The digital start-up launches a game-changing platform, which will transform the way consumers discover, learn about, and book cosmetic treatments in the UAE, with plans for regional expansion

In-depth content available in Arabic and English developed by global industry experts

Acquired seed funding of $17.5 million in June this year

selfologi, a Dubai-based digital start-up has launched a first-of-its-kind healthtech website, which enables users to discover and learn about cosmetic treatments in the UAE and KSA.

The new platform provides rich original content on cosmetic treatments allowing users to discover and compare treatments and clinics.

Consumers will now have access to articles and editorial features developed by global industry experts in Arabic and English, detailing everything they need to know to make informed decisions, with confidence. The website will serve as the go-to place for trusted information related to cosmetic treatments from fillers to skin rejuvenation, liposuction to laser hair removal.

According to google search data, more than a million searches are conducted each month on cosmetic treatments in the Middle East. Based on proprietary data, selfologi estimates that over $2.2B worth of cosmetic treatments are taking place across the region annually. However, a huge proportion of the consumers surveyed said that they cannot find the right information to book a treatment online.

In June 2021, selfologi secured $17.5 million in seed funding, led by selfologi’s founder, Tamer Wali and Xenel International group.

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“Currently, almost all cosmetic treatments are booked offline, with consumers not having access to updated, regionally-relevant information that can aid their decision-making when it comes to something as personal as cosmetic treatments and procedures. selfologi was born with the vision of offering consumers an unparalleled platform that informs, educates, and helps consumers make the right choice for themselves, and realise their full potential” said Tamer Wali, Founder of selfologi.

Rob Pye, CEO of selfologi added: “At selfologi, we aim to revolutionise the cosmetic and healthtech industry by providing a consumer-centric destination for cosmetic treatments and procedures. With support from the region’s leading experts in aesthetic technologies, alongside some of the best digital brains in the business, selfologi is set to be a game-changer and a pioneer in the multi-billion-dollar cosmetic treatments industry”.

Starting early 2022, users will be able to book cosmetic treatments directly on selfologi.com in the UAE and KSA, with the vision to become the ultimate destination for consumers and cosmetic clinics across the region. Cosmetic clinics and practitioners can join the platform to enhance their visibility and allow clients to book appointments directly online.

Cosmetic treatment professionals can learn more about selfologi at MEIDAM 2021 (Middle East International Dermatology Aesthetic Medicine Conference and Exhibition), taking place September 23-25 at Intercontinental Dubai Festival City.

ZENIQ’s vision paves the way to Dubai’s position as “Center of the sixth era of world creativity”

ZENIQ Technologies Ltd, a provider of blockchain-based decentralised applications, will launch a tokenization project in Dubai on Tuesday to revolutionise the trading of digital assets. To mark the occasion, members of the public will be invited to view for the first time a unique show of digital artworks displayed on the world’s largest façade screen of the Burj Khalifa.

The project will see the establishment of non-fungible token (NFT) trading platforms for real estate, gold and precious metals, gemstones and digital art. The launch will take place at “The Future of Digital Assets” conference at the Armani Hotel in the Burj Khalifa, Dubai, on Tuesday, 21 September, under the patronage of Sheikh Saeed bin Hasher Al Maktoum, chairman of ZENIQ Technologies. The public exposition of art on the Burj Khalifa will take place at 9:10 pm.

The ZENIQ Art NFT will be the first of several tokens, which are in effect digital stamps of ownership and provenance. Dubai has been selected as the launch venue for the ZENIQ Art NFT because of the city’s increasing role as a global centre for investment in digital art.

“We believe that Dubai will be the focus for the sixth era of world creativity,” said Erwin Dokter, founder and CEO of ZENIQ Technologies.

Distinguished authors believe in the idea that along the history of humanity, some cities were the center of world creativity. Remarkable examples are Athens, Hangzhou, Florence, Edinburgh and, most recently, Silicon Valley.

Paco Bree, professor of innovation at Deusto Business School, digital artist and cofounder of Paradima.io, a company specializing in Digital Art Knowledge, also argues that Dubai is fast emerging as the sixth centre of creativity throughout human history. Some of the factors that nurture this vision be include the commitment to invest and promote creativity and exponential technologies to solve global challenges for a better world. It is no coincidence that Dubai has just announced a new Dubai Creative Economy Strategy, with the aim of doubling its number of creative companies in the next five years. ZENIQ is very proud to be part of that.

