The Weekend Edition:
Killing corporate-speak, taking your startup to Paris, shopping at the UAE’s new Apple Stores, and lots and lots of Halloween

A QUICK NOTE TO NEW SUBSCRIBERS

Enterprise publishes Sunday-Thursday before 7am, with a focus on the business, economic and politics news that will move markets that day. But for the past few weekends, we’ve been experimenting with a weekend edition that is light on news and heavy stories to read, videos to watch and podcasts to which you may want to listen on Friday and Saturday (that being the weekend for the vast majority of our readers).

Also: Starting today, we’re going to be releasing the Weekend Edition *only* at the slightly more civilized hour of 9am rather than 8am. Work-life balance and all.

As always, feedback is very welcome at editorial@enterprisemea.com. We’ll be back on Sunday at around 6:15am with our usual roundup. Until then: Enjoy the weekend.

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SPEED ROUND, THE WEEKEND EDITION

The Central Bank of Egypt left rates unchanged yesterday following a meeting of its Monetary Policy Committee, leaving overnight deposits at 8.75% and lending at 9.75%. It was the last meeting of Hisham Ramez’s tenure as governor; he will hand the reins to former National Bank of Egypt chairman Tarek Amer at the end of November.

Declare war on corporate-speak. Or at least teach your direct reports to write like journalists. It may be too much to hope for a general uprising against “thought leaders fostering a differentiated, value-adding strategies for transformational change” (h/t Dilbert), but at least two high-profile corporate bosses have come out recently in favor of clear communications. Hedge fund legend Paul Tudor Jones demands his staff take intro to journalism courses, telling Bloomberg: “The single most important thing you need to learn for any job is how to communicate: how to write a memo, how to talk and how to think. The easiest way to learn how to do that is to take journalism 101 — newspaper writing.” Y Combinator’s Paul Graham would agree, calling recently on his personal blog for everyone to “write like you talk.” Doing so, he says, is not just the best way to make certain everyone understands what you’re saying — it’s the best way to work up an idea, because “informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas.” (We’re hoping the mental image he was going for was more ‘Under Armor’ and less ‘1990s college sweats.’)

Do you have a colleague, boss or board member still clinging to corporate speak? Jazz-up your next paper on how to synergize superior returns with either one of our new favourite corporate B.S. generators, whether you need short sentences (Wall Street Journal applet) or full paragraphs of nonsensical wonder (from the Mailchimp-sponsored Corporate Ipsum).

Oh, ever wondered about the origin of that “Lorem ipsum” gobbledygook your design agency uses? It’s been the standard ‘Greek text’ of the publishing industry since the 1500s. (And despite being called Greek text, it’s actually scrambled Latin.) More here and here.

And while we’re denouncing the lack of clarity in the corporate world, we loved this week’s “Your Job Title Is … What?“ in the New York Times. It’s a delicious takedown of corporate influencers, brand ambassadors, full-time thought leaders, trend strategists and customer happiness managers. Because, apparently, nobody in “The West” wants to be the Vice President (Human Resources) or Head of Business Development anymore. (Don’t even get us started on ninjas, gurus and demigods from this roundup of the “most meaningless job titles on LinkedIn.)

‘Twas the day before All Hallows’ Eve…

“Sorry if I’m a little on edge because you let a killer into the house,” Douglas said.

“First of all, I didn’t let him in, he busted in,” Ellen said.

“It’s true, I did,” the drifter said.

“Second of all, you’re also a killer, Douglas.”

“Touché,” the drifter said.

“And third of all, don’t say sorry to me, say sorry to the dead kid.”

With the Halloween spirit amongst us, The New Yorker’s Colin Nissan published the “scariest” story ever told, or how a ghost boy, a serial killer, and a killer clown doll might not want to hang out with you — because adjusting your contact lens is not an excuse for touching your eyeball with your actual finger, it’s just disgusting.

Looking for something more visual? Play the Scooby-Doo theme song in your head while browsing this gallery of “America’s coolest ghost towns“ — and imagine walking down their streets at midnight on a moonless night. (And may we please note that only the original 1969 Scooby Doo theme counts, not the later version that includes the horrible creation known as Scrappy-Doo?)

