Archive for the ‘Topics’ Category
Wajhy, Create Your Own Arab Avatar
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | February 16, 2010 – 12:38 pm |
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Over the past years, every now and then a new avatar creation tool would pop up from somewhere, to let internet users create avatars of theirs in the form of South Park characters, Lego men and women, and the list continues; each time people would flock to the new service, create their avatars, and they’d spread them like fire across social networks and all sorts of other online services.
A new tool called Wajhy has been launched, in Arabic, for Arab users, that allows them to create avatars that actually look a bit more like them, and that they can dress in traditional dress too.
The user can choose whether they want to create a male or female avatar, then go in and start setting the options one by one, from shape of face, ears and nose, to what they’re wearing, what their head dress is, and the accessories they’re sporting.
The main differences between Wajhy,which means ‘My face’ in Arabic, and other such services are in the choices of clothing available for men and women, their head dress, the facial hair options for men, and such small details that give a small Arab touch to the avatar.
The service was launched by Remal IT (Saudi Arabia) and SOCOOOL Entertainment (United Arab Emirates), and is still in Beta, but is quite stable and smooth to use.
Saot Al Arab, What Would You Do If You Were The Leader?
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | February 15, 2010 – 4:20 pm | Comments
Saot Al Arab (The voice of Arabs) is an interesting and ambitious non-profit project that was recently launched for the Arab world, asking visitors what they would do if they were in the leader’s chair, what would be the first project they would launch.
The idea of course is to give Arabs a space to voice their opinions and thoughts in an open and simple way that will let them get their ideas about different subjects and areas across to everyone. In a way, the site attempts to offer a platform for freedom of expression without making it a ground where people can openly criticize their governments, by framing the responses in a certain fictional context.
So basically, users from across the Arab world can go to the site and submit ideas for projects that they would implement and put in place if they were the leaders and decision makers; while other users visiting the site get to vote on the ideas and leave their comments.
Project ideas are categorized by topic: Security, Media, Economics, Education, Culture, Politics, Society, and Technology; and also broken down by Country.
A very interesting goal and milestone for the project lies ahead, as the plan is that after a certain time collecting all these ideas, they will be compiled into a book, a copy of which will be sent to each Arab ruler; the book will also be made available in the market for everyone.
Unfortunately, in order to make sure that nothing that will get the site banned is published, submitted ideas do currently have to go through a screening process before being published on the site.
The project was launched by Hijazi Natsheh, a Palestinian entrepreneur currently based out of the United Arab Emirates.
Shofha.com, Arabic Movies & Series Online On Demand
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | February 13, 2010 – 3:34 pm | Comments
LINKonLINE, a subsidiary of LINKdotNET (an Orascom Telecom Holding company), has announced the launch of a new entertainment service called Shofha, in collaboration with regional movie and series producers and rights owners.
The new service, which is available in English and Arabic, allows anyone from anywhere in the world, to legally watch the latest Arabic movies and television series online on the same day of their international release. Movies and series are provided in high resolution, commercial free, through online streaming or download; with the video files being all DRM protected, most probably using Microsoft Windows Media DRM.
Shofha.com comes with a good back catalogue of movies and series, either on rental or purchase basis, that can be downloaded or watched online. TV series will be available in both full series form as well as sing episode form; even 5 minute episode highlights are provided for those without much time on their hands.
The available options are to: Buy the video, where a user gets to download the video to their pc and play it anytime they wish indefinitely, with the ability to download the movie up to 3 times; Rent the video, where a user can download the video to their pc and watch it as many times as they want within a 48 hour time-frame; and finally there’s the Internet Cinema option where the user gets to instantly start watching the video through online streaming as many times as they wish in a 24 hour time-frame, with the quality of the video depending on the connection speed the user has.
The prices for each option seem to vary depending on the country, for example international users paying in US dollars would have to pay something like: $US 6 to buy, $US 3 to rent, and $US 9 to stream online; on the other hand, someone in the UAE would pay 9 Dirhams to buy, 5 Dhs to rent, and 7 Dhs to stream online, which is much cheaper.
