July 2009 – StartUpArabia

ShooFeeTV Goes On And Launches Its TV Channel

July 30, 2009July 30, 2009 MMM

ShooFeeTV has gone on as planned and launched its own television channel, which will air an around-the-clock scrolling guide of programs from more than 150 of the most popular satellite channels on the ArabSat and NileSat platforms.

Clips and trailers for upcoming shows and movies will also be aired on the channel, through segments like its ShooFee Aflam, ShooFee 7elo and ShooFee Riyada.

The channel will also broadcast original content developed by ShooFeeTV, where hosts discuss entertainment news.

ShooFeeTV also has plans to integrate some of the features from their portal into the TV channel, such as discussion boards and comment threads for individual shows.

The TV channel has been a project ShooFeeTV has been pursuing and preparing for from the beginning as another platform to provide their service and information to viewers, as well as drive more people to their portal.

The new ShooFeeTV channel is being broadcast via the Arabsat Badr-4 satellite.

Tamakkan! Initiative to Support Young Emirati Entrepreneurs

July 27, 2009July 27, 2009 MMM 2 Comments

Tamakkan!, an initiative aimed at supporting young Emirati entrepreneurs who need industry insight to achieve their business dreams, has been launched by BrandMoxie, a UAE based marketing firm.

BrandMoxie has set up Tamakkan! to nurture the spirit of entrepreneurship and provide an informal environment for the development of knowledge sharing and the spirit of mentorship for the benefit of young Emiratis.

Sana Bagersh, the CEO of BrandMoxie explained, “the idea is that through Tamakkan! industry professionals would be able to give back to the country, and the community, by helping to nurture the next generation of entrepreneurs. We hope to create a vibrant monthly platform of discussion, in the form of a free two hour seminar, open to those young entrepreneurs who want to attend an informative session presented by a professional, or expert, on a key topic in business.”

Bagersh explained that Tamakkan! would aim to provide high calibre seminars given by practicing professionals. The focus would be on the transfer of practical skills and information. “These would include short seminars on marketing such as branding, positioning, merchandising, franchising etc, and business topics such as the fundamentals of how to set up a business.”

Tamakkan! is intended to facilitate contributions by the business sector, and welcomes the participation of companies and individuals who can lend their support by giving their time or assistance in kind.

BrandMoxie won the Tamayyuz Award in June for its commitment to young students, offering them practical experience and professional guidance. Bagersh explained, “what has encouraged us to do more is our surprise at the high calibre of work performed by university interns. These students are very good; they have built up the skills and are passionate at what they do, but they lack the ‘street smarts’ and the understanding of the broad work context. And this is only something they can pick up through experience and professional guidance.”

Bagersh believes that Tamakkan! would support fresh graduates with entrepreneurship dreams by providing them exposure to knowledge from industry practitioners.

Seedcamp Week 2009 – Applications Now Open

July 23, 2009July 23, 2009 MMM

Seedcamp Week is an intensive week-long event held in London every September and is targeted at young entrepreneurs from across EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).

Applications are submitted online and based on these, a judging committee will select up to 20 teams to participate in the event.

The focus of this week is around providing an incredible experience for the 20 selected teams. There is a diverse mentor network of serial entrepreneurs, corporates, product designers, venture capitalists, recruiters, marketing specialists, lawyers and accountants that help the selected teams put together the foundations of a viable business.

The aim of this week is to collapse the time it takes startups to make and develop these critical relationships from months to a week and establish an unrivaled foundation on which the business can be built.

At the end of the week the funding decision will be made to invest up to €50K each in 5 teams for a small equity stake (5%-10%). (Sometimes, more than 5 teams are selected.)

The funding amount is purposely kept low enough that teams do not have to give away a large portion of their companies. The idea is to take enough money to develop a great product and build towards a higher valuation. As such preferred stock, board rights, or other rights often required by institutional investors are not asked for.

The three months following Seedcamp Week and the investment, is when the winning teams with the Seedcamp team begin building the product and company together.

The provided funding covers the teams’ move to London for at least three months, in which they are also provided access to services worth 2-3 times the invested €50K. The goal of this 3-month period is to help grow and nurture the teams by providing the same level of intensity and in-depth focus on developing the product and business.

During the course of the three months, the groups will have an opportunity to take advantage of the same ecosystem of experts which participated in the Seedcamp event through weekly dinners, topical lunches, conferences, and continued mentorship on various issues from scaling the business to raising further funding to M&A. Additionally, during the three months, assistance will be provided with all the paperworkto set up a company properly.