China put an end to its one-child policy, upgrading to the two-child policy: Xinhua news agency reported that China has dropped the population control measure adopted in 1979 and will now allow all couples to have two children. BBC says the one-child policy “is estimated to have prevented about 400m births since it began.” The policy was relaxed formally two years ago by allowing couples in which at least one of the pair is an only child to have a second child. The move comes as China’s workforce begins to decline. As one analysis put it: “Economists estimate that China’s elderly population will increase 60 percent by 2020, even as the working-age population decreases by nearly 35 percent.” Worse, the “senior tsunami” may be even worse than expected, as one demographer projects China’s population over the age of 65 will double to more than 17% by 2030. Drill deep into the demographics with Swiss Re here or more generalist skims in the National Interest or China Daily (via Huffington Post, as the China Daily doesn’t seem happy with web connections today).

This is the final weekend of the Rugby World Cup: Tomorrow at 18:00 CLT reigning champions New Zealand take on Australia in the final. South Africa will play against Argentina for the bronze medal at 22:00 CLT tonight. You can watch the highlights of the semifinal between New Zealand and South Africa here (watching time 03:30) and the ones from the Australia and Argentina semifinal here (03:42). In the MENA region, the matches will be shown on OSN.

Take a deep dive into the challenges of the independent lingerie industry with Racked’s “The Astonishing True Cost of Your Bra,” one of the more off-the-wall business stories we’ve read this week.

Git yer guns, boys: The Commies is coming fer yer internet. “Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications,” the New York Times tells us. “The issue goes beyond old worries during the Cold War that the Russians would tap into the cables — a task American intelligence agencies also mastered decades ago. The alarm today is deeper: The ultimate Russian hack on the United States could involve severing the fiber-optic cables at some of their hardest-to-access locations to halt the instant communications on which the West’s governments, economies and citizens have grown dependent.”

Speaking of the high seas: Western security analysts are fretting that, as the Economist would have it in its must-read analysis, “China no longer accepts that America should be Asia-Pacific’s dominant naval power.” Now that’s just what we need: A new Cold War alongside the ‘War on Terror’ to bring us back to 1970s and 1980s levels of defense spending and jumpstart the global economy… Uhm…

ICYMI- Back in September, Minister of Antiquities Mamdouh El Damaty announced plans for an underwater antiquities museum. The one-of-a-kind museum has an estimated cost of USD 150 mn and will be built in Alexandria, to showcase some of the recovered and unrecovered relics and treasures submerged just off the coast including Cleopatra’s Palace and the Pharos Lighthouse. The idea, originally announced in October 2008, received support from UNESCO that included scientific advisors and experts, but was put on half following the January 25 Revolution. In 2013, UNESCO sent another group of experts after reestablishing interest in the museum. While the precedent is excellent, we can’t feel a little leery about the Ministry of Antiquities and how they’re handling the Grand Egyptian Museum, which was announced in 1992.

Two of the three most sought-after Christmas gifts in America are Apple products, according to a recent survey by big-box retailer Best Buy ranking the 15 most-wanted tech toys of the season. Shockingly, three times as many men as women surveyed preferred to give and receive consumer electronics as gifts.

Oh, and speaking of Apple: Our favourite gadget maker has opened its first MENA stores — one each in the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai and Yas Mall in Abu Dhabi. 9-5 Mac has a roundup, complete with photos tweeted by Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s global retail chief. Gulf News was so excited that it live-blogged the opening. The National has more.

The conflict in South Sudan is showing no signs of abating, with an African Union (AU) report saying that the extent of the human rights abuses there has reached the level of forced cannibalism, mutilation of bodies, and conscription of child soldiers, according to Reuters. Who is fighting? Ethnic Dinka forces loyal to President Salva Kiir against ethnic Nuer forces loyal to (former) Vice President Riek Machar. The conflict has so far killed over 10,000 people and displaced more than 2 mn and the United Nations is saying that around 30,000 people are fighting are living in starvation conditions. South Sudan faces “a concrete risk” of famine by the end of 2015. While the AU’s report did not state which side it believed was responsible, it described some incidents very graphically. Cases of “extreme cruelty” reported included “mutilation of bodies, burning of bodies, draining human blood from people who had just been killed and forcing others from one ethnic community to drink the blood or eat burnt human flesh.” The sad truth of most wars still holds there too, as the “AU report found that most of the atrocities were carried out against civilians.”

