Archive for the ‘Portals’ Category
SouqElArab, Online Social Shopping Portal
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | May 10, 2008 – 11:55 am |
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SouqElArab is a growing Arab online social marketplace; It offers its visitors a social shopping experience whereby they can network with like minded people and do some shopping at the same time.
Their shopping experience is based on users’ recommendations and feedback; Visitors can rate and review products and come together to form a community based on their hobbies and interests.
SouqElArab provides a platform for vendors to bring their product catalogs online and easily start selling their products without the fuss of having to create their own web presences. Suppliers from over 15 countries are currently working with SouqElArab.
Through these different suppliers, SouqElArab offers a large variety of products from Books, Magazines, Music, Movies, e-Downloads and Software, to Food and delicacies, Health Care and Beauty products, Kids’ Toys and Electronics, to Hookahs, Shisha, Clothing, Antiquities, Art, and other Middle Eastern cultural products.
The website is available in both English and Arabic; with French, Persian and Afrikaans coming soon, aiming to expand both the user and supplier base.
SouqElArab Inc., founded by Fadi F. Dababneh, is the company that runs the website; with offices in USA, Jordan and Lebanon.
CarDaleel, Online Arab Auto Trading Service
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | May 9, 2008 – 12:37 pm | No Comments
CarDaleel, is a newly launched service based in Jordan, that aims to be an online auto trading hub for people all around the Arab world.
Users can list their cars for sale, including all necessary technical details about them, as well as their state and age, to make them easier to search for and find; photos of the cars can also be included.
On the other hand, users looking to buy a car can go through the cars listed on the website, by country, by make and model, or use the advanced search to find cars based on different criteria of their choice; once they find a car they’re interested in, they can directly contact the seller through the site.
Auto-dealers can also use the service to list their available cars for sale directly on the site, therefore adding a new sales channel to their business.
The interface is in Arabic only for the time being, but an English version is planned soon. The service is completely free for all users, both individuals and auto-dealers.
CarDaleel was founded and launched in Jordan by Khaled Salah, Khamis Siksek and Hamzeh Abu Zakham.
MBC iMatter, First Social Networking Site For Arab Women
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 26, 2008 – 9:30 am | No Comments
Saudi media giant MBC Group have made a new online move, this time aimed at Arab women, in the form of a new social networking site for Arab women, called iMatter, that was just launched a couple of days ago.
iMatter invites Arab women to join an online community tailored to their needs and that takes their specific cultural needs into consideration.
Like all the other social networking sites out there, you get to search for and befriend other users, join specific groups and events, post photos, vote on polls and discuss different topics in the forum section.
There is also an internal mail system built into the service, as well as a personal blog/journal feature.
The site isn’t just a social networking site though, as it also aims at empowering Arab women through their iMatter Achievements Awards program, in which women get to submit their entries on or more of four separate award categories: Art Matters (Pieces of art, poems, …), Community Matters (Outline of how to make a difference in community), New Media Matters (Ideas on how to maximize benefit of new media) and Entrepreneurial Matters (Business plan); and then get the chance to win prizes that could change their lives.
All entries should be themed around “Culture” or “Education”, or a collaboration of both.
An online magazine featuring articles on women-related issues is also part of the service.
The site was designed and built for MBC by UK agency Leftfield Digital.
Along with previously reviewed Twffaha, this new service signals a push from Arab businesses and entrepreneurs towards women-oriented services, in an attempt to empower Arab women, and help them reach their full potentials in community.
Both are great initiatives, and hopefully we’ll see more soon.
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
restate.ae, Dubai Real Estate Portal
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 24, 2008 – 8:57 am | No Comments
restate.ae is a web real estate portal dedicated to freehold and leasehold properties in Dubai, with the goal to act as a hub and bring people with different real estate needs together, whether they’re looking to live in Dubai, invest in real estate or sell properties.
The portal has a very nice, simple and usable design, integrating a wealth of features put together to provide users with in-depth real estate solutions, customized and advanced search to find what exactly suits their needs, access to other users’ opinions, neighborhood ratings, videos of properties and projects, the possibility to join discussions with other users, as well as the latest real estate news in the UAE.
restate.ae also offers agencies the possibility to list all their properties on the website, and through an administration interface manage their profiles, their properties, and assign agents to them.
All properties agencies list on the portal are then automatically republished to Google Real Estate.
It’s obvious that with the huge real estate boom taking place in Dubai, restate.ae has a really important and useful job to do, making life easier for everyone approaching this market.
restate.ae was launched in 2007 by Web 2.0 consultancy company SpinBits, and all its services are currently free, both for users and agencies.
Seamler, Personalized Arabic Startpage
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 1, 2008 – 10:00 pm | No Comments
Seamler is one of the first Arab services that followed the steps of Netvibes, launching a personalized startpage for the Arab world.
The interface is entirely in Arabic, and is very much like Netvibe’s earlier versions, with the same level of usability and interface basics.
Users can customize their startpage, or actually create several pages, using blocks of content, from a list of selected sites and blogs spanning several different themes; they can also add blocks that pull their content from RSS feeds of the user’s choice.
In addition to the content blocks, there are a few widgets users can throw onto their pages like clock, calculator, weather info, sticky notes, flickr and gmail widgets.
Seamler initially launched back in September 2006, and haven’t really done much to evolve the service, add new widgets or even other content sources ever since, and other Arab websites and portals have caught up adding the same startpage idea with richer features and more options.
