June 2010 – StartUpArabia

Video: Twtrtales Collaborative Story Writing Through Tweets At DemoCamp Dubai

June 30, 2010June 30, 2010 MMM 2 Comments

Twtrtales is a new project that was launched out of the UAE, which aims to enable collaborative story writing through tweets.

Users would basically get to start a new hashtag for a story, and then they’d start contributing to writing the story one tweet at a time by appending that hashtag. On the site, readers would be able to say whether they like a specific contribution or not, and through that decide what goes into the story and what doesn’t.

So in essence, it’s a new kind of publishing platform that hopes to unite tweeters/writers of all kinds, to create and tell stories, which could be general stories or written for a specific cause.

Video: Loomni Presents Education Project At DemoCamp Dubai

June 29, 2010June 29, 2010 MMM 5 Comments

Loomni is a new service for the region that aims to empower continuing education, making it more accessible and affordable to everyone. The service was previously reviewed here.

The overall idea of the startup is to fill the existing gap and provide learning opportunities for people who can’t afford expensive courses, nor have the time to spend locked up for long hours in a training venue somewhere.

It aims to do this by providing focused practical courses delivered in 90 minutes, at a fraction of the price available in the market, by working with another profile of instructors, mainly experts on certain fields who can share their knowledge and experience, educating people about their areas of expertise, but also helping market themselves and their services along the way.

Skype Confirms Plan For Regional Headquarters In Bahrain

June 28, 2010June 28, 2010 MMM 3 Comments

Skype, the internet telephony company has confirmed it will be setting up its Middle East headquarters in Bahraini capital Manama, to better target internet users in the Middle East and Africa.

Skype said Bahrain’s liberal and advanced ICT infrastructure and policies and its geographic position providing unparalleled access to the Gulf’s trillion dollar market were key reasons for establishing a regional office in the kingdom.

Skype, which allows users to make voice and video calls over the internet for free or at a fraction of the usual price, is actually illegal in a number of Gulf countries like the UAE, Kuwait and Oman, to protect telcos’ lucrative monopoly over international calls.

Video: AdGoing Online Ad Marketplace At DemoCamp Dubai

June 27, 2010June 27, 2010 MMM 6 Comments

AdGoing is a Saudi based company that bills itself as an online ad marketplace, aiming to make it easy to buy and sell advertising online, giving advertisers and publishers a platform to find each other.

The service supports both banner and text ads, as well as their variations. The system is mainly targeted at smaller publishers and bloggers who want to make money out of their advertising spaces, as well as advertisers who want to tap into the system for cheaper advertising rates and to have their ads go on a variety of sites and blogs.

Ads served up on the system are on a CPC (Cost per click) basis, and the system displays ads on a real time auction basis.

Video: The Question Company Presents SMS Based Q&A Service At DemoCamp Dubai

June 26, 2010June 26, 2010 MMM

The Question Company is a UAE based company that provides a question and answer sms-based service, that enables users in the UAE to sms any question to them and get an answer back in a few minutes time.

The guidelines to use the service are really simple, you basically just think of a question, text it to the number 4644 and then wait for them to send you the reply back. The target on their side is to have replies sent out in less than 10 minutes, and they say their current average is 6.55 minutes.

The service is available for both Etisalat and Du subscribers and costs 3 Dirhams per question, answering all types of questions, but refraining from providing any legal, financial or medical advice.

Video: O-Minds Presents FlashFirebug At DemoCamp Dubai

June 24, 2010June 24, 2010 MMM 1 Comment

O-Minds is a Jordan-based IT company with a focus on open source and web development. They’re active participants in the Drupal community, and work on advanced Adobe Flash development.

Ashraf Amayreh from O-Minds was the first startup person to present at the DemoCamp Dubai event that was held on June 23rd at Dubai Knowledge Village’s Auditorium, and the main focus of the demo and presentation was a tool called FlashFirebug that the company built to help Web and Flash developers.

FlashFirebug is inspired from the highly popular Firebug add-on for Firefox that enables developers to go under the hood of their web pages and debug them straight from the browser; However Firebug hits a wall when it comes to Flash, and that’s where FlashFirebug comes in.

DemoCamp Dubai – A Quick Review Of The Event

June 24, 2010June 24, 2010 MMM 3 Comments

The second DemoCamp Dubai event to be organised by Dubai Internet City took place at the Dubai Knowledge Village Auditorium a few hours ago, and I have to say the reaction I had and the one I saw and felt from the people in the auditorium was a lot better than it was at the previous one; the presenting startups were interesting, and the setup felt a bit less formal, which was a good thing.

If there’s one thing I still think needs to be addressed in future editions it’s that the presenters should spend more of their time on stage showing us how their projects work instead of taking us through powerpoint slides.

The event kicked off with a non-startup presentation by Marwan bin Haider, the CIO of DEWA (Dubai Electricity and Water Authority), who talked about DEWA’s iPhone, BlackBerry and iPad apps as well as the process of building such mobile apps and how developers could go about creating apps themselves.

Revisiting Arabic Social Bookmarking And Content Discovery

June 23, 2010June 23, 2010 MMM 2 Comments

A bit over two years ago, I wrote a post about the Arab social bookmarking services out there, listing the existing options, how good they looked and how well they seemed to be doing, identifying the top ones at that time.

If anyone were to pull up that same list today and go check on each one of the sites, they’d find that some have shut down, others have become useless and spam ridden, some others have become pretty much inactive, and only one or two are still holding on. What’s clear though is that these social bookmarking services never caught on with Arab web users, and never achieved their founders’ initial dreams for them.

However there are some new kids on the block, who are here to take another stab at social bookmarking and facilitating content discovery for users in the Arab world.

Jeddah Food, The Online Restaurant Guide Launches iPhone App

June 22, 2010June 22, 2010 MMM 2 Comments

Jeddah Food, the English language online restaurant guide to restaurants in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, recently announced the launch of their new iPhone mobile application.

The application enables visitors to Jeddah, as well as locals, quickly find restaurants around the city, based on your current location, while on the go. It provides a search functionality to look for specific restaurants and cafes around Jeddah, as well as quick categories that enables users to click through directly and locate places by type of cuisine (e.g. Lebanese, Japanese, Burgers etc.)

For each venue, the application provides the venue details, phone numbers, website details, photo galleries, and maps.

MENA ICT Forum – October 10-11, 2010 – Amman (Jordan)

June 21, 2010June 21, 2010 MMM 7 Comments

The MENA ICT Forum is an Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and Information and Communications Technology Enabled Services (ICTES) industry event for the MENA region, that is held in Jordan on a bi-annual basis. The event was previously known as Jordan ICT Forum in it’s previous incarnations.

This year’s event is scheduled for October 10-11, 2010; and expands to focus on the whole region’s ICT and ICTES success stories, trends, opportunities, and future outlook and plans.

The MENA ICT Forum 2010 will be held at the King Hussein Business Park in Amman, a modern and high-tech business park dedicated to the ICT and ICTES industry.