protesters to show up at Tahrir Square in central Cairo.

The unintended consequence caught Youssef by surprise. Users had integrated the new platform into organizing protests in a country where global positioning systems aren't readily available, he says. It became evident that a wired community could be a powerful antidote to authoritarian governments. Not surprisingly, Google executive and protest leader Wael Ghonim termed the uprising, "Revolution 2.0."

Egyptians wasted little time in exploiting "IntaFeen's" location feature. They employed the application when traveling to Libya to support forces opposed to Col. Muammar Gaddafi, Youssef says. The location device allowed drivers hauling medical supplies and food to check with Libyan contacts in real time to know exactly where to meet.

Fundamental Aspects A Challenge
As exciting as it was to watch the technology evolve, Youssef struggles with some of the more fundamental aspects of building an e-business in the Arab world. The entrepreneur has loads of technological experience from working at Google. But he doesn't have an employee who knows much about marketing and publicity. In other words, he needs guidance on the business side of his startup. That's where his TechWadi mentors enter the fray.

While many of the lessons are universal, author Malcolm Gladwell highlighted potential cultural disparities in a New Yorker story exploring the idea of creation. "The United States," Gladwell wrote, "has a decentralized, bottom-up entrepreneurial culture, which has historically had a strong orientation toward technological solutions."

The more traditional top-down approach in the Middle East and North Africa hasn't promoted the kind of organically grown mentors as seen in Silicon Valley. Wharton's Cappelli says mentorship might need to have a more hands-on role in the Arab world because of a reluctance "to just throw oneself into a problem and try to muddle through."

Risk aversion has been well-documented in Arab circles. The older generation hasn't made the switch to the high-paced startup culture where it takes a new kind of connection to succeed. It's a hurdle Mowgli's Hiasat has faced since opening the foundation's Amman office in January to better promote the group's free mentorship services. (The United Kingdom-based Mowgli Foundation has been encouraging the rise of mentorship in the Middle East since 2009 but this year began working with Wamda to buttress its efforts.)

She has become a one-woman purveyor of change in Jordan by trying to overcome entrenched beliefs to forge a new path. "Here you are governed by your family, by the customs," she says. "There's a sense that life is already designed for you. You go to school. You have a relative somewhere and you try to get a good job."

Schroeder, the Washington-based angel investor, sees perceptions about failure as some of the biggest obstacles to a vigorous startup ecosystem. "Bankruptcy laws are antiquated to say the least," he says. "That translates in two ways: Efficacy of getting capital raised and getting transactions done … is problematic. More importantly, people at the end of the day can just get hyper-upset and make mistakes because they are so afraid that this could lead to failure."

That view of failure is a stark contrast to Silicon Valley where entrepreneurs boast about unsuccessful startups like proud parents. A vibrant mentorship culture could help assuage fears of flopping in Arab nations. Mowgli tries to sell this idea through well-crafted YouTube videos celebrating successful Arab entrepreneurs. Many laud their mentors as being gifts from god.

Now Wamda wants to accelerate the process by closing the gap on the early stage ecosystem by empowering entrepreneurs and investing in them. Lebanese entrepreneur Habib Haddad recently has become Wamda's chief executive with offices in Beirut and Dubai.

While Wamda, which means "spark" in Arabic, is looking to turn the entire system on its head, it understands the role of mentors. It has developed the online platform MentorMatch, a matching algorithm instead of a self-contained mentorship dashboard like MentorCloud.

Both programs have similar ideas, however, about how to encourage connections. Instead of having to wade through thousands of hits from a typical online search engine, these programs provide customized searches to match entrepreneurs to mentors.

With MentorMatch, an individual creates a detailed profile including interests, skills, experience and location. Entrepreneurs can search the database using different criteria. It is owned by Abraaj, one of the Middle East's largest private equity firms.

"A portal like Wamda is, in its most ideal conception, trying to transform elements of society," says Nina Curley, who has worked as an editor at Wamda since its inception. "Part of our goal is to facilitate new business connections that don't immediately come from family and friends. MentorMatch is aimed at creating these new avenues."

Instability Remains A Factor
While the hyper-connectivity of the Internet works for many individuals, there's nothing like old-fashioned meetings at cafes to make deep connections, Haddad says. Such personal contact can build rapport and make it easier to impart tough lessons. "People can say you really do understand my ethos, you understand my religious views, understand my criminal views," Schroeder adds.

