Tag: Google

Hijri Calendar Now Available Through Google Calendar

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Google Calendar (Arabic)Google just recently announced the availability of the Hijri Calendar in English and Arabic in their Google Calendar tool.

Google Calendar is a tool that simplifies keeping track of events, special occasions, and appointments — whether they’re on your own agenda or on the calendars of contacts who opt to share their schedules with you. Now users that prefer to use the Hijri Calendar can add this feature.

“Launching the Google Hijri Calendar showcases our effort to focus on the needs of users locally. Calendar is a great tool for organizing your life,” said Wael Ghonim, Marketing Manager. “It’s another of our efforts to provide users with fast, easy-to-use applications that help to simplify your life in a way that is locally relevant for users who want Hijri Calendar dates.”

Google Calendar Hijri

To add the Hijri Calendar you need to sign in to your Google Account and go to your calendar. Once there click on settings. Under the General tab you can scroll down to Alternate Calendars and select the Hijri calendar of your choice.

There are three types of Hijri calendars available: Standard, Kuwaiti and Saudi Hijri calendars.

# Google Calendar

Middle East Economic Slowdown To Boost Online Advertising

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The economic slowdown in the Middle East is expected to accelerate the growth of online advertising in the region, reported The National, as companies opt for less expensive web ads over pricey traditional media.

Advertising online costs fractions of what it costs to advertise via traditional media, and makes it easier to measure the impact of advertising campaigns. 

The market now accounts for up to 20 per cent of total ad spending in developed economies, and is the driver of virtually all growth in advertising spending.

On the other hand, spending on online advertising in the Middle East is estimated to be as low as US$50 million, translating into less than 1 per cent of total advertising spending, which is one of the main factors holding back the growth of startups and web businesses around the region.

Google, which has become a giant in the area of online advertising, and which has been pushing hard into the Arab market, say they are seeing faster growth in regional demand as advertisers look for ways to increase their reach while limiting their spending.
“In an economically cautious environment, people need to continue to grow their business, making people aware of their product while also cutting costs,” said Mohammed Gawdat, the managing director of Google for the Middle East and North Africa.

“Every technology adoption follows an ‘S’ curve: it starts slow, then grows exponentially, peaks and tails off,” he said. “The Middle East is definitely in the hockey-stick part of that curve right now. Our numbers show that it is growing at a tremendous pace.”

Mazen Halawi, the corporate sales manager of Ayna, an Arabic search engine, recently said that large corporate advertisers in the region planned to put a larger percentage of their advertising budget into online media next year, with some planning for almost 10 per cent of total ad spending to go to the internet, up from just 5 per cent last year.

Globally, total advertising spending is predicted to grow by approximately 5 per cent next year, driven almost entirely by the online market, which will grow by 15 to 20 per cent according to some estimates.

# Source: The National

Third Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Competition Winners Announced

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QRNEC LogoThe winners of the third annual Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Competition (QRNEC) were announced just a few days ago in Amman, Jordan.

HRH Princess Sumaya, who was deputising for Her Majesty Queen Rania at the award ceremony, said that Jordan’s large pool of graduates “represents a tremendous value that Jordan creates every year”, and that the participants in this year’s competition represent “job makers rather than job seekers”, adding that their success is “important to Jordan as role models for the next generation of entrepreneurs whom they will inspire, as future employers and as innovators who are solving valuable problems for society”.

The competition, which aims to encourage a business culture among Jordanian youths, focuses on launching new competitive products and services in various technical sectors, including the environment, information, communications, water desalination, energy and agricultural technologies. It also hopes to promote the spirit of creativity and innovation among young people and highlight the significant role citizens play in social and economic development.

In her address, the Princess stressed that Jordan’s human capital is needed at home to build the country’s economy and advance society. “If we are to examine the numbers of Jordanians abroad, we learn that more than 500,000 live in the Gulf states alone, and nearly one million worldwide,” she said, adding that if the figures are examined “on how much it costs Jordan to educate these expatriates, Jordan is in fact a donor to the global economy in the form of billions of dollars worth of human capital”.

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Google Calendar Is Launched In Arabic

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Google Calendar (Arabic)Google today announced the launch of Google Calendar in Arabic. Google Calendar is a tool that simplifies keeping track of events, special occasions, and appointments — whether they’re on your own agenda or on the calendars of contacts who opt to share their schedules with you.

Google Calendar has become one of the most popular calendar services online. It has proven fast and easy to use; users can add events just by clicking on a time slot and typing in their event information. It’s also integrated with Gmail so they can add events mentioned in email messages to their calendars with just one click. Furthermore, any event on the calendar can be turned into an invitation just by adding the email addresses of the people to invite. Those invitees can then see and respond to the invitation, whether or not they use Google Calendar themselves. The services also makes it easy to share calendars with friends and family, and the other way around.

“Calendar is a great tool for organizing your life,” said Husni Khuffash, UAE Country Manager, Google. “It’s another of our efforts to provide users with fast, easy-to-use applications that help to simplify your life. We’re really happy to be launching this tool in Arabic.”

Google Calendar (Arabic)

Another benefit of Calendar is that it’s open, with the possibility to talk to many other calendar applications, enabling users to easily get event data in and out. And with the integrated holiday calendar, users can see public and national holidays listed automatically on their Google Calendars.

To try Google Calendar out in Arabic just go to the Google Calendar site, then click through to “Settings” and change your language to Arabic. 

