September 2009 – StartUpArabia

Bedkash, A New Palestinian Free Classifieds Portal

September 27, 2009September 27, 2009 MMM 73 Comments

Bedkash is a new free classifieds portal for Palestine that was just recently launched in its beta version, providing the service for users in all Palestinian cities.

The service enables users to post the objects they want to sell or the service they can provide, or what they are searching for, for free on the site for other users to search, navigate through and reply to with their offers.

The ads are organized under categories and subcategories, as well as by city, enabling users to go through all posted classifieds narrowing down the selection either by the available categorizations or by specific cities or a combination of both.

Only registered users can get in touch with the person who posted the classified ad, otherwise they just get to see the different details of the posting without any information about the poster.

Bedkash is a new product of Sadaf Technology Development, a Palestinian web development company based in Gaza. The site is available in Arabic only, and the company plans to monetize it through selling online advertising.

WebDialn@ Study Of Algerian Internet Users Results

September 26, 2009September 26, 2009 MMM

Algeria A new study entitled WebDialn@ (meaning ‘our web’ in the Arab Algerian accent) by Med&Com and Ideatic that polled about 6,000 Algerian internet users on ADSL, mobile internet, online advertising and e-commerce, estimates that 4.5 million people (12.8% of the Algerian population) use the internet, and that they heavily rely on it for news, research and activities such as social networking.

75% of Algerian internet users call the web an “indispensable tool”, with more than 90% confessing to “not being able to get by without going online ‘at least once a day'”. Most users reported spending two hours on average in front of their monitors.

The study also shows a gender gap and regional disparities in internet use. The typical Algerian Web user is described as male (72.2%), aged between 20 and 29 (29.2%), educated at least to the baccalaureate level + 1 (66.2%), and living in Algiers (29.28%). However, women represent just 25.8% of Algerian Web users.

The researchers reported that 82.6% of Web users communicate via email. Of this percentage, 42.5% also use instant messaging (such as MSN or Yahoo Messenger), 33.8% visit discussion forums, 33% make telephone calls over the Internet (Skype), and 9.9% use video conferencing.

Online media are the Algerian web users’ top online destinations, with 80.8% reading online newspapers, 19.9% listening to the radio, and 11.4% watching TV programmes. The internet is also used for research (80.7%) and making business contacts (22.9%). Social networks seem to be quite popular too with 40% of respondents having profiles on Facebook.

The study also shows that Algerians aren’t very active contributors, with 82.2% visiting online media-sharing sites (YouTube, DailyMotion, Flickr), but only 23.5% contributing.

Numbers from the Algerian Post and ICT Ministry say that there are 585,455 residential ADSL subscribers in the country. Nearly 65% of those surveyed said they can log on from home, compared with 24.6% who log on at work. Over 61% of web users say there are at least three people using the internet in a single home. Youth clubs and libraries with internet access, which used to be crammed, are hosting fewer users.

Some 72.1% of users say they are unsatisfied with the speed of their connection at home, and 79.7% complain about frequent service outages. 53.8% of Web users think the connection rates are affordable, while 43.8% of them think subscription rates are expensive or very expensive.

A presentation of the study results is available here in French: WebDialn@ Study Results (PDF)

[Source: Magharebia]

Talasim One Of Six Winners At Seedcamp Week 2009

September 26, 2009September 26, 2009 MMM

Seedcamp has announced the six winners of this year’s edition of Seedcamp Week, after an intense week of mentoring in London by a diverse mentor, investor and entrepreneur network.

Among the six winners is Jordanian startup Talasim, an online social network and photo sharing service for comedy/funny content, which was founded by Zeid Koudsi and Sabri Hakim, and is one of the projects leading Arab UGC portal Jeeran invested in and incubated.

Each of the six winning teams will be receiving a €50k investment from Seedcamp and active support over the next three months to help develop their products and companies. In return Seedcamp should be taking a stake worth between 5-10% of each company.

These next three months will be spent in London, with the winning teams working with the Seedcamp team on building the product and company together, and with the teams provided access to services worth 2-3 times the invested €50K, with the goal of helping grow and nurture the teams, and putting in-depth focus on developing the product and business.

During the course of these three months, the groups will also have an opportunity to take advantage of the same group of experts that participated in the Seedcamp week through weekly dinners, topical lunches, conferences, and continued mentorship on various issues. They’ll also get to demo their products to other groups from Seedcamp as well as potential investors in two events along the way.

