Archive for the ‘Content’ Category
JoCr8, An Online Community For Visual Communicators And Artists In Jordan
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 8, 2009 – 10:19 am |
Comments
JoCr8 is a portal created to connect visual communicators and artists in Jordan, and to be a one-stop resource for them for everything related to design and visual arts.
The site is open to everyone who practices any of the visual arts disciplines; from the traditional painter to the designer to the 3D artist.
Users can register to the site to start uploading their work to build their portfolio, that other users will be able to go through and that they can use as a showcase when applying for jobs.
Signed up users can also go through other users’ uploaded material; leave their ratings and comments on their work; and get in touch with them really easily through the interface.
The portal also plays the role of an e-zine with interviews and articles on visual media whether in Jordan, the region, or around the world. It also publishes art and visual media related news and events mainly happening in Jordan.
On the other hand, JoCr8 makes it possible for users to post and share tutorials on different subjects and topics related to design and art, making the site a source of interesting documentation and learning material too.
Another part of the portal is a job postings section that provides information on visual media job opportunities in Jordan and around the region. Job applications aren’t handled through the site though, it’s just a listings section, and users apply seperately to the jobs.
Jocr8, which was founded by Tambi Jalouqa and is a product of Binary Interactive Studios, won the silver award in the online communities category at the Jordan Web Awards 2008 show.
Sejaal, An Online Community For Arab Poets And Poetry Competitions
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 3, 2009 – 3:47 pm | Comments
Sejaal is a new online community portal for Arab poets and poetry competitions that was recently officially launched by Jeeran, a leading Arabic user generated content portal, in its efforts to enrich the Arabic internet with a new type of genuine content and a new crowd of users.
Sejaal’s vision is to be the place for poets from around the world, and to provide poets with tools that help them express their talent and share their creativity with other poets and people online.
A “Sejaal” is a traditional activity that Arabic poets used to enjoy throughout ancient times. This form of poetry has faded in the last century due to the invasion of modern lifestyles, as well as cultural dilution. The web site was specifically designed to replicate the real life experience of a traditional “Sejaal” and therefore revive this form by riding on the most popular medium today –the Internet- making it available to anyone, anywhere in the world.
With the beta version launched earlier in January of this year and even though sejaal is an invitation only site where only the good poets are allowed to join, to maintain the level of quality of the poetry at this very early stage, over 300 competitions were created, the topics of which reflected the general mood of events taking place in real life. For example, a competition on the sad events that took place in Gaza was started by Sejaal users through which the poets wrote 50 verses criticizing the attacks against Palestinians and encouraging the resistance of the Palestinian people.
H2O New Media Announces SODA CMS With Support For Location Based Services
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | May 16, 2009 – 12:55 pm | Comments
H2O New Media has just announced the availability of the SODA Content Management System which they describe as the first Web 2.0 Content Management system to support location based services.
These location based services should allow members of any social community built on the SODA content management system to send its users emails, SMS messages and alerts based on a users physical location.
Steve Vaile, CEO of H2O New Media, says that “The SODA CMS allows any community member to receive notifications either by SMS, MMS, Video or by email to their mobile phone based on their location. The development will enable our publishing and corporate customers to offer innovative new services and applications to their customers and internal based on location and vicinity on their mobile phone. Social communities should operate seamlessly between both web PC & mobile handsets, and with SODA taking advantage of location based services its really one of the first social media technology platforms to create a bridge between the online and the physical world.”
He continues to say that “with SODA a customer can deploy a social media platform that will allow its users not only to communicate with each other but to know where each other are, based on their preferences of course. For example if you are a member of a social community you can receive an SMS text when you are close to your friends, marketers can use it to message users are close to a store that has a promotional offer.”
H2O New Media provides social media applications based on software as a service (SaaS) model to corporate companies in the Middle East. H2O New Media clients include United Business Media, Sian Events, Channels Exhibitions, CSM, G2 Publishing and many other leading events and media companies.
Tunisian Business Portal Web Manager Center Launches Arabic Version
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 14, 2009 – 9:31 pm | Comments
Web Manager Center, the leading online portal for economic and business news in Tunisia just announced the launch of their Arabic version today.
Over the past years, the French version of the site has become a well known resource for business people and reporters alike.
This move comes to cater to readers from Tunisia who prefer reading their news in Arabic, as well as to reach out to readers from around the Arab world who are interested in economic and business news out of Tunisia.
Web Manager Center provides daily detailed news updates covering the latest developments and events in the areas of economy, business and technology.
The portal works on providing the latest news on the Tunisian economy and its various sectors from industry, to agriculture, to finance, services and healthcare. It also sheds light on the world of business in Tunisia, the deals taking place, investments and partnership opportunities. It also covers the information and communications technology sector in the country, detailing all the latest products and services in the market.
The site also provides a ticker of the latest stock prices on the Tunisian stock exchange, as well as exchange rates for the Arab currencies.
In short, just like the French version before it, the Arabic version of Web Manager Center aims to be a central resource on everything related to the Tunisian economy, business in the country, as well as technology, through the news and analysis it provides.