Mowgli, the brainchild of Zimbabwe native Tony Bury, also works on the front line like Wamda. It has outreach offices in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria to give it a better chance of recruiting local entrepreneurs.

But the instability in Syria, Libya, Bahrain and elsewhere cannot be ignored at the very moment some Arabs are marshaling forces to strengthen the region's entrepreneurial ecosystem. Mowgli, for instance, has discontinued its planned events in Syria for the time being.

Creating a new economic engine seemed almost idealistic as the Arab Spring faded into a summer of uncertainty. But few promoting change live in a state of Pollyanna. Instead, they view entrepreneurship as necessary in a region that some estimate will need to create 100 million jobs in the coming five years to accommodate the population explosion.

El Saadi, the graduate student from Beirut, says the region doesn't have the luxury to wait for democracy. "The economy can't just keep waiting for an answer from external forces or from outside lands," he says. "It just doesn't work like that."

Wamda's Haddad couldn't agree more. He calls the region the new China, saying the Middle East and North Africa is in a similar position of the Asian giant 10 years ago. Investors might recall the meteoric acceleration of China that started with a backwater infrastructure and almost overnight transformed into an economic trendsetter. "Do you really want to miss out on the next e-China?" Haddad asks. "The Middle East is the door to South Asia, the door to Turkey. It's even the door to countries that are tougher to reach directly. This is a unique opportunity in time and won't last for long."
Schroeder says investors haven't backed off, telling him, "Egypt is not going away."Will reform in Egypt get squashed? "It could," he adds. "In the meantime, it's just happening."

Wireless Stars' Youssef and his brethren aren't ignoring the political questions because it's difficult to conduct business until Egypt sorts out its emerging governance. But impassioned Arab entrepreneurs continue to host meet-ups, create accelerator hubs and thirst for mentorship.

Their sense of empowerment has fashioned a psychological revolution among those who reject the past. Perhaps whoever takes the reins of rule will find they also will be governed by a new principle -- a technological-inspired transparency that led to their predecessors' downfall. It's just the kind of impetus fueling optimism that a robust entrepreneurial community might rise up from the streets of protests.

The watchword these days is bidaya, Arabic for start. "Now we know it is up to us," Youssef says.

'Aadhaar' and India's Brave, New, ID-Armed Market

By M H Ahssan

An estimated US$20 billion worth of business opportunities over the next decade have begun rolling out in India with the launch of a nationwide program named "Aadhaar," which aims to issue 600 million unique identification numbers, or UIDs, to residents over the next four years.

A massive new market will open up as the Aadhaar UIDs enable hundreds of millions of poor and migrant residents to open bank accounts, get loans and expanded access to jobs, health insurance, mobile phone services and the like, while facilitating the delivery of public services including government programs for school children and the poor. The program also promises to improve the labor market with more efficiency in running pension plans, discouragement of jobseekers with spurious certificates, and improved tracking of attendance and performance for school students.

Large multinational technology and business services firms are looking to sell all manner of equipment, software and consulting services. Some are even planning to set up local manufacturing operations. Government and private sector entities, including banks and insurers, are poised to reengineer their services delivery as Aadhaar will help them identify, track and reach large new sections of the population that were previously underserved or off their radars. This writer spoke with executives at the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), led by Infosys Technologies co-founder Nandan Nilekani, and other experts about the emerging market opportunity.

Challenging the "Poverty Premium"
The UID project would create business opportunities at several levels, according to a report from CLSA Asia Pacific Markets, written by Anirudha Dutta, its deputy head of India research, and Bhavtosh Vajpayee, its head of technology research. "As UID-linked infrastructure expands over the next five years, we envisage a US$20 billion market and estimate that it will create 350,000 new jobs," they say in their report. By the sixth year, they expect the commercial pie to be worth US$10 billion annually.This, they say, could increase to US$20 billion with the "long tail impact" on banks and telecommunication services firms. Dutta and Vajpayee point also to the huge untapped market that the undocumented in India represent. Of a billion-plus people, only 35 million pay income taxes, 70 million have permanent account numbers to pay taxes, 60 million have passports and 240 million have bank accounts, they note. "The resulting poverty premium means the poor pay more (via usurious credit), receive less (thanks to misdirected or misappropriated subsidies) and are even excluded from basic services such as banking."

