Project Pen

Our books are in safe hands. Some of the books might even be making their way back to ! Thanks @ Sharjah Art Foundation

Project Pen. on Twitter “Thank you to Manal from for collecting our books! The books are in good hands & will be given to charities in & 😌”

;)

projectpen.com ادخل بياناتك لتكون من اول الحاصلين على نسخة من كتاب "ماسكارا" المقدم من مشروع قلم

So Facebook, this article is "What's On Our Mind," by our friend Laith Zraikat from Jeeran Amman

We'll be closing down in soon, which kinda sucks given that the media and creative class in Amman, basically helped build us.

Our books in stores across Rainbow Street will not be re-stocked.

Many of the mistakes were our own. Almost all, in fact.

But not being able to get visa's for our team, legally open a bank account for our team, or have access to the same digital resources that Israel or Dubai have access to, made it more difficult to scale in the way we wanted, and compete. [Youtube Enterprise, Paypal, Square are some examples].

To get around this, our founder had to fly to the United States to open as a subsidiary in Delaware - it worked out much cheaper.

Jordan has the best creative class and talent in the region. With cheap rent, lots of internet cafe's, and a young population that are educated and often speak fluent English - its the perfect place to startup, and a perfect launching point between East and West.

Despite the efforts of the Royal Family in the Kingdom, it sometimes seem like a tiny % in domestic government are slowing everything and everyone else down.

This is most visible in the tourism sector - where state of the art campaigns from one corner of the city, are fighting against government regulations that vastly overprice visits to Petra, or ask visitors to pay almost $100 to pay for a visa and get a taxi at the airport. Guys, its not going to happen. This is now how you welcome visitors - not when is free to enter.

In the startup sector, Jordan has some of the best incubators in the world. Zain Innovation Campus - ZINC is a global standard co-working space. Oasis 500 is a notable strategic asset to the country as a whole.

Global cities, like , where rent prices are a big issue, struggle to provide resources like this for their top graduates. Outside of & , Europe has relatively few resources given the respective size of its economies. In the United States, most co-working labs cost between $350-750 a month.

There have been so many failures in 's sector over the past six years. We're one of them. It was 90% our failure. But circumstances did not help.

Without pointing fingers or getting upset, it is probably time to start asking "why?" 💔

For tech’s sake, get out of our way [Opinion] Last October we found out the royal court wanted some major changes to reawaken Jordan’s technology sector. This was no surprise to those of us in the tech startup ecosystem: the sector produced less...