The critical barrier to global connectivity that Facebook and Zuckerberg forgot: Henri Winand, CEO of Intelligent Energy, argues in Quartz that Facebook’s plan to launch its own satellite internet service in 2016 “to beam Internet access into sub-Saharan Africa” will run into the obstacle of a lack of sufficient electricity to charge devices due to decades of underinvestment. “Nearly half a bn Africans still don’t have access to electricity, and the power sector alone would need an additional USD 100 bn a year investment to make the necessary improvements to the existing infrastructure.” (Read)

Will eating cured and red meat really kill you? As regular readers will know, we’ve been on top of the story this week. In a bid to keep it all in context, Wired crunched the numbers: “The scientific evidence linking both processed meat and tobacco to certain types of cancer is strong. In that sense, both are carcinogens. But smoking increases your relative risk of lung cancer by 2,500 percent; eating two slices of bacon a day increases your relative risk for colorectal cancer by 18 percent. Given the frequency of colorectal cancer, that means your risk of getting colorectal cancer over your life goes from about 5 percent to 6 percent.”

Armageddon watch: Not only is Greenland melting away, but the GCC countries may be too hot to support human life outside of climate-controlled buildings by 2100: “By the end of this century, areas of the Persian Gulf could be hit by waves of heat and humidity so severe that simply being outside for several hours could threaten human life …  Because of humanity’s contribution to climate change, the authors wrote, some population centers in the Middle East “are likely to experience temperature levels that are intolerable to humans.” The New York Times and CNN have more. The story comes after news that 2015 may have been the hottest summer on record in 4,000 years.

Uber uber alles: Having made headlines in June 2014 after raising USD 1.2 bn in investment that valued the company at USD 17 bn, a little over a year and seven rounds of fundraising later, Uber is back in the headlines with a USD 1 bn VC round and a valuation in the USD 60-70 bn range. Has the world gone mad? Vox’s Timothy Lee says no it probably hasn’t, citing a mixture of market monopoly and expanding services like Uber Pool as the answer to Why Uber could be worth USD 70 bn.

WATCH THIS

One may find it difficult to believe that this video was actually created by Chinese state media to describe the country’s current five-year development plan, or that it seems to be targeting American millennials, or that it sounds like a song one would learn the first day of being indoctrinated into a cult. ‘What’s China gonna do? Better check this music video.’ (Watch, running time: 3:03)

Twin Peaks. In August, Showtime dropped the trailer for the sequel series to Twin Peaks, one of the most influential television series of all time, picking up the narrative 25 years later, both in real time and within the show’s universe. Be warned that the trailer does contain some mild spoilers. (Watch, running time: 1:03)

READ THIS

Vanity Fair’s ‘Behind the Meme: Ermahgerddon: The Untold Story of the Ermahgerd Girl.‘ Darryn King details a true modern-day horror story: “Meet Maggie Goldenberger, who helplessly watched an Internet meme spawn from her awkward adolescent photo. Except, maybe the “Gersberms” girl never existed the way we thought she did?”

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson, 1971. Originally written as a two-part article for Rolling Stone magazine, and later republished as a novel, the original two-parter is republished here by the magazine. The story, a surrealist and semi-autobiographical take on two trips Thompson (b.1937-d.2005) made with his attorney to Las Vegas, later became the basis for the cult-hit film starring Johnny Depp. At c.24,000 words, this is definitely a long read.

‘The Force’ is money, reveals George Lucas,’ from The Daily Mash, the UK’s version of the Onion: “It amuses me that everyone thinks ‘The Force’ is some deep [redacted], it’s just another word for money … Obi Wan is … trying to convince Luke Skywalker to harness his entrepreneurial instincts so that he can get off that [redacted] desert planet and start making some serious cash aka force.” (Read)

Imagine being asked to write the press release announcing that you and your team are being fired. Also imagine that the CEO won’t be reviewing the release too closely before its publication. Or just read about the time Chris Mohney did it to the insufferable 29-year old founder and CEO of Tumblr, David Karp. Valleywag calls it “perhaps the greatest, most poetic exit [redacted]-you in Internet history.” (Read)

LISTEN TO THIS

It’s Halloween, so it’s time for some scary stories, and This American Life treated us to a number of such stories from Ira Glass himself, Gimlet’s Alex Blumberg, and comedian David Sedaris. What we’ve learned from this episode: No, your house is not haunted, you probably just have too much carbon monoxide in your system, and if you think you’re being chased by zombie raccoons, run faster, they probably have rabies. Want something really scary? A bat can bite you in your sleep without leaving a mark and without you feeling it. And if that’s not enough, it could also give you rabies, which is almost 100% fatal if a vaccine isn’t administered right after the exposure to the virus (listening time 01:00:22).

