Archive for the ‘Lebanon’ Category
SouqElArab, Online Social Shopping Portal
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | May 10, 2008 – 11:55 am |
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SouqElArab is a growing Arab online social marketplace; It offers its visitors a social shopping experience whereby they can network with like minded people and do some shopping at the same time.
Their shopping experience is based on users’ recommendations and feedback; Visitors can rate and review products and come together to form a community based on their hobbies and interests.
SouqElArab provides a platform for vendors to bring their product catalogs online and easily start selling their products without the fuss of having to create their own web presences. Suppliers from over 15 countries are currently working with SouqElArab.
Through these different suppliers, SouqElArab offers a large variety of products from Books, Magazines, Music, Movies, e-Downloads and Software, to Food and delicacies, Health Care and Beauty products, Kids’ Toys and Electronics, to Hookahs, Shisha, Clothing, Antiquities, Art, and other Middle Eastern cultural products.
The website is available in both English and Arabic; with French, Persian and Afrikaans coming soon, aiming to expand both the user and supplier base.
SouqElArab Inc., founded by Fadi F. Dababneh, is the company that runs the website; with offices in USA, Jordan and Lebanon.
Yamli Enable Advertising In Their Language Tool
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | May 7, 2008 – 12:58 pm | 2 Comments
More news from Yamli, the cool web-based tool that solves the problem of Arab users who don’t have an Arabic keyboard or who aren’t as comfortable typing in Arabic; They have come up with an interesting way to start generating revenue with their tool: they enabled advertising on their Yamli editor menus.
The ads are in the form of small 120×30 banners, simply and neatly placed at the bottom of the word suggestion and option selection menus.
A number of advertisers have already started buying these ad spots with Yamli, and users of the Yamli editor tool on the Yamli website, facebook, or elsewhere should start noticing them now.
No details about the pricing of these units are available on the website, but advertisers can contact Yamli to place their ads through the following contact form.
Very good move from Yamli, who just released an API to use their tool recently, and who should be seeing an increase in their tool’s usage over the following weeks as more Arabic websites integrate their tool. SouqElArab just announced integration of the tool from their side yesterday.
It will be interesting to see how well these ads will perform, and how successful they’ll be for advertisers as a new advertising channel and for Yamli as a revenue model.
LEBConnection, Access To Lebanese People And Projects
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 5, 2008 – 8:41 pm | No Comments
Newly launched LEBConnection is a business oriented social networking service that caters directly to the specific everyday needs of the Lebanese people around the world: finding jobs, promoting people and projects in the Lebanese community and finding housing.
The project started a year and a half ago while co-founder Patrick Sayegh was staying in Paris and various parts of France, and was exposed to the difficulties many Lebanese faced in getting jobs in French companies even if they were qualified for them.
So the idea was to create a platform that enabled Lebanese people all around the world to tap into their extended network of contacts to identify connections who can help them take advantage of certain business opportunities they wouldn’t have access to otherwise.
LEBConnection provides an intuitive interface that enables users to easily build their network of connections through importing contacts from other accounts as well as easily sending invitations to their friends and acquaintances. Information on the site can be accessed in many ways, and the search engines have broad or narrow searches to look for people or jobs according to specific criteria.
On one hand, businesses and people can post ads on the website, to their network of connections as well as to the whole community, about their open job opportunities, projects and deals; and on the other hand, users can search for these opportunities as well as contacts they have in certain companies and places who can help them in getting jobs, deals or resources.
An internal email system LEB mail is built into the system to enable the sharing of information between contacts.
The service is a free one, and the interface is in English and French for the time being with the possibility of adding Spanish as its next language.
Pressera, Online Newspaper & Magazine Hosting
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 4, 2008 – 7:48 pm | No Comments
Pressera are a Lebanese online publishing service that offers an easy and interesting solution for Arab newspapers and magazines to take their publications online.
There isn’t much detail on their website about the setup phase, but they promise it is an easy process, and that the service is 100% automated, enabling newspapers and magazines to publish online daily, and have their publications viewable through a fully customized viewer panel.
Newspapers and magazines from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar and Syria are currently using the service.
The publications are available for free to all readers through custom subdomains of the Pressera website; they can also download them in pdf format.
It seems like quite an easy and interesting solution for offline publications that want to extend their readership and offer their content online, although it’s a shame that the content isn’t in an indexable and searchable format.