The ZENIQ Art NFT will facilitate the authentication, sale and transfer of digital artworks in a safe digital environment. “We are convinced that the ZENIQ Art NFT, used in conjunction with our secure blockchain platform, will stimulate uptake from artists, buyers and dealers alike and grow the market for digital artworks both in Dubai and internationally,” Mr Dokter said.

Blockchain is a system in which a growing list of records is linked and encrypted to protect the security and privacy of users, applications and assets. Blockchain is maintained on multiple computers that are linked on a peer-to-peer network. The ZENIQ ecosystem and its blockchain is designed to provide unprecedented security standards for these assets.

ZENIQ Technologies was conceived in AREA 2071 of the Dubai Future Foundation. AREA 2071 is a physical manifestation of the drive to make Dubai the world’s leading city in terms of innovation, and ideas with positive global impact.

Hybrid Multicloud Leader Continues Channel Investment with Strategic Hire To Drive Company Growth

Nutanix (NASDAQ:NTNX), a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, today announced the promotion of Adam Tarbox to Vice President of EMEA Channel Sales. This senior promotion demonstrates Nutanix’s continued investment in the channel as it looks to accelerate the company to its next level of growth and support partners and customers in their journey to hybrid multicloud.

In this role, Tarbox will lead all routes to market, spearheading channel activities in all the European countries, Middle East and Africa region and will draw upon his extensive industry experience to play a strategic role in supporting Nutanix’s expansion in EMEA. Assuming overall responsibility for Nutanix’s go-to-market strategies with resellers, distributors, OEM platform partners, system integrators and technology partners in the EMEA region, he will be key in driving the continued growth and success of the company’s already enviable channel and alliance ecosystem.

Commenting on his appointment, Tarbox said: “Partners have and will continue to be an integral part of our success, and I’m inspired by the passion and drive of Nutanix’s channel team. My commitment is to listen, learn and lead through our partners so they can continue delivering business outcomes, best-in-class transformational solutions and a digital-first customer experience. I am looking forward to building upon our deep relationships with partners to help reach the next level of mutual growth.”

Prior to his new role, Adam was Director of Global System Integrator (GSI) Business for EMEA, where he was responsible for developing and executing an overarching regional alliance strategy for Nutanix’s GSI partners. Adam successfully led a team distributed across the EMEA region focused on driving go-to-market activities with GSIs around joint offerings for both horizontal markets and industry verticals.

Christian Alvarez, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channels at Nutanix said: “As Nutanix continues to transform to a subscription model, we continue to invest in the channel while retaining the best and brightest talent in the industry. Adam has a proven track record of driving transformational change and implementing successful strategies to deliver growth. By harnessing both Adam’s strategic abilities and experience, we can enable our partners of today and tomorrow to gain maximum benefit from our highly innovative solutions portfolio.” He continued: “I look forward to working closely with Adam to deliver our shared vision of assisting partners to accelerate their business by delivering the freedom of choice that enables true hybrid multicloud computing. As the channel is going through digital transformation to cloud, Nutanix is one of the only multicloud, multi-product companies carrying the torch to light the way ahead. Adam is the person best suited to do this, while executing on our mission to help both our partners and customers on their journey to hybrid multicloud.”

Barracuda, a trusted partner and leading provider of cloud-enabled security solutions, today released key findings from a report titled “The state of network security in 2021.” Commissioned by Barracuda, the research surveyed 750 IT decision makers responsible for their organization’s networking, public cloud, and security to get their perspectives on cloud adoption, working from home, security concerns, and a variety of issues and challenges related to cybersecurity risks.

Overall, the research shows that network breaches, ransomware attacks, and remote-work challenges underscore the need for cloud-native Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) deployments. Highlights from the report include:

• 81% of respondents said their organization has been the victim of a security breach once in the last year.
• Companies with staff working predominantly from home had a significantly higher network security breach rate (85%), compared to companies with staff working predominantly in the office (65%).  
• A full 74% of those surveyed said their organization has been the victim of at least one ransomware attack in the last year.
• On average, only 14% of employees at the businesses surveyed currently work in the office all the time.
• A full 97% of respondents with company-issued devices share their home internet connection with other members of their household, so the risk of breach remains.
• 73% of companies with all apps in the public cloud have already deployed SD-WAN, twice as many as companies with only a few apps in the public cloud (37%).
• 68% of companies with all apps in the public cloud have deployed Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), while just 38% of companies with only a few apps in the public cloud have deployed it.
• On average, organizations have 31 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps deployed.
• On average, respondents said 64% of their traffic is directed to public cloud providers.

