Archive for the ‘Featured’ Category
Revisiting Arabic Social Bookmarking And Content Discovery
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 23, 2010 – 12:00 pm |
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A bit over two years ago, I wrote a post about the Arab social bookmarking services out there, listing the existing options, how good they looked and how well they seemed to be doing, identifying the top ones at that time.
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.
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.
AppsArabia, An Arabic Mobile Applications Development Fund
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 7, 2010 – 11:33 am | View Comments
Abu Dhabi’s twofour54 has recently announced it will be launching a new investment fund called ‘AppsArabia‘, which promotes and supports mobile app development throughout the Middle East and North Africa using the Software Development Kits (SDKs) of all the major mobile and online platforms (e.g. Android (Google), iPhone OS (Apple), BlackBerry, Facebook, OpenSocial and Ovi (Nokia)).
The fund will be offered by twofour54 ibtikar, which provides funding and support to start-up and early stage Arabic content initiatives.
AppsArabia is led by David Ashford, and the plan for it is to invest in the best ideas for apps from entrepreneurs, app developers and businesses, and provide commercial guidance, resources and marketing support to make these apps successful.
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.
Oasis 500, A New ICT Seed Capital Fund For Jordan’s Startups
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | May 4, 2010 – 2:14 pm | View Comments
King Abdullah II Fund for Development (KAFD) in Jordan is planning to launch a new ICT seed capital fund in two months with the aim of solving the problem of innovative new startups in the country that need to secure some early stage funding.
The new fund will be called Oasis 500, and the goal is for it to provide an initial capital of between $50,000 and $100,000 to 500 startups. It will be mainly focused on funding new ideas, especially in media, online, content, applications and the service industry.
At this point, it seems that it’s still undecided though whether the fund will be expanded and made accessible to startups from outside Jordan.
Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority To Launch Global Technology Fund
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | October 22, 2009 – 11:31 am | View Comments
Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority (DSOA), the region’s largest integrated technology park, is planning to launch a global technology fund middle of next year.
“Some of the investments will be from ourselves, some from local and regional investors and also international investors,” said Ray Milhem, the new chief technology officer of technology investment at DSOA.
He said, it will largely target companies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, as well as global companies. The fund’s amount has not been finalised yet.
The fund is another means to attract research and development and manufacturing companies to set up a base in Dubai Silicon Oasis. And they are already talking to a number of companies to establish manufacturing in Dubai Silicon Oasis, with a concentration on start-ups.
Even though the focus is on the Middle East and North Africa, there are some start-ups in Europe and North America that they are looking at for potential investments, in order to get them to open higher-engineering offices in Dubai Silicon Oasis.
Earlier, the authority announced a budget of Dh25 billion set aside for investment in the coming years at DSOA. The whole project has already attracted foreign investments worth Dh1.4 billion. It has set aside about Dh500 million to invest in start-ups that will be spent over the next five years.
Additionally, private investment into real estate at DSOA is Dh13 billion, while Dh10 billion is budgeted for the third phase of the project’s development.
According to Milhem, the authority is in talks with several companies and should be making some decisions and announcing some deals soon.
[Source: Gulf News]
Twofour54 Ibtikar Launches Creative Lab Media Industry Grant Fund For Young Arabs
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | October 19, 2009 – 10:27 am | View Comments
twofour54 ibtikar, the media industry funding and support pillar of twofour54 Abu Dhabi, has launched twofour54 ibtikar: creative lab, a grant funding scheme aimed at engaging with young Arabs and stimulating creativity in order to build a long term sustainable media industry in the Arab world.
twofour54 ibtikar: creative lab offers grant funding and business support to talented Arab individuals from the UAE and across the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region, helping great media and entertainment ideas that would benefit from seed funding, development guidance and planning to get off the ground.
It offers funds ranging from US$1,000 to US$50,000 for creative and original ideas across all media platforms including television, radio, film, publishing, online, mobile, music, gaming and animation.
twofour54 ibtikar: creative lab and young Arab funding recipients will engage in regular brainstorming sessions to develop ideas into fully fledged creative projects. A key part of this collaborative process will include budget creation and training in project execution and support throughout.
Tarek Ghattas, twofour54 ibtikar: creative lab manager, added: “We want people to come forward with their media and entertainment ideas. We are looking for passion and originality and there is no such thing as a bad idea. This is an opportunity for young Arabs to unleash their inner creativity and have a go at turning vision into reality – coming to us means never having to look back and wonder what you could have been.”
twofour54 ibtikar: creative lab expands twofour54 ibtikar’s funding portfolio, which also includes ibtikar ventures, an investment fund that focuses on start-up and early stage media and entertainment initiatives.
