News
Paymob Announces New UAE Regional Hub
As the MENAP’s leading payment facilitator embarks on its next phase of expansion, it will open a new hub to serve the region’s growing number of micro businesses.
Paymob has just announced that it will expand into the United Arab Emirates and open a regional hub in the country after a successful round of Series B funding overseen by PayPal.
The UAE expansion will be focused on “empowering (SMEs) and microbusinesses across the seven Emirates, with best-in-class digital payments solutions that drive growth in the digital economy”, Paymob said in a recent press release.
Paymob has already appointed veteran Emirati financial services guru Omar Haddad as its General Manager for the UAE expansion. He’ll be responsible for building a 150-strong team of payment professionals in this new market.
“The UAE is a dynamic ecosystem that fosters entrepreneurship and innovation, largely enabled by tremendous support from the public sector. There are currently over 400,000 businesses in the UAE, 61% of which are microbusinesses and 38% are SMEs. We see a massive opportunity to serve this market segment. Our goal over the next three years is to empower 15% of those merchants with the latest payment technologies to fuel their growth and further digitize the economy,” says Islam Shawky, Paymob CEO and Co-founder.
Also Read: 10 Best VPN Services For The Middle East In 2023 (Free & Paid)
As a market leader in the digital payment sector in the MENAP region, Paymob currently caters to over 16.5 million registered users on its mobile wallet infrastructure. The company offers one of the most comprehensive payment platforms for MENAP businesses, and includes over 40 online and physical payment methods via its point-of-sale systems, online gateway, and app.
Paymob currently holds an 87% share of all of the mobile wallet processing volumes in Egypt, and in 2021, it partnered with Mastercard to offer the country’s first “Tap-on-Phone” contactless solution. The payments giant hopes to roll out the same tech to UAE businesses and their customers in 2023 and aims to help companies of all sizes deliver a frictionless and seamless digital payment experience.
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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