“Organizations are experiencing a high level of network breaches and facing ongoing connectivity and security challenges as they adapt to hybrid work environments,” said Tim Jefferson, SVP, Engineering for Data, Networks and Application Security, Barracuda. “But, they are realizing that moving to SaaS applications and the public cloud improves both the user experience and security, so they’re starting to embrace new SASE technologies.”

Resources: 

Download the full report: http://www.barracuda.com/netsec-report-2021

Safe Security, backed by British Telecom & John Chambers invests in international markets to drive next phase of growth

Safe Security, a pioneer in Cybersecurity & Digital Business Risk Quantification today announced its entry into the Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) region, to build on its success in North America. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Safe Security helps organisations manage, measure and mitigate cyber risks with its breach likelihood prediction platform SAFE. Backed by marquee investors such as British Telecom Group, John Chambers and other prominent industry leaders, the company appointed Cherif Sleiman, a veteran industry leader to head the business for international markets.

Sleiman is a visionary technologist and ‘turnaround specialist’ who will focus on building Safe Security’s regional presence, go-to-market and channel strategy in the region. Over his illustrious career which spans over 26 years, he has held leadership positions at giants of the tech industry including Cisco, Nortel, Brocade and most recently Infoblox. As part of its business expansion strategy, Safe Security will significantly ramp up its investments in Europe, Middle East & Africa – regions that the company believes are key to its growth. It plans to hire more than 100 employees in the next 18 months in the region.

Reflecting on his appointment, Cherif said, “Cybersecurity is a global concern. For all of the time, money, and energy spent telling us how to protect ourselves including what to buy to do so, there’s little sense of actual progress when it comes to security. And that’s key, because safety is not about how much money we spend on products, analysts or investments, it is simply about Knowing. Safe Security is uniquely positioned to provide organisations with the knowledge necessary to better secure their organisations. The SAFE platform delivers 360 degree continuous, dynamic & intelligent quantitative cyber risk management and breach likelihood prediction by assessing People, IT Infrastructure, Cloud Presence, Saas Deployments and Third Party Partnerships. It streamlines the knowledge and language needed by all stakeholders, from the boardroom to the frontline security professionals, so accurate decisions and actions can be taken in a timely fashion. I am excited to join Safe Security and honoured by the trust they have in me. I am confident that we will grow exponentially in the next 2-3 years across international markets.”

Over the course of the last year, cyber security incidents have seen a dramatic increase globally. With the growing sophistication of cyber attacks, cybersecurity through generic red-amber-green heat maps is not enough. Safe Security is at the epicentre of this paradigm shift; they provide an enterprise-wide, objective, unified and real-time cyber risk quantification platform called SAFE. It aggregates automated signals across people, process technology and even third party entities that an organisation works with, to dynamically predict the breach likelihood (SAFE Score) & the financial risk of the breach, to an organisation. 

Saket Modi, Co-founder & CEO, Safe Security said, “With SAFE, we have created a brand new category of products within cybersecurity, and we are pioneering the shift from a project led, reactive risk management approach to one that is proactive, and enables the Board to truly understand cybersecurity in a de-jargonized manner. Our vision is to make the SAFE score the global de-facto standard for measuring and mitigating cyber risks and our expansion to international markets is central to this vision.  International markets are extremely strategic for us and I am ecstatic to have Cherif join us to lead our business in the EMEA region. Cherif is a proven business leader and I am confident that he will replicate our global success and make Safe Security the preferred partner for addressing customer’s needs in the region.” 

By: Adrian Taylor, Vice President, A10 Networks

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of digital resiliency in the modern era. With employees working from home, and a shift online for consumer activities from banking and retail and media, to entertainment and healthcare, ensuring application performance and application availability became a matter of survival for most companies. Whether people are working or going about their personal lives, they expect a high-quality user experience for the applications they use—every time, with no excuses—with cybersecurity they can count on to protect customer data and privacy. These demands have made the application delivery controller (ADC) one of the most important components of modern digital infrastructure.

