How a Music Streaming CEO Built an Open-Source Global Threat Map in His Spare Time

"I'm an engineer by training, and I hold myself to a discipline of continuously learning new technologies regardless of my CEO title. The news became genuinely hard to parse. Iran, Trump's decisions, financial markets, critical minerals, tensions compounding from every direction simultaneously. I didn't need a news aggregator. I needed something that showed me how these events connect to each other in real time."

"The existing OSINT tools that did this cost governments and large enterprises tens of thousands of dollars annually. I built World Monitor in a single day as a learning exercise. The platform you see now reflects maybe five or six total days of development plus community contributions."

"The system ingests 100-plus data streams simultaneously. The platform processes a messy stream of global data, bypassing social media noise to pull facts directly from the source."

Elie Habib, an engineer and CEO of Anghami, developed World Monitor, an open-source dashboard designed to track and connect geopolitical events in real time. Frustrated by the difficulty of following fragmented global news across Iran, financial markets, and political tensions, Habib built the platform as a weekend project to show how disparate events interconnect. Unlike traditional news aggregators or expensive OSINT tools costing governments tens of thousands annually, World Monitor processes over 100 simultaneous data streams, pulling facts directly from sources while bypassing social media noise. Developed in approximately five to six days with community contributions, the platform unexpectedly went viral, transforming from a personal learning exercise into a widely-used tool for understanding complex geopolitical situations.

Read at WIRED