Archive for the ‘Startup News’ Category
N2V Announces Investment In Emirati Startup Yebab
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | August 23, 2010 – 1:27 pm |
View Comments
National Net Ventures N2V, one of the top internet groups in the Middle East just announced its investment in Yebab.com, the Arab portal specialized in organizing wedding celebrations in the United Arab Emirates.
Rashid Al Ballaa, CEO of N2V, stated that the project comes in line with the group’s current and future plans to expand its presence at the regional and the international levels. The plan is obviously to enhance the portal’s growth and presence, expanding it into other Arab Gulf countries, and the rest of the Middle East region, establishing it as the most trusted wedding directory in the Arab world.
Yebab.com, which was launched from the UAE in 2009, has proven really successful in the UAE, becoming a leading portal providing a directory of wedding services in the country; including listings for the various suppliers and services from caterers to dressmakers, artists, photographers and traditional musicians. The site shows strong potential to perform just as well and more in other markets around the region.
Yamli Releases Enterprise Version Of Arabic Query Expander
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | August 22, 2010 – 2:43 pm | View Comments
Yamli, the company that brought us products like the Smart Arabic Keyboard and Yamli Arabic Search, is releasing an enterprise version of the technology being used for Yamli Arabic Search in the form of a product they’re calling Arabic Query Expander.
The new service provides a solution for search and data normalization problems when it comes to the Arabic language, by analyzing and identifying all the English and Arabic script variations of an Arabic word, increasing the probability to find matches for searches.
Yamli gives examples like the name “Mohamed Mansour” having at least 80 ways of spelling it, “Mohamed Saleh Abdallah” having 7000 variations, “Jumeirah” having 51 spellings, and the song “Habibi Ya Nor El Ein” having 1207 spelling variations; to make the case for the utility of this tool and how much it can help in solving this problem.
AqarMap.com Launches New Version Based On User Feedback
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | August 21, 2010 – 5:22 pm | View Comments
AqarMap.com, the regional online real estate marketplace that was launched a few months ago, and that enables users to search for houses, apartments and land based on location, through satellite maps, has launched a new version.
According to numbers from AqarMap, they’ve grown quite well over the past few months, reaching a number of over 600 registered Real Estate companies and brokers, who are using the service and posting their properties on it.
The new version of the site aims to bring improved usability and more features for the users. The interesting thing is that all the enhancements and features in this new version were built on ideas and features requested by the early adopting users and clients of AqarMap, which makes it pretty much a crowd sourced effort.
Video: Loomni Presents Education Project At DemoCamp Dubai
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 29, 2010 – 11:48 am | View 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.
Jeddah Food, The Online Restaurant Guide Launches iPhone App
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 22, 2010 – 9:40 pm | View 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.
Ras2Ras Social Rating Platform Acquired By Qatari Investor
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 13, 2010 – 8:38 am | View Comments
Ras2Ras, the Yemen-based online social rating and comparison platform, that was previously covered here, has been acquired by Qatari investor Ahmed Alaji.
Ras2Ras, which was founded by Amad Almsaodi in 2008, was built around a very simple yet really interesting idea: putting any two comparable things against each other, and letting people vote on which they like best.
Now, even though the tool’s idea is very simple in principle, it could be used for a number of research and user engagement purposes by businesses, with the potential to be a source of some really interesting and useful insights and information.
Quirkat Launches Fantasy Football Game On Facebook
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 12, 2010 – 10:27 am | View Comments
Quirkat, the Middle Eastern game development studio has announced the launch of a new online ‘Fantasy Football’ game just in time for the South Africa 2010 World Cup. The game was developed exclusively for the Facebook platform and can be played in Arabic, English or French.
The game offers players the range of features they’d come to expect out of a fantasy football game. They’ve also featured all 736 players from the 32 teams participating in this summer’s World Cup in South Africa in a visual playing environment.
As users play on in the game, their teams are ranked against a number of real-world player events, such as scoring, successful defending, and bonus points for Man of the Match stature.
The game also allows users to create their own leagues in which they can compete head to head against selected friends.
Kngine Introduces Statistics Platform Called Kngine Stats
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | May 8, 2010 – 11:38 am | View Comments
Kngine, the semantic web search and question answering engine, that was previously reviewed here, recently launched a brand new statistics platform called Kngine Stats.
Kngine Stats goes out and collects, organizes, and indexes a large number of records of statistical data from resources such as: the UN, the World bank, the CIA Factbook, and a number of other important sources.
What it does with that collected data is crunch it together to come up with different statistics that users can tap into by selecting a certain topic, viewing the statistics for it and even filtering them; in hopes of making these large datasets easier to explore, visualize and share.
Yallakora Launches Mobile Version of Yallakora TV
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | January 16, 2010 – 7:12 pm | View Comments
Yallakora, one of the popular sports portals in the region has announced the launch of a mobile version of Yallakora TV, giving users the possibility to access sports news and information, as well as watch match commentary and analysis directly from their mobile phones, while on the go.
Yallakora, which is owned and run by LINKonLINE (a subsidiary of Orascom Telecom Holding), is available in both English and Arabic, providing full coverage to different sports with a bigger focus on Football, through publishing various details and news regarding Football leagues and championships in the Middle East, North Africa and others. This includes team news, player information and statistics, match results as well as analysis for Football matches
Yallakora’s new effort isn’t through an application that has to be downloaded and installed, all users have to do is point their mobile phone browsers to yallakora.com to access the mobile version of the site, and access the information and news on the site, as well as mobile phone compatible video streaming of interviews, match analysis and the contents of Yallakora’s video library.
A number of Arab entrepreneurs and startups are currently looking more and more to the mobile phone as a practical way to provide their services, especially with the high and growing mobile penetration around the region. We can surely expect a number of other announcements revolving around mobile in the coming year.
Arab Auction Portal Souq.com Launches Operations In Egypt
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | December 22, 2009 – 12:56 pm | View Comments
Souq.com, the Arab online auctions company, that is a subsidiary of Jabbar Internet Group, has officially launched operations in another country in the region: Egypt.
The Egyptian version of Souq.com is available in both Arabic and English, hoping to tap into one of the biggest internet markets in the Arab world in terms of number of users with over 12 Million internet users as of June 2009 according to ITU numbers (15.9% out of a population of nearly 80 Million).
Souq.com has been cautious not to attempt to grow too fast and launch the service for the whole region at one go, preferring to set up operations country by country, having staff on the ground in each country to manage the system and make sure users (both sellers and buyers) get the most out of the system and are fully satisfied, also aiming to overcome any trust or security fears.
A number of listings have already started showing up on the site, and one of the offers the service is currently giving is free pickup and delivery in Cairo and Alexandria.
With this launch, Souq.com now operates in four countries: United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and now Egypt.
