social – StartUpArabia

Restaurant Review Service Qaym Releases New Version

March 24, 2009March 24, 2009 MMM 4 Comments

Qaym, 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.

Synergos Middle East & North Africa Social Innovators Program

July 16, 2008July 16, 2008 MMM 2 Comments

In October 2007 Synergos launched the Middle East and North Africa Social Innovators Program, with funding from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and other donors. The three-year initiative seeks to identify and support twenty individuals from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and Palestine who are implementing successful social projects.

In order to be considered for selection, a candidate must be implementing an idea that has demonstrated positive social change and impact at a local level with the potential for replication in other communities and expansion to a national level. Social innovations will be considered which have as a focus one or more of the following fields; economic, social, or sustainable development; health; education; and culture.

The Program will invest in these Social Innovators through professional development and financial support to better enable participants to transform their small-scale projects into sustainable programs and organizations.

The selected Social Innovators will have access to training, mentoring and peer learning through a network of professionals and social entrepreneurs to help build financial and organizational sustainability for your innovation; as well as facilitation of connections to business, government, philanthropic and other civil society leaders in the area and across the world to leverage their innovation and make a greater impact. Financial awards of up to $17,000 per year, for two years, are also offered to help develop the winner’s social ventures.

The application period for the Social Innovators program began in early May 2008 and goes on until mid-September.

For more details about the program and project submission, check out the official program website: Synergos Social Innovators Program.

meOwns, A Social Tool To Publish Collections Of What You Own

June 5, 2008June 5, 2008 MMM 3 Comments

meOwns is a new web application that helps people complete another bit of their public personal profile on their blogs, social networks and other personal web pages by publishing personal collections of things they own.

The idea behind the service is that you might not be able to tell what kind of person someone is just by the way they look, but that you can get a better idea by knowing what they own.

As a user you can use the service to build and maintain collections of the items you own, create a personal wish list or import one you already have on Amazon, as well as add items from other people’s collections and wish lists to your own.

It’s also possible to get in contact with other users directly through the site, by sending them a message and choosing which of your contact details you’d like share with them for the reply (Email, Yahoo ID or Windows Live ID).

The meOwns blog talks about the possibility of launching a garage sale for items you want to sell, as well as the ability to request to buy items from other people. It seems these features still haven’t been officially rolled out, but they sound really neat. It’ll be interesting to see how the whole buying/selling/price details will be handled.

meOwns allows users to integrate many of the service’s basic functionalities into their personal blogs and websites through a customizable widget, which lets them directly maintain their collections and items, and also lets other users interact with it and the items in it. The widget is also available as a facebook application that can be added to the user’s profile.

Items from other users can be found through popular tags, popular types of items, or searched for using the quick or advanced search options. You can also check out other user’s pages and see what collections and items they own by searching for them or browsing the top users list.

meOwns was launched from Alexandria, Egypt by eSpace Technologies.

# meOwns

Qaym, User Generated Restaurant Reviews

April 23, 2008April 23, 2008 MMM 2 Comments

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.