Altibbi, An Online Arabic Medical & Health Resource
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | January 20, 2010 – 2:01 pm | Comments
Altibbi is an online Arabic medical and health resource, that aims to be a one stop destination for Arab users who are interested in researching and finding more about certain medical and health terms and conditions.
The portal provides a medical dictionary, medical articles and news, as well as question and answer features. It currently includes over 60,000 concise definitions of medical and health terms, and provides detailed descriptions of medical conditions, medications, conventional medical and healing practices, anatomical and physiological terms, illnesses and disorders, drugs, tests and procedures, noted medical personalities, and more.
All the content on the site is Arabized and clearly explained in Arabic, also matching each word with its official synonym term in English.
The goal of Altibbi is to contribute to raising awareness around health related issues among the general population, and removing any mystery surrounding illnesses and diseases. It can also be a handy resource for Arab medical students.
Something the site makes sure to clear up though is that the information on it should not be used in place of visiting and getting the advice of a medical professional, just as a resource to find information and to help understand certain medical details better.
Fora9, A New Online Job Service For Women
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | January 19, 2010 – 5:49 pm | Comments
Fora9 (read ‘Foras’, which means ‘Opportunities’ in Arabic) is a new free online job service out of Kuwait, created for women in the Middle East and North Africa, to make it easier for them to find job opportunities.
The idea came to life when the developing company was looking to build a team and faced difficulties getting to qualified women for certain positions even though they know they were obviously out there.
The design is simplistic and presents job opportunities under four different types which are part time jobs, full time jobs, telework, and volunteer work; and under several categories from IT jobs, to sales and marketing, to teaching and accounting, and more. Featured open job positions are also highlighted on the front page of the site.
The service also attempts to make it as simple as possible for companies and organizations to post their job openings that are tailored for women on the site, and reach a more targeted and qualified audience.
Fora9 is a product of Wasm Media, a Kuwait based company founded by Abdulmohsen Alajmi. It currently is available in Arabic only.
This isn’t the first time an Arab startup tries to tackle the women employment and jobs area; we previously covered Sudanese startup Twffaha that focused on the same point, which seems to have abandoned the effort at some point along the way.
Kngine, A New Semantic Web Search Engine
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | January 18, 2010 – 1:04 pm | Comments
Kngine is a new semantic web search engine and question answering engine that was launched from Egypt, aiming to provide more meaningful search results to users.
Unlike other regular search engines that focus more on the ranking of pages to serve search results to users, Kngine attempts to understand what the user is searching for exactly or what question they are asking, and then tries to come up with the best information, answers and results it can find.
This is done by analyzing the entered keywords to discover the relationships between them, linking the different found data together and then displaying united sets of related information from around the web.
The kinds of information and details provided by the search engine, along with the search results listings, are: Semantic information about the keywords/concepts, direct answers to the entered questions, comparisons between entered keywords/concepts, and possible links between different types of data such as movies, subtitles, photos, store prices, user reviews and more.
Kngine, which stands for Knowledge Engine, currently contains over 1 billion of pieces of data, and features about more than 7 million concepts; 70,000+ companies, 700,000+ movies, 1,100,000+ personalties, 450,000+ locations, 150,000+ books, and more. The interface is currently only available in English.
Even though the product is still in beta, it already shows promise in the way it searches, analyzes and returns relevant results; and we expect it to get even better with time as more work is put into its engine.
The search engine was launched from Cairo, Egypt, and founded by Haytham A. Abd ElFadeel, a Computer Science researcher, focused mainly on the semantic web and search, as well as parallel and distributed computing.
According to the founder, the long-term goal for Kngine is to make all human beings systematic knowledge and experience accessible to everyone; collecting and organizing all objective data, and making it easily accessible to everyone.
Yallakora Launches Mobile Version of Yallakora TV
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | January 16, 2010 – 7:12 pm | Comments
Yallakora, one of the popular sports portals in the region has announced the launch of a mobile version of Yallakora TV, giving users the possibility to access sports news and information, as well as watch match commentary and analysis directly from their mobile phones, while on the go.