StartUp is back: Gimlet’s hugely successful StartUp podcast is back for a mini-series and put out its first episode during the week. The first episode starts off back at Gimlet where Alex Blumberg moves forward with bringing his wife, Nazanin — producer of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show  — to join Gimlet. Gimlet’s investors think it’s a wonderful idea, but the episode begins to show how the couple wrestles with the implications of their decision on their professional and private lives. (Watching time 33:57).

SOMEONE TO FOLLOW

Who: Marc Andreessen (@pmarca), who we profiled last weekend (and who we shall banish from Enterprise for at least a month before mentioning him again).

Why: Sarcastic commentary and tweets on everything from the “tech bubble” to emerging markets by way of U.S. politics.

Best tweetstorm: His recent micro-history of the 2008 start to the global financial crisis, when it really seemed for a moment that capitalism might die. (Captured here by Business Insider, with some additional reading.)

ENTREPRENEURS

Vivre la France: France has launched a pitch contest for non-French entrepreneurs from all over the world who want to establish their business in Paris. Up for grabs: Cash, residence permits for up to three members of the founding team, mentoring and — brace for it — free office space in Paris at a leading incubator. Learn more about the French Tech Ticket here.

Leaning more to the Anglo-Saxon side of things? The application deadline for the ninth MIT Enterprise Forum Arab startup competition is 4 January 2016. More detail in this video.

Upcoming events:

• 12-13 December: RiseUp Summit 2015: The largest and most significant event for startups in Egypt of the year, held at the Greek Campus in downtown Cairo. A who’s who of both experienced startup types and wannabes as well as top regional and global investors and industry players will be on hand. (Register here)

TECH

Utopia or police state? It may be a few years out, but Harvard scientists have successfully stored 700 TB of data in just 1 gram of DNA, potentially opening a whole new era of computing. As Extreme Tech tells us: “Just think about it for a moment: One gram of DNA can store 700 terabytes of data. That’s 14,000 50-gigabyte Blu-ray discs… in a droplet of DNA that would fit on the tip of your pinky. To store the same kind of data on hard drives — the densest storage medium in use today — you’d need 233 3TB drives, weighing a total of 151 kilos.” That opens us all to a world in which it might be possible to store every piece of human data ever created — every word written, every blink of an eye, every piece of surveillance data on every square centimeter of the planet…

AstroLabs and Google opened a co-working space officially in Dubai. Wamda reports that “the space now has 40 startups from 27 countries, with startups like Little Thinking Minds, Eventtus, Chomp, ImpressMe, Air Crew Club, Visage and Toiran making it onto the list.” Entrepreneurs there will be looking to benefit from each other’s experiences and the space structure allows for cooperation. The co-working space includes meeting rooms, offices, a cafeteria, and a “Google Lab” and, according to Google’s MENA Managing Director Mohamed Mourad, offers “logistical services, and communicating with colleagues and mentors and learning more about technology and users.”

Why stop with robot cars…? Luddites of all ages. If you are whimpering in your bomb shelters over driverless cars, you better not get sick, because Robot Radiologists Will Soon Analyze Your X-Rays. San Francisco-based (really, where else) tech company Enlitic is using an advanced branch of artificial intelligence called deep learning, to make software that can diagnose illnesses by analyzing, prioritizing, and classifying X-Ray images. Deep learning is already being used by Google, Yelp, and Facebook to develop new features on their sites. Facebook is captioning photos for the blind.

…Because, as diagnostics firm Theranos has proven, med-tech startups are doing really well these days. Or not. Check out the deeply reported WSJ piece “Hot Startup Theranos Has Struggled With Its Blood-Test Technology,” which is causing a stir in tech circles — and which seems to have prompted the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to call its blood vial an “uncleared medical device.”

PERSONAL TECH

There’s a new Blackberry on the way. We know, we know. We didn’t care either — at first — despite having once plotted for weeks how to time a stopover at Heathrow on the way to Toronto in a way that would allow us buy one of the first unlocked Blackberry Bolds on the market. The new device? It’s touch screen. It runs Android. And it has a full slide-out physical Blackberry keyboard. Talk about polarizing: “The BlackBerry PRIV Is EASILY 2015’s Most Interesting Release“ vs. “BlackBerry’s USD 699 Android gambit is too much too late.”

