Royal Jordanian First Middle Eastern Airline To Offer OnAir Mobile & Internet Services

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Royal JordanianRoyal Jordanian and OnAir signed an agreement whereby RJ, a oneworld member, will provide passengers with OnAir’s in-flight Internet and mobile phone services, including email, SMS and voice calls, making it the first airline in the Middle East to offer such facility.

President/CEO Samer Majali, who signed the agreement with OnAir CEO Benois Debains, said that the OnAir service will enable Royal Jordanian passengers to use their mobile phones and BlackBerry-type devices to send and receive text messages and emails, and to make and receive mobile phone calls in flight, as well as to use their laptops to access Internet.

He indicated that the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) granted airworthiness certification to OnAir, testifying that neither Mobile OnAir system nor multiple mobiles cause harmful interference to any of the aircraft’s avionics systems.

Majali pointed out that phase one of the agreement stipulates installing the system by the Airbus company in two Airbus A319 that will be joining the fleet in February and March next year.  The second phase of the agreement includes implementing the Mobile OnAir Service on the airline’s single-aisle A320 family, installed with a standalone GSM/GPRS system at the end of 2009. 

Passengers will be able to use their own mobile phones during flights, above 3,000 meters, whereas during take offs and landings, the service will not be operative.  

Majali added: “Mobile OnAir will allow unlimited text messages and emails to be sent, and will allow up to 11 simultaneous voice calls. A central feature of the service is the crew’s ability to turn it off at any time, or switch it to “silent” – text and email only – mode, enabling the airline to customize the services to passengers’ preferences. For example, airlines could turn off the voice element, or even the whole service, during quiet times.”

He also said that the Mobile OnAir Service is one important move that will pave the way for airline mobile self-care services. This will allow the passenger to check the flight status, do his check in, view his itineraries and manage bookings, such as changing flights, selecting seats, requesting upgrades, booking bags and selecting meals. Additionally, it offers passengers information about their destination. “Royal Jordanian is at the forefront of e-travel. This includes providing passengers with the ability to plan trips, book online, issue e-tickets, make online seat reservations and use self check-in kiosks at the airport. We are now pleased to offer the latest technology: on board communications services, enabling our passengers to carry on with their travel planning, as well as to communicate with their colleagues, friends and families, in exactly the same way they can on the ground,” commented Majali.

OnAir signed roaming agreements with the world’s mobile operators, among which three Jordanian mobile operators: Zain, Orange and Umniah. The service is invoiced by the passenger’s home mobile operator at international roaming rates

OnAir was incorporated in February 2005 and is owned by Airbus, the aircraft manufacturer with the most modern and comprehensive product line on the market, and SITA, the world-leading provider of air transport focused applications, communications and IT infrastructure.

Jeeran Launches Web Statistics & Analysis Tool ‘Jeeran Visitors’

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JeeranJeeran, the Middle East’s largest UGC community, just announced the launch of a new web statistics and marketing tool called Jeeran Visitors that allows bloggers and users to get insights about the traffic on their blogs and content on Jeeran’s different services.

“Visitors”, features statistics and charts of the number of visitors each page/blog receives, with the ability to track number of pageviews, top viewed content, visitors’ countries, and much more .

Jeeran, Arabic for neighbors, is a pioneer Arab online community that offers a variety of web 2.0 services including blogging, photo and video sharing, as well as web hosting, aiding individuals to create their own presence on the internet, with minimum technical knowledge.

The launch of Visitors comes to complement Jeeran’s vision that aims to offer a unique and complete user experience to their users.

Commenting on the new tool, Laith Zraikat, Director of Innovation and Co-Founder of Jeeran.com, said: “We are so excited about Visitors as it puts our users in control, it’s very user-friendly and easy to operate, and it doesn’t need any installation or technical efforts.”

