Archive for the ‘Countries’ Category
Feedoor, Central Feed Management Service
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | July 2, 2008 – 2:28 pm |
1 Comment
Feedoor, is an interesting feed management service that aims to give users complete control over their feeds, and the flexibility to do whatever they want with them.
The service is quite simple and straightforward, packing a number of features in its corners. Some of the most important and interesting of these features are the following; it gives users the possibility to:
- Combine and splice several feeds of different formats (RSS, ATOM, RDF) into one feed.
- Easily add individual items such as videos, photos or audio directly into existing feeds.
- Create feeds of random items such as videos, photos and audio; thereby creating podcasts or media channels.
- Customize the look and feel of their feed page by using available themes or creating their own themes.
And for the created feeds, the service provides detailed statistics including: Subscribers, hits, visits, and referrals.
A developer API was launched recently enabling developers to pull content from hosted feeds, statistics of a certain feed, or the number of subscribers. The API also gives the ability to build and add themes, widgets and doors (small interactive applications that can be integrated into the feed to enhance reader interaction with feed content).
For people hosting their websites on their own domain names and who want to have their feeds hosted under the same domain, the option is offered for free.
A number of publishing and publicizing options are available as well, making it easier to integrate or show off a feed’s content on several places on the web.
Feedoor currently has an English interface only, although it supports different languages in the feed content.
The service was initially launched in 2007 from Jordan by Mahmoud Mehyar.
# Feedoor
weNear Launch Location Based Applications Competition
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | July 1, 2008 – 8:45 pm | 1 Comment
weNear, a mobile platform for location-based services and applications, developed by Egyptian company eSpace, just launched a location based applications competition today, which is open to students of The Computer Science Department at Alexandria University, Egypt.
The competition consists in building interesting location based applications using the weNear API. It starts today, July 1st, and the final submission date is August 31st.
Those interested in being part of the competition can go to the weNear competition announcement page to find details about the weNear architecture, documentation, and some initial client/server communication code in several programming languages to help them get started.
Contestants can then submit their applications at the weNear competition sub-site.
Should be interesting to see how this works out, and what different applications come out of it.
Online Multiplayer Games Account For Over 60% Of cashU Revenue
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | July 1, 2008 – 10:55 am | 3 Comments
Recent numbers from Maktoob’s cashU service, the largest internet payment system in the Middle East and Africa, show that user payments for online multiplayer games account for over 60% of their revenue.
cashU was launched some years ago to provide an easy online payment system for people without access to credit cards. At first they used to provide a credit card number that people could use on all sites, even those that weren’t affiliated with cashU, but that option was stopped after some time, and now users can only pay on cashU affiliated services.
Apparently some of the people who use the service the most are young Arab online gamers, who use it to make payments on the biggest names in online multiplayer gaming – World of Warcraft, Maplestory, and Runescape, which have a multi-million user base globally, and a loyal fan base in the Middle East.
Multiplayer games have been surging in popularity throughout the world in general, and the Arab world is no exception, which is making it a target for expansion for a number of established games, like Maplestory which has a Middle East version planned for Q4 of this year, and Travian that supports Arabic.
We also reported a couple of days ago on how MBC Group is launching a new project with Chinese CDC Games, which consists of an online Arab gaming portal, in an attempt to lure online Arab gamers and get a share of the rising market.
Massively multiplayer games have explored many different distribution models, and many of them can be freely downloaded and experienced for a trial period. Typically the user only pays for a subscription fee, but there exists a third party market for virtual gold, which can be used to buy armor, weaponry, and spells.
# More: Maktoob Business
MBC Group & CDC Games Partner On Arabic Online Gaming Portal
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 29, 2008 – 12:25 pm | 3 Comments
MBC Group recently partnered with CDC Games, a global market leader in online gaming and distribution based in China, to develop and launch an Arabic online gaming web portal which will include a portfolio of massive multi-player online games (MMPOG/MMPORG), in both English and Arabic.
MBC Group aims to reproduce the success of the online multi-player game genre in the Arab world, through launching games that are customized for the region’s audience and that appeal to the numbers of Arab gamers that have been pretty limited in their choices up to now.
Online gaming has become a huge global industry with an estimated value expected to reach $13 - $15 billion by 2012. This progressive trend is clearly what incited MBC Group to develop this venture for the Arab market.
This is yet another online project by MBC Group, that is part of their strong online strategy push recently, which has produced projects such as MBC iMatter, a social networking site for Arab women, and MBC2 Movies In Motion, a video sharing and social networking service; and which Sam Barnett, Chief Operating Officer and General Manager of MBC Group, describes as their “overall strategy of leading the region towards digital and media convergence.”
# More: Zawya
Leading Arab Job Site Bayt.com Crowdsource New Design Online
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 27, 2008 – 9:55 pm | 2 Comments
Bayt.com, the leading job site in the Arab world, are looking to give their website a facelift, and instead of fully doing it in-house or going to some design company to work on it for them, they’ve decided to try and crowdsource the design online.
From their side, they’ve done a lot of thinking and benchmarking internally, and their staff came up with a preliminary design, that they’re now opening up to different people online to get a fresh perspective on it all, and how everything can be laid out and designed.
They’re doing this through 99designs, where they’ve posted a contest asking people to submit their designs and the way they see the website.
The initial mock-up files featuring Bayt’s own ideas and the elements they want included are provided, with a number of guidelines, what they’re looking for and need in the design, and the no-nos that designers should avoid.
The winning design gets a $500 prize.
It’ll be really interesting to see how this experience works out, and what comes out of it in the end. Really nice move from Bayt.com to try and explore different ideas and artistic directions.
