News
Female Entrepreneurship Is Growing Rapidly In The UAE
The United Arab Emirates is seeing greater female representation in startups, boardrooms, and venture funding firms.
A rise in the number of women-led startups and venture funds is set to boost female entrepreneurship across the United Arab Emirates, which has already grown significantly in recent years. In October, global technology group e& launched a $250 million venture capital fund to support a new startup ecosystem and diversity and inclusion of women are crucial parameters to qualify for investment.
“Women have a voice that is loud and clear in boardrooms, in investment committees, and in funding rounds. I see a lot of opportunities created for women, especially in recent years,” explained Zahra El Zayat, chief commercial officer at evision, during an online panel hosted by the Atlantic Council’s WIn Fellowship earlier this week.
Meanwhile, Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador to the US, explained to the panel, “I know funding, in general, is hard, even for young men now, it is not just a challenge for women [but] we have to create the right ecosystem and allow more encouragement, more risk-taking and more incentivizing for women [to motivate them to] enter this space”.
Also Read: Dubai’s Sheikh Hamdan Launches New Digital Cloud Project
Nearly half of female business owners in the UAE find it tough to raise capital, with up to 80% tapping into personal savings to achieve their goals, according to Visa’s Women SMB Digitalisation Index.
However, the index also found that women-owned companies in the UAE scored highly regarding digital marketing, online presence, and customer engagement.
The UAE’s government has passed several laws over the past 15 years to enhance female contribution to society and sustainable development goals, reflecting a genuine commitment to equality across economic, social, and work environments.
News
Google Releases Veo 2 AI Video Tool To MENA Users
The state-of-the-art video generation model is now available in Gemini, offering realistic AI-generated videos with better physics, motion, and detail.
Starting today, users of Gemini Advanced in the MENA region — and globally — can tap into Veo 2, Google’s next-generation video model.
Originally unveiled in 2024, Veo 2 has now been fully integrated into Gemini, supporting multiple languages including Arabic and English. The rollout now brings Google’s most advanced video AI directly into the hands of everyday users.
Veo 2 builds on the foundations of its predecessor with a more sophisticated understanding of the physical world. It’s designed to produce high-fidelity video content with cinematic detail, realistic motion, and greater visual consistency across a wide range of subjects and styles. Whether recreating natural landscapes, human interactions, or stylized environments, the model is capable of interpreting and translating written prompts into eight-second 720p videos that feel almost handcrafted.
Users can generate content directly through the Gemini platform — either via the web or mobile apps. The experience is pretty straightforward: users enter a text-based prompt, and Veo 2 returns a video in 16:9 landscape format, delivered as an MP4 file. These aren’t just generic clips — they can reflect creative, abstract, or highly specific scenarios, making the tool especially useful for content creators, marketers, or anyone experimenting with visual storytelling.
Also Read: Getting Started With Google Gemini: A Beginner’s Guide
To ensure transparency, each video is embedded with SynthID — a digital watermark developed by Google’s DeepMind. The watermark is invisible to the human eye but persists across editing, compression, and sharing. It identifies the video as AI-generated, addressing concerns around misinformation and media authenticity.
While Veo 2 is still in its early phases of public rollout, the technology is part of a broader push by Google to democratize advanced AI tools. With text-to-image, code generation, and now video creation integrated into Gemini, Google is positioning the platform as a full-spectrum creative assistant.
Access to Veo 2 starts today and will continue expanding in the coming weeks. Interested users can try it out at gemini.google.com or through the Gemini app on Android and iOS.
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