Yamli Releases iGoogle Arabic Transliteration Gadget

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Yamli iGoogle gadgetYamli has gone on and released a new iGoogle gadget that allows easy access to its award-winning Arabic transliteration technology directly from users’ customized Google homepages.

Yamli’s Smart Arabic Keyboard allows users to type Arabic using Latin characters by converting their words in real time into Arabic text.

The gadget integrates the functionality to convert words from Latin characters to Arabic in order to launch Arabic searches on Google, or to write words and paragraphs that can then be copied and used elsewhere.

To add the Yamli gadget to your iGoogle homepage, you can use the following link: Add Yamli iGoogle Gadget.

Google Launches Arabic Transliteration Tool, Takes On Yamli

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Google Ta3reebGoogle recently launched a new Arabic transliteration tool, that allows users to use their Latin keyboards to type in Arabic text. This move puts them in direct competition with Yamli, a small startup that has proven very popular and generated great feedback; simulating a modern day tech reenactment of David vs. Goliath.

This isn’t the first time Google works on transliteration; they actually launched transliteration services from English to various Indian languages like Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu on Blogger and through Google Talk bots over the past year. 

Now with Google’s push in the Arab world, they’ve gone on and launched ‘Google Ta3reeb’ (Google Arabization). The new tool was one of the services visible at the Google booth at Gitex Technology Week in Dubai.

From my initial usage of the tool, and comparing it to Yamli; Yamli stills seems to maintain the advantage, by being faster and offering more relevant transliterations and word suggestions. But I expect the Google tool will get better with time, as more people use it, and its inner workings optimised.

Google Ta3reeb screenshot

According to an anonymous tip that was picked up by TechCrunch, actually searching for ‘Yamli’ or ‘Yamli.com’ on Google’s Arabic versions like (Google.ae or Google.com.sa), users get a search results page that prominently displays ads for Google’s competing service alongside the search results, which suggests that Google is using Yamli’s name to target ads for their new service.

I’ve contacted both Yamli and Google for their comments on this story and should be following up with their responses pretty soon.

Update 1: Google has gone on and retracted the above mentioned ads.

Update 2: Responding to my enquiry about the story, Yamli co-founder Habib Haddad said “We are happy to see Google serving the Arabic web and we welcome healthy competition. Our primary focus as a young Arabic startup is and will remain on innovations for the Arabic user for whom we think we can continue to make significant contributions.”

Google Brings Better Arabic Support To Gmail

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GmailIn another move from Google confirming their continuing push and commitment to the Arab world, the in-built Gmail Chat application now fully supports instant messaging in Arabic.

In addition to the introduction of chat, Arab users will see some other changes to Gmail. Google said in a statement it understands that Arabic language speakers may need to use Gmail in other language settings (such as English, French or Spanish) so it has made it easier for them to switch between languages. For example, if your email thread starts in English but you want to reply in Arabic, that’s now no problem. This was one of the top requested features from our Gmail users.

‘We’ve been working hard to increase the functionality of the Arabic version of Gmail so that people can get more out of their email,’ said Yasmina Brihi, marketing manager at Google EMEA.

‘We think chat is a feature people will really like as it provides another, more rapid, option for communication with others. On top of this, we’ve made some other changes to Gmail that means it will be quicker to open, read, label and archive messages,” Brihi added.

Google Launches Knol In Arabic As One Of The First Languages Worldwide

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KnolGoogle has just launched their service Knol in Arabic, as one of the first languages supported by the language worldwide. Knol is a new service from Google that in some way competes with Wikipedia, it is a free tool encouraging people to write articles about the things they know about most, and that they’re considered experts on.

So whatever their area of expertise, the service lets users write, share and participate in a community of information and knowledge.

Arabic is one of the first languages that Knol is launching globally, showcasing the importance of the Arabic market to Google.

Mohammad Gawdat, Managing Director for Emerging Markets explained: “The Arab region is a high priority for us at Google and we are excited to provide more tools in local language such as Blogger and now Knol.”

For more information and to start writing on your subject of expertise in Arabic or English, or explore existing knols (articles and posts), all you have to do is visit the website at: knol.google.com

Knol screenshot

‘The internet is huge, but still a lot of expert knowledge remains untapped,’ said Ahmed Gaballah, spokesman for Google. ‘Knol provides a way for people to share their expertise with others–and get credit for their contribution. In the same way that books have authors’ names right on the cover, knols have authors’ names–and links to their other articles–right there on the page.’

Knols are a great way to tackle the lack of Arabic content on the internet. ‘We are delighted that beyond providing a forum for Arabic speakers to share their knowledge, readers can now access information they are searching for that they otherwise could not get in Arabic,’ Gaballah stated.

Knols allow authors to include references, link to additional information, and interact with readers. And readers can easily submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol.

Online Advertising in the Arab World: Impacts and Opportunities – August 21st – Amman, Jordan

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PosterThe Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship and Google have announced a new seminar titled “Online Advertising in the Arab World: Impacts and Opportunities“, with Google Country Business Development Manager (UAE) Husni Khuffash.

The event will be taking place on August 21st (5:30 PM) at the Friendship auditorium in The Princess Sumaya University for Technology in Al Jubeiha, Amman (Jordan).

As the title implies, the seminar will be tackling the topics of online advertising in the Arab world, the existing opportunities, and the impacts of pursuing advertising online.

If you’re interested in attending the seminar, you can register by sending an email to: google@qrce.org