Mr. Zraikat also added: “With the growing popularity of user-generated-content communities such as Jeeran, bloggers and websites owners, as well as photo and video sharing enthusiasts, are in need for a free and reliable tool to evaluate their contribution to the web.”

Jeeran Visitors

Over the past few years, the community of Jeeran grew-up to host more than one million active users, in addition to 650,000 websites, and a growing community of bloggers that exceeded 120,000 blogs, the largest blog community in the Arab world.

Omar Kudsi, Jeeran’s President and Co-Founder welcomed the launch of Visitors, and quoted: “Our tracking system is user-friendly and comes in both Arabic and English, which offers a convenient Arabic-language tool to measure visitors and traffic.”

Mr. Zraikat pointed out that Visitors is already available for all users on Jeeran without the need of any installation, he also stressed on the fact that many features will be added to the system soon.

Kudsi concluded: “We strive to offer Arab users a top notch web experience that empowers them to contribute, communicate and interact, and Visitors is just the beginning of a series of features and products in the pipeline.”

Businessbuyandsell.me, Middle East’s First Business & Franchise Marketplace

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Businessbuyandsell.meDubai-based RichWeb, a member of Tharaa Holding, has just launched the beta version of BusinessBuyAndSell.me, the region’s first portal dedicated to buying and selling businesses and franchises, in a move that aims to cater to and boost company acquisitions and expansion activities by business establishments in the Middle East and North Africa (including Turkey and Iran).

BusinessBuyAndSell.me offers a number of services, such as listing businesses for buying and selling with the option to search by category and region; listing and finding global franchise opportunities available for the Middle East; receiving auto-updates on new listings based on saved search criteria; advertising opportunities; with a number of other value-added services that will be launched with the non-beta version within the next 6 Months.

The directory of listings on BusinessBuyAndSell.me is a free service for buyers, which will enable them to search opportunities by location, category and size of businesses. Potential buyers can also have their search criteria saved and regularly receive listing updates, based on their specific requirements. Owners who plan to sell their businesses or franchises can register online and list their offerings on the website and find potential buyers in a much faster, easier and convenient way, as opposed to traditional methods of newspaper advertising.

As an introductory offer, all listings are free of cost during the trial period and huge reductions in advertising rates are available.

Businessbuyandsell.me

Commenting on the portal’s launch, Mr. Shabeer Mohamed, RichWeb’s Managing Partner, said: “Buying and selling businesses and franchises is a key area of economic activity all over the world. However, until now, there has been no proper domain in the region for potential buyers and sellers to come in contact with each in a fast and easy manner, I am sure our service will come as a saviour to many establishments seeking to restructure their operations.”

Other related services that BusinessBuyAndSell.me plans to offer include providing details of available business loans, business-related services and other useful resources. 

# Source: Maktoob Business

Abu Dhabi Authority For Culture And Heritage To Launch Online Poetry Encyclopaedia

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Poetry EncyclopaediaThe Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) has announced that it will soon launch a website that serves as the latest issue of the poetry encyclopaedia, to coincide with the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, held on March 2009. 

The fourth edition of the encyclopaedia, whose publishing rights are owned by ADACH, will include: 2,693 poetry collections (which mount to 2,890,301 verses or 138,641 poems). In addition, it will have 1,081 books on scientific, literary and historical heritage.

Many of the original poetry collections have been provided with huge additional content. For example, the third edition Ahmed Shawqi’s collection had 376 poems (11,724 verses), while the fourth edition includes 776 poems (16,517 verses). 

Work on the poetry encyclopaedia began in 1997 and the National Library launched the first edition in 1998, which included nearly 180,000 verses of 88 poets, in addition to the Arabic dictionary ‘Lisan Al Arab’ (the Arab tongue) of Ibn Mandhour. 