The business opportunities begin with identifying and verifying the authenticity of potential customers for all manner of services such as banking or mobile phone subscriptions. The UIDAI has kept its task simple, as Nilekani explains it: Issue Aadhaar numbers to enrollees, and provide authentication to whomever needs it. It uses biometrics technology such as fingerprints and iris scans as its identification criteria. It collects enrollees' biometric information through "registrars" it has appointed including all state governments, several public sector organizations, banks and other entities. The registrars are responsible for hiring and training the field staff that will collect the data, each carrying a specially designed kit that includes a computer, iris and fingerprint scanners and a camera. The enrollees' information is sent to the UIDAI, which then runs them through a "de-duplication" process to weed out any duplicate entries to ensure each number is truly unique. To ensure data security and privacy, UIDAI will not release enrollees' data; it will only respond to every request for authenticating an identity with a simple "yes" or "no."

"What is special about this project is the use of today's technology and computing horsepower and biometrics ... for a developmental purpose, to give an ID to a large number of Indians who don't have any papers or an ID, and then lay the foundation for the reengineering of public services," Nilekani says in an interview. "One of the big challenges is [that] we have a nation of migrants -- 120 million migrants out there -- they don't have an ID or their ID is not recognized; they may come from one village in one state and go to another city in another state." The Aadhaar numbers will help track the delivery of government programs such as the public distribution system (PDS) for food or mid-day meals or immunization programs for school children by matching benefits with actual beneficiaries, thereby plugging siphoning of funds or leakages to the private market, as with wheat.

"The whole idea of a subsidy or benefit or entitlement delivery system is it should reach the person it is supposed to reach, so the non-transferability of these is something the government would like to ensure," says R.S. Sharma, UIDAI's director-general. "If something meant for X gets delivered to X, that in itself is a great improvement as it will eliminate the leakage and misdirection of subsidies. For example, in PDS, if you are able to ensure that the food grains meant for X are indeed delivered to X only and nobody else, this will bring in accountability at the last mile of the delivery chain."

The Power to Claim Your Money
Aadhaar will also open up a whole new market for banks and other financial services providers. UID enrollees that don't have bank accounts could have them, thanks to an agreement UIDAI has reached with the Reserve Bank of India that the data collected would meet requirements. "We are telling the banks that we will transfer a single file [to each of them] including the [enrollee's] consent and that we have done the due diligence for it," says Ashok Pal Singh, UIDAI's deputy director-general overseeing the plan for financial inclusion, besides other portfolios. "Banks can do customer acquisition without any cost." (The UID is yet to figure out the best way to apportion these account-opening mandates to banks; it may do that through competitive bidding, Singh adds.)

"The fundamental purpose of a bank account is you are associated with your money -- a demonstrated and verifiable property right over the money you have," says Arun Sundararajan, professor of information, operations and management sciences at New York University's Stern School of Business. "This is probably the most transformational IT (information technology) project we are going to see in our lifetime," says Ravi Bapna, a professor of information and decision sciences at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, who holds a joint appointment at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. He is working on a study of UID's potential with Sundararajan.

As Big as Y2K
The UID is seeing robust interest from providers of equipment, software and other services for both the enrollment process (scanners and cameras, for example) and for financial and other applications, such as micro-ATMs to facilitate financial transactions in rural areas. "We are talking to almost every MNC in the technology area," says Bala Parthasarathy, UIDAI's head of authentications and applications. They include the likes of Microsoft, LG and Oracle, besides an array of smaller, specialized technology firms like U.S.-based biometric technology services firm IriTech and business applications developer Geodesic of Mumbai. In fact, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates announced at a conference last year that he found the UID project "a great initiative" and wanted Microsoft to be part of it. Parthasarathy, a 20-year Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has taken a break to work on the UID project. He notes that he and other entrepreneurs and corporate executives whom Nilekani has attracted to UID "are here because this is more exciting than anything else we can do in the private sector."

Parthasarathy likens the UID program to the U.S. government's Darpa (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which laid the foundations of the Internet in the early 1970s. Darpa at the time launched research and applications development around communication protocols for networked computers. The reengineering of banking, PDS, government-run pension and social security programs and educational infrastructure will be on a scale similar to that of the Y2K conversions at the turn of the century, says Tushar Vashisht, manager, project strategy at UIDAI; he has taken a break from an investment banking job in Singapore to work on his current project.