At the same time, maintaining application performance and application availability for existing resources isn’t enough to guarantee survival. In today’s digital business environment, you have to stay agile and innovative to compete, grow, and thrive. In fact, even facing an uncertain economic outlook over the past year, businesses plan to invest in digital transformation spending during the pandemic. That puts DevOps front-and-centre in digital business strategy as companies seek simple, streamlined ways to develop, deploy, change, and manage applications. The results speak for themselves: companies that use DevOps achieve 46x more software deployments and 440x faster lead time for changes. Here again, the ADC has a critical role to play in enabling the full speed and agility DevOps makes possible.

Of course, simply deploying ADCs isn’t a solution in and of itself; meeting these requirements depends on having the right application delivery controller capabilities and deploying them in the right way. Here are a few things to consider, to ensure that your application delivery infrastructure is meeting the digital transformation needs of your business and customers.

Using ADCs to Ensure Application Performance, Application Availability, and Cybersecurity

Whether it’s customers or employees who are using your applications, the experience you provide has a direct effect on digital business performance. If customers become frustrated or are unable to use your applications or services effectively, they can take their cash—and their loyalty—to a competitor. Without reliable application performance and application availability, your workforce can grind to a halt, sending waves of disruption throughout your business. Gartner estimates the average cost of downtime is $5,600 per minute which equates to more than $300,000 an hour.

Your application delivery controller solution can help you maintain a high-quality user experience by enabling a unified approach to managing performance, troubleshooting problems, and optimising traffic across complex environments with holistic visibility into devices, applications, policies, users, and more across data centres and clouds. By gathering and analysing data from across your hybrid infrastructure, you can work proactively to detect anomalies sooner, diagnose problems more accurately, and resolve issues more quickly. Global server load balancing functionality can intelligently guide application traffic to the best available site for each user to ensure the best possible service.

Ensuring high availability, disaster recovery, and rapid failover across cloud providers is essential to keeping employees productive and customers satisfied. As part of its global web traffic management capability, your ADCs can assess the health and response time of each site in your environment, then make intelligent adjustments to application traffic to prevent a failed server from affecting users. Similarly, an ADC solution can help you use a public cloud as a backup for your on-premises data centre using global server load balancing to determine when and how to tap into that capacity, then reroute traffic accordingly.

While application performance and application availability are the foundation of user satisfaction and loyalty, a cybersecurity breach can destroy that trust in a flash. As ransomware attacks, DDoS, and other threats grow in sophistication, and enterprise environments become more distributed and dynamic, cybersecurity and compliance become critical challenges. Your ADC solution can provide a unified policy infrastructure across every platform you use, making it easier to provide the same, consistent protection for applications and services wherever they are deployed. By managing authentication consistently across cloud and on-premises platforms, you can support a Zero Trust security model while providing employees with the right level of access for their needs. Protective measures such as security analytics, DDoS protection, web application firewalls (WAF), authentication, modern SSL/TLS encryption standards, and threat intelligence enable a multi-layered approach to cybersecurity for defence in-depth.

Supporting DevOps—While Simplifying Management at Digital Speed

DevOps isn’t just a core methodology for digital transformation—it’s also a set of technical requirements. To enable development and operations teams to collaborate effectively across the software development lifecycle, you need to provide simple, streamlined ways to develop, deploy, change, and manage applications. A standard set of automation tools across platforms can help teams work efficiently, bring new staff up to speed more quickly, and ensure consistent best practices. Real-time continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) visualisation can help teams catch costly errors before applications enter production.

The rapid pace of digital transformation can increase both cost and management complexity. By providing a single point of management across your hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environment, with comprehensive visibility and analytics for actionable intelligence, your ADC solution can help your staff use resources more efficiently, make better decisions, avoid errors, and simplify operations.

Coursera, Inc. (NYSE: COUR), one of the largest online learning platforms in the world, today released a new study that examines the pandemic’s impact on skills and learning trends among women. The Women and Skills Report compares pre-pandemic enrollment and performance data with trends observed on the Coursera platform since the onset of the pandemic through June 2021. The new study found that women in the UAE are learning online at higher rates compared to pre-pandemic, with the share of STEM course enrollments from women increasing from 32% in 2019 to 37% in 2021. 

