Archive for the ‘Tunisia’ Category
Chkobba Popular Tunisian Card Game Online
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | May 11, 2008 – 7:59 pm |
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Chkobba is one of the most popular card games in Tunisia, mainly played by men at coffee shops around the country, but also played at home by men and women alike.
Tunisian web agency Web Carré have successfully captured the Chkobba coffee shop experience and brought it online through Chkobba.net; the game, which is implemented in Flash, gives you a full coffee shop setting, with the small square tables, the coffee cups, cigarettes, hookah (Shisha), in addition to the ambient noises of a coffee shop, all its hustle and bustle, and the songs playing on an old radio in the corner somewhere.
You can also chat with other users while you’re playing, just as you would be doing if you were sitting with them playing in some coffee shop.
You can play solo against the computer, with the ability to choose your competitor’s level, or invite your friends and play with them in a multi-player game. In both solo and multi-player mode you can choose to play in an online championship and win prizes.
The game is in its second version, even though still in beta and might have some little quirks here and there, but it is very well implemented and really nice to play.
An interesting feature they’re adding is the possibility to find users to play with who are from your same neighborhood or near you by displaying their avatars on a map.
There are a number of other little flash games available on the website, but none as well designed or well implemented as the chkobba card game.
TN-Emploi: A Resource For IT Jobs In Tunisia
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | May 1, 2008 – 12:46 pm | No Comments
TN-Emploi, a.k.a La Tunisienne pour l’emploi, is a new project that was recently launched in Tunisia by Mahmoud Gourar, and that attempts to use a simple blog format to bring job offers and opportunities to Tunisian job seekers, with a focus on IT-related jobs.
Job opportunities are posted daily, organized by category, and tagged with keywords, to make it easier for job seekers to find the jobs that match their goals and skillsets better.
It being a blog, people can access these offers directly through the blog, through the RSS feed or by subscribing to the email feed.
Recruiters and companies can post their offers simply and for free by sending them to a provided email address.
The blog is in French only, and is quite an interesting resource for Tunisian programmers, web developers, database administrators and so forth who need a place where they can find focused job offers for their respective IT fields.
Even though most posted job offers are for opportunities in Tunisia, some others are posted for opportunities in France or the rest of Europe, for those who might be interested in working abroad.
Microsoft And LINKdotNET Launch New MSN Maghreb Portal
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 24, 2008 – 6:30 pm | 1 Comment
Microsoft has launched a new French-language portal for its MSN service, called MSN Maghreb, geared towards the Arab Maghreb region which will provide the latest news and entertainment for users in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria.
The project is a joint venture with LINKdotNET, a subsidiary of Orascom, with which they already launched MSN Arabia in the past, and who currently operate that portal and will operate this new one too.
MSN Arabia, which was launched back in October 2001, attracts around two million page views a day and 2.7 million Hotmail subscribers; and with MSN Maghreb, Microsoft and LINKdotNET are hoping to tap into the rest of the Arab population from the mainly Francophone North African Maghreb region, and of course by doing that, consequently get into local advertisers’ pockets.
The announcement was made by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Orascom board member Khaled Bichara at a press conference in Skhirat, Morocco, earlier today.
The new portal is accessible at www.maghreb.msn.com
Markkit, Web 2.0 Text Highlighter
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 21, 2008 – 10:03 am | 2 Comments
Markkit is a very simple and straight-forward online service, yet a really useful and interesting one; It is, simply put, a web 2.0 text highlighter; it provides you with a bookmarklet that you can use whenever you need to highlight text in a web page: you simply click on the markkit bookmarklet, select the text you want to highlight, and voila it’s done. You don’t even need to create an account or anything.
An option is also provided for site owners to easily integrate a markkit button on their web pages to give their visitors the possibility to highlight text right away.
Users can then access a mark log to see all the latest highlighted texts by everyone, organized by day, or they can search through the archives of marked texts. The possibility to see highlighted texts by everyone actually gives it a bit of a social highlighting touch.
It’s still not possible to view only your highlights, as the functionality to create a user account that you can save your highlights to is still not available.
Markkit, which was launched by Tunisian Slim Amamou, is still in its early stages of development, and only works with Firefox for the time being.
I think it’s really interesting that we’re seeing these new really simple and unitary web tools popping up from the Arab world, addressing one problem and solving it in a really neat and effective way. It’s a sign Arab startups are maturing and realizing that they don’t have to be everything for the user, and that if they do one thing well enough then that is a success.
# Markkit
Mezed, Product Auctions Differently
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 1, 2008 – 10:34 pm | No Comments
Mezed is a Tunisian auction site that recently surfaced into the arena of online startups in Tunisia.
A number of Tunisian websites have already attempted to try and push through the idea of online auctions in Tunisia, get it popular, and attempt to make some money out of it. Examples off the top of my head are sites like: MoncefBay and EchriBay.
A lot of these services hang on for a while before fading away into Tunisian internet history. It just seems that the auction model just hasn’t taken off and worked up to now, for one reason or another.
Websites that approach the whole buying/selling thing through small classified ads seem to be doing a little better maybe, but nothing big enough to come close to real e-commerce yet.
Back to Mezed, they take on a new and different approach to the whole auctions system, taking out the sellers and auctioning off partner products themselves. Their system revolves solely around buyers competing to get the auctioned product at a cheap price.