The other 5 winners are: Boxed Ice (UK), Brainient (Romania), Codility (Poland), Erply (Estonia) and Patients Know Best (UK).

Shawshara, An Online Encyclopedia For Arabic Music

September 24, 2009September 24, 2009 MMM 4 Comments

Shawshara is a community based project aimed at collecting and documenting all aspects of Arabic music in an online encyclopedia.

Shawshara is set up as a wiki based platform enabling anyone to add and modify the contents of any page, without the interference of site administrators, in order to enrich the content and grow the database.

The site currently contains over 25 Arabic artists, their biographies and discographies that translate into several hundred albums, and over 700 song pages which include the song’s lyrics, lyrics translated into English and other languages, transliteration and videos.

The site interface is presented in both English and Arabic, and so is the content, which is translated and transliterated into English, and in some cases into other languages as well.

Shawshara was founded by Waseem Sayegh, a Palestinian, currently living and studying in Canada.
It is powered by MediaWiki, the same open source software that runs Wikipedia.

MENA Broadband Subscribers To Reach 27 Million By 2014

September 22, 2009September 22, 2009 MMM

According to Informa Telecoms & Media’s new Middle East & North Africa Broadband report, the MENA region will continue to experience some of the world’s highest growth rates in broadband subscriber numbers.

The report states that the 66 percent growth that the region witnessed in 2008 will be leveling out at around 24.9 percent (compound annual growth rate) by 2014. At that point there should be a total of 27 million high-speed internet subscriptions in the region, up from the 7.1 Million subscriptions in Q1 2009..

The report cites the demand for media services as one of the major bandwidth drivers.

“The prospects for broadband in the MENA region will continue to grow as operators improve infrastructure to make their services more attractive with multi-play offers. In addition media companies will begin to respond with more relevant online content aimed specifically at the region,” said Mohammed Hamza, senior broadband analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media.

“Operators across the region are beginning to invest heavily in getting high-speed, high-capacity and cost effective telecoms networks into the region and the current infrastructure is much more advanced than perhaps they have been given credit for,” added Hamza.

The largest broadband subscription bases in the MENA region are in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, Algeria, Morocco and Iran; representing 79 percent of the MENA’s total broadband subscriptions – 3.8 million from a total of 4.8 million.

Eight countries in the region had a household penetration of more than 10 percent at the end of 2008 – four exceeded 60 percent and two were greater than 70 percent, the report said.

However, excluding the top four, the average penetration rate across the region was just 8.7 percent.

[Source: Digital Production Middle East, Arabian Business]

Woopra To Come Out Of Beta And Launch Paid Accounts

September 21, 2009September 21, 2009 MMM

Woopra, the innovative and real-time web analytics tool, just announced that their beta program is coming to an end and that in the coming weeks, the beta label will be dropped and the waiting list for the service ended.

From then on, different levels of paid accounts will be introduced and registration will be open for anyone wishing to sign up for a paid version of Woopra. Those who are interested in the free version will still need to obtain an invitation code in order to register a site.

As part of the introduction of paid accounts, the page view limit that was fixed at 10,000 page views a day for beta accounts will be lifted, and users will be able to instantaneously upgrade to any level of traffic necessary to ensure Woopra tracks all of their visitors daily.

The paid account levels are structured based on monthly page view limits, and according to a non-final draft of the pricing structure, range from $4.95 for sites with up to 100,000 monthly page views, all the way to $99.95 for sites with up to 3 Million monthly page views. Free accounts for personal non-commercial use have a limit of up to 30,000 monthly page views.

All current beta accounts will be automatically transformed into free accounts, but their users can choose to upgrade to any of the paid versions.

Of course, for each level, other than the page view limit, there are different levels of service as well, with differences in the number of users they can create for their account, the number of months that data is stored for, whether SSL support is provided or not, and whether they have full or limited access to some of the more advanced features.

These changes should start happening over the next couple of weeks, with a number of new features to be introduced to the service as well.

All this of course is a natural step forward for Woopra, that was in the plans from the beginning, in order to start generating revenue, cover the costs of their infrastructure, and make the company and service sustainable.

For more details on the coming changes and the pricing structure, check out the official Woopra blog post.

Nahel.com, A New UAE Online Shopping Destination

September 19, 2009September 19, 2009 MMM 9 Comments

In an Arab internet scene where e-commerce remains largely untapped, Nahel.com from Dubai is a very welcome addition, with a very big goal: to establish itself as a prime B2C online retailer.

