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.

Tasree3 Expand Their Food Delivery Search Engine To Riyadh

Tasree3 is a simple and straightforward search engine that enables its users to search for and find the delivery numbers and menus for the different restaurants around town.

The design of the site is very simplistic, centered around a search box that enables users to search for the restaurant they want. There also is a Random button that randomly picks and suggests a restaurant for you, which should come in handy at times when you’re having a hard time picking what to have.

Suggestions are shown as you type your search query, and when you submit your search the results appear directly under the search box without loading another page, showing you the delivery number and providing a link for you to view the menu if you need to. The menu pops up as a layer on the page for you to browse through.

Read More

YallaWain: A New Kuwaiti Social Dining Out Service

YallaWainYallaWain is a new social networking service that was launched in Kuwait, and that revolves around the experience of dining out; helping people pick what places to go to and what to have.

The service describes itself as a new way for people to mix and tip-off each other about the finest restaurants and top dishes in Kuwait; which sums it up quite nicely.

Basically, the site is built around user reviews and ratings of the different restaurants and eateries in the country, their ratings of the different dishes those places serve on their menus, and tips they leave for other fellow diners.

The service also integrates a social aspect that enables users to follow their friends and contacts on the service, in order to get a more personal touch and receive their different tips and reviews, as well as what restaurants are their favorite ones.

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Jeddah Food, The Online Restaurant Guide Launches iPhone App

Jeddah FoodJeddah Food, the English languageĀ online restaurant guide to restaurants in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, recently announced the launch of their new iPhone mobile application.

The application enables visitors to Jeddah, as well as locals, quickly find restaurants around the city, based on your current location, while on the go. It provides a search functionality to look for specific restaurants and cafes around Jeddah, as well as quick categories that enables users to click through directly and locate places by type of cuisine (e.g. Lebanese, Japanese, Burgers etc.)

For each venue, the application provides the venue details, phone numbers, website details, photo galleries, and maps.

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Dine In UAE, UAE Restaurants Guide And Reviews

Dine In UAEDine In UAE is a service that aims to be a comprehensive United Arab Emirates’ restaurant directory on the web, serving as a central point, introducing people to good restaurants all over the UAE.

It also helps restaurant owners promote the new and unique aspects of their restaurants while providing diners with an effective way to find and try new restaurants.

Users can search restaurants by name, by area or by cuisine, or go through the highest rated restaurants and most popular ones, to find details about these restaurants, their addresses, telephone numbers, opening hours, ratings, user reviews and comments.

Registered users can rate restaurants they’ve gone to and post their personal reviews of them.

A forum is integrated in the website to add more interaction between the community of users on several food related subjects like dining at home, sharing recipes, special offers and more.

Restaurant owners can add their restaurants and menus to the website by filling out an offline form. Restaurants have to pay AED 2,000.00 (~ $540) to be included in the directory. Obviously, it’d be much more practical if they could take this process online soon.

Dine In UAE screenshot

Dine In UAE was launched by Siankar Comm LLC.

# Dine In UAE

Otlob, Free Online Food Ordering Service

Otlob is a free online food ordering service that was first launched in Egypt back in 1999, and which has expanded to three other countries in the Middle East ever since: Saudi Arabia (Riyadh & Jeddah), United Arab Emirates (Dubai) and Bahrain.

Otlob provides its users with the complete menus of their favorite restaurants, enabling them to order meals online easily and quickly; they can even add comments with their order if they need to be specific about certain details.

Users can also save their favorite orders so as to save time the next times they need to order the same meals, they can order from a number of restaurants at the same time, and set the delivery time of their choice.

Restaurants are organized by category and by the neighbourhoods they serve to, and their latest menus are available on the website for users to choose from.

The interface is very well designed, really simply and easy to use; and it comes in two languages: English and Arabic.

Otlob was developed by LINK Development, and manage by LINKonLINE, both subsidiaries of LINKdotNET, an Orascom company.

# Otlob

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.