Month: May 2008

Where Is Your Target Audience?

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A very big and important question that every entrepreneur faces, or that they must ask themselves if it doesn’t come naturally, is: What is their target audience?

In answering that question, entrepreneurs mainly get into details about certain demographics and break down their target market into numerous categories; which is all great, really necessary and very important.

In a web context, it gets even more complicated, because it adds a bigger factor of location into the decisions that have to be taken, and entrepreneurs have to decide how open or closed to the world their new business should be.

If we take the case of Arab entrepreneurs launching their online businesses:

Should they target local internet users in the country they’re based in?
After all, they’re close, they have access to them offline too, they know more or less how they think, or at least it’s easier to get the information they need through local market research and studies, and well they’re part of the market and they know it pretty well; in other words: it just feels safer.

Or should they expand it just a bit to the whole Arab region?
Even if every Arab country has its own different considerations and unique culture, they’re not really all that different, they more or less share the same economic situations, they have the same backgrounds and very close traditions: it just feels quite predictable and controllable.

Or should they just take the jump and try to take it global?
After all, they’re online, they potentially have access to every connected person around the world, it’s an ocean of opportunity, so why limit themselves?

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New Version Of Kalimat Araby Advertising Platform

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The new version of the Kalimat Araby advertising platform, by Maktoob subsidiary Araby, will be released in private beta soon for current users of the platform, both advertisers and publishers, to try and get their feedback on the new system and integrate any important suggestions before its official launch.

Kalimat Araby was originally launched in June 2007; and the new system will bring a set of technical and functional enhancements.

While the old system was displaying keyword-related ads on search pages, the ads displayed on publisher’s content pages were pretty much random ads; with the new platform the displayed ads are contextual ones for both content and search pages.

Another feature being rolled out for Ad Agencies is the addition of a new special interface and an API to make their work buying ads and setting up campaigns for their customers easier.

From the publisher’s point of view, a set of new features are being introduced as well; from Ad filtering, to registering multiple sites under one account, to management of ad zones and more; making it easier for them to better serve and optimize ads from the Kalimat Araby network.

Technically speaking, the system will be able to scale a lot better with the changes that were made under the hood; and a very important and interesting addition for advertisers is a new click audit mechanism that should eliminate most common click fraud issues.

The new system’s interface will be in two languages now, both Arabic and English, instead of Arabic only for the old system; with the possibility to add more languages.

With Kalimat Araby maturing into a well-rounded product, I expect we’ll slowly start to see it spreading onto more publisher websites and being generalized on to the whole Maktoob network of web sites and properties, making it a sort of one place stop for placing ads on Maktoob’s content network, online services, and even newly launched Maktoob TV; as well as a list of other publishers’ web properties.

# Kalimat Araby

The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell)

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The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell)Every entrepreneur’s dream is to see their new product or service catch on, break into the mainstream and reach widespread adoption. Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘The Tipping Point‘, published in 2002, talks about just that: the point where products, services, messages or ideas tip over and become a big success.

The book explores the concept of “epidemics” and how ideas, products, messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do, and what it is that makes them tip over and become an epidemic; starting from the influential kinds of people who can spread the message, to the stickiness of the message itself and the context in which it came to exist.

The book also discusses the three pivotal types of personalities that trigger “word-of-mouth epidemics” and help spread the message: Connectors, sociable personalities who bring people together; Mavens, who like to pass along knowledge; and Salesmen, adept at persuading the unenlightened.

It’s a very interesting read and provides a new way of thinking for how to handle promoting a product, idea or message; and how to eventually make it a success.

The book is very well written, in a really simple style, explaining the different concepts and ideas and giving a number of examples to illustrate everything, making the discussed points even clearer.

This book is recommended to every entrepreneur looking to build an effective marketing strategy for their new business; it really gives you a new perspective and line of thought that is very interesting and could help enormously in generating the required buzz around your ideas and creating a hype around your products, which should eventually result in more sales and success.

# The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell

Don’t Start A Startup, Start A Business

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Jason Fried, from 37signals, wrote a great post last week on Signal vs. Noise, titled Start a business, not a startup, in which he talks about the importance of handling a startup as the business it is supposed to be, and the obvious rule that any business needs to generate revenue to live on and grow.

From the moment they go live, startups are as real as any other business. They are governed by the same set of market forces and economic precepts that wrap around every other company, new or old.

At the atomic level, all businesses need to generate revenue to pay their bills, grow their business, and stay in business. The sooner they find themselves in the black, the better chance they’ll have to survive.

[…]

A poorly run startup is a poorly run business. A wonderfully run startup is a wonderfully run business. I don’t believe there are many great startups that are bad businesses. Maybe less than 1%. If the business is bad the startup is bad. A great idea, maybe, but a great business, no.

So if you start something up, start a business, don’t start a startup.

— Jason Fried; Start a business, not a startup

I think this is very important in an age where the speed and ease of getting things off the ground makes many people overlook or delay the very crucial business planning part of building their startup; while some others have a business goal as simple as being acquired by X or Y of the giant companies.

Some of what’s going on nowadays reminds me a bit of the first internet bubble, when everyone launched startups covering every imaginable idea with no business model whatsoever, aiming to cash out with an IPO. Now it’s no longer IPOs they’re after but acquisitions by bigger players. That will come to an end too, as those big players start considering how they are going to fit those startups into their bigger picture and make more money out of them.

Another thing to consider is that even if you’re after someone acquiring your startup, you’ll certainly have better chances of getting a better deal if your startup actually generates money and will bring an extra financial value to them.

Places.ae, Dubai’s Location Based Directory

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Places.ae is one of those simple, small, but very useful services that we really wish we had more of all around the Arab world.

In short, and using their own words which I think say it best, places.ae is a location based directory for Dubai.
Integrating Google Maps, the website helps you find, positioned on a map, anything in Dubai by simply asking you what you are looking for, and the neighborhood you’re looking for it in; from businesses to restaurants to clubs to hospitals to any other place you would want to go to in Dubai.

The interface is very simple and really easy to use; you start typing what you’re searching for and the website helps by giving suggestions, and then it delivers a list of nearby places sorted by how far they are from the location you typed in.

You get to click on each one of these places to see it located on a map, find how other people who have been there rate it and read their comments on it.

Users can also add other places that they know of to the website, thereby giving the community the possibility to further enrich the service.

Places.ae currently only covers Dubai, but should be adding other emirates soon. The service is free, both for users and for businesses for the time being.

This very cool service is a product of the collaboration of code.ae and spinbits.

# Places.ae

TN-Emploi: A Resource For IT Jobs In Tunisia

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TN-Emploi, a.k.a La Tunisienne pour l’emploi, is a new project that was recently launched in Tunisia by Mahmoud Gourar, and that attempts to use a simple blog format to bring job offers and opportunities to Tunisian job seekers, with a focus on IT-related jobs.

Job opportunities are posted daily, organized by category, and tagged with keywords, to make it easier for job seekers to find the jobs that match their goals and skillsets better.

It being a blog, people can access these offers directly through the blog, through the RSS feed or by subscribing to the email feed.

Recruiters and companies can post their offers simply and for free by sending them to a provided email address.

The blog is in French only, and is quite an interesting resource for Tunisian programmers, web developers, database administrators and so forth who need a place where they can find focused job offers for their respective IT fields.

Even though most posted job offers are for opportunities in Tunisia, some others are posted for opportunities in France or the rest of Europe, for those who might be interested in working abroad.

# TN-Emploi.com