Startups – Page 5 – StartUpArabia

Qanawati, Check Flight Details & Availability Using SMS

October 16, 2009October 16, 2009 MMM 1 Comment

Qanawati (‘My Channels’ in Arabic) is a new mobile based service that was just launched from Saudi Arabia by Remal IT, allowing you to check for flight reservation availability via SMS.

The service enables you to check for the availability of seats to be reserved specifically for the following airlines: Saudi Airlines, Nas air and Sama; as well as for all airlines using IATA data.

Other than that, the service also makes it possible to check the details and status of a specific flight by entering the flight number, and if needed the specific date for it.

Another available option is to check the arrival/departure activity in Saudi airports to see what planes are coming in or leaving on that day and the details of the flights.

The service is based on premium rated sms messages, and currently works with Mobily and Zain, with STC support on the way.

Nakhweh, A Volunteer Matching Portal For Jordan

October 4, 2009October 4, 2009 MMM 2 Comments

Nakhweh is a new portal that was recently launched in Jordan, aimed at being a tool to foster and develop voluntary work in the community, through bridging the gap between available programs and volunteers.

The site tries to achieve its goal by offering a number of online features to support the networking of leaders and volunteers in the community.

The portal is the brainchild of Kamel Al-Asmar and Hadi Nasereddin of Ideation Box from Jordan.

The following is a little Q&A we got to do with Kamel to know more about Nakhweh, how things have been going so far and their plans for the future. A big thanks to him for taking the time to answer our questions and offer some insight into Nakhweh.

Tell us more about Nakhweh and your goals for it in your own words.

Nakhweh.com is basically a website that aims to help in the matching process between the volunteers who are passionate about serving their communities and the organizations that need the help of those volunteers.
Nakhweh has been launched on the 19th of August with the least options that make the website usable and functioning in a way that serves volunteers and organizations simply yet effectively. That decision of launching the project at its early stages has been taken for two main reasons, which are: The Holy Month of Ramadan and to be the first in taking such an initiative before anybody else.

Our vision for Nakhweh is to make it the official volunteering platform for Jordan in a short time, to help other social entrepreneurs and to plan events every while and then to support a cause.

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.

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.

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.

Photojonet, Online Photo Storage & Printing For Jordan

September 10, 2009September 10, 2009 MMM 5 Comments

Photojonet is a new online photo service that was recently launched in Jordan, specialized in digital photo printing, and aiming to provide users with quality photo prints at good prices.

Basically, the service provides users with unlimited online storage for their photos, which they can upload, organize into photo albums and then order high quality prints of. The chosen photos are then printed and delivered to the person’s doorstep within 24-72 hours (Free if the order amount is over 6 Jordanian Dinars).

Usage of the service and storage of the photos is totally free, as long as at least one order is done per year; printing prices range from 0.10 Jordanian Dinars for a 9x13cm print to 20 Jordanian Dinars for a 80x120cm one. Payment for the prints is done with cash on delivery.

Photojonet was officially launched in July 2009, and currently only provides its services for people living in Jordan. The company was founded by Issam Hijazi, who started work on the project as part of his graduation project, and Rami Al-Natsheh who came up with the initial idea and invested in it.

A special offer is currently available offering 10 free prints to newly registered users.

MailPacks Email Marketing Service Launches Private Beta

September 5, 2009September 5, 2009 MMM

MailPacks, a new online service that enables companies and organizations to manage and send their email marketing campaigns, has just gone live with its private beta.

MailPacks promises low prices for sending email campaigns and a free tracking and follow-up system to measure the effectiveness of sent campaigns and set up follow up messages.

Using the service, email marketers can create and manage unlimited lists of email addresses, for example having lists for multiple tasks and/or lists for different sites.
When sending they can also choose to send to selected segments and target specific subscribers according to their countries, age, and/or sex.

They also have full control over the design side, as they can fully customize all landing pages with their text and design, and use an integrated HTML editor to create and design their HTML email messages as well as their custom pages. (MailPacks provides unlimited image hosting space.)
A set of pre-designed and tested templates are also made available.

Once done with the design of the message, the spam score for it can be checked, so that the message can be optimized in order to get higher deliverability.

After the email campaign is sent, marketers can keep track of the campaign’s results (opens, clicks, bounces …etc.), and set up unlimited follow up messages at the intervals of their choice.

To be sent an invitation code for MailPacks, you need to send a message to the MailPacks twitter account (@MailPacks) with a small request.

MailPacks was founded by Mamod Mehyar from Jordan, who is also behind Feedoor, that was previously reviewed here.