The team at Seedcamp just announced the top 21 teams who made it as finalists for Seedcamp Week 2009, an intensive week-long event held in London every September, that targets young entrepreneurs from across EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).
Among this year’s finalists 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.
The focus of Seedcamp week is around providing an incredible experience for the selected teams, with a diverse mentor network helping the 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.
With this selection, Talasim joins another 20 startups from around Europe, the Middle East and Africa, to compete to receive one of the 5 investments worth €50K that will be made at the end of the Seedcamp week.
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 in London, and 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 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. They’ll also get to demo their products to other groups from Seedcamp as well as potential investors in two events along the way.
Previously, the only other startup to make it to Seedcamp from the Arab region was Content Syndicate, that participated in Seedcamp Week 2007, and was nominated as one of the top 10 startups out of 260 participating startups from 40 countries.
Talasim was also selected as one of the Arab world’s top ten investment ready startups at the 6th Investing in Technology Forum that was held in Cairo, Egypt, earlier this year.
with all due respect Talasim is a silly project. the way they do comedy is the way that Red newspapers write stories.
for example I remember one story that was posted by its team was mocking ramadan where he was talking about how he was smoking inside the university during Ramadan!
Another point if anybody claims that such an Arabic site is increasing Arabic content online , he is wrong, most of the content on talasim is in 3amiah the Jordanian slang of Arabic, which is killing actually Fusha Arabic if i started to be wildly used, plus users from other Arab countries would not understand everything due to that.
you can start a porno website and make tones of money, you can start prostitution service and make tones of money but is it ethical? is it in line with Islam that the founders belong to?
We do not want to see another Red Newspaper but online.
I hope the founders of Talasim re consider the content strategy rather than look for a cheap way to get traffic.
Startups like these should not be championed as a success story.
Munzer, go do better yourself, what are you waiting for ?
Talasim was mentioned in the Financial Times as “the onion of the Arab world”
http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2009/09/seedcamp-s…