As we watch the world evolve and ponder our place in a new digital landscape, Step Conference will bring top experts to Dubai to explore and discuss a future with cutting-edge technologies, revolutionary artificial intelligence, and Web3.

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We identified 5 things to look forward to at the conference this year:

1. This year’s conference is unique because it is our 10th anniversary. Step will be celebrating the community of startups, investors, accelerators, corporates, and the government. During this decade, Step was a witness to a handful of billion-dollar startups, such as Careem, Souq, and Kitopi. The interest among the younger generation to be entrepreneurs in MENA is unprecedented, making this next decade extremely exciting.
2. Web3 has been a hot topic throughout the second half of 2021 and is supposed to replace the internet as we know it. At this year’s Step Conference in Dubai’s Internet City, we will be looking into the transformative world of the Internet, the Metaverse and our new digital world. Topics that will be discussed this year will be eye opening and will assist all of us in understanding the new landscape and our place in it. In our discussions we will look into Web3 and Blockchain. They seem to be the same thing with different names. Blockchain is a database that is not managed by a single company. Instead, it’s driven by multiple people making it a peer-to-peer database and thereby decentralized. Blockchain significantly affects how ownership and value are stored and transferred—everything from currencies and contracts to ownership of physical or digital items. So what does this mean for you? We will help answer these questions in February 2022 at our conference with internationally renowned speakers.
3. We will also be looking into NFTs, a.k.a non-fungible token. This topic has been taking twitter and clubhouse by storm, but a lot of us do not understand how we can benefit and where to start. In brief, they are unique tokens linked to digital or physical benefits that provide proof of ownership. Non-fungible simply means that you can’t trade the item with something else like you would with Bitcoin. Tokens are a form of smart contract stored on the blockchain that guarantee ownership. In summary, NFTs change the way we authenticate, value, own, and transfer digital (and sometimes physical) assets.
4. We are all wondering where the world is going and discussions at Step 2022 is here to shed some light on these questions. As the Metaverse takes the news by storm we will also be exploring the core idea of AI systems. Yes, we are all well connected and use platforms that help make our daily life and business easier to manage and grow. It even helps us make the world a better place. We look at how AI can be integrated across sectors from daily corporate operations all the way to autonomous vehicles. The role of AI in setting stable grounds for any startup is important, and what’s more important is knowing where to implement AI in your business and how to make the best use of the data generated. Discussing AI strategies to boost grown, scalability and success for startups will be a highlight of the conference.
5. Last but not least, here’s a taster of a few of our speakers: 
   – Paul Misener, Amazon
   – Elie Habib, Anghami
   – Michelle Arrazcaeta, Polaroid
   – Robbie Douek, BLAST
   – Madiha Naz, Team captain of the first all-female Middle East Esports team at Galaxy Racer
   – Bei Wang, Straight Fire

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