Month: May 2008

Logta, Online Service To Help Find Best Deals & Promotions

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LogtaLogta is a new online service aiming to provide shoppers with a one-stop shop for promotions covering Electronics, food items, travel and leisure, real estate, beauty & personal care, clothing, and apparel amongst other categories.

The service also provides retailers and brand owners with a new channel to advertise & publicize their promotions, getting their message and products across to the site’s visitors, who will be able to search through these categorized promotions and pinpoint the location of the product they are looking for with the best deal.

Additionally, visitors can register for alerts and notifications by building special profiles for the products or services they are looking for; making it a lot easier for them to find what they’re looking for, but also building a rich database for Logta.com, with the community member’s preferences and details, making targeted advertising a strong opportunity for them.

Even though Logta is essentially just a place to find promotions for people to use at retailers’ stores; they plan to start providing retailers with online payment & delivery capabilities for certain categories and items in the future.

The service has built-in analysis tools that retailers and brand owners can use to measure the effectiveness of their promotions and advertising campaigns by analyzing traffic from the site vs. products sold at their stores.

Logta screenshot

Logta was developed by Dubai based Danat e-ventures, and is available in Arabic & English. The service mainly targets users in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, with future expansion plans to the GCC and other Middle Eastern markets.

# Logta

MSN Arabia Partners With Propertyfinder For Real Estate Listings

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Propertyfinder.ae, the popular UAE real estate web portal, and MSN Arabia have announced a new deal today, maximizing propertyfinder.ae’s exposure for real estate agents using their service and their listed properties.

The deal gives Propertyfinder.ae access to MSN Arabia’s large user base, a potential regional audience of more than 10 million unique visitors a month.

On the other hand, the added-value for MSN Arabia is the ability to offer their visitors quality real estate listings, to satisfy the demand for that kind of information by users, as property markets boom throughout the Arab region.

Propertyfinder - MSN ArabiaMSN Arabia is the only network with an international presence covering the Arab region, with a dual-language interface catering to all Arabic and English speakers in the MENA region. MSN Arabia is managed by LINKonLINE, a subsidiary of Orascom’s LINKdotNET.

Propertyfinder.ae specialises in real estate and investment in Dubai and offers agents and developers access to a potential global audience of 9 million unique visitors. Propertyfinder.ae is a subsidiary of REA Group and forms part of the global online real estate advertising company.

# MSN Arabia, Propertyfinder.ae

# Source: BI-ME

Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Competition (3rd Edition)

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QRNEC LogoThe Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Competition (QRNEC), which is in its 3rd year now, was created to be a platform to increase the interest of Jordanian entrepreneurs and innovators in designing a path to achieve their dreams.

It strives to advocate entrepreneurial skills as students and mature entrepreneurs coalesce their knowledge with their resources along with their competitive drive to create a business plan that is both practical and innovative.

The competition is now open for all Jordanian entrepreneurs, whether they are a university student or an aspiring entrepreneur, to enter for the opportunity to compete for US $70,000 in cash awards. They can submit their innovative business ideas in any discipline of science and technology to the Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship (QRCE) through its website www.qrce.org.

The vision of QRNEC is to evolve and expand into a comprehensive entrepreneurship enabler, involved in fostering creativity, incubating viable concepts, and facilitating the success of entrepreneurial ventures to a level that affects the cultural orientation of the Jordanian community.

The additional interesting points for this year are that Google is offering an additional cash award for the best online business plan, and that KADDB is offering another cash award for the best business plan for defense and security.

# Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Competition (QRNEC)

Is trust an issue for you when it comes to Arab startups? [Poll]

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A new poll has gone live on StartUpArabia, you can find it on the first sidebar on the right or vote straight from this post.

This poll addresses the question of trust, and it asks:
Is trust an issue for you when it comes to Arab startups?

Is is an issue for you? Do you think trust is a bigger issue when it comes to Arab startups? Do you as a user need a bit more assurance from Arab startups for them to earn your trust?

What do you think?

Feel free to further expand on your response in the comments section of this post.

FotoArabia, Arab Stock Photography & Image Service

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FotoArabiaFotoArabia is a new Arab stock photography service dedicated to the Arab community of photographers and artists; that was just launched a few days ago from Kuwait.

The service aims to provide an online place for Arab photographers and artists around the world to submit their high-quality material and put it up for sale. On the other hand, FotoArabia will work on attracting interested buyers from the photo and graphic design market segments from around the world; such as newspapers, magazines, web publishers, and others to search for and buy photographs, illustrations and other artistic material through the website.

Buyers can purchase Download Credits from the FotoArabia store, with credits starting as low as $1 each, with a minimum purchase of $13; these credits are valid for one full year from the date of purchase and become less expensive when bought in bulk. Buyers can use these credits to download images for 1, 3, 5, or 10 credits, for x-small, small, medium, and large files respectively. Even larger resolution images are available, for 15 and 20 credits and video clips are available for 10 to 50 credits.

