Tag: Markkit

BarCamp Tunisie, Al Ghazela Technology Park, May 9th 2009

MMM 7 Comments

BarCamp TunisieTunisia will be soon be getting its first BarCamp event, that will be held at the Al Ghazela Technology Park (Hannibal Hall) on May 9th 2009 starting at 9:00 AM.

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering, born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. These events are quite intense with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.

A number of Tunisian entrepreneurs will be at the event talking about their startups and demoing their products and services, then opening a discussion about them with the attendees.

The startups that are confirmed to be demoing at the first Tunisian BarCamp so far are the following:

  • Keejob: A new Tunisian job portal. (Demo by: Amira Mimouni)
  • Wezign: A Tunisian web & graphic design agency. (Demo by: Kais Ben Sedrine)
  • Resto Tunisie: A community powered directory of restaurants in Tunisia, previously reviewed here. (Demo by: Kais Ezzine)
  • Tools4Com: A simple online invoicing system, previously reviewed here. (Demo by: Mohamed Aymen Ben Abdallah)
  • Twitterists: A service that lists and watches celebrities on Twitter. (Demo by: Mohamed Ben Dhaou)
  • Je révise: A course revision service for college students. (Demo by: Myriam Sfar)
  • Markkit: A web 2.0 text highlighter, previously reviewed here. (Demo by: Slim Amamou)

People interested in participating can sign up through the following form: BarCamp Tunisie Sign-up Form.

For more information and details about BarCamp Tunisie, you can check out the following page: BarCamp Tunisie (FR).

If you’re registered to the StartUpArabia Events iCal feed in your calendar software, the event should already be showing up in your calendar for that day.

The event is being organized by my friend Mehdi Lamloum.

Markkit, Web 2.0 Text Highlighter

MMM 8 Comments

Markkit is a very simple and straight-forward online service, yet a really useful and interesting one; It is, simply put, a web 2.0 text highlighter; it provides you with a bookmarklet that you can use whenever you need to highlight text in a web page: you simply click on the markkit bookmarklet, select the text you want to highlight, and voila it’s done. You don’t even need to create an account or anything.

An option is also provided for site owners to easily integrate a markkit button on their web pages to give their visitors the possibility to highlight text right away.

Users can then access a mark log to see all the latest highlighted texts by everyone, organized by day, or they can search through the archives of marked texts. The possibility to see highlighted texts by everyone actually gives it a bit of a social highlighting touch.
It’s still not possible to view only your highlights, as the functionality to create a user account that you can save your highlights to is still not available.

Markkit, which was launched by Tunisian Slim Amamou, is still in its early stages of development, and only works with Firefox for the time being.

I think it’s really interesting that we’re seeing these new really simple and unitary web tools popping up from the Arab world, addressing one problem and solving it in a really neat and effective way. It’s a sign Arab startups are maturing and realizing that they don’t have to be everything for the user, and that if they do one thing well enough then that is a success.

# Markkit