Archive for the ‘Topics’ Category
Is social media marketing overrated?
Nagi Salloum | August 26, 2010 – 9:51 am |
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There has been a lot of buzz lately about social media marketing (SMM), its impact on business, and the feeling of necessity for companies to have a social-media-marketing-strategy. So I wanted to share my opinion and raise some important questions. First, social media is not Facebook or Twitter. It’s way more than this. But considering we want to limit to most popular tools Twitter, Facebook and Blogging, I still fail to see the impact of SMM on real business measures. Here is my rationale. I will give the case for UAE, representing Arabia.
Twitter: How many Twitter users are there in UAE (the most connected country in Arabia with 76% internet penetration)? 40,000? How many of those are active? 20,000? (If you know specific figures, please let me know). UAE has 3,777,900 internet users. So, with a super successful Twitter campaign, the maximum number of users any business can attract is only 0.5% of internet users. Pretty small number, no?
Facebook: I will not refer to Facebook ads reach, because advertising is not marketing. How many fans did the biggest Facebook campaign attract in UAE? How many of those fans were active? The numbers I have seen were close to 30,000 of active fans (I cannot disclose the campaign for confidentiality purposes). Again, it’s a pretty small number, no?
Video: Online Shopping Portal Nahel.com At Dubai Tech Nights
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | August 24, 2010 – 1:09 pm | View Comments
Nahel.com is an online shopping portal based out of Dubai, United Arab Emirates; that aims to become the biggest B2C online retailer in the region.
Nahel.com was founded by Saeid Hejazi, and was officially launched in July 2009. It currently only covers the UAE, although there are plans to expand to the GCC region, with hopes to reach the whole Middle East in the future.
They’ve worked on building an inventory of thousands of new brand-name products covering several categories, from electronics, to games to perfumes, watches and clothing. They source products from wholesalers and distributors in order to be competitive in terms of selection, quality and prices.
N2V Announces Investment In Emirati Startup Yebab
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | August 23, 2010 – 1:27 pm | View Comments
National Net Ventures N2V, one of the top internet groups in the Middle East just announced its investment in Yebab.com, the Arab portal specialized in organizing wedding celebrations in the United Arab Emirates.
Rashid Al Ballaa, CEO of N2V, stated that the project comes in line with the group’s current and future plans to expand its presence at the regional and the international levels. The plan is obviously to enhance the portal’s growth and presence, expanding it into other Arab Gulf countries, and the rest of the Middle East region, establishing it as the most trusted wedding directory in the Arab world.
Yebab.com, which was launched from the UAE in 2009, has proven really successful in the UAE, becoming a leading portal providing a directory of wedding services in the country; including listings for the various suppliers and services from caterers to dressmakers, artists, photographers and traditional musicians. The site shows strong potential to perform just as well and more in other markets around the region.
Yamli Releases Enterprise Version Of Arabic Query Expander
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | August 22, 2010 – 2:43 pm | View Comments
Yamli, the company that brought us products like the Smart Arabic Keyboard and Yamli Arabic Search, is releasing an enterprise version of the technology being used for Yamli Arabic Search in the form of a product they’re calling Arabic Query Expander.
The new service provides a solution for search and data normalization problems when it comes to the Arabic language, by analyzing and identifying all the English and Arabic script variations of an Arabic word, increasing the probability to find matches for searches.
Yamli gives examples like the name “Mohamed Mansour” having at least 80 ways of spelling it, “Mohamed Saleh Abdallah” having 7000 variations, “Jumeirah” having 51 spellings, and the song “Habibi Ya Nor El Ein” having 1207 spelling variations; to make the case for the utility of this tool and how much it can help in solving this problem.
AqarMap.com Launches New Version Based On User Feedback
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | August 21, 2010 – 5:22 pm | View Comments
AqarMap.com, the regional online real estate marketplace that was launched a few months ago, and that enables users to search for houses, apartments and land based on location, through satellite maps, has launched a new version.
