STARTUP RISING

Entrepreneur and venture investor Schroeder debuts with a report on technology and entrepreneurial activities across the Middle East.

Involved with startup companies like Abraaj in Dubai and with the American University in Cairo, where he serves as a director for the School of Business, the author has an easy familiarity with individuals at all levels of business. Schroeder passes easily from reporting discussions with young wannabes, such as the Saudi Arabian working to develop and market a leather carrying case for IT products, to explorations of the development of Egypt's arterial water-supply potentials and the establishment of health-monitoring capabilities in the Middle East and Africa. Schroeder draws examples from Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and other countries, and he discusses the impact of Vodafone's Safaricom and its fund-transfer apps in Kenya. The narrative really comes alive when the author chronicles the activities of the tech-savvy young Eygptians, Jordanians and Lebanese who are beginning to create new kinds of hope for their countries. He looks at weather-monitoring programs, apps that permit Cairo's unbelievable traffic to be properly examined and startups working on making money out of creating a recycling system that can be tracked online. He shows how university environments are helping to attract the pools of talent from which such potentials are generated. The author's accounts of Jordan, where youth programs are providing opportunities to explore notions of self-determination while learning about entrepreneurship, are particularly fascinating.

A lively introduction to a new generation's efforts to shape a future free of outdated notions of entitlement.