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Doers Summit 2025 wraps up in Dubai Silicon Oasis with big impact
DUBAI: Dubai Silicon Oasis has successfully concluded the first Middle East edition of the Doers Summit 2025, drawing innovators, investors and technology leaders from across the world. Held on 26 and 27 November under the patronage of his highness Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the event transformed the special economic zone into a buzzing arena of ideas and opportunity.
More than 4,000 attendees representing 115 countries explored the forces shaping tomorrow’s economies. Conversations ranged across AI, fintech, digital infrastructure, climate tech and sustainable mobility, creating a lively mix of insight, debate and collaboration.
Dubai Silicon Oasis director general Badr Buhannad, said the turnout reflects the global confidence in Dubai’s innovation ecosystem and its ability to nurture companies of every size. He noted that the momentum supports Dubai’s drive to build 30 unicorns within the next decade as part of the Dubai Economic Agenda D33. He added that Dubai Silicon Oasis continues to offer competitive incentives and world-class infrastructure to help businesses scale while strengthening partnerships across regions.
Doers Company and the Summit co-founder Stylianos Lambrou, praised Dubai for offering a dynamic platform where startups and investors could exchange ideas, pitch boldly and build relationships that travel beyond borders.
Attendees echoed that sentiment. HT Labs CEO and co-founder Avinash Mudaliar, described the Summit as a space where ambition met action. He said the event showed why Dubai is fast becoming a global hub for innovation.
Sessions on startup exits reflected a shift in founder thinking. Speakers advised entrepreneurs to prioritise strong products, operational advantage and realistic valuations instead of building companies solely around exit plans. IPOs remain rare in most markets, placing mergers and acquisitions at the forefront. Organised financials and airtight legal documentation were highlighted as key accelerators, helping founders close deals more smoothly. The broader message was clear: genuine value creation remains the real path to meaningful exits.
Another conversation turned the spotlight to future economies and the growing importance of circularity. Panellists unpacked the “Circular Trilemma”, the balancing act between resource security, ESG commitments and competitiveness. With an estimated $2 trillion in secondary materials still untapped globally, circular systems were presented as both an environmental need and a commercial advantage. Success will depend on digital resource-tracking, sector-wide collaboration and policy frameworks that reward recovery and reuse.
Discussions on the future of work pointed to flexibility, technology and trust as the foundations of tomorrow’s organisations. Traditional full-time structures are giving way to fluid work models that combine remote teams, flexible schedules, project-based expertise and AI-powered productivity. Speakers stressed that performance cultures based on outcomes, along with supportive legal frameworks for hiring across borders, will shape the next era of work. AI was positioned as a partner that removes routine burdens and sharpens focus rather than replacing human capability.
With its mix of sharp insights, global participation and practical takeaways, the Doers Summit 2025 closed on an energising note for Dubai. The event strengthened the city’s role as a place where ideas travel, connections deepen and the future is shaped collaboratively.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
