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Liabify: Qatar-born Payroll Fintech Scales Around the GCC

Liabify Founders at Internet Summit Qatar 2026, held this previous February. The corporate is turning payroll into a platform for monetary empowerment throughout the Gulf area, offering accountable, versatile and technology-driven get…

By spsingh

1 month ago

Qatar advances as a strategic launchpad for international era enlargement

Qatar is positioning itself as a solid, digitally complicated gateway for international era corporations, providing coverage simple task, strategic get admission to and focused incentives to boost up regional enlargement and long-term funding, in accordance to a senior legitimate at Make investments Qatar.Make investments Qatar performing leader advertising and marketing and communications officer Reem Saad al-Kuwari instructed Gulf Occasions that Qatar is reinforcing its status as a strategic base for international era corporations and high-growth startups in quest of to input the Heart East, Africa, and South Asia.She added that the nation’s proposition is constructed on long-term simple…

By spsingh

2 months ago

MCIT celebrates graduation of 10 firms of Scale Now programme

By spsingh

1 week ago

GCC banks enter a new phase of technology modernisation

By spsingh

2 weeks ago

AI Designs Novel Viruses in Scientific First, Raising Promise for Medicine and Biosecurity Concerns

By Samridhi Puri

2 weeks ago

Latest Technology News

drivers

Korea unveils future technology drivers, targets moon landing by 2030

People look at views across the city from…

By spsingh

1 week ago

Corridor

Gulf-Asia technology corridor paves the way to shared success

SHI YU/CHINA DAILY For years, we have been…

By spsingh

1 week ago

Award

Hayya wins Silver Stevie Award

Qatar Tourism (QT) has announced that the Hayya platform has been awarded the silver award in the “Technical Innovation of the Year in Government Technology” category at the 2026 Stevie Awards for Technology Excellence, recognising its continued evolution as a digital platform driving artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled, automated and intelligently integrated government services.Since 2024, Hayya has advanced from being a visitor entry platform into a connected national digital ecosystem supporting Qatar's tourism, government services and major international events.Its e-visa processing ecosystem now unifies identity verification, approvals, payments, notifications and access services within a single digital workflow, the QT said in a press statement Monday.The platform's innovation is reflected in its adoption of advanced technologies, including OCR (optical character recognition)-powered document extraction, passport parsing, ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation) photo-compliance checks, and automated validation workflows, which have improved efficiency, reduced manual intervention and enhanced processing accuracy.Hayya processed nearly 850,000 applications in 2025, with an average of one e-visa processed every 35 seconds, while application correction rates were reduced to 5% over the same period."This award is a testament to Hayya's unwavering commitment to enhancing our services through innovation, technology, and user-centric solutions that deliver a seamless, hassle-free travel experience from visa application through to arrival,” said Hayya director Saeed al-Kuwari.“As we continue to evolve, we remain focused on leveraging digital transformation to deliver frictionless experiences and support Qatar's vision for a smarter, more connected future,” he said.Operated by Qatar Tourism, Hayya serves as Qatar's official e-visa platform and central digital gateway, streamlining access to the country through integrated visa processing and event services within a single, user-friendly interface.Stevie Awards are conferred in nine programmes: “The American Business Awards”, “The Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards”, “The German Stevie Awards”, “The Middle East & North Africa Stevie Awards”, “The International Business Awards”, “The Stevie Awards for Great Employers”, “The Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service”, “The Stevie Awards for Women in Business”, and “The Stevie Awards for Technology Excellence”.Stevie Awards competitions receive more than 12,000 entries each year from organisations in more than 70 nations.Honouring organisations of all types and sizes and the people behind them, the Stevies recognise outstanding performances in the workplace worldwide. Related Story

By spsingh

2 weeks ago

capture

How Carbon Capture Technology Could Maintain Gulf States’ Oil Legacy – Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University SIPA | CGEP %