Jumaa Al Qubaisi, Director of the National Library, said ADACH was keen that the poetry encyclopaedia, in its new look, remains committed to the high refined taste of its Arab readers, in its collections of selected Arab poets – old and new. The poetry encyclopaedia did not set as a pre-condition of only including previously published poetry collections as its editors believe that many glorious poets, whose poems can be found in different places, did not have their poetry collections published, while not every poet whose work has been fully published means that his/her work is of a valuable significance. 

There are books that deal with the poetry of some of the Arab tribes, the poetry of a certain country or region, the poems of people belonging to certain religion or sect, as well as ones focused on female poets only.

The encyclopaedia also provides a search engine to help researchers. 

The fourth edition of the poetry encyclopaedia will be available online for all visitors of the ADACH website.

Undersea Cable Damages Disrupt Internet & Communication Services

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Damage to three major undersea cables located in the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tunisia seriously disrupted more than half of internet and phone services between Europe, the Middle East and Asia on Friday, with India, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates the worst affected.

France Telecom said initial estimates show 82 percent of service to India was disrupted, while 73 percent of service to Qatar and 68 percent to the UAE was affected. Around 50 percent of service to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt was also disrupted.

The causes of the cut remain unclear. A ship set off in the early hours of Saturday morning to fix the lines, but it could take until Dec. 31 for normal service to be restored.

The cables are jointly owned by several dozen different countries. One of the cables is 40,000 km long and links 33 different countries while a second is 20,000 km long and serves 14 states. 

In January of this year, similar damages to five cables in the Mediterranean, north of Alexandria Egypt, and in the Arabian Gulf, caused major disruptions to internet and communication services around the Middle East and Asia.

ReKrute.com Expands Into Tunisian Employment Market

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ReKrute.comReKrute.com, one of the leading online career portals in Morocco, that was launched from Casablanca in 2006, just expanded into the Tunisian market, recently opening an office in Tunis and launching a dedicated version of their portal.

Like other online job portals, ReKrute.com aims to continuously connect companies looking to recruit in Tunisia with the best candidates out there.

The portal is totally free for candidates searching for a job, hoping to become their main access point to the job market, providing them with fresh job offers, information on the Tunisian job market, career advice and tips, online language tests and more.
Of course, the possibility to just post their CVs to the portals database so that they can be found by employers is also possible. 

For companies, ReKrute.com provides a global and flexible e-recruitment solution, that enables them to search through a database of CVs that match their exact needs, post their job vacancies and get in touch with the right potential employees for them.

All Job offers through the portal will also be reachable through the MSN Maghreb‘s job section which is powered by ReKrute.com.

ReKrute.com

In order to promote ReKrute.com in Tunisia and increase its visibility, partnership agreements are being finalised with big media entities, as well as a number of important Tunisian and European universities.

Ramla Jamel, who previously was a channel manager at Intel Corp., is the general manager of ReKrute.com in Tunisia.

Yamli Launches New Smart Arabic Search Engine Features

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Yamli Search

Yamli, the startup based in Cambridge, MA, that is funded by ex-Googlers, and that specializes in smart transliteration technologies for the Arabic Web, just unveiled its new search engine that allows users to easily search Arabic content in all its forms.

Various studies show that transliterated Arabic content is ubiquitous due to a large portion of Arabic internet users choosing to write Arabic phonetically using Latin characters in an ad-hoc and informal fashion. Yamli automatically expands Arabic keyword searches to include all of their transliterated variations and returns results for both Arabic and transliterated content. This feature is a breakthrough for Arabic Internet users who are frustrated with having to repeatedly search different variations of their query when searching for music, news or videos.

According to co-founder Habib Haddad, “The challenge with Arabic content is that it’s hard to reach all of it. For example, a simple search for ‘Umm Khulthum’, the famous Egyptian signer, has over 90 transliterated variations – Om Kaltoum, Oum Kalsoum, etc…. Yamli will take an Arabic search term and expand it to include all transliterated variations, returning the maximum number of relevant search results, regardless of whether Arabic or Latin characters were used to write the content. Prior to Yamli, that kind of search was not possible,” concluded Haddad.

