Archive for the ‘Saudi Arabia’ Category
Argaam Opens Up To Contributions Through Alpha Beta
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 7, 2009 – 3:19 pm |
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Argaam, the Arabic financial portal, has just launched Alpha Beta, a section of the portal for informed visitors to contribute through posting their analysis of news and events taking place in the market, as well as any information that they might have that isn’t necessarily common knowledge to everyone interested in the stock market and economy in general.
Alpha Beta is open for direct contributions in the form of articles, news, opinions, analysis about regional or worldwide stock markets, investment opportunities; as well as comments and followup on articles published on the portal.
Argaam hope to create a vibrant open environment for discussion and sharing of new ideas, enabling the portal’s visitors to connect, interact and exchange opinions and information that will help enrich and develop the investment culture in the Arab world.
The portal’s editors will go over submitted material before it is published to make sure of its quality, accuracy and reliability, as well as its adherence to the guidelines for these articles, which ask for them to be focused, unbiased and precise among other criteria.
It’s an interesting move from Argaam, attempting to tap into the knowledge of the crowds for insider information about a financial market where there’s more to each story than what figures in the official press releases and news, in addition to all that takes place behind the scenes.
As with the parent portal Argaam, Alpha Beta is available in Arabic only.
Kammelna: An Online Multi-player Baloot Card Game Service
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 6, 2009 – 10:26 am | Comments
Taking its first step into the online gaming world, Saudi web company Remal IT has launched a beta of its ‘Baloot’ card game site, Kammelna.
Kammelna is an online multi-player ‘Baloot‘ game, a popular card game played in Saudi Arabia (which is quite similar to the French game Belote), that is built in Flash and runs in a browser.
Being a flash game, the game does not require downloading, and is played directly from within the browser, featuring a simple Arabic interface that is geared toward getting the players started with a game as easily and quickly as possible.
The game also supports firewall traversal, which will allow players to play the game even from within restricted networks.
Remal IT noted that Kammelna.com basic playing features will be free, and that the site will be supported through ads and extra paid playing features. They also hope to roll out more free online games, geared towards the Arab market, in the future.
Remal IT is a Saudi based Internet applications and services startup that was established back in 2005. It owns and operates a network of social sites and Internet applications, and relies on e-commerce and e-marketing for revenues.
Ehsaeyat, Open Free Survey Service Around Technology Topics
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 2, 2009 – 10:24 am | Comments
Ehsaeyat is a new Arabic service that was launched a couple of months ago by Bluemeel as an open and free service holding and publishing results of surveys, mainly around technology topics.
Surveys done by Ehsaeyat are open and free for everyone to access and make use of, in an attempt to help academic researchers as well as business people find the numbers they need for their research and businesses.
The service is aimed at everyone, but mainly at people who don’t have the budget to go to one of the market research companies out there for the numbers and details they need.
Anyone can suggest surveys to be launched and then shared through the site. The surveys done by Eshaeyat are managed through SurveyMonkey, and then their results are published for everyone to access.
The service should come in handy for a number of people, and I think it could be used by internet startups to try and collect more information to help them with their first steps.
Ehsaeyat is still at its beginnings, and a good start it is, I just think they should try to put more focus on their ongoing surveys, and on getting them out there to more people from different backgrounds, incomes, …etc., in order to have a better and more significant result set.
Restaurant Review Service Qaym Releases New Version
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | March 24, 2009 – 10:09 pm | Comments
Qaym, the Arab website for user generated restaurant and coffee shop reviews, that was previously reviewed here, recently celebrated the launch of it’s new redesigned interface and additional features.
Qaym is an online project through which users rate and review restaurants and coffee shops, in addition to uploading pictures of them and their food items, discussing their positives and negatives and posting relevant information about them.
Each restaurant has its own page that contains information about it (including location, branches, type of offered food, etc.) and reviews of the people who visited it and tried its food, which can range from enthusiastic delight to obvious disappointment. There’s a gauge in each page showing the average user rating of the restaurant.
The new version includes a re-branding for the service, introducing a new logo, and a new more simplistic and organized design for the homepage, as well as some other design tweaks for the inside pages.
