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Meet Hotdesk: A Homegrown UAE Remote Workspace Platform
Co-founded by Mohamed Khaled, Hotdesk has already disrupted the tech industry, and is helping to support flexible and remote co-working worldwide.

Although the UAE has become a favored location for tech startups in recent years, Hotdesk, founded by Mohamed Khaled, stands out as one of the most compelling success stories. Despite maintaining a technical and operational base in Egypt, Hotdesk has been headquartered in the UAE since its inception in 2020, making it a genuine homegrown platform.
Hotdesk has a simple USP: The app provides instant access to remote workspaces, opening the doors to over 148+ establishments in over 800 cities worldwide. In the same way Airbnb disrupted the hospitality industry, Hotdesk makes it simple to book a desk, meeting room, or whole office within seconds.
Cofounder and CEO Mohamed Khaled has over seven years of experience working in the UAE and beyond. In addition to having ambitious expansion plans, he has already assembled a team of 50 top-flight professionals with resumes featuring the likes of Google, Swvl, and WeWork.
“Prior to entering the startup world, I spent more than six years as a Senior Associate working for one of the Big Four [including] PwC, Deloitte, EY, and KPMG, accounting for nearly 40% of the industry’s $150 (Dh550.89) billion global market. I spent most of my time traveling and working from various locations across the region, often in silos; as a result, I was limited to the options of where to work from when it wasn’t at a client’s office. Towards the end of my time at the company, I began to rethink the ways of co-working, realizing that more flexible working options were needed for workforces of the future to adapt and thrive, and that was the germinal idea behind Hotdesk,” says Mohamed Khaled, co-founder and CEO of Hotdesk.
Also Read: Advanced Tech Adoption & Innovation Are UAE’s Top Priority
According to Khaled, Hotdesk is focused on supporting a hybrid work model known as “work 3.0”. Since COVID-19, many consultants, freelancers, and creatives now operate from a blend of different spaces, which means that traditional co-working venues, with their high fees and long contracts, aren’t always a good fit. Hotdesk overcomes this issue by allowing users to search for and book spaces at hourly, daily, monthly, or yearly terms without long contracts or tricky terms and conditions.
So how does Hotdesk benefit from offering this service to its users?
“Hotdesk matches supply and demand in the market, and the end-user always gets the best prices from the co-working hosts, enjoying us as a free service. We charge a market-based fee that varies slightly from market to market, and that fee is then collected from the co-working hosts’ revenue. Some might compare the model with Uber, Careem, or Airbnb, although we charge a lower fee and help our hosts sell workspaces, which otherwise would be vacant,” says Mohamed Khaled.
After a year of explosive growth, which saw Hotdesk grow from 15 bookings in its first month to over 10,000+ per month today, the company will next focus on expanding into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, before setting its sights on the lucrative European market.
News
Adobe Firefly AI Image Generator Comes To Photoshop
The Generative Fill tool will arrive in the app’s tool palette sometime in the second half of this year.

Adobe Photoshop is the latest app to benefit from the explosion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, gaining a new tool called Generative Fill. The company’s AI image generator Firefly benefitted from the new feature in a web-only update back in March, and today, the Generative Fill tool launches in beta for the popular photo editing program.
Generative Fill is a little like a smarter version of Adobe’s existing Content-Aware Fill feature and works within individual Photoshop image layers. The tool can be used to expand the borders of an image (a feature known as outpainting) or to generate entirely new objects, and contains a text prompt to add direction to the AI technology.
Adobe claims its AI is only trained to work on Adobe Stock images, licensed content, and images without copyright restrictions. Generative Fill also supports a system called Content Credentials, which attaches metadata-style attributes to images before they are shared online, informing viewers that content was created or edited with the help of AI.
“By integrating Firefly directly into workflows as a creative co-pilot, Adobe is accelerating ideation, exploration and production for all of our customers,” announced Ashley Still, the senior vice president of Digital Media at Adobe. “Generative Fill combines the speed and ease of generative AI with the power and precision of Photoshop, empowering customers to bring their visions to life at the speed of their imaginations,” she added.
Also Read: PicSo Review: A Popular AI-Based Text-To-Image App
Generative Fill isn’t yet available in the latest version of Photoshop, but if you’re curious about how the tool works, you can download the desktop beta app or try it out within a module of the Firefly beta. Adobe is still tight-lipped about the exact release date of Generative Fill, but says we can expect the new feature to drop sometime in the second half of 2023.