Category: Startups

TN-Emploi: A Resource For IT Jobs In Tunisia

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TN-Emploi, a.k.a La Tunisienne pour l’emploi, is a new project that was recently launched in Tunisia by Mahmoud Gourar, and that attempts to use a simple blog format to bring job offers and opportunities to Tunisian job seekers, with a focus on IT-related jobs.

Job opportunities are posted daily, organized by category, and tagged with keywords, to make it easier for job seekers to find the jobs that match their goals and skillsets better.

It being a blog, people can access these offers directly through the blog, through the RSS feed or by subscribing to the email feed.

Recruiters and companies can post their offers simply and for free by sending them to a provided email address.

The blog is in French only, and is quite an interesting resource for Tunisian programmers, web developers, database administrators and so forth who need a place where they can find focused job offers for their respective IT fields.

Even though most posted job offers are for opportunities in Tunisia, some others are posted for opportunities in France or the rest of Europe, for those who might be interested in working abroad.

# TN-Emploi.com

Otlob, Free Online Food Ordering Service

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Otlob is a free online food ordering service that was first launched in Egypt back in 1999, and which has expanded to three other countries in the Middle East ever since: Saudi Arabia (Riyadh & Jeddah), United Arab Emirates (Dubai) and Bahrain.

Otlob provides its users with the complete menus of their favorite restaurants, enabling them to order meals online easily and quickly; they can even add comments with their order if they need to be specific about certain details.

Users can also save their favorite orders so as to save time the next times they need to order the same meals, they can order from a number of restaurants at the same time, and set the delivery time of their choice.

Restaurants are organized by category and by the neighbourhoods they serve to, and their latest menus are available on the website for users to choose from.

The interface is very well designed, really simply and easy to use; and it comes in two languages: English and Arabic.

Otlob was developed by LINK Development, and manage by LINKonLINE, both subsidiaries of LINKdotNET, an Orascom company.

# Otlob

Muslim Heritage Images; Manuscripts, Artwork, People & Architecture

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Dubai based Muslim Heritage Consulting recently launched the world’s first Muslim history image library online.

The library, at MuslimHeritageImages.com includes manuscripts from the 10th Century as well as contemporary images of people, architecture and museum artifacts.

Collections telling the story of Muslim civilisation have been brought together from museums, archives and private collections across the world. Many images recreate pivotal moments in history such as pioneering early surgical work carried out in the Middle East centuries before similar treatments were available in Europe.

The images are available for sale as downloads or prints, and with specific usage licenses, mainly a single country and single language licence for commercial users, suitable for print and publication use.

Images are organized by category and searchable by keyword; and detailed descriptions are provided for each image.

# Muslim Heritage Images

MBC iMatter, First Social Networking Site For Arab Women

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Saudi media giant MBC Group have made a new online move, this time aimed at Arab women, in the form of a new social networking site for Arab women, called iMatter, that was just launched a couple of days ago.

iMatter invites Arab women to join an online community tailored to their needs and that takes their specific cultural needs into consideration.

Like all the other social networking sites out there, you get to search for and befriend other users, join specific groups and events, post photos, vote on polls and discuss different topics in the forum section.
There is also an internal mail system built into the service, as well as a personal blog/journal feature.

The site isn’t just a social networking site though, as it also aims at empowering Arab women through their iMatter Achievements Awards program, in which women get to submit their entries on or more of four separate award categories: Art Matters (Pieces of art, poems, …), Community Matters (Outline of how to make a difference in community), New Media Matters (Ideas on how to maximize benefit of new media) and Entrepreneurial Matters (Business plan); and then get the chance to win prizes that could change their lives.
All entries should be themed around “Culture” or “Education”, or a collaboration of both.

An online magazine featuring articles on women-related issues is also part of the service.

The site was designed and built for MBC by UK agency Leftfield Digital.

Along with previously reviewed Twffaha, this new service signals a push from Arab businesses and entrepreneurs towards women-oriented services, in an attempt to empower Arab women, and help them reach their full potentials in community.
Both are great initiatives, and hopefully we’ll see more soon.

Twffaha, Job Portal For Arab Women

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Twffaha, a new service based in Sudan, and founded by Sudanese entrepreneur Ashraf Mansoor, has recently launched in private beta, promoting itself as the first job site devoted to recruiting women in the Middle East.

The aim of the service is to empower Arab women, and address the problem of women unemployment in the region, by providing them with an online job service geared towards their needs, and that contributes to their career advancement.

Twffaha joins a number of already established players in the region’s online job and recruiting market, although they’re one of the first who focus only on a subset of the market.

Upon launch the service will be available in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman , Kuwait, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq and Yemen.
They aim to add more countries as the service grows and they get to scale their underlying infrastructure.

The user interface is in English only for the time being.

The service should be launching into public beta in June. But if you’re interested in trying it out now, just send an email to beta@twffaha.com with the following referral code: startuparabia included in the subject line. This offer is valid for the first 100 people who request invites.