An important new feature that has been introduced is the ability to pinpoint the location of a restaurant and its different branches on a map; to make it easier for people to find them. This is done through the integration of Google Maps.
Other than that the site’s rating system has been enhanced and extended to allow users to rate each other’s reviews, posts and photos.
The site currently focuses on food and drink establishments, and intends to expand so that the community can rate and review any charged service or product, ultimately aiming to provide an honest, user- and consumer-driven community in which people’s real experiences are shared and published so that they can be the basis of people’s decisions to buy or use a product or service, instead of attractive advertisements and ubiquitous billboards.
New Version For Al-Fawaed Social Knowledge Sharing Service
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | March 23, 2009 – 6:00 pm | Comments
After around a year and a half without releasing any new features, the team behind Al-Fawaed, the Arab social knowledge sharing site has gone and launched a new version of their online service.
Al-Fawaed is a service that lets users share the useful and most interesting points they’ve taken away from reading a certain book or article, listening to a lecture, watching a television program, or even from a personal life experience, in the form of summaries or mind map diagrams.
The new version includes a slight re-design aimed at making the site more user friendly and the information shared on it more organized and accessible. The homepage has been changed to show the latest summaries and mind maps in respective columns, instead of defaulting to the summaries page.
A number of the page elements have also been revamped and re-organized around the page to better present them to the user.
A section offering the user some randomly selected entries to discover has been added to the side of the page, offering an entry point to more summaries or mind maps. At the end of each entry, there is also a new section serving up links to other entries, as well as the previous and next ones.
The possibility to share entries with friends through the most popular online social bookmarking and social networking services has been integrated into the system as well.
A number of technical enhancements have been added to the system too, including keyboard shortcuts to make the creation of summaries and lists easier, tag suggestions, better support for the most popular browsers among others.
Kn.tc (Konashah), An Arabic Online Notebook Application
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | March 9, 2009 – 10:04 pm | Comments
Kn.tc, which stands for Konashah, a word that means notebook in Arabic, is just as its name suggests an Arabic online notebook application, made to provide a place for Arab internet users to jot down and save their thoughts, favorite quotes and sites, and anything they’d like to be able to go back to and find in the future.
Konashah enables users to create as many online notebooks to group their notes into as many different categories and themes as they wish.
A Firefox plugin was created for Konashah that enables users to directly start typing their notes from within the browser extension without having to go to the Kn.tc website every time, or to simply select the text they want to clip on any given web page and send it to their notebooks right away.
The design is very simplistic and the interface is really easy to use, with Ajax integration making management of notebooks, as well as updates and changes on notes within them quick and light.
Konashah was developed by Mazen Melibari from Saudi Arabia and is only available in Arabic.
DemoCamp Saudi - King Saud University, Riyadh - (March 11th)
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | March 8, 2009 – 9:47 pm | Comments
The first DemoCamp Saudi; a launch event in Saudi Arabia for new products, technologies and companies; will be taking place at King Saud University in Riyadh on March 11th in hall #26.
The following seven demos will be taking place at the event:
- 3zeema: An Arab social event organization and invitation service, that was previously reviewed here.
- Fwateer: An online service that enables businesses selling online to bill their clients directly through their bank accounts.
- Moshtry: A service that provides tips and advice on what products to buy and use, allowing users to share their own experiences as well.
- Kammelna: An online Baloot group card game site.
- Books Exchange: An online book exchange service.
- Qaym: An online service for user generated restaurant reviews, previously reviewed here.
- Dorat: An online central resource for all training opportunities provided by companies.
The format will be the same as other DemoCamp events in the region, with the presenters giving a 10 minute presentation of their work, with another 5 minutes for Q&A.
The presenters will also be available to answer any further questions, receive feedback and share some thoughts after the event.
Startups and web applications presented at DemoCamp Saudi will also be reviewed here on StartUpArabia.
[Updated 09/03/09: Two other demos have been added (Qaym and Dorat), bringing the total to seven demos.]
