Watwet’s New Version With Twitter Link, Channels And Better Language Support

WatwetWatwet, the Arab social networking and micro-blogging platform, has released a new version of their web application code named ‘Suzie’, and with it come a bunch of really interesting new features.

With the recent migration to the Rails 2.2 framework, they’ve worked on better language support on Watwet, which translates into better handling of Arabic in this version, but also opens the door for other languages like French, Farsi, Turkish and Swahili, that are in their future plans.

Something interesting they’ve also gone and opened up is the possibility for anyone to create a channel of their own, without having to go through the Watwet team like they used to in the past.
It should be interesting to see how many people and businesses start using this feature; and when/if we’ll start seeing the concept of sponsored channels.
Complementing this move, the public timeline of Watwet now also shows the watwets coming from channels too, along with the watwets coming from the users.

Another good move with this version is the possibility to link a Watwet account to a Twitter account, in a way that anything posted to Watwet gets automatically posted to Twitter and vice versa. A simple settings page available under ‘Twitter Link’ turns this on for the user.
This makes it easier and more efficient for people who mainly use one of the services, but also want to try out the other, or who want to streamline their status and lifestreaming activities across both platforms.
I expect more focus will be put on the integration with Twitter in the future to try and lure more Twitter users to play around with Watwet, growing their user base and activity level through it to make the service even more interesting to use.

Other than these mentioned points, they’ve also worked on some design and layout tweaks for the interface, as well as on browser compatibility issues.

Some really exciting moves in this release by Watwet, paving the way for some pretty interesting possibilities in the future and for some other features they seem to have hidden up their sleeves.

Meedan Cross-Language Dialogue Platform Launches Open Beta

MeedanMeedan has officially launched its online service into open beta. Meedan is a non-profit social technology company which aims to increase cross-language interaction on the web, with particular emphasis on translation and aggregation services in Arabic and English.

Through its use of Machine Translation (MT), Machine Augmented Translation (MAT), and distributed human translation, Meedan’s goal is to increase dialogue and exchange between Arabic and English speakers primarily by launching a cross-language forum for conversation and media sharing, in an attempt to foster understanding and tolerance between the Arab and Western worlds.

Meedan means ‘gathering place’ or ‘town square’ in Arabic, and it reflects the service that was designed to stand as a digital town square for a linguistically, culturally, and geographically diverse community of Arabic and English speaking Internet users, coming together online to discuss current events taking place all over the world.

Meedan

Everything that appears on meedan.net is mirrored in Arabic and English; whether it’s the published headlines, the posted comments, or shared articles; so as to ensure an open two-way conversation.

Meedan was founded by Ed Bice in 2005 and incorporated as a nonprofit charitable organization in 2006.

For more information about the service and to try it out, go to: Meedan.net

Interview With Habib Haddad, Co-Founder Of Language Analytics LLC. / Yamli

Habib Haddad And Imad Jureidini
Habib Haddad & Imad Jureidini

Continuing our series of interviews with Arab entrepreneurs, we bring you our interview with Habib Haddad, co-founder of Language Analytics LLC., the company that brought us Yamli, the cool web-based transliteration tool that solves the problem of many Arab users who don’t have an Arabic keyboard or who aren’t as comfortable typing in Arabic.

I’d really like to start by thanking Habib for taking some of his time to answer our questions, generously providing details and insight about Yamli, how everything fell into place, where they’re taking it, as well as sharing some tips and advice for other entrepreneurs.

How did you get the idea to build a tool like Yamli?

The idea came from my personal frustration in interacting with the Arabic language on the Web. It seemed to me unreal that I, an Arabic native speaker, had difficulty using my own language on the web. Living in Boston, access to an Arabic keyboard is not very easy especially when you are on your desk at work and want to search for news in Arabic. Even when I lived in Lebanon my interaction with the Arabic keyboard was limited, which is sad but it is the case with a large number of Arabic internet users. In fact, studies at the American University in Cairo shows that 78% of Arabic internet users have never typed in Arabic! Imagine if 78% of French never typed in French. Imagine how destructive that would be for the language on the web and how limiting it would be for local businesses, entrepreneurs and even publishers.

Could you tell us more about the steps you went through to make Yamli a reality?