They’ve worked on building an inventory of thousands of new brand-name products covering several categories, from electronics, to games to perfumes, watches and clothing. They source products from wholesalers and distributors in order to be competitive in terms of selection, quality and prices.

The idea behind Nahel.com was conceived back in 2007, with its original business plan born as the first place winner in the University of Toronto’s Business Plan Competition.

Over the past 2 years Nahel sold products through other existing online markets, like Souq.com, and were involved in all aspects of selling products online. After building the experience and community, Nahel went a step further, and launched its independent e-commerce portal, offering a full e-commerce experience to its clients, from the moment they log on to the website all the way to post-sale services.

To make it as easy as possible for people to pay for items they buy on Nahel, several payment methods are provided: from Cash on delivery, to credit cards, PayPal and Nahel gift certificates.

Nahel.com was founded by Saeid Hejazi, and was officially launched in July 2009 from Dubai, UAE. It currently only covers the UAE, although there are plans to expand to the GCC region and maybe the whole Middle East in the future.

Search Advertising’s Double-Digit Growth In The Arab World

September 17, 2009September 17, 2009 MMM 1 Comment

As several regional reports and studies have shown, online advertising in the Arab world is pretty much still in its infancy, with it only representing around 1% of total advertising spends in the region. Search advertising which is a relatively newer form of online advertising has just started making inroads into the market over the past couple of years, and it’s interesting to have some insight into how things are looking with it, and what kind of growth it is seeing.

Google of course is the main player in the search advertising market worldwide and in the region, and according to Husni Khuffash, Google’s Country Business Manager, Google search advertising is witnessing a double-digit growth in the Arab World, despite the reports of a worldwide decline in the performance of search ads.

Meanwhile, David Sheridan, CEO, Neo Digital, commented that search ads currently consist well under 10 per cent (5-6%) of total online advertising budgets, which in turn constitute only around one per cent of the total ad spend.

Sheridan, however, agrees that search advertising is seeing a double-digit growth in the region, with Neo Digital seeing more than 10 per cent growth in online advertising based on pay per click.

In fact, he said search ads constituted 15 to 20 per cent of the total agency expenditure, with some clients spending about 10 per cent of their online budgets on Google search display ads, and between 15 and 20 per cent on text search, varying according to each client’s needs.

However, he also thinks that search ads aren’t probably the best way to advertise to a specific targeted audience, and that more specific advertising is still better placed on specific portals.

An important point he makes is that one of the main reasons why the search ad market is not so big here compared to other markets is because those are heavy e-commerce markets as opposed to the Arab region, where pay per click is more intended for lead generation and directing traffic to websites, not to drive direct sales.

This, I think, not only applies for search advertising but online advertising in general. As long as businesses don’t see the results of their online campaigns translated into conversions and revenue, their investments in online advertising in general will be limited. The only way for them to start seeing those conversions and that revenue rolling in though if for them to work on more elaborate online strategies and start venturing into e-commerce.

Most digital advertisers in the Arab region are still government, telecommunications and automotive; with smaller companies that search advertising should appeal to not being very active.

Expectations are that the search ad sector will maintain a steady growth, just like online advertising as a whole, despite the almost untapped e-commerce market in the Arab World. But, in my opinion, it will only take off hugely when the internet starts being perceived as a really important sales channel by companies.

[Via: Business 24-7]

International Conference On E-Commerce, E-Payment And Applications, Marrakech, 25-27 September 2009

September 15, 2009September 15, 2009 MMM

For three days this month, from September 25th to 27th 2009, in the city of Marrakech (Morocco), the ICEP’09 Conference (International Conference on e-Commerce, e-Payment and Applications) will be gathering researchers and executives from all over the world to discuss the latest developments in e-commerce and in e-payment solutions.

Speakers have been invited from academic institutions and leading innovative companies to debate the most crucial contemporary issues related to e-payment and e-commerce. Over a hundred advanced papers will be presented and discussed.

The conference will also act as an opportunity for a number of e-commerce and e-payment companies to exhibit their already built services and products, and provide a stage for a number of e-business presentations from executives of leading e-commerce and e-payment companies.

The Conference generally aims to open the opportunity for:

Academics and researchers to present to and share with other colleagues from all over the world their findings on the topics;
Researchers to meet decision makers;
Vendors and experts at all levels to meet and discuss business opportunities;
Companies with offers on the conference topics to exhibit their solutions/products to other experts and to the end users through an exhbition;
Enabling any other possible business opportunities.

For more details about the event, the speakers and the programme; check out the official site: ICEP’09 Conference