ABAN Signs MoUs To Set Up Three New Business Angel Networks In MENA Region
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | January 20, 2009 – 9:47 pm | Comments
The Arab Business Angels Network (ABAN), established by the Young Arab Leaders (YAL) with Dubai International Capital as its founder and lead investor, recently announced the signing of three strategic memorandums of understanding (MoUs) with companies in the MENA region to collaboratively work towards establishing three new business angel networks in the region.
ABAN’s agreement with the Saudi-based Siraj Capital in Jeddah and the National Enterprise Centre (NEC-Centennial Fund) in Riyadh, as well as the Beirut-based Bader Lebanon will facilitate the creation of the Jeddah Business Angels Network, Riyadh Business Angels Network, and the Lebanese Business Angels Network respectively.
ABAN will counsel the three partner companies on various aspects of establishing and maintaining a local Business Angels Network in their respective cities. The key components of their knowledge transfer will include full technical support and skill-set training, extensive onsite training on global best practices for recruiting angel investors, screening investment opportunities, and nurturing a spirit of entrepreneurialism within the organizational structure. ABAN will also equip each of the three partner networks with a training manual on effective practices to maintain day-to-day operations.
Other than sharing the responsibility of due diligence activities such as screening potential angel investors and seeding ventures, ABAN will be invited to participate in the three new networks’ future matchmaking events, opening up a new pool of seed capital for ABAN’s network. The events will help provide an organized and professional platform for entrepreneurs to showcase their companies to potential angel investors.
3zeema, An Arab Event Organization And Invitation Service
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | January 19, 2009 – 9:05 pm | Comments
3zeema is a new Arab service that was recently launched in its beta version to make it easier for people to organize events and invite their friends and contacts to them, whether it’s a personal or professional event.
The service is free and pretty simple to use; after signing up you can directly start creating events by following three easy steps: choosing a place to hold the event, either by selecting from the list of venues already existent in the site’s database or by specifying a new venue and locating it on a map; the next step is to add the friends and contacts that you want to invite to the event, either by choosing from your lists of friends or friend groups, both of which are administrable from seperate interfaces, or by adding your invitees directly through a little form; finally the last step is to put in the details of the event, confirm the invitation and have it sent out.
Invitations are sent by sms, providing invitees with the details of the event. Invitees can also use their phone number and invitation number to login and view more details about the event and the venue.
As an organizer, you can also choose whether you want your event to be public, and thereby viewable by all site visitors, or whether you prefer it to be private. The same goes for the venue, as some people could be hosting the event at their homes, and don’t want to make their addresses public.
If the invitation is sent a long time in advance, it is possible to specify when you want the service to send a reminder to all invitees. It is also possible to specify if the event is a recurring one, inputting its periodicity so that the service automatically sends out reminders to invitees each time.
An events page for each user shows the events that they created as well as all the events that they were invited to.
3zeema was founded by Esam Alwagait, and its beta version was released earlier this month. The service is only available in Arabic and for events in Saudi Arabia for the time being.
# 3zeema
Mobile Subscribers Sector In Saudi Arabia To Expand By 27%
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | November 2, 2008 – 12:24 pm | Comments
The mobile subscribers sector in Saudi Arabia will expand by over 27 per cent in 2008, lifting the official mobile penetration rate to 144 per cent, according to Business Monitor International (BMI).
The launch of commercial services by new entrant Saudi Zain is expected to further stimulate the market.
The BMI report, made available to Khaleej Times, noted that according to the Saudi regulator, the number of mobile users in the kingdom had reached 28.4 million at the end of 2007. This was after having grown by over 44 per cent during the year. Mobile penetration at the end of 2007 stood at just over 116 per cent. By the end of March 2008, the number of Saudi mobile subscribers had estimatedly grown to 30.7 million.
“Growth in 2007 was actually stronger than in 2006, and this leads us to believe that much of the sector’s recent growth has been based on the addition of new prepaid users,” it explained.
Meanwhile, regulatory figures indicate that Saudi Arabia had 4 million operational fixed lines at the end of 2007. This is slightly less than the previous estimate of 4.129 million lines. According to the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC), the fixed line sector as a whole saw very little growth during 2007; combined with an expanding population, this meant that Saudi Arabia’s fixed-line penetration rate decreased from 16.8 per cent at the end of 2006 to 16.4 per cent by the end of 2007.
