August 2009 – Page 2 – StartUpArabia

Total Country Connectivity Measure For The Arab World

August 20, 2009August 20, 2009 MMM

The annual results of Arab Advisors Group’s Total Country Connectivity Measure (TCCM) reveal substantial –mostly cellular service driven- improvements in overall scores. The Arab broadband Internet markets also registered very positive growth.

The United Arab Emirates is the most connected country in the Arab World according to the Arab Advisors Group’s annual report; Bahrain and Saudi Arabia followed in second and third ranks respectively.

The Arab Advisors Group calculates its Total Country Connectivity Measure (TCCM) by adding the household mainlines penetration, cellular penetration, and Internet users penetration rates in each country. The household mainlines penetration is measured by dividing the residential mainlines by the number of households in each country.

The TCCM shows the extent of connectivity of individuals in a certain country whether via fixed lines, cellular lines and/or Internet. Of course, there will be an overlap since many individuals will be using these three communications technologies at the same time. However, the measure still yields an accurate and informative picture on the level of ICT services penetration in each country.

As previously mentioned the Total Country Connectivity Measure results for 2009 revealed that UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia still dominate the top three spots as the highest adopters of telecommunication services, with values of 321%, 249% and 248% respectively.
The results for the rest of the Arab World came as follows: Qatar (205%), Libya (199%), Kuwait (184%), Oman (170%), Algeria (141%), Jordan (141%), Syria (129%), Egypt (128%), Tunisia (128%), Morocco (127%), Lebanon (125%), Iraq (100%), Palestine (95%), Mauritania (74%), Yemen (55%) and in last place Sudan with a TCCM value of 34%.

“Only four out of the nineteen countries covered in this year’s study have a total country connectivity measure that exceeds a 200%. This indicates a substantial potential for more growth in most Arab markets, especially in the under penetrated Internet markets.” Mr. Andrawes Snobar, Arab Advisors’ Research Manager wrote in the report.

TweetShell, A Web Based Shell Interface For Twitter

August 15, 2009August 15, 2009 MMM 2 Comments

TweetShell is a fun, in a geeky kind of way, new Twitter web application that provides a command line interface for users who are more comfortable working in the shell environment.

The site’s idea is to provide a way to use everyday shell commands to interact with twitter. So for starters, users might want to run a man command to discover the available commands and how they work within the twitter context.

TweetShell is still in early alpha and doesn’t cover all Twitter functionalities yet, but it very nicely covers the most basic ones, enabling the viewing of user timelines (using directory commands like cd and ls), tweeting (using wall), logging in to your Twitter account (using the ssh command) and more.

The site’s tag line is quite a fun one as well: “You know, in linux they say everything is a file. In TweetShell everything is a tweet!!”

Tweetshell is a creation of Monther AbuShaikh from Jordan, who is also CTO at Ikbis, the popular video and photo sharing service.

Google Launches Google.ps Domain Name For Palestine

August 13, 2009August 13, 2009 MMM 6 Comments

Google just announced the addition of a new domain to their list of international domain names google.ps for Palestine.

The new domain will give Arabic-speaking users in the Palestinian Territories, who use Palestinian ISPs, access to Google in Arabic–and eventually, access to more locally-relevant content.

Local domain names are part of a bigger strategy for Google, they’re a first step towards making the web more accessible and relevant for users from around the world, providing local services to them wherever they happen to be.

Google has already previously launched a number of local domain names for other countries including Jordan, Morocco, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Libya among others and plans to continue doing so.

With the launch of google.ps, the total number of international Google domains goes up to more than 160.

Bedaya Angel Network’s First Pitching Session For Startups

August 9, 2009August 9, 2009 MMM

A group of 10 Angel investors gathered in Jordan to attend the first match-making event for the newly created Bedaya Angel Network, where 20 pre-selected entrepreneurs got to pitch their projects to the investors.

Entrepreneurs were given 20 minutes to present their project and explain why they were looking for investment. Presentations were followed by another 20 minutes with questions from the attending Business Angels about their project’s details and concept, business development, the market for their project and what any eventually invested money would be used for.

The Bedaya Angel Network initiative was launched only a few months ago, in May of 2009, and has attracted over 30 important figures from the Jordanian investment, business and economic development communities.

The founding institutions of the Bedaya Angel Network are: the Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship, the iPark business incubator and the Arab Science and Technology Foundation. It is supported by the European program Medibtikar.

The goal behind the creation of Bedaya is to offer national financing vehicles for innovative business startups as part of the El Hassan Science City’s mandate to foster knowledge-based enterprises with a promising potential for growth. The network will be offering investments for early stage start-ups with a focus on science and technology.

Bedaya Angel Network - Match-making Event

The process starts with the selection of entrepreneurs who are looking for funding and giving the ones that are most ready the opportunity to pitch their projects to an audience of business angels at match-making events that should be held every 2 months.

Before pitching to investors, the entrepreneurs received special full-day training and coaching by Mr. Nelson Grey, a seasonal expert on business angel investments.

The next Bedaya pitching session is planned to happen next October.

[Business Angels are private individuals willing to invest their own money into high growth potential startups; not only offering money to the companies they invest in, but also a lot of experience and their personal business networks.]

BberryApp.com Releases Free “Forward, Reply & Edit” BlackBerry Application

August 6, 2009August 6, 2009 MMM 7 Comments

BberryApp.com is a new Jordanian startup, that specializes in Blackberry application development, both as a service for clients with specific needs, as well as with products for the general market.

