Restaurant Review Service Qaym Releases Arabic iPhone App

Qaym, the Arab website for user generated restaurant and coffee shop reviews, that was previously reviewed here, and recently received an investment from N2V, is announcing the launch of their iPhone application.

The online service enables users to rate and review restaurants and coffee shops, in addition to uploading pictures of them and their food items, discussing their positives and negatives and posting relevant information about them.

The newly released iPhone application provides users with the following features:

  • A list of the best ten restaurants in the city they’re in, based on the ratings of its users.
  • The possibility to drill down and find the best restaurants in the city by category or type of cuisine.
  • Access to the restaurants’ Qaym profiles that show the ratings, reviews and photos that other users who visited it shared and uploaded.

This first version of the application supports the following cities: Riyadh, Jeddah, Manama, Dammam, Khobar, Medina, Buraidah, Unaizah and Mecca. But more cities are planned for future releases of the application.

An Android version of the application is underway, and should see the light of day soon too.

The application is available in Arabic only, and can be downloaded for free from the iTunes store here.

N2V Adds AqarMap, Qaym And True-Gaming To Their Portfolio

National Net Ventures, better known as N2V, and one of the top internet groups in the Middle East, have been on an investment roll lately, announcing three new investments in regional startups within the past couple of weeks alone.

The three startups cover three different areas, following N2V’s strategy to diversify their portfolio of internet properties and expand regionally and globally to cover new areas of interest for users in the Arab world.

The announced investments were in the following startups: AqarMap, Qaym and True-Gaming.

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Restaurant Review Service Qaym Releases New Version

QaymQaym, the Arab website for user generated restaurant and coffee shop reviews, that was previously reviewed here, recently celebrated the launch of it’s new redesigned interface and additional features.

Qaym is an online project through which users rate and review restaurants and coffee shops, in addition to uploading pictures of them and their food items, discussing their positives and negatives and posting relevant information about them.

Each restaurant has its own page that contains information about it (including location, branches, type of offered food, etc.) and reviews of the people who visited it and tried its food, which can range from enthusiastic delight to obvious disappointment. There’s a gauge in each page showing the average user rating of the restaurant.

The new version includes a re-branding for the service, introducing a new logo, and a new more simplistic and organized design for the homepage, as well as some other design tweaks for the inside pages.

An important new feature that has been introduced is the ability to pinpoint the location of a restaurant and its different branches on a map; to make it easier for people to find them. This is done through the integration of Google Maps.

Other than that the site’s rating system has been enhanced and extended to allow users to rate each other’s reviews, posts and photos.

The site currently focuses on food and drink establishments, and intends to expand so that the community can rate and review any charged service or product, ultimately aiming to provide an honest, user- and consumer-driven community in which people’s real experiences are shared and published so that they can be the basis of people’s decisions to buy or use a product or service, instead of attractive advertisements and ubiquitous billboards.

Qaym, User Generated Restaurant Reviews

Qaym is a Saudi based service, built around user reviews and social rating of restaurants and eateries from around the world, that just came out of private beta and launched publicly.

Users fully generate the content for the service through their contributions; Every restaurant gets a page, which shows the current user rating for it, tags that describe what the restaurant offers, a list of the countries and cities that restaurants has branches in, as well as reviews and photos submitted by users.

The way the content is organized, you not only get access to reviews of certain restaurants you want to check out before going to, but you can also access a directory-like listing of all restaurants, or of eateries in a certain country or city.

The idea behind it is quite simple and straight-forward, as is the interface and design, which makes it all the better and easier to use. The interface is in Arabic only for the time being.

Saudi Jihad al-Ammar is behind this project, he began working on it last year, and beta tested privately for a bit over 9 months before launching last week.