Form the team: I was happy to have Imad Jureidini, a colleague from a previous startup to join me as a co-founder. My advice here is to pick someone who complements you, excel at what they do, who you enjoy hanging out with, and look for someone you think is smarter than you.

Identify the vision and goals: This is the thing that says that if we don’t get anything else right, this is what we’re going to do well and really excel at it.

This to me is the most important step and is broken down into multiple steps:

  • Listen to your users’ problems: We spoke to potential real users (friends and family) to get a feeling on how they view the ideal solution for this problem. It’s amazing how unexpectedly unhelpful this was. Basically users don’t know the best solution to their problems, but they know what problems they have. Instead of asking what users want, try listening to their problems.
  • Know your REAL competition: Transliteration in general, and even in the case of Arabic, is not a new concept but we felt it had not been solved the right way. There were a few tools out there that solved this problem by requiring the user to learn a one to one mapping table. However our real competition was the English keyboard. We wanted to come up with a solution appealing enough to convince the user, who is not accustomed to typing in Arabic, that now he can actually do it, that he can type real Arabic words using Yamli with no extra effort.
  • Our vision:
    • Accurate solution that does not require the effort of learning from the users and that “magically” finds the right word.
    • Seamless solution, drop dead simple to start typing and not even feel an extra layer.
    • Available to all users (API)

Read More

Do Arab Startups Really Need An Arabic Interface? [Poll Results]

In the latest poll on StartUpArabia, the question to the readers was:
Do Arab startups really need an Arabic interface?

The result of reader voting came out as follows:

41% of readers thought it was preferable for the website to have an Arabic interface.
32% of the readers thought it was a must.
20% of them thought that it wasn’t necessary.
– The remaining 8% said they didn’t really care

Personally, I’m somewhere between ‘preferable’ and ‘must’, shifting between the two depending on the case, I guess.

A big percentage of internet users in the Arab world are most comfortable using the Arabic language online, instead of English or French, and deciding not to launch an Arabic interface for a website directly alienates those people, cutting out an important part of the service’s possible target audience, which can’t really be good business-wise no matter how you look at it.

Yamli Wins “Best Web Technology Award”

YamliPress Release: Online tool that enables the transliteration of Arabic using English characters wins prestigious web award

Yamli.com wins “best Web technology award” within year of launch

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – May 14th, 2008 — Language Analytics, LLC, a software startup, has won “Best Web Technology Award” during the 4th Year Pan Arab Web Awards 2008 (http://www.panarabwebawards.org) for its flagship website, Yamli.com. Yamli allows users to convert transliterated text back into Arabic characters, facilitating access to and the development of Arabic content.

The Pan Arab Web Awards aim to promote the innovative spirit of the web while recognizing the accomplishments of its community members. The competition received an unprecedented number of registrants from the Middle East region, including new entrants from Bahrain, Kuwait, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The awards ceremony was held on 26 April 2008 at Burj Al Arab, Dubai.

According to co-founder Imad Jureidini, “We are very honored to receive this year’s Best Web Technology Award. This is a recognition, not only of the technological breakthrough that Yamli represents, but also of the Arabic web’s need for such technology.”

Yamli’s patent-pending solution converts the user’s input into Arabic as the user types. To maximize usability, Yamli accepts a variety of phonetic spellings and generates a list of suggested matches. Over time, Yamli will recognize popular patterns of spelling and word selection, increasing its accuracy.

Co-founder Habib Haddad says: “Today, the Arabic language represents less than 0.5% of the content on the Internet. Our mission at Yamli is to empower the Arabic language on the web. We are going to continue to increase that percentage to a much higher number.”

You can view Yamli at www.yamli.com.

About Language Analytics LLC

Language Analytics LLC, a software startup based in Cambridge, MA, specializes in smart transliteration technologies for Arabic and other languages. For more information, visit our website, at www.yamli.com/about/.

Yamli Enable Advertising In Their Language Tool

Yamli Ads

More news from Yamli, the cool web-based tool that solves the problem of Arab users who don’t have an Arabic keyboard or who aren’t as comfortable typing in Arabic; They have come up with an interesting way to start generating revenue with their tool: they enabled advertising on their Yamli editor menus.