SOCIETY

Depending on your outlook on life, you’ll want to either tie-up your teenaged children next weekend or grab a fistful of cash and run down to the Cairo Tattoo Convention, which runs from 6-7 November.

THE WEEK’S MOST-CLICKED STORIES

The most-clicked stories in Enterprise in the past week were:

• Morgan Freeman at the Pyramids of Giza (View image gallery)
• Women laughing alone with salad Halloween costumes (View images)
• [Redacted] Finding Your Passion (Read)
• Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid and President Abdel Fattah El Sisi take a drive around Dubai (View images)
• Which MBA? The Economist’s ranking of full-time MBAs around the world (Explore)
• A Gas Discovery in Egypt Threatens to Upend Mideast Energy Diplomacy, The New York Times. (Read)
• I Would Rather Be Herod’s Pig: The History of a Taboo (Long Reads)

THIS WEEK IN: BUSINESS AND ECONOMY

The market entered a one-month period of limbo this week as we head into the final weeks of Hisham Ramez’s tenure as governor of the Central Bank of Egypt. Ramez will hand over to former National Bank of Egypt boss Tarek Amer on or about 26 November. That leaves Egypt in the grip of an FX crisis with little expectation of progress until Amer is on board. The governor-designate has been lobbied heavily to cut rates, back an IMF facility and eliminate caps on cash deposits as first steps toward a successful devaluation, with Federation of Egyptian Industries chairman Mohamed El Sewedy leading the charge as the week drew to a close.

In a similar vein: GB Auto revealed this week that it had temporarily halted (and since resumed) its assembly line in September as it was unable to source the kits it needed in light of the FX crunch, and Nissan’s local CEO told Reuters’ Arabic service that the automaker would expand assembly operations in Egypt only if the FX crisis passes. Nissan also announced this week that it would begin assembly of new model Sentras in Egypt

The CBE left the USD:EGP rate of exchange unchanged at all three auctions this week.

Otherwise notable this week:

• AbbVie’s Qurevo is in and Sovaldi is out as the government’s go-to Hepatitis C cure.
• EgyptAir has embarked on a 10-year restructuring program that will include the purchase of new airliners, including widebodies.
• The World Bank has still not reached a decision on a potential USD 3 bn loan announced by Finance Minister Hani Dimian nearly three weeks ago.
• Qalaa Holdings seems to be on the verge of divesting both Rashidi El Mizan (to Olayan, if report are true) assets of ASEC Cement including ASEC Minya Cement Co. and ASEC Ready Mix.

THIS WEEK IN: POLITICS

In an otherwise quiet week in politics, Alexandria Governor Hani El Messeiry resigned in the wake of flooding in the nation’s second-largest city, and Cabinet approved (and released few details of) legislation that will establish a regulator for the nation’s natural gas market.

ON YOUR WAY OUT

Harry Potter Watch: The two-part stage play “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which opens in London on 30 July 2016, will be a sequel, not a prequel, according to a statement on JK Rowling’s official Pottermore website: “It was always difficult being Harry Potter and it isn’t much easier now that he is an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband and father of three school-age children. While Harry grapples with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs, his youngest son Albus must struggle with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted. As past and present fuse ominously, both father and son learn the uncomfortable truth: sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places.”

With Intrade dead, there’s a new a new way to track who’s most likely to (a) win their party’s nomination and (b) the presidency of the United States. The website uses odds from UK-based Betfair because it has become “the only prediction market in the world that has a lot of trading and is efficient.”

Sorry, Bill Gates: There’s a new “richest man in the world.” He’s Spanish — and you make him a tiny bit richer every time you shop for the kiddies at Zara.

Ah, the memories: “How journalism works, the foreign correspondent edition.” In a single tweet.

What are you going to be for Halloween? Google Tells How Unoriginal Your Halloween Costume Is, says Wired. Its microsite Frightgeist offers an interactive infographic breaking down the popularity of costumes in the US nationally and in specific location in the country. You would think the Yanks would show a little creativity (although, one could never get tired of Princess Leia). Ah, Google. Is there anything you can’t do? You know, besides not pausing Youtube when you switch screens…

Keep the kiddies happy: Watch these two videos (first and second) on how to carve the best pumpkin possible. And if you’re seriously skilled? Try these printable Star Wars stencils and let the Jack O Lantern Force be with you.