Yallakora, which is owned and run by LINKonLINE (a subsidiary of Orascom Telecom Holding), is available in both English and Arabic, providing full coverage to different sports with a bigger focus on Football, through publishing various details and news regarding Football leagues and championships in the Middle East, North Africa and others. This includes team news, player information and statistics, match results as well as analysis for Football matches
Yallakora’s new effort isn’t through an application that has to be downloaded and installed, all users have to do is point their mobile phone browsers to yallakora.com to access the mobile version of the site, and access the information and news on the site, as well as mobile phone compatible video streaming of interviews, match analysis and the contents of Yallakora’s video library.
A number of Arab entrepreneurs and startups are currently looking more and more to the mobile phone as a practical way to provide their services, especially with the high and growing mobile penetration around the region. We can surely expect a number of other announcements revolving around mobile in the coming year.
Taya IT Launches Beta Of Yajeel Content Discovery Portal
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | January 14, 2010 – 11:42 am | Comments
Taya IT, a regional specialist in Enterprise and internet search applications, has announced the beta launch of Yajeel, a new content discovery portal which aims to play the role of an independent gateway to some of the best online content from Arabia.
The portal is in Arabic only, and uses Taya IT’s advanced search technologies to provide Arabic internet users with a new tool to easily discover and share Arabic content online,
Through the Yajeel homepage, users will be able to find the highlights from Arabic content around the web, search through content, as well as navigate through content specific web channels that serve as dedicated portals to the most popular topics available from third-party web publishers. With the beta launch, the only channel available now is a football news service containing the latest news and fixtures from Middle Eastern and international football.
The service also integrates a ranking tool, that allows users to rate the content they view and push it up or down in the listing of “most popular” pages.
The technology behind Yajeel intelligently classifies Arabic internet content, giving users access to a continuously updated stream of relevant web pages categorized according to topics of interest. Users can then customize the stream controlling what they see and how they see it, as well as share content from all web channels with their friends.
The official release is expected to be sometime in February 2010, with a number of new extra features and additional web channels products.
# Yajeel
ArabNet 2010: Trends and Opportunities in Arab Web Business
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | January 13, 2010 – 12:47 pm | Comments
IBAG, International Business Alliance Group, presents the first edition of a new international conference for the Arab internet industry, ArabNet 2010, under the tagline of “Trends and Opportunities in Arab Web Business.”
The conference will be held in Beirut on March 25-26, 2010 with the support of Endeavor Jordan, the Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship, the Syrian Young Entrepreneurs Association and YallaStartup!.
ArabNet aims to bring the internet community together to network and help launch the hottest startups from across the region. Top investors, internet executives and leaders from Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, AdMob and Intel will address subjects that are critical to the Arab Web Industry including: e-commerce, gaming, mobile, content, online advertising, social networking, new media, and start-up fundraising.
Key to the conference are pitch sessions: Ideathon & Startup Demo. This is the place to match talent with opportunity.
The Ideathon is looking for 10 select entrepreneurs to introduce their fresh startup ideas to eager investors in a rapid-fire pitch session. Similarly, the Demo will select startups with innovative products to pitch and exhibit their companies for the duration of the conference.
Applications are currently being accepted from entrepreneurs and startups from all over the region with strong ideas and products.
For more details about the conference as well as how to apply, you can visit the official website: ArabNet.me.
[StartUpArabia is an official media partner of ArabNet 2010.]
Arab Auction Portal Souq.com Launches Operations In Egypt
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | December 22, 2009 – 12:56 pm | Comments
Souq.com, the Arab online auctions company, that is a subsidiary of Jabbar Internet Group, has officially launched operations in another country in the region: Egypt.
The Egyptian version of Souq.com is available in both Arabic and English, hoping to tap into one of the biggest internet markets in the Arab world in terms of number of users with over 12 Million internet users as of June 2009 according to ITU numbers (15.9% out of a population of nearly 80 Million).
Souq.com has been cautious not to attempt to grow too fast and launch the service for the whole region at one go, preferring to set up operations country by country, having staff on the ground in each country to manage the system and make sure users (both sellers and buyers) get the most out of the system and are fully satisfied, also aiming to overcome any trust or security fears.
A number of listings have already started showing up on the site, and one of the offers the service is currently giving is free pickup and delivery in Cairo and Alexandria.
With this launch, Souq.com now operates in four countries: United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and now Egypt.
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