Young entrepreneur shares his success story at .Open Minds forum in Oman

Business Friday 12/February/2016 18:47 PM
By: Times News Service
Young entrepreneur shares his success story at .Open Minds forum in Oman

Muscat: Lack of trust and support are the main problems faced by young creative minds said a young entrepreneur from Ireland.
Jordan Casey, the youngest app developer in Europe, was in Oman to attend the .Open Minds thought leadership forum. He said he wanted to encourage other young people to get involved in technology.
Casey is a self-taught programmer, and after convincing his grandmother to buy him an HTML handbook when he was aged nine, he created his own site and a few years later, sought a new challenge, deciding to develop an iPhone app.
With the help of a fictitious letter from an “Apple executive” that he sent to his own parents, after which they duly bought him an Apple Mac, his journey as a young entrepreneur began.
“I developed my first app just for experimentation,” he told the audience at .Open Minds.
“I didn’t see any commercial value in it. But then it went on to become the number one app in the App Store (UK games chart) and I realised it could be a huge business opportunity for me,” he added. Since then, Casey has built a number of apps.
After his teacher lost a log book, full of a year’s worth of exam results and attendance records, he was inspired to create a cloud-based service for teachers to store such records more securely.
Casey’s latest project, KidsCode, is an attempt to get young people involved in programming.
Despite his huge success, Casey admitted that it’s not always been easy for him.
“Being a young entrepreneur has its downsides. Sometimes people don’t take you seriously. But you also get a head start,” he said.
“Being young and knowing what you want to do, there’s nothing stopping you. If you know what you want to do, don’t let your age hold you back,” he added.
According to him, children are creative and fearless. A voice of support is enough to achieve his goal.
Speakers for the final day of the .Open Minds were Ghassan Fadhil, caricaturist Matt Ryder, Col. Abdulwahab Al Balushi and a Stand-up comedian, along with Jordan Casey.
Fadhil taught the audience how to deal with social emotional intelligence while caricaturist Matt Ryder shared his technique for crafting a caricature.
Successful individual
According to Al Balushi, to become a successful individual everybody should believe in themselves.
Every day is an opportunity to learn, he explained in his speech.
According to him when an individual opens his mind, all possibilities will open to you and he also gave advice to the audience to be themselves and not to become a copy of others.
The central theme of this year’s .Open Minds forum was, “Open mind will open doors.”
The two-day event was presented by Areej Vegetable Oils and Derivatives (AVOD).
Other event partners included the Ministry of Tourism and Information Technology Authority (ITA)/e-Oman.
Merge and Al Wisal were the radio partners and the Times of Oman and Al Shabiba were the media partners.