Product news, field notes and what we're seeing across the markets we build in, Syria's tech reopening included.
Six lessons from twelve months, four offices, forty product launches, and one quiet bet that paid off bigger than we expected.
The Dubai Land Department hosts the global property-technology forum's first Middle East edition.
100% foreign ownership in software. Telecom capped at 49%. Tax holidays up to ten years. And a FATF grey-listing you must take seriously. The current rulebook, summarized.
MBZUAI's Institute of Foundation Models, with G42 and Cerebras, released a 70-billion-parameter open reasoning model built in Abu Dhabi.
Every byte of Syrian cloud traffic currently does a round trip abroad. A greenfield hosting market with new submarine capacity and a power problem — here's how the math works.
Gartner forecasts Middle East & North Africa IT spending to reach $169 billion in 2026 — up 8.9%, led by data centres and software.
From the fall of the regime to the repeal of the Caesar Act: a precise timeline of how the world's most comprehensive sanctions program was dismantled — and what's still in force.
36% penetration. A million-plus new mobile connections in a year. A user base raised on WhatsApp and Telegram. The statistics say 'underdeveloped'; the texture says 'mobile-first and ready.'
Average fixed broadband near the bottom of global rankings, electricity a few hours a day in much of the country, and Starlink in a regulatory gray zone. Here's how we design software for that — without patronizing the user.
Steam, Binance, Zoom, Google's ad network, GitHub. A running inventory of the global services that have restored access — and the legal plumbing that made it possible.
Under the old regime, an electronic application legally needed a license before it could exist. An April 2025 decision flipped the default: register your company, ship, and notify. It's the quietest big deal of the year.
A memorandum of understanding sets out to develop Syria's national payments ecosystem — a foundation for digital commerce.
On September 4, 2025, GitHub announced that private repos, paid plans, and Copilot are returning to every developer in the country. What was lost in 2019, what's restored, and what it changes.
Global technology vendors are coming back: Nokia has returned to partner on modernizing national networks and trial 5G.
On July 30, 2025, Syria was formally readmitted to the global mobile industry's standards body after more than a decade outside. Months earlier, the first 5G pilot went live in Damascus. The sequence is the story.
Syria's only stock exchange reopened in June 2025 after a closure, with the finance ministry pledging a strong focus on digital.
The Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre signed an MoU with Japan's SpaceData to build high-fidelity digital twins of the city — and the Moon.