# Twffaha

restate.ae, Dubai Real Estate Portal

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restate.ae is a web real estate portal dedicated to freehold and leasehold properties in Dubai, with the goal to act as a hub and bring people with different real estate needs together, whether they’re looking to live in Dubai, invest in real estate or sell properties.

The portal has a very nice, simple and usable design, integrating a wealth of features put together to provide users with in-depth real estate solutions, customized and advanced search to find what exactly suits their needs, access to other users’ opinions, neighborhood ratings, videos of properties and projects, the possibility to join discussions with other users, as well as the latest real estate news in the UAE.

restate.ae also offers agencies the possibility to list all their properties on the website, and through an administration interface manage their profiles, their properties, and assign agents to them.

All properties agencies list on the portal are then automatically republished to Google Real Estate.

It’s obvious that with the huge real estate boom taking place in Dubai, restate.ae has a really important and useful job to do, making life easier for everyone approaching this market.

restate.ae was launched in 2007 by Web 2.0 consultancy company SpinBits, and all its services are currently free, both for users and agencies.

# restate.ae

Qaym, User Generated Restaurant Reviews

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Qaym is a Saudi based service, built around user reviews and social rating of restaurants and eateries from around the world, that just came out of private beta and launched publicly.

Users fully generate the content for the service through their contributions; Every restaurant gets a page, which shows the current user rating for it, tags that describe what the restaurant offers, a list of the countries and cities that restaurants has branches in, as well as reviews and photos submitted by users.

The way the content is organized, you not only get access to reviews of certain restaurants you want to check out before going to, but you can also access a directory-like listing of all restaurants, or of eateries in a certain country or city.

The idea behind it is quite simple and straight-forward, as is the interface and design, which makes it all the better and easier to use. The interface is in Arabic only for the time being.

Saudi Jihad al-Ammar is behind this project, he began working on it last year, and beta tested privately for a bit over 9 months before launching last week.

Darrb, Community Powered Shipping And Delivery

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Darrb is a new and interesting service launched from Dubai, UAE, that aims to solve people’s shipping needs, at better prices and faster than the conventional methods of shipping.

The idea behind Darrb, which means “way” in Arabic, is to build an online community around an auction based marketplace, that connects people willing to send items from one location to another, with people willing to deliver these items and earn an income as a return.
When users auction their deliveries, deliverers (Darrbers) compete with each other by offering the lowest price and fastest delivery time in order to win the bid. This will ensure that users get the best rates and fastest delivery service.

Payments are arranged outside the system between the sender and the deliverer for each delivery, but a rating and reputation system is integrated into the system to enable senders to rate the quality, price and speed of service of the deliverers once the shipping is done, and help other senders compare and choose which people to work with in the future.

Darrb is a free service for all parties for the time being; People can add delivery orders for free and Darrbers can offer their delivery services without any cost. They do plan to start charging membership fees for Darrbers in the future though, but still have no plans to start taking commissions from users.

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Markkit, Web 2.0 Text Highlighter

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Markkit is a very simple and straight-forward online service, yet a really useful and interesting one; It is, simply put, a web 2.0 text highlighter; it provides you with a bookmarklet that you can use whenever you need to highlight text in a web page: you simply click on the markkit bookmarklet, select the text you want to highlight, and voila it’s done. You don’t even need to create an account or anything.

An option is also provided for site owners to easily integrate a markkit button on their web pages to give their visitors the possibility to highlight text right away.

Users can then access a mark log to see all the latest highlighted texts by everyone, organized by day, or they can search through the archives of marked texts. The possibility to see highlighted texts by everyone actually gives it a bit of a social highlighting touch.
It’s still not possible to view only your highlights, as the functionality to create a user account that you can save your highlights to is still not available.

Markkit, which was launched by Tunisian Slim Amamou, is still in its early stages of development, and only works with Firefox for the time being.

I think it’s really interesting that we’re seeing these new really simple and unitary web tools popping up from the Arab world, addressing one problem and solving it in a really neat and effective way. It’s a sign Arab startups are maturing and realizing that they don’t have to be everything for the user, and that if they do one thing well enough then that is a success.

# Markkit

Filaty, Arab File And Photo Sharing Service

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Filaty (which means ‘My files’ in Arabic) is an online service that gives users the possibility to upload files and photos quickly for online storage and sharing. The service, which was launched by Egyptian Muhammad Abdul-Shakour Arab (Division Designs), and developed with Syrian Ali Jabr (Reverya Web Solutions), is still in public beta.

The service is completely free for everyone, in fact you don’t even need to create an account, you can start uploading right away. It allows unlimited uploads, files of up to 100MB each, photos of up to 15MB each, and to make things even easier, up to 15 concurrent photo uploads.

The main target of this service are bloggers and forum dwellers who need a quick place to upload the photos and files they want to post and share with others, but of course it is not limited to them only.

The interface is only in Arabic for the time being; it is very easy and straight-forward, with a simplistic and clean design.

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