Ideas Oasis freezes operations

Dubai Ideas Oasis (DIO), the Technology, E-Commerce and Media Free Zone's (Tecom) venture capital initiative, will be revived when conditions in the information technology industry are suitable, said Ahmed bin Byat, director-general of Tecom.

"As it stands now, the brand and the business operations that it represented have been frozen," he added.

"However, there is the likelihood that a sizeable portion of what the DIO initially represented will be brought under the pur-view of the Knowledge Village. This is what we are planning for."

"Also, the focus will be reworked to help entities with concepts or technologies that can be made relevant to this part of the world," said bin Byat.

For instance, he added, this could be about working on solutions for water resource management or waste management.

Within the Knowledge Village, the emphasis will be more on the scientific and the practical, as opposed to ideas-driven businesses that were spawned at the height of dotcom mania, said Dr. Abdullah Karam, director of Knowledge Village recently.

The DIO was supposed to be one of the pillars of Tecom, with a focus on providing venture capital and incubation support to IT startups in the Middle East and some of the markets adjoining it.

Apart from Tecom, plans were afoot to rope in big names such as Visa, Intel and Accenture to be partners in the DIO programme. Nothing much came out of that.

"When DIO was first envisaged, the global market for IT was upbeat about dotcoms. Obvio-usly, things have changed and there was no point in trying to run something that investors did not want any more," said Bin Byat.

"Now, our emphasis is not to go after global investors, but tap resources from within."

Before it went into cold storage, DIO did manage to identify and support six entities. Of them, three did not make it past the first post, while three did, which is a fairly good hit-and-miss rate in the world of venture capital.

A marked successes was Vert-scape, one of the three winners of the e-business challenge floated by DIO. The company, now based at Dubai Media City, received a cash award of $150,000 at the time. However, there was no equity involved.

"In the first half of last year, we went through an incubation period where we were able to leverage the services on offer from the free zone. DIO was a good building platform," said Chirag Patel, one of the founding partners of Vertscape, which provides solutions such as CRM.

In six months, Vertscape won contracts from Thuraya, with which it was involved in three phases, and the Kanoo Group.