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.

EMS 2010 aims to offer young managers from the countries bordering on the Mediterranean Sea an opportunity to obtain the entrepreneurial and managerial skills necessary to start and/or develop a business capable of operating in multiple markets within the Mediterranean Basin.

EMS 2010 is divided into two phases:

A. Distance Learning (from October 19th to November 26th, 2010), compatible with one’s work responsibilities, in which each student participates via web. This phase consists of an on-line course intitled “Business Strategy, International Growth and the Business Plan”.The course will be made up of video lessons, business testimonials, exercises, case presentations and group discussion forums. A tutor will follow the progress of the course and guide the group discussions.

B. Business Education and Networking, (from February 14th to March 11th, 2010), in which the top students from the distance learning program will be invited to spend 4 weeks in Italy.
This part of the program will involve an extention of the course of study already undertaken online, and will add an intensive business networking experience.

The program is designed for young people with strong leadership and business potential who desire to open new business ventures, assume a leadership role in their company’s or country’s international strategy, or create opportunities for foreign businesses to establish commercial relationships within their country of origin.

From among the Arab countries, participants are invited from the following countries: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, and Tunisia.

Among the entry requirements: At minimum a bachelor’s degree in business, economics, law, or related subjects; An excellent command of both spoken and written English; A maximum age of 35 years; and a disposition toward international and multicultural teamwork.

For more details about the program, you can check out this pdf file: EMS 2010

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.

The first of these services is Merkab, which was launched in March of this year, from Morocco, by the well-known Arab blogger Mohammed Sahli.

Merkab is geared towards helping users discover interesting new content by surfacing the best content that other users have found and submitted to the site, and that other users just like them liked and voted up.

The service combines elements from popular social bookmarking sites Digg and StumbleUpon; mixing Digg’s straightforward interface for listing content and letting users vote on it, with StumbleUpon’s toolbar enabling users to jump from site to site without having to go back to the main Merkab site each time.

Future plans for the service include growing the social aspect of it, allowing users to create a social graph on the site, and building more intelligence into the system to be able to surface content that would be interesting for the user based on their preferences, content they’ve viewed, liked and added to favorites, as well as what their friends on the site liked. That would be a key differentiator from other such services out there.

What the service is currently missing are bookmarklets that users can use to bookmark content directly from their browsers, and buttons that webmasters can integrate into their sites to make bookmarking their pages easier.

Another new service that has just been launched in the same space is a project called Thabbet, that was launched by a company called Exyria Studies that operates out of the UAE, Syria and Canada..

The service of course allows people to post and share content through the site and have other users rate it, pushing it either up or down in importance, and also making it easier for everyone to find the best and most interesting content.

The site also offers the ability for users to comment and create a conversation around each piece of content that is posted to the site, whether it be a link, photo, video, or topic of conversation.

Bookmarklets are offered for users to add to their browser’s link bar and automatically bookmark pages to Thabbet. Webmasters also have the option to integrate Thabbet buttons on their sites so viewers can directly bookmark using them.

Both of these new services are available in Arabic only, and aren’t too far from other social bookmarking sites in terms of concept and design, with Thabbet looking a lot more like digg though.

Now the thing is, whipping together a basic social bookmarking site isn’t all that complicated technically speaking, in fact a number of free software options such as pligg exist out there that anyone can setup and get running in a few minutes; the biggest challenge of all is actually building the active community around it to find and share interesting content that will draw users curious to find new content they can enjoy, which in turn will draw webmasters who want to get more traffic going their way, therefore giving the site more exposure and helping its community expand more.

Maybe the older services were too early for their time, maybe they didn’t give as much importance to community building as they should have, or maybe they were just unlucky; however, the fact they weren’t able to crack this nut doesn’t mean someone else won’t succeed at doing so.

It’ll be interesting to see how things go with both these services, or if things pick up with any of the old ones, how they go about growing it and making it relevant and interesting in this time when sharing seems to be moving away from such independent services and more towards general all-encompassing social networks like facebook.

The event will be taking place at l’Office des Changes in Casablanca, from 6:30PM to 8:30PM.

