Ihsan Jawad has swapped from space to cyberspace. Zawya, the fast growing website of which he is founder and CEO, is now firmly established as a must-use resource for business professionals through out the region.
Since setting up zawya.com in London in 2000 at the age of just 28 years, Jawad's business has grown to such an extent that today he employs more than 80 people between offices in Dubai and Beirut.
Now aged 34 years and having moved his business lock, stock and barrel to Dubai in 2002 after it suffered the side effects of the internet bubble burst, Jawad is aiming once again for the stars.
Following its latest audit by ABC UK Online, which confirmed 212,853 individual users, he has every reason to be optimistic. More cause for cheer is last year's joint initiative with the Dow Jones and the launch of the Zawya-Dow Jones financial newswire a huge step forward.
Sitting in Zawya's brand new and sparkling HQ in Dubai International Finance Centre you get an immediate sense of the future and Jawad's mind is clearly focused on this too. But he is also keen to talk about the not so distant past and Zawya's meteoric rise.
Originally from Iraq but a British citizen since moving there at the age of eight, Jawad studied physics before switching to finance as part of his PHD in Mathematical Finance.
"I was working in investment banking for the Middle East when I spotted the need for regular, reliable and easy to access information for business professionals," he says. "That was what first gave me the idea."
And he didn't hang about. Resigning from his job on his 28th birthday Jawad launched Zawya just a few months later. He began by raising $1 million, a huge amount then and even by today's standards.
He managed it in a week. "In 2000 there was a huge interest in the internet," he says modestly. "I had a business plan with dot com in it and so people were interested.
"Also I really believed in the concept; it was more than just another dot com idea. From day one we wanted to build a real 'bricks and mortar company' which would collect information, audit it, analyze it, structure it and present it to an audience that would find it useful and pay money for it.
"We called ourselves zawya meaning angle because we want to give all of the different angles on a story," he explains.
"It's not our opinion, it's a way of collecting all of the different angles."
The site has three main platforms; Zawya Premium, which has general business news plus detailed company databases and sector analyses; Zawya Investor, which has the Dow Jones newswire and mees@zawya, aimed at the gas and oil industries.
The three platforms carry different subscription levels. "There is easy to get information that is free and there is hard to get information that you have to pay for."
That 80% of Zaywa's content is paid for makes its success even more remarkable and Jawad is quick to point out that it is this which differentiates it from the competition.
"By making the information available to subscribers we have achieved a critical mass and we are getting the right audience," he explains. "Another good thing is that it enables us to really know who our audience are and what their expectations are.
"It also gives us loyalty. I think true media is only true if it has an identity, a policy and a personality. For example, people read and are influenced by the Financial Times and The Economist because they have specific identities that is what we recognize that we need to have as a media company."
The association with the Dow Jones is something of which Jawad is rightly proud.
"It's a vote of confidence for us for the setups that we have and our structures that we have managed to persuade the Dow Jones, which has some of the most important medial assets in the world, to go into partnership with us," he says.
For the Zawya Premium platform, Jawad hopes that a similar partnership can be entered into to create a micro site for the specific use of the sales and marketing professionals, many of whom, he says, already find the service useful.
"Marketing and sales professionals want to know industry prices and trends, they want to know what's happening in the market overall, they want lists of companies and clients as well as trend analyses," he says.
"We have all of that and otherwise it is very difficult information to get."
He adds: "We also know how many people work in a certain sector, how fast it is growing, what generations there are and also who the big players are that is the kind of information people need.
"Sales and marketing is a big audience because every company has a sales and marketing department. You are looking at a whole region and so there's a lot of scope. However, in general these people are not information junkies and so we need to create a platform especially for them."
Zawya's detailed company database containing information about 10,000 of the Middle East's biggest firms is also a valuable resource and Jawad suggested that direct marketing is something he will look at in the future.
Just spending an hour with Jawad gives you an idea of his relentless activity Zawya is not stopping and neither is he.
When asked his traffic targets for the site he is quick to jump to a figure of "around half a million by the end of the year."
A little ambitious? "Yes," he admits, "But up until now it has just been about creating the product and we have done very little PR, so to speak, and no dedicated marketing campaigns."
"It is not easy to charge for products online there has to be reliability and credibility.
"Now we think we have this and we also have all these different platforms which we didn't have in 2002, so now is the time to go out and market it.
"We are being quite aggressive and running campaigns on BBC, CNN and CNBC, as well as in some of the newspapers.
"Now that we know the audience we are attracting and the technical support is in place we are making an effort to push for traffic increase."
Part of this technical support, of which he is extremely proud, is a seven day a week telephone helpline, which means that client interaction is a regular occurrence. It currently receives around 20 calls a day.
"The advice that we have at this time is not to go out and market specific platforms," Jawad continues, adding that Zawya itself is undergoing strong brand reinforcement.
"At the moment, we are just brand building and letting people know more about the Zawya operations and about the business values what we stand for."
This push will no doubt be aided by the news that Zawya has just invested in an autonomous search engine, to be launched this month. As a result of the investment, more of the content will be opened up, and the previous seven days worth of news made free of charge.
A recent addition has also been a link up with Dubai Eye 103.8's Business Breakfast, audio trails of which are now available free of charge on the site.
"This is content aggregation on a different level," explains Jawad.
"Now we are moving on to different formats and so TV might be next. The beauty of it is exclusivity and the opportunity it gives for branding and sponsorship which we are looking into at the moment."
It is these constant technological changes and updates that may help Zawya to hold its own in a competitive market. Ameinfo, Maktoob.com and MEED, among others, are all competing for a share in what, although growing rapidly, is still a fledgling sector.
"We do have our work cut out for us," admits Jawad. "There is Ameinfo and MEED which both have wide audiences. For the investor platform there is competition from Reuters which is a widely known brand in the Middle East.
"However, through partnerships we can provide viable alternatives and hopefully this one we are building now will prove a good alternative to Ameinfo."
While Ameinfo is now backed by the resources of global media giant Emap, regional Zawya has only Jawad's energy, combined with the strong determination and insight of the Zawya team. That, you suspect, will be more than enough.
Curriculum vitae
Age: 34
Marital status: Married this year
Lives: Dubai
Education: BSc Physics, Masters Laser Physics, Imperial College London
Career high: "...a major client calling me up and saying we have helped to make their business better."
Career low: "18 months after starting the company ...we had very little support and it was hard to convince people that this is the future."
First job: Analyst in city group, sponsors of a Mathematical Finance PHD which he is yet to finish)
Hobbies: "...squash... keep fit ... read about history, education and behavior."
Dream job: "This is pretty much it. Anything that gives people knowledge. Knowledge is important."
Gulf Marketing Review 2006