All uploaded files are inspected for quality and legal integrity before becoming available for sale; and the revenue generated from the sales is divided between the contributor and FotoArabia.

FotoArabia Screenshot

FotoArabia have a limited time introductory offer for the first 50 photographers and contributors. These first 50 contributors will be making 80% of the sale of their photos and/or art work for their first year, after that the earned royalties will be 50%.

The service was developed by Generation Four Company LLC, a Kuwaiti technology company.

# FotoArabia

Do Arab Startups Really Need An Arabic Interface? [Poll Results]

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In the latest poll on StartUpArabia, the question to the readers was:
Do Arab startups really need an Arabic interface?

The result of reader voting came out as follows:

– 41% of readers thought it was preferable for the website to have an Arabic interface.
– 32% of the readers thought it was a must.
– 20% of them thought that it wasn’t necessary.
– The remaining 8% said they didn’t really care

Personally, I’m somewhere between ‘preferable’ and ‘must’, shifting between the two depending on the case, I guess.

A big percentage of internet users in the Arab world are most comfortable using the Arabic language online, instead of English or French, and deciding not to launch an Arabic interface for a website directly alienates those people, cutting out an important part of the service’s possible target audience, which can’t really be good business-wise no matter how you look at it.

PixiPost, Digital Photo Printing

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PixiPostPixiPost is a Tunisian startup, that was launched back in June 2006, specialized in digital photo printing, and aiming to provide customers with quality photo prints at good prices.

The service gives users the possibility to upload their digital photos, organize them in photo albums and order prints of them. The photos are then printed and sent through the post according to the chosen delivery mode.

Payment for the print orders can be done either online with all major credit cards, using the Monétique Tunisie secure payment platform, or using cashU payment accounts, or for people in Tunisia through transfer of mobile phone prepaid credit.

The user interface is available in both English and French.

I think digital photo printing services are pretty interesting and could come in very handy for the shutterbugs among us who would like to get their photos printed quickly and simply. What would be even greater though would be to see partnerships formed between photo sharing sites like Ikbis and such photo printing services, providing an added-value to both site’s users and making their lives a tiny bit easier.

# PixiPost

DemoCamp Dubai 2 – The Agenda

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DemoCamp Dubai

As previously announced, the second DemoCamp Dubai will be taking place at the Radisson SAS in Dubai Media City on May 27th at 7:30PM.

The following five demos will be taking place at the event:

  • Darrb: A marketplace for delivery services, it will be presented by its co-founder Murshed (Previously reviewed on StartUpArabia here)
  • Logta: A one-stop-shop on promotions for all sorts of products, to be presented by Hisham Baker
  • Wasfati: The first dedicated Arab portal for food, recipes and nutrition. It will be presented by Fouad Masoud (Previously reviewed here)
  • SwalifCast: An Arab portal for digital learning, to be presented by Mohammed Al-Fares
  • mediaME: A user-generated content website for advertising and media professionals, to be presented by Zeid Nasser.

The format will be the same as the first event, with the presenters giving a 10 minute presentation of their work, with another 5 minutes for Q&A.

The presenters will also be available to answer any further questions, receive feedback and share some thoughts after the event.

Momentum In Continued Improvement & Delivery Of Results

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“Tremendous power exists in the fact of continued improvement and the delivery of results. Point to tangible accomplishments—however incremental at first—and show how these steps fit into the context of an overall concept that will work. When you do this in such a way that people see and feel the buildup of momentum, they will line up with enthusiasm.

— Jim Collins ; ‘Good To Great‘

iBlog… iMedia Conference Postponed Due To Financial Issues

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iblog... imediaLast month, the iBlog… iMedia conference on consumer generated media was announced, organized by casualPR, a leading PR agency that focuses on blogs and online media.

The event was supposed to take place in Amman, Jordan on Sunday June 1st 2008; But has been canceled due to financial issues and lack of funding and support by Sponsors, even thought the event succeeded in getting a lot of media attention, approximately 100 delegates without any promotions or ads, and a great group of speakers from different countries; including Hervé Cuviliez (Managing Director of DDB France), Alexander McNabb (Spot On PR Dubai), Samih Toukan (CEO of Maktoob Group), Adam Flinter (Online Editor of Gulf News), Ziad Barouni (Founder of Waleg.com) and others.

Some important sponsors did express their interest in supporting next year’s edition; but for this year Samer Marzouq, CEO of erabia, the mother company of casualPR, is trying to reschedule a scaled down version of the conference.

Anyone interested in lending a hand or sponsoring the event can contact him directly at: samer@jazarah.net

The idea of the event is a very interesting one, as it aims to play a role in bringing media and marketing professionals closer to Blogs, highlighting the role that bloggers are playing in changing the face of the media.

Hopefully, the event will still take place, even if on a slightly smaller scale, and that it opens the door to more and bigger editions in future years.