The contest details, how to take part in it, as well as the already submitted designs can be found here: Bayt.com Homepage Facelift.
meOwns Launch New Version, Redesign & More Features
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 26, 2008 – 11:15 am | No Comments
meOwns, the social web application that enables users to publish personal collections of the different things they own, that was previously reviewed here, just launched the new version of their service, with a new design and a set of new features and enhancements.
The new layout and design, brings increased usability throughout the website and its different sections and functionalities, looks a lot nicer, and just feels more organized.
But the new version doesn’t stop at the aesthetics, it brings a number of interesting additions as well:
- More options to navigate the website, by going through the lists of recently added stuff; recently wished for items; hot, beloved or interesting stuff; and the enhanced search and tagging systems.
- Users can now also rate items they own or that other people own.
Other features that we should be seeing on the website soon are:
- The listing of related and similar items that you might be interested in on item pages.
- Knowing who else owns a certain item that you own or someone else owns; or who wishes to get that item.
- Integration of microformats.
# meOwns
Shoof TV, Arab Media Group’s Video Sharing Service
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 25, 2008 – 8:50 am | 2 Comments
Shoof TV is an Arab video sharing website, which was intially launched by Arab Media Group, one of the largest media companies in the UAE, back in April 2007.
The site’s content is user-generated, with videos submitted from users all over the Middle East.
Users can upload files in several popular video formats, with file sizes up to 50MB. For larger files they can be sent via regular mail to Shoof TV for inclusion on the site.
Uploaded content is screened for objectionable content before appearing online.
The site visitors can vote on the videos using the ‘Applause’ feature, and also leave their comments on them.
As well as hosting user-generated media content, Shoof TV also hosts a number of competitions, with various prizes, to encourage more talented people from the Middle East to submit and share their content. Winners are selected by a panel of judges and by public SMS voting.
Khadeeja Al Marzooqi, the General Manager of Shoof TV, recently talked about the future plans for Shoof TV, and how a TV station will be launched towards the end of 2008, with 100% user generated content, relying on the clips people uploaded on their website.
# Shoof TV
Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation & PICTI Sign MoU
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 24, 2008 – 5:26 pm | 3 Comments
Dubai’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation and the Palestine Information and Communications Technology Incubator (PICTI) have signed a memorandum of understanding to work together on projects and opportunities for economic development.
Under the MoU, the two organizations will be co-operating on initiatives aiming to encourage young entrepreneurs in the region and across the Arab world and identifying promising technology projects for incubation.
PICTI will also support the Foundation’s aims of establishing an Arab Incubators’ Network, which will provide an online resource and collaboration for new businesses and other interested organizations; as well as establishing integrated resources for promoting entrepreneurial activity across the Arab world.
The Palestine Information and Communications Technology Incubator (PICTI), is an independent Palestinian organization that has been created through the initiative and support of the Palestinian Information Technology Community. PICTI and its partner organizations have as their mission the revitalization and the sustainable growth of the Information Communication Technology (ICT) sector in Palestine, through an incubation model that will offer professional business services to Palestinian entrepreneurs who have mature concepts for unique and innovative ICT products assessed to have strong market potential.
# More: ITP
Dwwen Arab Blog Aggregator To Launch API Soon
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 22, 2008 – 10:33 am | 2 Comments
Dwwen, the popular Arab blog aggregator, almost shut down recently due to financial and resource burdens. Luckily a flow of supportive messages, and a generous offer by an Arab blogger to help the service out with the necessary server resources changed the aggregator’s destiny and gave it a new lease on life.
Now Dwwen are working on an API that they’ll be releasing very soon, in a move to open up their service and make the information aggregated in it more available and usable to everyone.
We got to play around with the inside beta of the API, and it’s really easy and simple to use. The API currently allows the pulling of articles directly from Dwwen; it provides the possibility to specify the number of articles you want to pull, the language of the pulled posts (Arabic, English or both), and whether you want to get the latest articles or the most popular ones.
A number of applications are also being built around the API, one of them using Adobe AIR, which is proving to be a pretty popular choice for internet applications on the desktop.
# Dwwen
Syraty, Online Professional Resume Builder
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 18, 2008 – 9:30 am | 2 Comments
Syraty is a new Saudi-based Arabic online service that provides job seekers with the possibility to easily create and maintain a professional resume that is hosted online, available for download in Word or PDF format, or printing, and that can easily be sent to companies.
Users can build and customize their resumes online through an easy straight-forward interface, that allows them to add as many sections as they wish and input content for them through a rich text editor.
They can then either publish their CVs or keep them for their personal use; and even when published, they have the choice to either make them public and have them submitted to search engines or to password protect them so as to control access.
Instant email and SMS notifications can be enabled to allow the candidate to know exactly when and from where potential employers viewed their resume. A detailed statistics and graphs interface provides even more details about the resume’s distribution and where viewing visitors came from.
A list of Saudi and International employers is provided as well, enabling users to quickly send their hosted CV address to a number of these companies by simply selecting them and clicking send.
Of course job seekers can also send their CVs to other companies either by downloading one of the formats and sending it by email, printing the CV, or by sending the link to the online version of it.
Employers can use a contact form on the user’s resume page to get in touch with them, ask questions and eventually schedule an interview.
The service is available through three paid plans, ranging from $5.33 to $39.7 per year, providing different options and possibilities, like the number of themes that can be used for the created resumes, whether it’s hosted on a subdomain of Syraty or on the user’s own personal domain, the number of SMS notifications they can receive, …etc.
Syraty is generously offering StartUpArabia readers, the first 1000 at least, a free account under the Silver plan; Register for your free account.
The service’s interface is in Arabic only, but it allows users to create their CVs in English, as most companies in the Middle East region require English-language resumes.
# Syraty