This Energy Explained post represents the research and…

By spsingh

3 weeks ago

accelerating

Biomimicry accelerating sustainable technology by learning from nature

Many living organisms on Earth inhabit an environment that is, in one way or another, trying to work against it: scorching heat, freezing cold, scarce water, relentless predators. Over vast stretches of time, life has been engineered to respond not with brute force but with elegant design in the shape of structures, surfaces, and processes that solve problems with remarkable efficiency and minimal waste. Biomimicry is the discipline that studies these natural strategies and asks a deceptively simple question: what if human technology did the same?Popularised by the biologist Janine Benyus in her 1997 book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, the term describes an approach to innovation that seeks sustainable solutions by studying nature’s models, structures, and processes. It is not just about copying a shape, but understanding the underlying principle that makes a biological strategy work and translating it into human design. Biomimicry sits at the intersection of biology, engineering, materials science, and architecture, and is gaining serious momentum as a research methodology for a world urgently seeking sustainable solutions.How it worksBiomimicry operates on three distinct levels. The first is form: borrowing a shape or structure from nature to improve a product’s performance. A classic example is Japan’s Shinkansen bullet train which was redesigned with a nose resembling a kingfisher’s beak, cutting sonic booms and improving energy efficiency. The second is process: learning how organisms manufacture or assemble objects, often at ambient temperature and without toxic by-products. The third, and deepest, is ecosystem: designing whole systems in which waste from one process becomes input for another, mirroring the closed-loop logic by which natural ecosystems sustain themselves indefinitely.What distinguishes biomimicry from earlier forms of bio-inspiration is its explicit sustainability ethic. Biomimicry practitioners do not simply borrow a clever mechanism; they ask whether the resulting technology operates within the planet’s ecological limits. Nature runs on sunlight, uses only what it needs, and recycles everything. These are precisely the principles the circular economy seeks to embed within modern society. In this sense, biomimicry is not just an innovation tool but a design philosophy aligned with the long-term health of the planet.From laboratory to real worldBiomimicry is already delivering tangible results across diverse fields. Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have observed that dogs consistently outperform conventional explosive detectors at airports. In response, they developed a 3D-printed replica of a dog’s nose which boosted the sensitivity of a commercial explosive detector sixteen-fold.Inspired by camels’ pairing of insulating fur with an evaporative skin, MIT engineers have also built a power-free two-layer hydrogel-aerogel cooler that maintains objects more than 7°C below ambient for over eight days — five times longer than hydrogel alone. The same animal’s nasal turbinates act as passive counter-current heat and water exchangers, recovering up to 60% of the moisture in its exhaled breath, a geometry now being adapted for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, dehumidification, and atmospheric water harvesting.In architecture, ORNILUX bird-protection glass uses a UV-reflective coating inspired by spiders that weave UV-reflective silk into their webs. The glass becomes visible to birds yet remains virtually transparent to human eyes, reducing collisions with building glass by up to ninety percent. More recent developments include Xpeng’s iron humanoid robot featuring a biomimetic spine, bionic muscles, and flexible synthetic skin that enables human-like movement far beyond rigid mechanical frames. Mass production is planned for 2026.Nature-conscious design in QatarCloser to home, Qatar has also embraced nature-conscious design at an ambitious scale. Inspired by the gypsum crystal better known as the desert rose, the National Museum of Qatar comprises 539 interlocking disc elements that create shaded courtyards mediating between the building and the country’s intense climate. Msheireb, the world’s first sustainable downtown regeneration project, draws on traditional Gulf architecture: streets oriented to capture sea breezes, thicker walls for thermal mass, and building clusters that create natural ventilation corridors, cutting energy consumption by 30%.These achievements are significant. Yet there remains a clear opportunity to go deeper to invest in dedicated local biomimicry research that studies how the organisms and ecosystems of the Arabian Peninsula have adapted to extreme heat, coastal humidity, and salinity, and to translate those biological insights into technologies purpose-built for this region.At the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute (QEERI), part of Hamad Bin Khalifa University, this work is underway. One line of research draws on the micro-textured skin of sharks whose dermal denticles naturally resist biofouling to develop coatings that improve the performance of desalination membranes. This approach is currently being advanced through QEERI’s participation in the XPRIZE Water Scarcity competition, a global initiative focused on developing relevant innovative and scalable solutions. Another initiative investigates region-specific surface modifications to combat soiling on solar panels. Qatar’s coastal desert, with its combination of high humidity and airborne salts, produces a soiling profile distinct from that of inland arid zones. Nature-inspired surface engineering must account for this specificity to be effective.A framework for the futureBiomimicry is not a silver bullet for translating a biological principle into scalable technology. As a research framework, it nevertheless offers something that purely computational approaches sometimes lack: a starting point, already proven under nature’s most demanding conditions. And new tools are making the framework more practical. Nano-fabrication can now replicate biological structures with increasing fidelity. Large Language Models accelerate the screening of biological databases for engineering-relevant analogues. At QEERI, a platform called ThinQa (thin.qa) generates three-dimensional structures from mathematical equations — many elegantly found in nature — ready for modification and direct 3D printing, reducing the journey from concept to evaluable prototype from months to hours.For societies pursuing ambitious sustainability targets, biomimicry offers a powerful reframing of the innovation challenge. Instead of only asking “what can we invent?” it invites us to consider “what has already been perfected in the natural world, and what can it teach us?” The answers are not exotic or distant. They are in the texture of a shark’s skin, the aerodynamics of a camel’s breath, and the crystalline geometry of a desert rose. Our task and our opportunity is to learn to read them. The writer is a Scientist within the Materials Unit at Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s (HBKU) Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute (QEERI).(This piece has been submitted by HBKU’s Communications Directorate on behalf of its author. The thoughts and views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect an official University stance). Related Story

By spsingh

3 weeks ago