Microsoft & ABAN Partnership To Promote Entrepreneurship In MENA Region

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Microsoft
ABAN

Microsoft signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) today with Arab Business Angels Network (ABAN) covering the Middle East and North Africa region.

The partnership aims to increase the success rate of new entrepreneurial ventures in the region, by encouraging innovative business ideas and providing seed funding. Under the agreement, ABAN will work with Microsoft to identify and foster innovative technology ventures in the region.

During the launch event, ABAN and Microsoft gathered four budding entrepreneurs who presented their business ideas to over 70 potential investors. These business projects were:

  • Dia Diwan, an online portal that offers the latest news on lifestyle and entertainment in the region, including an ecommerce shopping facility for fashion items.
  • WeNear, a mobile platform for location-based services and applications.
  • Cash Trash, an innovation aimed at recycling to reduce pollution problems.
  • PolluMap, an automatic pollution mapping system to track city pollution levels.

This initiative like others before it aims to address the problem early stage startups and businesses face in the Arab world when it comes to financing.

Arab Business Angels Network (ABAN) was launched by the Young Arab Leaders and Dubai Holding, with Dubai International Capital as its founder and lead institutional investor, back in 2005. It invests through its Angels’ network and manages two funds: a US$ 10 Million seed capital fund and US$ 5 Million fund for women-led ventures.

ABAN recently announced its first three investments in the Middle East, and has been leveraging its global partnerships and high-profile connections to optimize its investments and reach out to more promising entrepreneurs.

From Microsoft’s side, this partnership follows their Unlimited Potential and Local Software Economies initiatives that aim to create social and economic opportunity through programs and products that transform education, foster local innovation and enable jobs and opportunities worldwide.

# Press release: Zawya

Dwwen Arab Blog Aggregator To Launch API Soon

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DwwenDwwen, the popular Arab blog aggregator, almost shut down recently due to financial and resource burdens. Luckily a flow of supportive messages, and a generous offer by an Arab blogger to help the service out with the necessary server resources changed the aggregator’s destiny and gave it a new lease on life.

Now Dwwen are working on an API that they’ll be releasing very soon, in a move to open up their service and make the information aggregated in it more available and usable to everyone.

We got to play around with the inside beta of the API, and it’s really easy and simple to use. The API currently allows the pulling of articles directly from Dwwen; it provides the possibility to specify the number of articles you want to pull, the language of the pulled posts (Arabic, English or both), and whether you want to get the latest articles or the most popular ones.

A number of applications are also being built around the API, one of them using Adobe AIR, which is proving to be a pretty popular choice for internet applications on the desktop.

# Dwwen

Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation Launches ‘Sawaed’ Challenge Fund Programme

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Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum FoundationThe Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation announced recently the launch of ‘Sawaed’, a new programme that aims to challenge the private sector to develop innovative business concepts to drive the development of the Arab world.

Operating as a ‘challenge fund’, ‘Sawaed’ will encourage businesses to compete for funding in response to a specific regional development goal. Each year, the programme will promote a regional challenge and invite businesses to submit competitive project concepts dedicated to addressing the challenge.

A memorandum of understanding was signed between the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation and the Young Arab Leaders (YAL).

According to the signed MoU, YAL, an independent, not-for-profit organization with a strong membership base across the Arab region, will leverage the experience of 30 active members who will serve as mentors and support eligible businesses across the region throughout the process of applying to the fund.

As the first initiative under the Foundation’s Entrepreneurship and Employment sector, ‘Sawaed’ seeks to promote business excellence, empower young Arabs to innovate, while facilitating job creation in the region. The program will award non-refundable grants of between AED100,000 to AED1 million (US$27,000 to US$270,000) to projects implemented by private sector entities that aim to increase the amount of high quality Arabic online content, develop and improve access to education, knowledge, and information on ICT platforms to promote Arab capabilities.

Application for Sawaed programme will open on the website starting September 1st, 2008. Interested applicants can download and fill electronic forms of “Concept Note Proposals” and submit them online before October 12th, 2008. Winners will be announced towards the end of March 2009.

Launched with an endowment of AED37 billion (US$10 billion), the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation aims to develop future leaders and create a knowledge-based society in the Arab world through the key components of knowledge creation, culture, as well as entrepreneurship and employment generation.

# Sawaed

Is trust an issue when it comes to Arab startups? [Poll Results]

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In the latest poll on StartUpArabia, the question to the readers was:
Is trust an issue for you when it comes to Arab startups?

The result of reader voting came out as follows:

Poll results - Trust

Out of 59 readers who responded to the poll:
– 41% of them think there is definitely an issue of trust when it comes to Arab startups
– 32% say it is sometimes an issue for them
– 8% responded that it wasn’t an issue at all
– and the remaining 19% thought the question was irrelevant

Even though the reasons every person may have vary, and even though not everyone might agree with all the points mentioned in Qwaider’s guest post here detailing why he doesn’t trust Arab online services, it’s obviously an issue that Arab startups have to tackle seriously.

