Archive for the ‘Sharing’ Category
meOwns Launch New Version, Redesign & More Features
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 26, 2008 – 11:15 am |
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meOwns, the social web application that enables users to publish personal collections of the different things they own, that was previously reviewed here, just launched the new version of their service, with a new design and a set of new features and enhancements.
The new layout and design, brings increased usability throughout the website and its different sections and functionalities, looks a lot nicer, and just feels more organized.
But the new version doesn’t stop at the aesthetics, it brings a number of interesting additions as well:
- More options to navigate the website, by going through the lists of recently added stuff; recently wished for items; hot, beloved or interesting stuff; and the enhanced search and tagging systems.
- Users can now also rate items they own or that other people own.
Other features that we should be seeing on the website soon are:
- The listing of related and similar items that you might be interested in on item pages.
- Knowing who else owns a certain item that you own or someone else owns; or who wishes to get that item.
- Integration of microformats.
# meOwns
Shoof TV, Arab Media Group’s Video Sharing Service
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 25, 2008 – 8:50 am | 2 Comments
Shoof TV is an Arab video sharing website, which was intially launched by Arab Media Group, one of the largest media companies in the UAE, back in April 2007.
The site’s content is user-generated, with videos submitted from users all over the Middle East.
Users can upload files in several popular video formats, with file sizes up to 50MB. For larger files they can be sent via regular mail to Shoof TV for inclusion on the site.
Uploaded content is screened for objectionable content before appearing online.
The site visitors can vote on the videos using the ‘Applause’ feature, and also leave their comments on them.
As well as hosting user-generated media content, Shoof TV also hosts a number of competitions, with various prizes, to encourage more talented people from the Middle East to submit and share their content. Winners are selected by a panel of judges and by public SMS voting.
Khadeeja Al Marzooqi, the General Manager of Shoof TV, recently talked about the future plans for Shoof TV, and how a TV station will be launched towards the end of 2008, with 100% user generated content, relying on the clips people uploaded on their website.
# Shoof TV
Interview With Questler Founder Razan Khatib
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 16, 2008 – 11:04 am | 4 Comments
First of all, I’d like to really thank Razan Khatib, the founder of Questler, an interesting Jordan-based startup which was previously reviewed here, for taking some of her time to answer some of our questions about Questler, offer us some insight into the startup, the experience so far and where it’s going, as well as tips and advice for other entrepreneurs.
How would you describe Questler in your own words?
Questler is an informal learning network which allows its user base to learn from each other on any topic they have in mind through posting Quests and commenting on them. Quests in Questler are mini-blogs of information categorized into 6 types, Query, Observation, Discovery, Research, Media and Story. Each of those types represents an informal aspect to everyday learning. It’s not only a Q & A site, as some users keep comparing us with Yahoo!Answers. Questler is a place for mini-blogging, conversation, discussion, opinions and recommendations from peers rather than experts. The word “Questler” was chosen because learning starts with a quest!
How did you get the idea for Questler? and what made you feel passionate about this specific idea?
The initial thoughts on Questler came in late 2005, I basically stumbled on facebook while searching for learning technologies, and thought immediately of the power of social networks in learning rather than just social connections. I felt that there is a great space here for innovation yet I let sometime over 10 months before I started seriously working on Questler. Had to make the jump into entrepreneurship and that took some time to kick in! I was always enthusiastic about self-learning and learning from others, I find this form of learning (informal) is the real learning everyone does when they start working as opposed to what we learning in formal settings.
Did you face any difficulties or challenges taking Questler from idea to project to company?
Yes of course I did, financing from one hand was a challenge, trying to find the right partners as well as trying to create something new as opposed to imitating other sites. Still a challenge with the number of web startups launching everyday, the hardest challenge is your ability to adapt and keep trying to differentiate your project/product. We made numerous mistakes along the way, but working on Questler was and is the most exciting and fulfilling work I’ve done in my life, the adrenaline rush when launching a release, when traffic takes a hike, amazing experience.
Filaty 2.0 Now Open For Public Beta
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 6, 2008 – 8:51 am | No Comments
The Arab file and photo sharing service Filaty, which was previously reviewed here, has just launched a public beta of its new second version.
The new beta version can be accessed at: http://beta.filaty.com
The design used in the beta is really simplistic and neat, to rather put the emphasis on the functionality. The system was rebuilt from scratch based on a new Arab programming framework that was launched not too long ago.
The main focus for this second version was upload speed, so that was tweaked, optimized and tested rigorously to attain the best results possible.
The design will be changed a bit before the official launch of the new version, conserving the simplicity and ease of use of both the upload page and the file/image detail pages.
The beta goes on until June 25th. A quick form is integrated into the upload page for testers to send in feedback, faced problems, or suggestions directly.
meOwns, A Social Tool To Publish Collections Of What You Own
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | June 5, 2008 – 1:10 pm | 2 Comments
meOwns is a new web application that helps people complete another bit of their public personal profile on their blogs, social networks and other personal web pages by publishing personal collections of things they own.
The idea behind the service is that you might not be able to tell what kind of person someone is just by the way they look, but that you can get a better idea by knowing what they own.
As a user you can use the service to build and maintain collections of the items you own, create a personal wish list or import one you already have on Amazon, as well as add items from other people’s collections and wish lists to your own.
It’s also possible to get in contact with other users directly through the site, by sending them a message and choosing which of your contact details you’d like share with them for the reply (Email, Yahoo ID or Windows Live ID).
