I was suffering from a bit of an intestinal bug last night, so I took it easy today. We had planned on going on a tour of the city, but I had to beg off. Instead, I'll give you a couple pictures of the colorful Gaza harbor, across from my room:
Taking the morning off gave me enough energy to get through the afternoon, spending about 6 hours with four different companies, reviewing their business plans and marketing ideas. They ranged from a company that inspired to make an insert for your shoes, which would generate electricity as you walked, to one who had a very elegant prototyping tool for web developers.
I have reviewed lots of business plans and watched a lot of pitches all over the world, but this is the first time I've seen pitches that have to be done from inside of what is essentially a giant prison camp. How do you do sales if you have no prospect of visiting a customer? How do you keep a developer up to date if s/he can't go to a conference or even visit a client? Everything has to be done remotely.
This affects the types of businesses that can be realistically created in Gaza. You look for companies that can do remote sales and marketing, entirely through the Internet.
On the other hand, they have the advantage of an extremely hard working, very motivated workforce, with surprisingly good technical skills, at low cost. They have not worked in large teams in a world-class company, but many of them are quite familiar with state-of-the-art development techniques. They will know lots about Angular and JavaScript, not so much about Cassandra or Bigtable.
I have reviewed lots of business plans and watched a lot of pitches all over the world, but this is the first time I've seen pitches that have to be done from inside of what is essentially a giant prison camp. How do you do sales if you have no prospect of visiting a customer? How do you keep a developer up to date if s/he can't go to a conference or even visit a client? Everything has to be done remotely.
This affects the types of businesses that can be realistically created in Gaza. You look for companies that can do remote sales and marketing, entirely through the Internet.
On the other hand, they have the advantage of an extremely hard working, very motivated workforce, with surprisingly good technical skills, at low cost. They have not worked in large teams in a world-class company, but many of them are quite familiar with state-of-the-art development techniques. They will know lots about Angular and JavaScript, not so much about Cassandra or Bigtable.
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