Yamli comes with a rich and easy-to-use interface that has been optimized for slower connections. Under the hood, Yamli uses APIs from proven search engines such as Google, Microsoft Live Search and YouTube. Yamli Search also includes Yamli’s award-winning Editor that allows users to type Arabic without an Arabic keyboard.

According to one of the early ex-Googlers Georges Harik, “The web is universal, and speakers of every language should get equal access to information. Yamli continues to do a great job of extending access to information to all Arabic speakers,” concluded Georges Harik who is also an investor in Yamli.

Yamli’s new search engine was first announced at Harvard Business School’s MENA Conference on Saturday, December 4th during a panel discussion on Entrepreneurship in the MENA region in which co-founder Habib Haddad participated.

StartUpArabia got access to test Yamli’s new expanded search features early on, and got to follow the development of the product up until today’s official release; and what truly stands out is how helpful and time-saving the service really is, how simply it is integrated in the interface, and how fast it all actually works.

You can try the new Yamli Search for yourself at http://www.yamli.com/

And here’s a little demo video demonstrating how the new search features work.

Seminar: Strategic Planning Process: A Must to Survive in Today’s Global Environment

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QRCEThe Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship (QRCE) just announced a new seminar they’re organizing under the theme of “Strategic Planning Process: A Must to Survive in Today’s Global Environment“.

The seminar will be taking place on Wednesday, December 17th 2008 from 3:00 – 5:00 PM, at the Friendship Auditorium of Princess Sumaya University for Technology, in Amman (Jordan).

The seminar will be with Dr. Niren M. Vyas, Distinguished Professor in the University of South Carolina Aiken, USA.

Dr. Vyas has a Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of South Carolina, and has worked in corporations located in Asia, Europe and North America for 27 years, offers consulting services to companies in the USA, Europe, India and Nepal, along with his work in academia for 14 years, the last 9 years as the Dean of Business School at the University of South Carolina.
Currently, Dr. Vyas is in Bahrain as a Visiting Professor with Ahlia University.

Those interested in attending the event can register by sending an email to workshops@qrce.org.

Qatar Science & Technology Park Opens Registration For Next Investor Readiness Program

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Qatar Science & Technology ParkThe Qatar Science & Technology Park (QSTP), has announced that registration is now open for its next Investor Readiness Program seminars.

Comprising five consecutive Monday-evening seminars starting 19 January, the free program focuses on how to become “investor ready” and raise finance. They are open to any Qatar resident that wishes to learn how to plan and build a start-up technology company.

Together the five seminars cover the full process of planning a successful start-up, from idea development through to raising capital and steering the company through its early years.  

Topics covered include:

  • Project selection, development & commercial evaluation
  • Building a management team
  • Business planning
  • Pitching to investors
  • Business development

The seminars and workshops are free, however places are limited and require registration. 

Those interested in attending can register online here: QSTP Investor Readiness Program Registration.

Ayna Corporation Launches Ayna Events Service

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Ayna EventsAyna Corporation announced today the launch of a beta version of their new Ayna Events Service. The service is dedicated to covering the latest events and occasions happening in the Middle East & North Africa.

Ayna Events presents interesting features where events are listed by date and geo-located on Ayna Maps, displaying detailed information with routine options as well as providing comprehensive search criteria.

The service carries a constantly growing database of Concerts and Shows, Conferences, Educational Activities, Entertainment, Exhibitions, Fairs & Festivals, Premiere/Road Shows/Launchings, Seminars, Sports, Theatres and Plays, and Trade Shows taking place in the Middle East & North African region.

Ayna Events

Event Organizers are able to submit their events manually and geo-locate them on Ayna Maps through a user-friendly interface. The service is offered for free and holds different advertising options.

Ayna Events service is presented in Arabic and English and will be adding a number of new features in the coming future.

You can check it out here: events.ayna.com