The meOwns blog talks about the possibility of launching a garage sale for items you want to sell, as well as the ability to request to buy items from other people. It seems these features still haven’t been officially rolled out, but they sound really neat. It’ll be interesting to see how the whole buying/selling/price details will be handled.
meOwns allows users to integrate many of the service’s basic functionalities into their personal blogs and websites through a customizable widget, which lets them directly maintain their collections and items, and also lets other users interact with it and the items in it. The widget is also available as a facebook application that can be added to the user’s profile.
Items from other users can be found through popular tags, popular types of items, or searched for using the quick or advanced search options. You can also check out other user’s pages and see what collections and items they own by searching for them or browsing the top users list.
meOwns was launched from Alexandria, Egypt by eSpace Technologies.
# meOwns
Al-Fawaed, Arab Social Knowledge Sharing Service
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | May 15, 2008 – 1:23 pm | No Comments
Al-Fawaed, which means “benefits” or “useful things” in English, is an interesting new project, which 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.
There are two ways of sharing these useful points; either by writing a summary resuming and listing them, or by posting a mind map diagram explaining the ideas behind them; in either case presenting the information in a simple format that can be passed on easily; the possibility to tag and categorize these points further organizes them and makes them easier to find.
The aim behind it all is both to be able to go back to these noted useful ideas at a later date, and to share them with the community of users, thereby sharing knowledge in a simple and effective way.
Like all social sites, other site users can vote these summaries and mind maps up or down according to how useful they find them.
Al-Fawaed was launched in 2007 from Saudi Arabia, with an Arabic interface only, by a team consisting of Nawaf Hareeri, Abdulrahman Al-Harithi, Rakan Yamani and Khaled Hareeri.
Ikbis Arab Video & Photo Sharing Site Launches New Design
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | May 12, 2008 – 9:55 am | 4 Comments
Ikbis, the popular Arab video and photo sharing website, launched a new design last night. The new design feels a lot neater and more organized, which is great and isn’t that easy to achieve for a media content site.
A new ‘Contests’ tab has been added, so it’s clear Ikbis are going to be launching more and more contests to encourage users to post more high quality content.
A ‘Coming soon’ banner, showing two primitives and a mosquito, promises a new surprise soon; I’m guessing it’ll be a cool cartoon series by the talented Ikbis designers.
According to Ikbis, this new edition starts to reflect their evolved thinking and some of the new strategies they’ll be rolling out in the upcoming months.
# Ikbis
EatLime, Fast Video And File Sharing
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | May 6, 2008 – 10:34 am | No Comments
EatLime, is an online sharing service that attempts to make the hosting and sharing of video and other file formats simpler and faster.
As with other services of this kind, the idea is quite straight-forward; you upload your file, and then share it with the world, by providing a link to your uploaded file.
But EatLime does it with a bit of a twist; Unlike other services, EatLime lets your friends start downloading your shared files as soon as you start uploading them, by providing a link that you can share with them, making the entire sharing process quite faster; All links to files you’ve uploaded to the system are saved to your account so that you can go back to them whenever you need; and you can import all your contacts from Gmail, Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo in order to send out links and share your uploaded files easily and quickly.
When it comes to video, you can upload videos of different formats, choose the player style you want for them, and then either automatically post to a number of services like myspace, facebook, bebo, orkut, hi5 to share with your friends, or have a link emailed to your friends so that they can watch it on EatLime.
The service is free and offers unlimted uploads up to 1GB for registered users. The interface is in English only, it’s very nicely designed, and registration is pretty simple and quick.
EatLime was founded by Mohamed from Jordan and Adil from Pakistan.
# EatLime
Places.ae, Dubai’s Location Based Directory
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | May 2, 2008 – 11:19 am | 4 Comments
Places.ae is one of those simple, small, but very useful services that we really wish we had more of all around the Arab world.
In short, and using their own words which I think say it best, places.ae is a location based directory for Dubai.
Integrating Google Maps, the website helps you find, positioned on a map, anything in Dubai by simply asking you what you are looking for, and the neighborhood you’re looking for it in; from businesses to restaurants to clubs to hospitals to any other place you would want to go to in Dubai.
The interface is very simple and really easy to use; you start typing what you’re searching for and the website helps by giving suggestions, and then it delivers a list of nearby places sorted by how far they are from the location you typed in.
You get to click on each one of these places to see it located on a map, find how other people who have been there rate it and read their comments on it.
Users can also add other places that they know of to the website, thereby giving the community the possibility to further enrich the service.
Places.ae currently only covers Dubai, but should be adding other emirates soon. The service is free, both for users and for businesses for the time being.
This very cool service is a product of the collaboration of code.ae and spinbits.
Qaym, User Generated Restaurant Reviews
Mohamed Marwen Meddah | April 23, 2008 – 8:45 am | No Comments
Qaym is a Saudi based service, built around user reviews and social rating of restaurants and eateries from around the world, that just came out of private beta and launched publicly.
Users fully generate the content for the service through their contributions; Every restaurant gets a page, which shows the current user rating for it, tags that describe what the restaurant offers, a list of the countries and cities that restaurants has branches in, as well as reviews and photos submitted by users.
The way the content is organized, you not only get access to reviews of certain restaurants you want to check out before going to, but you can also access a directory-like listing of all restaurants, or of eateries in a certain country or city.
The idea behind it is quite simple and straight-forward, as is the interface and design, which makes it all the better and easier to use. The interface is in Arabic only for the time being.
Saudi Jihad al-Ammar is behind this project, he began working on it last year, and beta tested privately for a bit over 9 months before launching last week.