The ads are in the form of small 120×30 banners, simply and neatly placed at the bottom of the word suggestion and option selection menus.

A number of advertisers have already started buying these ad spots with Yamli, and users of the Yamli editor tool on the Yamli website, facebook, or elsewhere should start noticing them now.

No details about the pricing of these units are available on the website, but advertisers can contact Yamli to place their ads through the following contact form.

Very good move from Yamli, who just released an API to use their tool recently, and who should be seeing an increase in their tool’s usage over the following weeks as more Arabic websites integrate their tool. SouqElArab just announced integration of the tool from their side yesterday.

It will be interesting to see how well these ads will perform, and how successful they’ll be for advertisers as a new advertising channel and for Yamli as a revenue model.

SouqElArab Partners With Yamli For Better User Experience

SouqElArab
Yamli

Press Release: SouqElArab.com partners with Yamli.com to offer a unique user experience for Arabs
Amman, May 6, 2008

The Arab social Web shopping portal, SouqElArab.com has partnered with Yamli.com, which offers tools that allows easy access and expand the Arabic Web, to offer Arabs the facility that allows Arabic speakers to write Arabic using English alphabet.

Embedded within the SouqElArab.com Web site is Yamli’s API technology that allows the user to easily access the vast product lines without the need of an Arabic keyboard. The technology has been implemented in the search engine, as well as the use of User Names for the Networking facility offered, and for placing reviews, messages and text fields. The technology is simply “Write in Arabic – Type it the way you say it” as Yamli creators put it.

“I am really excited for this partnership and looking forward for more collaboration with SouqElArab.com. Our mission at Yamli is to empower the Arabic language on the Web and we firmly believe that in unity and collaboration we can and will achieve our goal” says Yamli.com Co-Founder, Habib Haddad.

Further to this facility, numerous co-operations and partnerships are in process of implementation to better serve both companies in terms of exposure, accessibility and branding.

Fadi F. Dababneh, Founder & CEO of SouqElArab Inc. added: “This new technology has started to revolutionise the Arabic language’s use on the Internet. More and more Web services are offering this technology from Yamli.com to better serve and understand the needs of its user-base. I believe nothing like this has come along since the first Arabic e-mail service was offered in the late 1990’s.”

Language Analytics LLC, which created and operates Yamli.com is an Internet startup based in Cambridge, MA, (USA) specializes in smart transliteration technologies for Arabic and other languages.

SouqElArab.com, operated by SouqElArab Inc., is a growing Arab on-line marketplace in the making. It offers visitors a social shopping experience whereby they can network with like-minded people and shop at the same time. The shopping experience is based on members’ recommendations and feedback, where visitors rate and review products and come together to form a community based on their hobbies, interests and traits.

# SouqElArab, Yamli

Do Arab Startups Really Need An Arabic Interface? [Poll]

A new poll has gone live on StartUpArabia, you can find it on the first sidebar on the right or vote straight from this post.

This poll’s question is quite specific to Arab startups, and it asks:
Do Arab startups really need an Arabic interface?

Is it really a necessity? For each and every startup? No matter where in the Arab world the startup is from?

What do you think?

Feel free to further expand on your response in the comments section of this post.

Language Analytics Release Yamli API

Language Analytics, the company behind Yamli, the really cool web-based tool that solves the problem of Arab users who don’t have an Arabic keyboard or who aren’t as comfortable typing in Arabic, by enabling them to type Arabic words out phonetically using English characters, and then converts these transliterations into Arabic characters, have recently released an API for the service.

Language Analytics previously released a Yamli facebook application that lets users plug in Yamli features into facebook textboxes for message writing. And now to further open up their service comes the API, which should be pretty easy to setup and integrate with any other service.

This is a great move from them, giving developers the possibility to tap into their technology and use it in their own platforms; Something I wish more and more Arab startups would start doing.

I also hear the Yamli team are working on a WordPress plugin to bring its functionalities to WordPress blogs; which is really cool, and something I was going to ask for when I launch the Arabic version of this blog.

The API is in beta now; If you’re interested in testing it out to integrate their functionalities into your own service, you can apply for an invite to the beta; and check out the API documentation.