Seven Golden Rules For Startups & Entrepreneurs

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I thought I’d try a fun little experiment and throw out the following question on Twitter:
“If you were to choose one golden rule for startups and entrepreneurs, what would it be?”
and then see what everyone’s feedback would be and share it over here with you all.

Here are the first seven replies I got:

  • Always have fun #
  • Read Guy Kawasaki’s the Art of the Start, and his upcoming book Reality Check #
  • A startup’s job isn’t to save money, it’s to invest as much in the business intelligently as you can so that the gamble will pay off #
  • Creating customer personas to narrow down your target market which would also help your business plan #
  • Be different #
  • Business is not about ideas, it’s about initiatives #
  • Do not reinvent the wheel #

Thanks to everyone who replied, sending in their golden rules, and helping create this post.

Please do add to the list and enrich it by sharing your golden rules in the comments section.

Syraty, Online Professional Resume Builder

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SyratySyraty is a new Saudi-based Arabic online service that provides job seekers with the possibility to easily create and maintain a professional resume that is hosted online, available for download in Word or PDF format, or printing, and that can easily be sent to companies.

Users can build and customize their resumes online through an easy straight-forward interface, that allows them to add as many sections as they wish and input content for them through a rich text editor.
They can then either publish their CVs or keep them for their personal use; and even when published, they have the choice to either make them public and have them submitted to search engines or to password protect them so as to control access.

Instant email and SMS notifications can be enabled to allow the candidate to know exactly when and from where potential employers viewed their resume. A detailed statistics and graphs interface provides even more details about the resume’s distribution and where viewing visitors came from.

A list of Saudi and International employers is provided as well, enabling users to quickly send their hosted CV address to a number of these companies by simply selecting them and clicking send.
Of course job seekers can also send their CVs to other companies either by downloading one of the formats and sending it by email, printing the CV, or by sending the link to the online version of it.

Employers can use a contact form on the user’s resume page to get in touch with them, ask questions and eventually schedule an interview.

Syraty screenshot

The service is available through three paid plans, ranging from $5.33 to $39.7 per year, providing different options and possibilities, like the number of themes that can be used for the created resumes, whether it’s hosted on a subdomain of Syraty or on the user’s own personal domain, the number of SMS notifications they can receive, …etc.

Syraty is generously offering StartUpArabia readers, the first 1000 at least, a free account under the Silver plan; Register for your free account.

The service’s interface is in Arabic only, but it allows users to create their CVs in English, as most companies in the Middle East region require English-language resumes.

# Syraty

On Going The Extra Mile

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“When you reach an obstacle, turn it into an opportunity. You have the choice. You can overcome and be a winner, or you can allow it to overcome you and be a loser. The choice is yours and yours alone. Refuse to throw in the towel. Go that extra mile that failures refuse to travel. It is far better to be exhausted from success than to be rested from failure.

— Mary Kay Ash; founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics

Interview With Questler Founder Razan Khatib

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QuestlerFirst 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.

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Travel Yolk, Travel Industry Online Recruitment Portal

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travelyolkDubai-based travel industry technology solution provider TechTuners recently launched a new online recruitment portal named Travel Yolk that aims to address the staffing requirements of the Middle East’s travel industry.

Travel Yolk is built much like you’d expect a career website to be, providing the possibility for job seekers from the travel industry to build their CVs online, look for new job opportunities in the industry throughout the Middle East, get email notifications of interesting job vacancies and apply directly through the website.

On the other hand, employers can post their job offers and search the database of travel professionals to find people who best suit their vacant job positions.

As with most job sites, the service is free for job seekers, while employers will have to pay for posting their career opportunities. Different plans are provided to suit employers’ needs and activity.

travelyolk screenshot

An online forum where employees can meet their potential employers and vice versa should be added to the portal soon; making it easier and more effective for both sides to connect.

The website is available in English only for the time being.

# Travel Yolk

Young Arab Leaders Launches Entrepreneurship Initiative

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Young Arab LeadersYoung Arab Leaders (YAL), the region’s foremost development platform for business, public sector and civil society leaders, recently announced the launch of the ‘Entrepreneurship Initiative’ for 2008-2009.

The Initiative is sponsored by The Dow Chemical Company through its charitable arm, The Dow Chemical Company Foundation, as part of its support for the ‘Arab and American Dialogue Programme’ for 2008 and 2009.

The ‘Entrepreneurship Initiative’ aims to nurture innovation among young, small and medium entrepreneurs in the region and provide them opportunities for training mentoring and networking. Through the programme, they will learn from the experiences of other start-up and early-stage companies in the region and receive mentorship from YAL members.

It will serve as a primary platform whereby small and medium entrepreneurs will be identified, their business plans assessed for capacity building training through a process of mentoring and adopting by more established companies in the region.

Applications for the programme will be invited through an Online Portal, Chapter Announcements and Member and Task Force Nominations. These will be assessed via a selection committee chaired by YAL that will include representatives from ABAN, DIFC Centre of Excellence and Larta, in addition to other members nominated to the Committee by the YAL Regional Office. Selected applicants will then go through the capacity building or the training component of the programme.

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