Start-up spring

When Fida Taher decided in early 2011 to launch a website showing recipe videos, her family laughed. Not only were her cooking skills mediocre; she had no experience in business. And she was leaving a good job at a video-production company. “But I had stopped learning there and felt too young to settle,” she explains.

Today Ms Taher’s firm, Zaytouneh (“olive” in Arabic), boasts 600 visual recipes, from frying salmon to baking doughnuts. The short clips, which show only the ingredients and the hands of the cook, are a hit on YouTube and other websites. In May Zaytouneh, which now has a dozen employees, attracted financing from a satellite broadcaster, which will also air its videos. Several of the region’s mobile-telecoms operators will carry them, too.

The story sounds like a common one from Silicon Valley or Silicon Roundabout, London’s start-up district. But Ms Taher tells it in a café in Amman. She is just one of several hundred entrepreneurs, many of them women (see article), who have started online firms in Jordan’s capital in recent years, making it one of the Middle East’s leading start-up hubs. Even more surprising, such clusters (“ecosystems” in the lingo) have been popping up all over a region that is better known for armed conflict and political strife. Whether in Beirut, Cairo, Dubai, Riyadh or even Gaza City, small technology firms are multiplying, creating a sort of “start-up spring”.