The program of the event will be as follows:

• 6:45PM : Presentation of Mobile Monday
• 7:00PM : 4 presentations, 4 visions of the present and future of mobility:
  • MobileWorks 3D : Search and content accessibility on mobile devices (Christine Maxwell)
  • Online Advertising : Online advertising « from web to mobile »
  • Lemon Way (France) : Mobile Banking solution
  • WebyPass : Social networks through mobile
  • ART UP : Mobile Film Festival Morocco
• 7:45PM : Networking, free discussions, partner connections.

This edition of Mobile Monday is happening on the sides of the Moroccan leg of the regional IT trade show Med-IT which is taking place in Casablanca, Morocco, from the 3rd to the 5th of November 2009.

For more information on Mobile Monday in Morocco and to sign up for the event, you can visit the official site: Mobile Monday Maroc.

Speakers have been invited from academic institutions and leading innovative companies to debate the most crucial contemporary issues related to e-payment and e-commerce. Over a hundred advanced papers will be presented and discussed.

The conference will also act as an opportunity for a number of e-commerce and e-payment companies to exhibit their already built services and products, and provide a stage for a number of e-business presentations from executives of leading e-commerce and e-payment companies.

The Conference generally aims to open the opportunity for:

• Academics and researchers to present to and share with other colleagues from all over the world their findings on the topics;
• Researchers to meet decision makers;
• Vendors and experts at all levels to meet and discuss business opportunities;
• Companies with offers on the conference topics to exhibit their solutions/products to other experts and to the end users through an exhbition;
• Enabling any other possible business opportunities.

For more details about the event, the speakers and the programme; check out the official site: ICEP’09 Conference

Damrej takes a local approach, and has been launched for Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Libya and Egypt for the time being; with versions for the UAE and other countries to follow soon.

The services’ robots crawl different websites from the country building its indexes of shopping catalogs, jobs, real estate offers, cars and other types of classified ads; making them all searchable from one central point. The results provide some collected details about the item and point to the original website where the item or offer can be found.

Some merchants or classifieds services also provide an updated feed directly to Damrej to make it even easier to index their content and provide through the search engine.

Users can search by theme, narrow their search by using theme-specific filters, and get results from one or all online services depending on their choice. Related offers are also served up next to the items found through the search.

After a really short subscription process, users can save results/offers they liked to their favorites so as to be able to go back and find them anytime. A history of all their searches and visited items is saved automatically too.

Users will also soon be able to setup alerts for specific searches, so they get notified whenever new items or offers become available that match their search criteria. RSS feeds are made available for all themes, current offers and popular items.

Social features to enable people to share interesting offers with their friends as well as a facebook application are currently under development.

The very first iteration of Damrej was built under a different name and was meant to be a search engine for jobs, but then the team chose to expand it to other types of offers.

Damrej is available in French and English, depending on the country, for the time being. I expect an Arabic version is on the way. The team behind Damrej is made up of two Tunisians, Hamza Ghandouri and Mohamed Miled Mrassi.

Their aim was to present the content in an attractive way with very little advertising to help users maximize their sales online, while retaining the concept ”results in 1 or 2 clicks”.

The service is now available in three languages: English, French and Spanish; and has integrated a number of new features like: simple and fast single page ad posting, optimized search tools, and two options to display ads (list or photo gallery).

Another new interesting additiong is the concept of user galleries; Users with a SokoMaroc account can now setup a personal space “gallery” to present their items for sale and details of their activities. They can personalize this space with their logo / photo, contact info and a unique url for it to share with friends and potential buyers.

A Facebook application is also being developed and should be released soon.

SokoMaroc.com has been active since November 2007 and is run by Soko tech, which is based in Boston US.

SokoMaroc.com is a central network of online communities in Morocco featuring free classified ads organized geographically and by categories (Jobs, Real Estate, Auto-Motorbikes, Personals, For Sale, Services, Community, and Resume categories) and forums on various topics in Morocco. The site currently serves over one million page views and 50 000 unique visitors per month.

Like other online job portals, ReKrute.com aims to continuously connect companies looking to recruit in Tunisia with the best candidates out there.

The portal is totally free for candidates searching for a job, hoping to become their main access point to the job market, providing them with fresh job offers, information on the Tunisian job market, career advice and tips, online language tests and more.
Of course, the possibility to just post their CVs to the portals database so that they can be found by employers is also possible. 

