Archive for the ‘Egypt’ Category
Euro-Mediterranean School 2010 Open For Entrepreneurs’ Applications
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | August 31, 2010 – 9:37 pm |
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The Euro-Mediterranean School (EMS), which is an initiative that aims to offer young entrepreneurs from the Euromed countries an opportunity to follow a learning program in the field of business management and entrepreneurship, has opened up applications for the fifth “Introduction to Entrepreneurship” course taking place this year.
EMS was founded by the Milan Chamber of Commerce, the Lombardy Region, and the Fondazione per la Sussidiarietà (‘Foundation for Subsidiarity’). These sponsoring bodies offer full scholarships to all participants covering travel costs, room and board, tuition fee and teaching materials for the entire duration of the course.
In 2010 EMS will host the fifth edition of the course “Introduction to Entrepreneurship”, in which the Chambers of Commerce of Naples and Reggio Calabria will also participate.The sponsoring bodies offer full scholarships to all participants, covering travel costs, room and board and teaching materials for the duration of the course.
Otlobmall.com: A New Online Shopping Destination For Egypt
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | August 11, 2010 – 3:31 pm | View Comments
Otlob.com, the online food ordering service, is building on their success and experience, by making a new push into online shopping through their recently launched portal called Otlobmall.com.
Otlobmall.com allows users to shop online for a variety of products in different categories, including electronics, mobile phones, beauty products, sports, jewelry, apparel, books and magazines and gifts.
Purchased products are delivered directly to the purchaser’s home or designated delivery address and can be paid for either online or by cash on delivery.
ITIDA And Vodafone Egypt Launch MobileAppsAcademy For Egyptian Mobile Developers
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 19, 2010 – 3:45 pm | View Comments
Egypt’s Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA) is partnering up with Vodafone Egypt to launch MobileAppsAcademy, a contest and a program for sponsoring developers of mobile programs and applications in Egypt.
The initiative aims at preparing a generation of talented developers and helping them generate innovative ideas conforming to the needs of the Egyptian and Middle Eastern market.
Another purpose of this initiative is to highlight Egypt as a regional hub for projects and ideas and to encourage the creation of high-quality mobile applications. It aims to work on raising the local production through encouraging and sponsoring the skills of local developers, offering opportunities for talented Egyptians and turning their ideas into real projects that can contribute to the development of the ICT sector.
Winners Of The MIT Arab Business Plan Competition 09-10
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 5, 2010 – 7:51 pm | View Comments
The MIT Arab Business Plan Competition is a competition designed to encourage all entrepreneurs in the Arab world to start their own company and, ultimately, create a nest of leading firms in the Arab world.
The current version of the competition was officially launched on October 12th 2009 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The competition went through a number of rounds, including different teams covering the following sectors: Energy, Engineering, Healthcare, Internet, Software and Telecom.
The final round just took place at a ceremony in Cairo, Egypt, and the awards for this year were handed out. The winners of this edition of the MIT Arab Business Plan Competition are as follows:
First place: The Little Engineer (Lebanon) – Prize: $US 50,000
An after-school edutainment center which introduces kids and teens [age 4-16+] to pre-engineering courses such as robotics, physics, electricity, electronics, renewable energy and more.
Team: Rana El Chemaitelly, Albert Shamieh, Nadia Alamah, Marwa Harb.
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.
Shofha.com, Arabic Movies & Series Online On Demand
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | February 13, 2010 – 3:34 pm | View Comments
LINKonLINE, a subsidiary of LINKdotNET (an Orascom Telecom Holding company), has announced the launch of a new entertainment service called Shofha, in collaboration with regional movie and series producers and rights owners.
The new service, which is available in English and Arabic, allows anyone from anywhere in the world, to legally watch the latest Arabic movies and television series online on the same day of their international release. Movies and series are provided in high resolution, commercial free, through online streaming or download; with the video files being all DRM protected, most probably using Microsoft Windows Media DRM.
Shofha.com comes with a good back catalogue of movies and series, either on rental or purchase basis, that can be downloaded or watched online. TV series will be available in both full series form as well as sing episode form; even 5 minute episode highlights are provided for those without much time on their hands.
The available options are to: Buy the video, where a user gets to download the video to their pc and play it anytime they wish indefinitely, with the ability to download the movie up to 3 times; Rent the video, where a user can download the video to their pc and watch it as many times as they want within a 48 hour time-frame; and finally there’s the Internet Cinema option where the user gets to instantly start watching the video through online streaming as many times as they wish in a 24 hour time-frame, with the quality of the video depending on the connection speed the user has.
The prices for each option seem to vary depending on the country, for example international users paying in US dollars would have to pay something like: $US 6 to buy, $US 3 to rent, and $US 9 to stream online; on the other hand, someone in the UAE would pay 9 Dirhams to buy, 5 Dhs to rent, and 7 Dhs to stream online, which is much cheaper.
Kngine, A New Semantic Web Search Engine
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | January 18, 2010 – 1:04 pm | View Comments
Kngine is a new semantic web search engine and question answering engine that was launched from Egypt, aiming to provide more meaningful search results to users.
Unlike other regular search engines that focus more on the ranking of pages to serve search results to users, Kngine attempts to understand what the user is searching for exactly or what question they are asking, and then tries to come up with the best information, answers and results it can find.
This is done by analyzing the entered keywords to discover the relationships between them, linking the different found data together and then displaying united sets of related information from around the web.
The kinds of information and details provided by the search engine, along with the search results listings, are: Semantic information about the keywords/concepts, direct answers to the entered questions, comparisons between entered keywords/concepts, and possible links between different types of data such as movies, subtitles, photos, store prices, user reviews and more.
Kngine, which stands for Knowledge Engine, currently contains over 1 billion of pieces of data, and features about more than 7 million concepts; 70,000+ companies, 700,000+ movies, 1,100,000+ personalties, 450,000+ locations, 150,000+ books, and more. The interface is currently only available in English.
Even though the product is still in beta, it already shows promise in the way it searches, analyzes and returns relevant results; and we expect it to get even better with time as more work is put into its engine.
The search engine was launched from Cairo, Egypt, and founded by Haytham A. Abd ElFadeel, a Computer Science researcher, focused mainly on the semantic web and search, as well as parallel and distributed computing.
According to the founder, the long-term goal for Kngine is to make all human beings systematic knowledge and experience accessible to everyone; collecting and organizing all objective data, and making it easily accessible to everyone.
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.
Taya IT Launches Beta Of Yajeel Content Discovery Portal
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | January 14, 2010 – 11:42 am | View Comments
Taya IT, a regional specialist in Enterprise and internet search applications, has announced the beta launch of Yajeel, a new content discovery portal which aims to play the role of an independent gateway to some of the best online content from Arabia.
The portal is in Arabic only, and uses Taya IT’s advanced search technologies to provide Arabic internet users with a new tool to easily discover and share Arabic content online,
Through the Yajeel homepage, users will be able to find the highlights from Arabic content around the web, search through content, as well as navigate through content specific web channels that serve as dedicated portals to the most popular topics available from third-party web publishers. With the beta launch, the only channel available now is a football news service containing the latest news and fixtures from Middle Eastern and international football.
The service also integrates a ranking tool, that allows users to rate the content they view and push it up or down in the listing of “most popular” pages.
The technology behind Yajeel intelligently classifies Arabic internet content, giving users access to a continuously updated stream of relevant web pages categorized according to topics of interest. Users can then customize the stream controlling what they see and how they see it, as well as share content from all web channels with their friends.
The official release is expected to be sometime in February 2010, with a number of new extra features and additional web channels products.
# Yajeel
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.
