The MIT Arab Business Plan Competition is a competition designed to encourage all entrepreneurs in the Arab world to start their own company and, ultimately, create a nest of leading firms in the Arab world.
The current version of the competition officially started on November 10th 2008, by opening up registrations. A few hours ago, the final round took place in Dubai, where the 10 finalists did oral presentations of their business plans to the jury panel, and the awards were handed out.
The winners of this edition of the MIT Arab Business Plan Competition are as follows:
First place: A tie between Syphir (Husain Al-Mohssen, Courtland Allen, Ghassan Fayad, Faisal Alibrahim [Saudi Arabia]) and HAYATI Healthcare LLC (Michael Matly, Tariq El-Titi, David Matly [United Arab Emirates])
Second place: Rice Straw Fertilizer Company (Ibrahim Khater Youssef, Ahmed El Dorghamy, Mohamed Abdel Raouf [Egypt])
Third place: Blog Souq (Ahmad Takatkah, Adey Salamin, Ammar Ibrahim [Jordan])
According to the terms of the competition, the winner of the competition should receive prize money of USD 50,000; which in the case of a tie will most probably be split in two. The members of the winning teams will also be given the opportunity to attend the MIT Global Startup Workshop (GSW).
The first and second runner-ups will receive a check of USD 10,000 and USD 5000 respectively.
Besides the financial reward, the winning teams will be provided with coaching/mentoring from the members and network of the MIT Enterprise Forum who will also help the winners get their businesses up and explore further funding opportunities by introducing them to business development centers, financing institutions, and similar organizations.
what the hell is SYPHIR?
Syphir is an online service that identifies and ranks important email messages based on a user's social graph. Both global and personalized ranking algorithms are used to achieve accurate rankings. The service is targeted at both consumers and corporate users.
Hello
please can you give us URL(s) of the winners web presence !
especially the URL of Blog Souq !
thank you
The competition is a business plan competition, so some of these are still at that early stage of just being a business plan, while some others are a bit further down the road operating in stealth mode.
Blog Souq should be launched under http://blogsouq.com; but it's still not available online yet.
I will surely be writing about these projects as they move further in their lives.
Congratulations for the winning teams, and hard luck for the other teams including ours – AqarMap.com (Yemen)
The competition was extremly competitive, and the winning teams deserve the prizes. It was an honor for me to meet all the teams and be part of this amazing experience.
Every Arab entrepreneur should put this competition on his radar for next year 🙂
Regards,
Amad
Where can we read about what each winner. It would be better if some one can tell me little bet more information about each idea.(I have googled them all ) but can not gain information on Blog Souq Can some one be nice enough to tell me what was there idea…….
Good luck with AqarMap Amad; as you
I'm hoping to follow up soon with a post with more details on the winning projects.
Blog Souq, is a sort of marketplace where people can invest in blogs that they like so that they can grow the blog and enhance it, in return for a percentage of the blog's revenues.
BlogSouQ presents a unique and innovative stock market concept for blogs. We are establishing a platform to accelerate the monetization process of original content generated by individuals with the vision to become the preferred online micro Investment platform. As an initial proof of concept the platform is focused on semi-professional / professional bloggers allowing them to solve their traditional problems of raising capital to improve their blogs’ performance and revenues.
BlogSouQ enables people to participate in sustaining, developing and promoting their favorite blogs. Investors and blog readers get an opportunity to capture the benefits of this new exciting market via a new investment product and a safe, secure and user friendly online service that bloggers and investors can trust.
We are still at the pre-startup stage hence we dont have a website as not much information can be released at this stage (being confidential).
If you are interested in the concept (as a user or a potential investor), please email us.
Adey Salamin
BlogSouQ, co-founder
http://www.asuaq.com, co-founder
http://www.singularityadvisors.com, co-founder
Got some web ideas / startup ideas? contact us.
Thank you mohamed marwen and Adey(congratulation on your win). Mr.Adey you seem to have already been trough few start ups can you give some advise to eager Entrepreneurs.
Thank you
Muneeb Hussain
sounds interesting, closer to xobni but may have something unique
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Thanks & regards