ArabNet Roadshow 2010

Yesterday I attended ArabNet Cairo Workshop organized by the International Business Alliance Group (IBAG) in Partnership with The American University in Cairo, School of Business , It was held at the American University in Cairo (AUC), Ewart Memorial Hall, DownTown Campus.

The workshop started 6pm by Omar Christidis ( @Omarchr ) , founder of ArabNet and VP of IBAG , introducing ArabNet then started talking about how to start your own business and introduced six steps needed to transform an idea into a business case:
1. The value of work presented.
2. The target market.
3. Who are the competitors.
4. The infrastructure.
5. Setting up a budget.
6. How to find investments. 

Then Omar invited the first speaker to step up on stage. The first speaker was Badr El Din Abdel Khalek, a lawyer & head of TAG Legal Egypt office , he discussed the legal issues concerning starting up a company in Egypt and presented different types of companies ; Capital companies , Joint-stock companies , Share recommendation companies and Limited responsibility companies. He advised the entrepreneurs with limited responsibility companies.

The third part was about financing your startup panel, presented by three speakers: Ahmed El Alfi (@AOAlfi ); Chairman of Sawari Ventures , Tarek Assaad (@tassaad ) ; Managing Partner of Ideavelopers , and Walid Bakr; Partner of Riyada Enterprise Development , summarized in the following points:

• Business has to go through four stages: seed, early stage, growth, maturity. 
• The seed stage starts with self funding then FFF (Friends, Family and Fools) given that an investor won't put money in your company unless you run out of money. 
• The minimum required capital to start a limited responsibility company in Egypt is 200 EGP.
• An entrepreneur has to visualize his idea to attract investors attention. 
• To get funding for your project you must be flexible and adaptable with changes. 
• Investors evaluate your project based on type of business, the value and size. 
• Some investors are looking for companies that use social media others looking for those that use e-marketing. 
• One of the things that investor care about is the entrepreneur's ethics and way of acting.

Then we had 10 mins break. In break, I've met some entrepreneurs like Abdelrahman Magdy ( @abdome ) he said " As an entrepreneur I should keep myself updated in Egypt, that's why I came to this event ". Another entrepreneur Noha Mahmoud ( @NohaMahmoud ), she said that she is working on a project about mobile applications with her friend Rasha Tantawy, she was interested to know the legal issues part.

After break, Gamal Selim ( @gimbo ), the Co-founder of Masrawy and Ziad Aly ( @Ziadaly ) , Serial Entrepreneur & CEO of ZMS ( Zwad Mobile Services ) stepped up on stage each to talk about his experience as a co-founder and entrepreneur which was really interesting.

The last part was about the trends in the web sector, presented by Cornelius O´Donnell ( @kanaafa ) , Wael Fakharany ( @mowael );The Regional Manager Egypt and North Africa at Google and Karim Khalifa ; CEO & Co-Founder at Digital Republic, summarized in the following points:

• Social Media is one of most important digital trends in the region.
• We should see a wave of mobile applications made in Egypt and serve Egyptian needs in the near future.
• There are almost 20 million Internet users ( 70% access from Universities , 7% from work and 14% other)  and 7 million mobile Internet users ( 96% of them use prepaid credit scratch cards ) in Egypt.
• There are 4.5 million user of Facebook in Egypt.
• 70% of online users use Facebook  and 9% only use Twitter in the Middle East.
• People spend up to 3hrs everyday on social networks in Egypt ( Males are more than Females ).

Finally, There were breakout sessions, speakers sat on different round tables where entrepreneurs  can have informal discussions with them.

On the following day, Omar Christidis quoted on twitter that there were about 500+ attendees.

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