They just released their first public application for Blackberry Smartphones called “Forward, Reply and Edit” on August 2nd 2009. This application integrates with your BlackBerry messages and allows you to do exactly what its name suggests: open an email message, choose ‘Forward & Edit’ or ‘Reply & Edit’ from the menu and be able to change any of the content in the email before sending it.

“Forward, Reply and Edit” has seen very good success in the few days since it’s been out with over 3,500 downloads so far.

You can download the application for free here: Forward, Reply & Edit. To activate the software, all you need to do is send an email to a friend letting them know about the application too.

According to people who have tested the application, the only downside of this application is that you cannot use it with emails that have attachments, as it strips off the attachments when editing. But that is also the case of other paid solutions that do similar tasks.

BberryApp.com was founded by Adey Salamin, Razi Al Qasem and Tariq Shadid from Jordan.

[Application screenshot courtesy of BerryReview]

Arabic Language Domains & Internet Growth In The Arab World

August 6, 2009August 6, 2009 MMM 9 Comments

A lot of talk has been going on these past couple of days about Arabic language domain names which should become possible within the coming year, with the major changes planned for the web addressing system, allowing the use of international scripts such as Arabic, Chinese and Hindi in domain names, as well as the liberalization of the registration process for top-level domains.

The Arab league already has plans to play a big role in the midst of all this by operating its own “.arab” domain, registered in Arabic and Latin characters.

The officials at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) think that this move will help boost internet growth in the region, as more and more Arabic speakers find it more accessible to them.

According to Baher Esmat, the Middle East relations manager of ICANN, “The next 10 million or 20 million Arab internet users will be those who do not speak English,” as “They will want to do everything in Arabic, including the addresses.”

Now even though I’m not really a supporter of the move to liberalize the registration of top-level domains, because of the big hassle and mess I fear it will create, I think the other change adding the possibility to use international scripts in domain names is a great step forward for the web addressing system.

I’m sure a lot of Arab websites will be registering web addresses in Arabic once it becomes possible next year, and it will be interesting to analyze the statistics and see how many people prefer using them.

Still, I’m not sure it’ll really have that big of an effect on internet growth in the region. I mean, is using a web address typed in Latin characters really a big barrier holding back people from getting online and surfing the web?
Of course, it’s more practical to just do everything in Arabic for many, but how many people do you think have skipped using the internet altogether just because they don’t want to type urls in Latin?

What do you think? Will Arabic domain names help boost internet growth in the region? Why?

Tweepi, A Set Of Tools To Help Manage Your Twitter Account

August 5, 2009August 5, 2009 MMM 2 Comments

Tweepi is another project that has popped up from the Arab world to cater to the ever-growing group of Twitter users around the world, presenting a set of simple tools to help users manage their following and followers lists.

The site has started off with four different tools:

Geeky Follow: This tool helps you find users who share the same interests as you and whom you might be interested in following. The way it works is that it asks for the handle of a Twitter user that you like, and it goes and gets a list of people who follow that user too, with their details, so you can see who of them you’d like to follow too.

Geeky Flush: This is for the more sensitive Twitter users who don’t like it when they follow someone and they don’t follow them back. So this tool simply enables you to unfollow people who aren’t following you back.

Geeky Reciprocate: This is the flip side to the previous tool, allowing users to find users who are following them but that they’re not following back, so that they can start following them quickly.

Geeky Cleanup: This tool enables you to go through the list of users you are following to identify users you might want to unfollow, like spammers, inactive users or the likes.

The tools come with Preset Target filters that help you filter the list of users to better identify the users you want to follow or unfollow, depending on the tool. They also show you a number of different indicators for each user like how many tweets they’ve sent within the last week, how many RTs they’ve gotten, how many replies and RTs they’ve sent themselves, …etc. It’s possible to customize and choose which of these indicators are shown as columns in the result set.

The site uses oAuth to link with your Twitter account and be able to perform the different actions it needs to do following your choices on the system.

Tweepi was built by ThoughtPick from Jordan, and is still in its beta version.

What do Arab startups need the most? [Poll Results]

August 4, 2009August 4, 2009 MMM

In the latest poll on StartUpArabia, the question to the readers was:

What do Arab startups need the most?

The result of reader voting came out as follows:

What do Arab startups need the most?

Out of 230 readers who responded to the poll:

– 30% of them believe there is a need for more original ideas
– 28% say funding is the most needed thing for these startups
– 17% think Arab startups are in need of mentoring
– 12% believe there is a need for strong complimentary teams at these startups
– 8% think marketing is what Arab startups need more of

The remaining 5% listed some other very interesting and true needs for Arab startups; among them are: business freedom from govermental interference, market research skills, ability to set up a truely limited liability company, more social media interaction, available data and statistics, unregulated non-paternalistic markets, and good execution.

Another really interesting thing the results of this poll show is that even though it’s often easy to blame the lack of funding or support for the lack of successes in the internet space in the Arab world; not all of the important things Arab startups need are external factors, there is a lot they can work on and solve themselves like picking and working on more original ideas, putting together stronger complimentary teams, buffing up their business and market research skills, reaching out more to the community …etc.

Of course, the external factors like mentoring, funding, government support are also very important and should go in parallel to help startups on their way to perfecting their product and building a successful business around it.

What do you think? What’s your view of things?