More Arabic Websites From The Gulf, But Few Visitors?
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 5, 2009 – 8:24 am | Comments
Arabic websites based in the Gulf are increasing in number but the locals are not using them much, according to experts discussing “Investing in Future Media” at the TMT Finance and Investment 2009 forum that was recently held at Sharq Village hotel in Doha, Qatar.
The opening presentation at the forum expressed concern over the fact that although the number of Arabic websites was increasing, these were rarely visited by those who know the language because they were not satisfied with the contents of the sites.
“This is still an open question,” said Mohamad Murrad, Principal, Vice President and Partner of Booz & Company, when asked if Arabic websites from the region can compete successfully with English websites.
Based on the study explained in the presentation, although there are now more Arabic websites in the region than before, their number is still small compared to that of English websites. Another fact is that most people in the Gulf access the popular sites such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo.
The same study highlighted the growth of the mobile platform, on which it is believed Arabic content can get a market share since 99 percent of the sales in the telecommunications industry are derived from it.
Mobile content is already on the rise and has high penetration in the region but the online network infrastructure for Arabic is still very limited, the study disclosed. It said SMS/MMS-based advertising offerings, although still small, showed strong growth.
Online ads are not very effective in the region, fetching just $2 per user, which is way behind the worldwide average of $27 per user and $59 per user in the United States. “The problem with online ads is very much skeptical, that is how to reach and capture the audience,” said one of the speakers.
[Source: The Peninsula]
Meedan Cross-Language Dialogue Platform Launches Open Beta
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 4, 2009 – 12:49 am | Comments
Meedan has officially launched its online service into open beta. Meedan is a non-profit social technology company which aims to increase cross-language interaction on the web, with particular emphasis on translation and aggregation services in Arabic and English.
Through its use of Machine Translation (MT), Machine Augmented Translation (MAT), and distributed human translation, Meedan’s goal is to increase dialogue and exchange between Arabic and English speakers primarily by launching a cross-language forum for conversation and media sharing, in an attempt to foster understanding and tolerance between the Arab and Western worlds.
Meedan means ‘gathering place’ or ‘town square’ in Arabic, and it reflects the service that was designed to stand as a digital town square for a linguistically, culturally, and geographically diverse community of Arabic and English speaking Internet users, coming together online to discuss current events taking place all over the world.
Everything that appears on meedan.net is mirrored in Arabic and English; whether it’s the published headlines, the posted comments, or shared articles; so as to ensure an open two-way conversation.
Meedan was founded by Ed Bice in 2005 and incorporated as a nonprofit charitable organization in 2006.
For more information about the service and to try it out, go to: Meedan.net
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.
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.
Content Syndicate Announces Investment By IV Holdings
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | February 18, 2009 – 5:01 pm | Comments
Content Syndicate has officially announced that it has received strategic investment from Interactive Ventures Holding Company (“IV Holdings”), a leading venture capital firm, focused on internet and interactive companies, and based out of Amman, Jordan.
The funding will be used to support Content Syndicate’s rapid growth and development of its content services platform.
“In its private beta alone, Content Syndicate, with its unique and disruptive business model, as well as its dynamic management track record, impressed us. More importantly, the strong validation the company has received from major customers and publishers, combined with our investment strategy focused on the development of content syndication in our region, made Content Syndicate a great fit. Very few early-stage companies have this kind of amazing traction and robust business model,” said Fawaz H. Zu’bi, Chairman of IV Holdings.
Content Syndicate’s patent-pending platform helps publishers to commission, buy, sell, syndicate content in more than 200 languages. With no entry-level costs, coupled with its ‘pay for performance’ model, Content Syndicate helps publishers to monetize their content further and minimizing the inefficiency, thereby generating additional revenues and cutting costs. The company intends to extend its service to support other media - audio, video and mobile content in 2009.
Du Launches Full Track ‘Music on Demand’ Service In The UAE
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | February 9, 2009 – 11:54 am | Comments
Du, the integrated telecom operator in the UAE, just announced the availability of Music on Demand, an online music service which allows du customers to download full track music content.
The initial launch of Music on Demand features over 2000 songs from Rotana’s leading Arabic artists, such as Husain Al Jassmi, Amr Diab, Elissa, Najwa Karam, Shireen and many more, made available for du customers to download on their mobile handsets or personal computers. All du customers who register for Music on Demand will receive free full track music downloads worth AED18.
du plan to grow their full track music library soon, to allow customers to download music from other genres and regions of the world through partnering with leading content providers.
Rotana, the leading provider of Arabic entertainment content in the region, signed an exclusive agreement with du in 2008 to offer all content from its library to du’s customers in the UAE. For as little as AED 6, du customers can purchase full music tracks via 3 new exciting channels – a web portal, a Mobile client, or a PC application. Once songs are purchased, customers can download the same song on any of these 3 channels mentioned above, making this an industry leading “Music on Demand” offering.
All the customer needs to do is to register at the website to get access to the service and start downloading music, streaming audio and video from Rotana channels and have access to the latest buzz and gossip in the Arabic entertainment world.