Six weeks into the project, a Demo Day is held where teams can show their products to the other groups from Seedcamp and a select group of investors. And eleven weeks into the project, an Investor Day is held where startups can present to potential investors.

For those interesting in knowing more about Seedcamp, check out the Seedcamp website; and those who want to apply can use this Seedcamp application form.

From the Arab region, Content Syndicate participated in Seedcamp Week 2007 and was nominated as one of the top 10 startups out of 260 participating startups from 40 countries.

Watwet Opens Up Their Platform Through Public API

July 22, 2009July 22, 2009 MMM

Watwet, the Arab social networking and micro-blogging platform, has gone on and taken another big step forward by releasing a public API covering the different methods and functionalities of the service.

Methods covered include ones to get user and friend timelines, search, follow and unfollow users, retrieve lists of followers and friends, and of course send updates, among others.

This means that developers can now easily integrate the different Watwet functionalities into other web, mobile and desktop applications.

The full documentation for the Watwet API is available at developer.watwet.com.

This comes not long after them providing users the possibility to link their Watwet and Twitter accounts, in a way that anything posted to Watwet gets automatically posted to Twitter and vice versa.

On another note, Watwet also went ahead and changed its interface moving to a simple “following/follower” model, instead of the previous “friendship” model that was based on reciprocal agreement from two people to become friends.

Blue Ocean Strategy Seminar – July 27th ’09 – Amman (Jordan)

July 15, 2009July 15, 2009 MMM 2 Comments

The Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship announced a new event, the Blue Ocean Strategy Seminar, which will be held in the Le Meridien hotel, Amman (Jordan) on July 27th 2009 from 5-7 PM.

Blue Ocean Strategy, for those who haven’t read the great book (by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne), is about how to take your business into new expanding, competitor-free markets “Blue Oceans”, which are unlike “red oceans,” which are well explored and crowded with competitors. “Blue oceans” represent untapped market space and the opportunity for highly profitable growth.

It is about following a strategy of value innovation, focusing on utility, price, and cost positions, to create and capture new demand and to focus on the big picture, not the numbers.

The seminar is made for CEOs, COOs, directors, managing directors, general managers, marketing managers, business development managers, innovation leaders, and entrepreneurs.

The speaker will be Mohammad Ajlouni, one of the few certified Blue Ocean Strategy practitioners.

The seminar is free, and anyone interested can sign up using the form here: Blue Ocean Strategy Public Seminar Registration form.

A full 2-day paid workshop will be following on August 10-11th 2009. Details are available here.

Globalvations.com, A Global Search Engine Focused On Innovation

July 14, 2009July 14, 2009 MMM

Multilingual Global Marketing (MGM), a global consulting firm, just announced the launch Globalvations.com, a new search engine specifically focused on global innovations.

The search engine was founded by Malik Laibi, an Algerian entrepreneur currently based in Australia, and developed by SearchChannel, LLC of Oak Brook, Illinois. It currently indexes and categorizes thousands of highly relevant sites that deliver valuable information focused on the world of innovation, aiming to connect its visitors to new technologies, innovative companies, products and business opportunities throughout the world.

The simplistic interface allows visitors to search for editorials and news about a certain topic and industry or to look for startups, with the possibility to choose a specific industry of interest or to search across all industries.
The search results page is very straightforward, offering a listing of what was found and linking out to the respective sites and pages containing the information.

Explaining the idea behind the project, Malik Laibi says that “Working with clients internationally, we found the pace of change in the global marketplace speeds up every single day. With new technologies being introduced so rapidly, and with economies changing across the world, staying up to date on innovation is increasingly difficult. We saw an opportunity to create a global information tool in our search portal, Globalvations.com. For the user, we answer swiftly and directly one simple question: ‘What are the most cutting-edge business and technology innovations that I should know about?'”

SearchChannel president William Furlong makes the point that “Globalvations.com offers only very specific, innovations-oriented content. Users stay up to date on what they’re truly looking for: research, current news, upcoming conferences, and the actual technologies constantly turned out by the most reputable global businesses and institutions,” and continued that they are “expressly excited about what this tool can do for entrepreneurs, business executives, scientists, government officials, academics, or just for the curious mind!”

Malik Laibi shared his plans to establish a base in the MENA region for Globalvations.com, and that he is currently looking for suitable partners in the region.

# Globalvations.com

Iconty: An Arabic Search Engine For Website Icons

July 12, 2009July 12, 2009 MMM

Iconty is a new niche Arabic search engine, specifically created for web designers and developers, to provide them with an easy way to search for and find icons to use for certain functions on the websites they are building.