One of the key objectives of the Dubai Plan 2021 is to create an ‘inclusive and cohesive society’. The country as a whole has closed 71.6% of its gender gaps to date according to the 2021 WEF Global Gender Gap report, advancing 48 ranks in the gender gap index in just one year, from #120 rank to #72 globally. The UAE is also identified as the most-improved country in the world for women in parliament.

This aligns with Coursera’s findings in the report. The overall share of Coursera for Government learners in the country is nearing parity with 45% of government learners in the UAE being women. The Abu Dhabi School of Government (ADSG), which partners with Coursera to upskill its entire government workforce, for example, is championing online learning among women. In 2020, women accounted for 43% of overall course enrollments in ADSG’s learning initiative, up from 39% in 2019.

“It’s promising to see how the gender gap in online learning has narrowed since the pandemic”, said Anthony Tattersall, Coursera VP of EMEA. “We are particularly encouraged by how women in the UAE are embracing online learning in the field of STEM. This can help accelerate their return to work, bolster economic growth, and foster gender pay parity.”

Key UAE insights from the Women and Skills Report include:

• Women are turning to online education at higher rates than pre-pandemic. The UAE has 220,000 registered women learners on Coursera. In 2020, a peak of 47% new registered UAE learners were women. While this share is at 44% in 2021, it still represents an increase from 42% in 2019. Forty-five percent of female learners in the country also use mobile to learn.

• More women in the UAE are enrolling in STEM courses and entry-level Professional Certificates. The share of overall course enrollments from women increased from 38% in 2019 to 42% in 2021. For STEM courses, the gender gap narrowed from a share of 32% of enrollments from women in 2019 to 37% in 2021. Women’s enrollments in entry-level Professional Certificates have also gone up in the country from 26% in 2019 to 32% in 2021. These certificates, from industry leaders such as Google, IBM, and Facebook, are designed to prepare learners without a college degree or technology experience for a wide range of high-demand digital jobs.

• Top skills among UAE women show a strong inclination towards business leadership. Top skills UAE women have developed over the past year include communication (110,000 enrollments from UAE women), leadership and management (100,000), and entrepreneurship (80,000). Women are also investing in STEM skills, like probability and statistics (70,000), data analysis (60,000), and machine learning (50,000). The most popular courses among women in the UAE teach job-relevant and personal development skills, including The Science of Wellbeing from Yale University and English for Career Development from the University of Pennsylvania.

• Businesses, governments, and campuses can play a key role in reducing gender gaps in learning. In 2021, programmes where Coursera is used by various governments and campuses in the UAE saw the share of women registered learners was nearing parity, standing at 45% and 48% respectively. Better gender share is likely to contribute to more diverse talent pipelines for employers. Among businesses, women now constitute 36% of UAE learners.

Key global insights from the Women and Skills Report include:

• Women learners enroll more than men in courses taught by women instructors. Instructor representation is one of the most important factors contributing to increases in women’s enrollments. Forty-nine percent of enrollments from women learners are in courses with women instructors, compared to 38% for men learners. The most popular women instructors on Coursera include Laurie Santos (The Science of Wellbeing, Yale University), Seung Hae Kang (First Step Korean, Yonsei University), and Dr. Rosa I. Arriaga (Introduction to User Experience, Georgia Institute of Technology).

• Product innovations help grow women’s participation in online learning. Factors contributing to enrollment increases from women include adding practice quizzes before challenging assessments (+12% increase in share of lifetime enrollments from women), listing most common mistakes for peer-reviewed assignments (+16%), and distributing assessments throughout a course (+8%).

“I earned my computer science degree with only a handful of women alongside me, and while a great deal has changed since then, we still have important work to do to increase women’s representation in technology and leadership,” said Betty Vandenbosch, Chief Content Officer at Coursera. “Access to flexible, job-relevant education can help women learn the new skills they need to enter high-demand roles and achieve better gender balance in the workforce.”

With over 87 million learners and 5,000 courses on the platform, Coursera has one of the largest data sets for identifying and measuring skill trends. The Women and Skills Report includes data from 40 million new learners who registered during the pandemic between January 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021.