For companies, ReKrute.com provides a global and flexible e-recruitment solution, that enables them to search through a database of CVs that match their exact needs, post their job vacancies and get in touch with the right potential employees for them.

All Job offers through the portal will also be reachable through the MSN Maghreb‘s job section which is powered by ReKrute.com.

In order to promote ReKrute.com in Tunisia and increase its visibility, partnership agreements are being finalised with big media entities, as well as a number of important Tunisian and European universities.

Ramla Jamel, who previously was a channel manager at Intel Corp., is the general manager of ReKrute.com in Tunisia.

The event will be conducted by the Forum Nokia business development management team, who will be meeting startups, SMEs, established firms, operators and developers from the three countries.

Forum Nokia will also be participating in the Mobile Monday Morocco event at the Casablanca TechnoPark on Monday, October 13th.

The Road show’s main purpose is to reach out to the local mobile application developer community in the region and stimulate innovation on top of the advanced Nokia mobile platform. The road show will be a unique opportunity for the local developers and universities to see the best technology and business platforms that Forum Nokia provides. They will also get a better understanding of the potential market and the great business opportunities for their innovative mobile applications thanks to Nokia’s large consumer base locally and globally.

Through Forum Nokia, local developers and universities have access to Nokia’s large developer community’s knowledge and expertise; they are connected to tools, technical information, support and distribution channels they can use to build and market applications around the globe.

From offices in the U.S., Europe, Japan, China, India and Singapore, Forum Nokia provides technical and business development support to developers and operators to assist them in achieving their goal of successfully launching applications and services to consumers and enterprises.

The growth has been fueled by a boom in 3G Internet and the sustained growth of mobile telephone subscriptions.

Morocco now has more than 21.5 million customers in the mobile sector, equalling a 70% penetration rate. In terms of market share, Maroc Telecom covers 66.37% of the market, compared to 33.37% for Médi Telecom.
Of these mobile customers, most are pre-paid users, with only 4% on contract.
The recent entrance of a third mobile operator, Wana, promises more growth in the mobile market. 

As for the internet, the Morocco now has more than 650,000 subscribers; representing a growth of 37% compared with June of last year. New entrant Wana (in the 3G internet sector) holds 18% of the market in comparison to 76% for Maroc Telecom and 4% for Médi Telecom.

Regarding 3G internet penetration, it rose to around 160,000 subscribers in June 2008, with a growth rate of more than 553% in a single year, making 3G the second most popular way of accessing the Internet in Morocco, holding 24% of the market compared to ADSL’s 74%.

The number of fixed-line telephone customers has also continued to grow, recently surpassing 2.7 million, which represents a penetration rate of 9% of the population. This number encompasses residential subscribers, businesses, as well as payphones. The fixed telephony market is split almost equally by Maroc Telecom and Wana.

Hyde Park is a group blog with integrated social networking features, enabling bloggers to publish freely and as easily as possible.

The main goals behind Hyde Park are to simplify the process of blogging as much as possible and to create more and more connections and interaction between bloggers by bringing them together on one collective blog where they can write about a range of common topics.

With Hyde Park there won’t be any complicated or obligatory steps to blog; a blogger can just enter his name and a password to create an account and start blogging right away, using a simple and clear visual interface. Every blogger has a personal dashboard to publish their blog posts from, get in touch with other blogges, follow comments, …etc.

All blog posts can be voted on (both positively and negatively), with the possibility of showing the blog’s content in the same way used on social bookmarking services.
Content on the blog will be categorized using tags and channels, and can be displayed according to this categorization, date of publishing, or number of votes. Comments on posts can also be followed on an independent page. 

As for the social networking side of things; every blogger will get their own personal page to share their personal details and list their blog psots; this page can be totally personalized and redesigned according to the blogger’s taste. Other users can comment on the blogger’s page, much like they can do on a person’s wall on Facebook and other social networks. Bloggers can also build up their list of friends on the site.

A public beta version of the service will be released on October 1st, as a number of standard features continue to be added and completed, before the official launch of the site.
The service will be available in Arabic only at the beginning, with the possibility of more languages in the future.

Hyde Park is a project that was launched by well known blogger Mohammed Said Hjiouij from Morocco.

# Hyde Park