According to numbers from AqarMap, they’ve grown quite well over the past few months, reaching a number of over 600 registered Real Estate companies and brokers, who are using the service and posting their properties on it.
The new version of the site aims to bring improved usability and more features for the users. The interesting thing is that all the enhancements and features in this new version were built on ideas and features requested by the early adopting users and clients of AqarMap, which makes it pretty much a crowd sourced effort.
DuShare: A Simple P2P Direct File Transfer Service
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | August 17, 2010 – 10:53 am | View Comments
duShare is a simple P2P direct file transfer service that aims to make the act of sending files between people as easy and effective as possible.
The service enables users to send files of unlimited size to one another though the system, and without having to go through uploading the file to a central server in the process. File transfers are handled through a peer to peer, secure direct transfer connection between the sender and the receiver.
Also as connections are direct between users and don’t go through any central server, files and chats aren’t monitored or viewed by duShare, which gives users a bit of extra privacy.
Cobone, A Group Buying Venture From Jabbar Internet Group
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | August 13, 2010 – 2:43 pm | View Comments
Cobone is a new startup that is looking at using the power of group purchasing in order to offer its users the best deals, allowing them to save on the things they want.
Cobone aims to offer online shoppers in the Middle East region one deal everyday from every city’s best hotels, goods, services, meals, spas and more; with savings they say will start at 50%.
Shoppers are encouraged to invite friends, colleagues and family to join in on daily deals so as to increase their own chances of successfully making a purchase. Customers will also be given the flexibility to purchase coupons for themselves or their friends using a selection of online payment options, from credit cards to other options like CashU (another Jabbar company) and PayPal.
Otlobmall.com: A New Online Shopping Destination For Egypt
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | August 11, 2010 – 3:31 pm | View Comments
Otlob.com, the online food ordering service, is building on their success and experience, by making a new push into online shopping through their recently launched portal called Otlobmall.com.
Otlobmall.com allows users to shop online for a variety of products in different categories, including electronics, mobile phones, beauty products, sports, jewelry, apparel, books and magazines and gifts.
Purchased products are delivered directly to the purchaser’s home or designated delivery address and can be paid for either online or by cash on delivery.
Abjad Hawaz 7o66i Kalamun, lost in the Markup
Saleh Esmaeili | August 5, 2010 – 1:00 pm | View Comments
An Arabic art gallery without some of the best crafted calligraphy holds no value. That’s a fact. Arabic calligraphy & poetry are forms of cultural pride and not just art. Going digital, we lose all that. From readability to interaction. It’s all gone. Bold? Italic? Underlined? Get yourself ten Arabic books. Open’em, read’em, do you find anything in Bold? Italic? or Underlined? No you don’t. But we do have all that on the Web. How come?
Some will debate this with Interaction & Readability unity across different languages–English that is but with all the author-ware software developers’ presence in the region there hasn’t been one solid negating report which gets us to a simple conclusion, not enough efforts, at least not as much as it deserves.
So with all the calls for Arabic content around and how much Arabic content is going to be important for the growth of Arabic users’ online experience and the Internet industry in general, the basics haven’t really been covered.
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Dakwak: A Tool For Website Localization Into 60+ Languages
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | July 27, 2010 – 11:12 am | View Comments
Dakwak is a new startup that was recently launched from Jordan that aims to provide a solution for website localization into 60+ languages.
The site makes it easy for webmasters to integrate Dakwak’s localization and translation service right into their sites; instantly providing their visitors access to content in the language they’re most comfortable reading in.
All it takes is a bit of javascript code that needs to be integrated into the site pages, and to flag the content that needs to be localized/translated; and the rest is taken care of by Dakwak.
The service automatically detects the country a visitor is connecting from based on their IP address, and changes the language of the content to the visitor’s language, switching all the text without breaking the design of the page; unless the visitor chooses to switch back to the base language.