Iconty aims to be a central repository for icons, where users can come and search for icons using Arabic keywords, or even English ones, to find the ones best suited for their needs.

Users can sign-up to the service for free and start uploading their own icons to share on the site so that other people can download and use them as well.

Users can add icons individually through a simple form where they specify the file, the owner and the tags; or upload a zip file with a whole icon set, and then input the details for each icon.

Iconty is still in beta; work on it started in February 2009 by a team of three family members: Mahmoud, Mohamed and Alia Rida. The team are currently working on enhancing the organization of the platform and how icon result sets are displayed, as well as making it even easier for users to find icons.

# Iconty

Twatweet & TN Labs: Following Tunisians On Twitter

July 8, 2009July 8, 2009 MMM 2 Comments

Over the past year, Twitter has taken off in Tunisia, much like everywhere else in the world, with more and more users getting on board every day, and it becoming a source for instant information and news about what’s going on in the country.

To make it easier to follow tweets coming out of Tunisia, two projects have surfaced to aggregate tweets from Tunisian twitter users: Twatweet and TN Labs.

Twatweet is based on WordPress and uses FeedWordpress and the Twitter API to aggregate tweets from Tunisian users being followed by the @twatweet user. Users who want to be included in the aggregator can follow @twatweet which will follow them back if they’re Tunisian, and users who don’t want to be included can simply block the @twatweet user.

The service uses a theme that matches Twitter’s design so as to keep the experience quite similar.

Twatweet also includes a search engine that enables users to search among tweets by Tunisian users.

Twatweet was founded by Jazem Halioui (@jazinthecity) and Houeida Anouar (@Houeida), and currently aggregates 217 active users.

TN Labs, on the other hand, was developed on a Java/JSP backend using Twitter’s streaming API to aggregate tweets in realtime from Tunisian twitter users, automatically updating the timeline.
Users are added by the founder of the service, and have to contact him to be added or removed.

Some of the other features it has is that a preview of links that are posted in tweets are displayed whenever possible, by hovering on the icon next to the link; and hash tags link to their respective search pages on Twitter (not to TN Labs’ own search).

As for search on TN Labs, although it allows for realtime search, it is on all of Twitter not just on tweets from Tunisian users.

An interesting new addition is the possibility to view discussions, with an icon at the end of a certain tweet, opening up a layer with the original tweet and the different replies that followed around it by different users.

TN Labs has a rougher design as the focus has been more on experimenting with features than the overall design.
TN Labs was founded by Sami Ben Romdhane (@samiTunis), and currently aggregates around 237 active users.

Both services provide links to redirect users to the Twitter interface to retweet or reply to a certain tweet; a list of the active Tunisian users they’re following, allowing people either to hover or click through for more details about each user; as well as RSS feeds for updates from Tunisians users.

Twatweet and TN Labs are both still early stage projects, and I’m guessing we’ll be seeing more development happening on both fronts.

Jawaker Launches Campaign Management Tool For Advertisers

July 7, 2009July 7, 2009 MMM 3 Comments

Jawaker, the online multiplayer card games website that was previously reviewed here, and whose co-founder Mohamad Haj Hasan was interviewed here, has introduced a new feature called the Jawaker Campaigner.

Jawaker’s approach to serving ads on its cards games platform has been an interesting and different once from the beginning, with them choosing to move away from the traditional advertising options and coming up with what they call “Cost per Hand” (CPH for short).

The idea is that every CPH credit displays an ad (which consists of branding the back of all the cards on the table, branding the table cloth and a small text ad on the right side of the page with a target link) to the player for an entire round (or “hand”) of play.

Their ad server has been in place for some time now and they have been tweaking it and enhancing it so as to reach a point when they can open it up to potential advertisers to log in and create their own targeted advertising campaigns on Jawaker.
The result of these efforts is Jawaker Campaigner which does just that; enabling advertisers to create their campaigns and choose to target their ads based on: Country, Gender, Age and Time of Day.

Jawaker Campaigner

Advertisers can state the maximum number of hands to serve per day, write their ad text and target URL (in both Arabic and English) and upload their ad images. Jawaker will then approve the campaign and start serving the ads. The advertiser can freeze or delete the campaign whenever they want and can add as many campaigns as they like.

Jawaker automatically deducts credits from the advertiser’s total CPH credits as soon as an ad is served on a hand to the target audience. The advertiser will also be able to see statistics on their campaign such as how many impressions were served, how many clicks their ad got and their average implied click-through rate.

Currently, advertisers need to contact Jawaker in order to get an account and purchase credits, but an automatic sign-up and online credit purchase system should be rolled out soon.