UIDAI has designed and published specifications for the collection, storage and authentication of the data, and for equipment and software including iris scanners and cameras, as well as for business applications like microfinance payments. Interestingly, it has insisted on open-source technology for UID applications to the maximum extent possible. "Vendor neutrality is an absolute principle. We do not want any part of the system to be tied to any vendor," says Pramod Varma, UIDAI's chief architect overseeing its technology architecture. "We told all the vendors that if you want to be playing into this ecosystem, you have to adhere to these standards. We are going to have a plug-and-play architecture." Open-source technology enables freer competition and therefore lower prices, Varma adds.

The UID has so far certified five manufacturers of devices and plans to extend that to about five others shortly; it is working with a total of some 15 devices makers, according to Varma. He expects the first lot of about 15 registrars requiring up to 40,000 device kits in the next six to eight months, and the increasing volumes to force price declines. "For example, in the iris scanner market, we initially expected prices of about US$2,000-US$2,500 each; by the time we started enrolling [Aadhaar recipients] the price had come down to US$1,000-US$1,500, and now we are seeing sub-US$1,000 prices," Varma says.

Some foreign vendors are enthused enough to consider setting up manufacturing facilities in India to supply the Aadhaar market, Varma notes. U.S.-based L1 Identity Solutionshas already confirmed to the UIDAI that it plans a facility near New Delhi. L1, a provider of identity-related products services, recently won a US$24.5 million UIDAI order for fingerprint and iris biometric capture devices. "With the volumes, they don't have much of a choice [but] to have local assembly that is also fully locally supported," says Varma of the pressures on suppliers to set up local bases. What's more, he adds that he is also seeing "tremendous partnership activity" between local and foreign firms in products such as mobile banking devices for microfinance payments.

Streamlining Employee Benefits
Aadhaar would also help bring new efficiencies to the employment market, says Manish Sabharwal, co-founder and chairman of TeamLease Services, a large temporary staffing services provider based in Bangalore. With UID numbers, benefits such as provident fund, pension and medical insurance plans could be linked to employees' accounts, instead of the current practice of employers managing those records. "It is particularly relevant in India where 93% of employment is informal or unorganized," says Sabharwal. "The benefits world would receive a dose of productivity, transparency and lower cost if they anchor themselves in UID." Further, he expects UIDs to help separate out the administrative, investment and management functions in government-run provident fund programs and make way for new competition and lower costs. As an employer, he also looks forward to a UID-linked labor market where he can verify applicants' academic credentials.

In late October, the UIDAI signed a deal with India's ministry of human resource development to create an electronic registry of all students. The previous day, the Central Bureau of Investigation uncovered a fake university degree racket and discovered more than 51,000 forged certificates. Human resource development minister Kapil Sibal expects to use UID numbers on school records to help track student mobility, stem dropouts by monitoring student attendance and performance, prevent spurious certificates and enable employee verification, according to media reports. He also wants to link the UID numbers to education loans and scholarships.

Meanwhile, the UIDAI has gotten off to a brisk start with a critical mass of registrars including all state governments, 16 banks and the Life Insurance Corp. of India and its network of agents, according to Ashok Dalwai, its deputy director-general for the Bangalore region (covering five states in South India). The registrars also include civil society organizations that would cover migrant labor, the homeless and the physically or mentally challenged. "The whole purpose is to capture these people who are typically left out," Dalwai says. The Tata Group's CMC has been retained for training data collection operators, and the UIDAI would need about 7,000 operators to capture the targeted one crore (10 million) records in four months, he adds.

Peering not too far into the future, other opportunities could beckon UIDAI. For one, it could export its knowhow and expertise in designing, implementing and running large social and financial inclusion programs elsewhere in the world. Director-general Sharma points out that UIDAI would have the world's largest database of 1.2 billion biometric records; the biggest such database so far is the U.S. Visit program which has about 110 million biometrics records, he says. Already, Mexico and Brazil have shown interest in studying Aadhaar, and Argentina has invited Sharma for discussions on how to implement such a massive program. "The world is looking to India to see how we do it," says Sharma. "If we are able to pull it off, it will be really transformational -- not only for ourselves but also replicable elsewhere in the world."