Third Edition Of MIT Arab Business Plan Competition Launched
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | October 12, 2009 – 8:32 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. It also brings to the Arab world all the MIT expertise in entrepreneurship and in running such competitions.
The equivalent of the MIT Arab Business Plan Competition in Boston is called the MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition and has created a number of leading firms and thousands of jobs.
The Launching Ceremony for the 3rd MIT Arab Business Plan Competition is taking place tonight (October 12th) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at the Four Seasons Hotel. The event will include an address from Mr. Hussein Shobokshi (President, Shobokshi Development & Trading; Managing Director, Okaz Printing and Publishing), in addition to testimonials from last year’s winning teams.
The website is open now for registration by interested candidates. They are required to fill the online application form consisting of a series of questions that summarize their business idea and the means of implementing it.
The deadline for submitting applications is Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 23:59 GMT.
The competition is open to all Arab nationals with a business idea, with the only requirement being to be part of a team, with each team comprising of minimum 3 individuals, of which at least 2 should be citizens of the Arab world. The business concept put forward by the team should also be implemented in a country within the Arab world.
Thirty teams will qualify for the second round of the competition, and invited to Beirut to attend a one-day workshop lead by Ken Morse, Managing Director of MIT Entrepreneurship Center in Cambridge, MA; and designated a mentor who can help with developing their business plan.
After they submit their full business plans, only 9 make it to the final round and invited to Cairo to give oral presentations of their business plans; with 3 winning teams to be selected and announced during the awards ceremony.
All entrepreneurs interested can go to the competition’s website and Apply Now.
Talasim One Of Six Winners At Seedcamp Week 2009
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | September 26, 2009 – 2:54 am | View Comments
Seedcamp has announced the six winners of this year’s edition of Seedcamp Week, after an intense week of mentoring in London by a diverse mentor, investor and entrepreneur network.
Among the six winners is Jordanian startup Talasim, an online social network and photo sharing service for comedy/funny content, which was founded by Zeid Koudsi and Sabri Hakim, and is one of the projects leading Arab UGC portal Jeeran invested in and incubated.
Each of the six winning teams will be receiving a €50k investment from Seedcamp and active support over the next three months to help develop their products and companies. In return Seedcamp should be taking a stake worth between 5-10% of each company.
These next three months will be spent in London, with the winning teams working with the Seedcamp team on building the product and company together, and with the teams provided access to services worth 2-3 times the invested €50K, with the goal of helping grow and nurture the teams, and putting in-depth focus on developing the product and business.
During the course of these three months, the groups will also have an opportunity to take advantage of the same group of experts that participated in the Seedcamp week through weekly dinners, topical lunches, conferences, and continued mentorship on various issues. They’ll also get to demo their products to other groups from Seedcamp as well as potential investors in two events along the way.
The other 5 winners are: Boxed Ice (UK), Brainient (Romania), Codility (Poland), Erply (Estonia) and Patients Know Best (UK).
Google Launches Egabat New Arabic Questions & Answers Service
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | September 8, 2009 – 9:00 pm | View Comments
Google is officially announcing the launch of a new service for the Arab world, under the name Google Egabat (meaning Google Answers in Arabic), in an event now taking place in Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), Dubai, UAE.
As the name suggests the product is a questions and answers service, a community-driven knowledge market site that allows users to both submit questions to be answered and answer questions asked by other users.
But unlike the now defunct Google Answers, which shut down in December 2006, where asker-accepted answers used to cost $2 to $200, Google Egabat deploys a reputation and incentive system, giving members the chance to earn points along the way, as a means to encourage participation.
While using the service, rating answers, and other tasks on the service users get to accumulate points in their account that they can use to ask questions of their own, assigning a number of those points to be transferred to the person who gives the best answer.
In parallel users also accumulate reputation points that are assigned to them depending on the good questions or answers they post on the service, according to the votes by the other users. Each user’s expertise level is based on the number of reputation points they were able to accumulate, going through nine different levels, ranging from newbie to scientist.
Upon signing up to the service users get 20 free points in their account that they can spend on asking questions and 10 points in reputation points. Each action from just visiting the site to answering to rating brings its own rewards in terms of points. The details for the points system can be found here (in Arabic).
Questions are broken down and organized by categories, sub-categories, and tags, to make them easier for people to find and access answers to.
Similar services by Google are also currently available in two other markets: Russia (since June 2007) and China (with Tianya, a Chinese community website, as Tianya Answers).
The service can be accessed through http://egabat.google.com or http://ejabat.google.com; covering both possible ways to write the word.
