Elie Habib doesn’t work in the defense or intelligence industries. Instead, he runs Anghami, one of the Middle East’s largest music streaming platforms. But as missiles began flying across the region, a side project he coded earlier this year suddenly became something bigger: an open-source dashboard people around the world were using to track the war in real time. The engineer turned executive built the system, called World Monitor, to make sense of chaotic geopolitical news. Instead, it went viral. Habib’s day job revolves around licensing deals and streaming metrics. But during a stretch of increasingly chaotic geopolitical news, he started building a tool to make sense of it. “I’m an engineer by training, and I hold myself to a discipline of continuously learning new technologies regardless of my CEO title,” Habib tells WIRED. The idea emerged as headlines began colliding in ways that felt impossible to follow. “The news became genuinely hard to parse,” he says. “Iran, Trump’s decisions, financial markets, critical minerals, tensions compounding from every direction simultaneously.” Screenshots of worldmonitor.com COURTSEY OF …