Zoofs, The Most Talked About YouTube Videos On Twitter

ZoofsZoofs is a new simple and pretty fun service, offering users a destination where they can start to discover the YouTube videos that are proving popular with people on Twitter. So basically what the service does is scour twitter to find the most tweeted videos, ranks them according to popularity, and serves them up for users to enjoy.

The project is yet a new offering from TootCorp, the Jordan based company that brought us the video-sharing portal Ikbis and micro-blogging service Watwet in the past.

Visitors to the site can browse through videos by category, and also filter videos to show only the freshest (ones that were uploaded to YouTube in the past 72 hours only). The Zoofs team also mark some of the videos they really like as “Zoofs Picks” to highlight them for users.

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Ikbis Introduce New Direct Webcam Upload Feature

Ikbis

Ikbis, popular Arab video and photo sharing website, has launched a new feature enabling users to upload videos directly from their webcams.

This means that users who have a webcam and microphone connected to their computers can directly click on ‘Webcam upload’ to access a new interface where they can start recording their messages after enabling the integrated flash player/recorder to access their webcam and microphone.

After recording the video, the user is presented with three options: the possibility to re-record, overwriting the video and recording a new one; a preview option, to check the video before publishing it; and the choice to publish it directly among the user’s videos and shots, after filling in all details about the video (title, description, tags).

Ikbis Webcam Upload

This new development makes it a lot easier and faster for users to get their videos on the service, and opens the door for video bloggers who want to get up and running quickly with their podcasts.

Yamli Officially Releases Free API Allowing Easy Integration of Arabic Transliteration Into Any Website

Yamli Yamli has officially released its free API that allows the easy integration of its award-winning Arabic transliteration technology into any website. Yamli’s Smart Arabic Keyboard allows users to type Arabic using Latin characters by converting their words in real time into Arabic text. Third-party websites using the API can reach a larger group of Arabic speaking visitors who would otherwise find typing Arabic difficult.

According to co-founder Habib Haddad, “We are very excited about making this technology available to any website for free. We hope it will encourage every user to be more engaged with the Arabic language not only on Yamli.com but on all Arabic sites and blogs. Our approach makes a significant contribution to the Arabic web by actually reducing the proliferation of transliterated Arabic words and converting them into real Arabic words,” concluded Haddad.

Various studies show that a large portion of Arabic internet users shy away from typing Arabic, choosing instead to write Arabic phonetically using Latin characters in an ad-hoc and informal fashion. The transliteration of Arabic words and the limited availability of Arabic keyboards have stymied the use of Arabic on the web. By making it easy for everyone to type in Arabic, Yamli.com is making the Arabic language more accessible for every day users, and helping to promote Arabic content on the web.

According to George Akra, Co-founder of Ikbis, the popular photo and video sharing service, “I think Yamli is one of the most innovative and useful services in the region, plugging the API to our site was easy and lead to the increase of Arabic comments on Ikbis.com. The simplicity and accuracy of the service is just remarkable,” concluded Akra.

The technology allows users to fully engage with Arabic content on blogs, e-commerce, social networking, education, government, video and music websites. The API, which has been undergoing testing since March with selected partners, such as Maktoob, Annahar, Moheet, ART TV, 3alarasi, and Babnet, has already been used by hundreds of thousands of users already.

According to Sami Tueni, the General Manager of Naharnet, a leading Lebanese news and services portal, “Yamli is the best contribution to the Arab web. So easy to implement, it was the long awaited tool to help the Arabic language flourish online,” concluded Tueni.

You can get more info about the API at www.yamli.com/api

The Arabic version of StartUpArabia has been using the Yamli API for quite some time now, integrating the very useful Arabic transliteration functionalities in the user comments area. It was really easy to setup and integrate, and only took a couple of minutes time.

But to make things even easier and straight-forward for website developers to integrate the Yamli functionalities into their websites, a new easy setup page has been added that enables developers to configure the Yamli API and generate the bit of code needed to integrate it exactly the way they need it.

On another note, in a recent conversation with Yamli co-founder Habib Haddad, he shared the info that Yamli is working on an exciting big new project that aims to take Arabic search to a whole new level, making it much more relevant for Arab search users. More details will follow about this project as they become available.

Ikbis Launch New Advanced Video Player

IkbisIkbis, the popular Arab video and photo sharing website, has launched a new advanced video player with improved features, interface and performance.

The new video player looks a lot cooler than the old one, and feels more organized, using space in a better way, with a new on hover dock system instead of the old fixed bar at the bottom.

A new HD feature has been added to the player to enable watching videos in high definition, and it is now possible to skip forward by dragging the player head on the timeline.

And following the re-design the Ikbis homepage underwent recently, another key page, which is the single video/photo page was also redesigned now to be more compact/streamlined, giving users easier access to related content, commenting, embedding and social bookmarking services.

ikbis new single page

According to Ahmad Humeid, CEO of TootCorp, Ikbis’ parent company, the design also takes into consideration the increasing demand from advertisers that ikbis has been experiencing, especially in the Gulf region.

Waleg & Ikbis Launch ‘The Online Arabian Star’ Contest

Waleg
Ikbis

Waleg, the first and largest blog network in the Arab world, and Ikbis, the popular Arab video and photo sharing service, have teamed up to launch a new online contest under the name of ‘The Online Arabian Star‘.

Talent TV shows; like Star Academy, SuperStar and a bunch of others on a bunch of Arab TV stations; have proven to be very popular with viewers all around the Arab world. This contest aims to capture some of that success online.

All contestants have to do is upload a video of themselves singing a song in Arabic, and then wait for the votes to roll in. The top 20 winners move to the second phase, and another round of voting is launched to select the winner according to user voting. The final winner gets a $500 cash prize.

For more details on the contest, you can visit the contest’s page on Ikbis or on Waleg.

The Online Arabian Star

It’ll be interesting to see how successful this contest is in terms of number of contestants, quality of the submitted material, and how much interest, attention and traffic it generates.

Ikbis Launches It’s First Comedy Channel “Ground Zero”

IkbisWhen Ikbis, the popular video and photo sharing service, launched their new design last week, there was a little teaser ad showing two primitives and a mosquito, promising a new surprise soon, without any details or hints.

Well now we know what that surprise is, it’s a new comedy channel called “Ground Zero” that was just launched on Ikbis yesterday.

Ground Zero is an online show created by Mike Derderian and Mohammed Jaradat.

The show has three segments:

1- Doblage (Dubbing): where they choose a scene from a classic movie and record a new funny conversation over it.
2- Lost in translation: which makes fun of translations with “Professor Eshmael”.
3- Pirates of down town Amman: which will take you on a trip to see the newest pirated DVDs in town.

Ikbis Ground Zero

# Ground Zero

Ikbis Arab Video & Photo Sharing Site Launches New Design

IkbisIkbis, 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 screenshot

# Ikbis