The Middle East is no stranger to big ideas. As the birthplace of the Abrahamic religions, it’s never struggled with ideologues. Rather, the struggle facing the region is the opposite — a lack of pragmatics. People and nations who are willing to compromise for the greater peace, stability, and prosperity. …

Ataturk is an interesting figure in modern history. Today he is claimed to support ideologies as diverse as secular scientism all the way to fundamental Islamism. Political parties in Turkey all claim Ataturk as one of their own. There is a certain cult of personality around him that makes it…

The Problem Ever since the advent of Netflix and the video streaming era, people have begun to wonder: can the same be done for video games? Could it be possible to stream a modern video game to a low power computer, and play it in real time? First let me start with…

Background After analyzing various job descriptions for Microsoft’s Teams division, I discovered three main goals that Teams is trying to accomplish: Drive growth with new segments, especially enterprise and SMB users. Another related segment is creating specialized solutions for first-line workers, including workers in retail, education, financial services, etc. Increase user…

Smartwatches today are toys. Enterprise users don’t want toys. They want a stylish and functional watch. So I set design a smartwatch a CEO could gladly wear.

*The following is a Product Specification (and) passion project I created in my free time. It is in no way affiliated with Microsoft. Background Trend 1: The esports market is expected to be worth USD 926.3 million in 2018 and is expected to reach USD 2.1 billion by 2023, at a…

Discovery Interviewing users about their experience using Venmo and discovering pain points During my discovery phase three things stood out after interviewing users on their Venmo experiences: group dynamics, accidental payments, and privacy. Specific feedback include: Wanting a more efficient way to deal with group charges — such as splitting a…

TO: Kirstjen Nielsen , Director of Homeland Security FROM: Hamed Rabah, Information Policy Analyst RE: Striking the Balance Between Privacy & Surveillance in the Age of Cryptocurrency DATE: April 27th, 2018 Absent from the conversation in Congress around data privacy and surveillance is the latest methods by technologists in the…

Step 1: Interviewing users on their experiences with Venmo. During my interviews a common factor that came up time and time again was the difficulty in distinguishing between when the user was paying another person as opposed to receiving money from another person. …