Startups – Page 6 – StartUpArabia

Jabbar Internet Group: The New Group & Its Companies

August 25, 2009August 25, 2009 MMM

In the previous post about Yahoo! acquiring Maktoob, there was a brief paragraph about what will happen to the rest of the Maktoob Group. Here, we’ll get into more details about what’s next for the group and its companies.

A new group entity has been setup under the name ‘Jabbar Internet Group’, to group the remaining sister companies of Maktoob Group that weren’t part of the Yahoo! deal, which are: Souq.com, CashU, Tahadi, Ikoo and Araby. This group is owned by the current investors, including Tiger Capital (a hedge fund out of the United States), the founders and other investors.

Samih Toukan, one of the two original co-founders of Maktoob, will be heading the group as CEO and Chairman. He said that the group will be receiving a fresh capital injection of $20 million and will continue to expand aggressively.

As for the companies of Jabbar Internet Group, they are as follows:

Souq.com: Headed by Ronaldo Mouchawar; Established in 2005, Souq.com has grown to become the largest e-commerce site in the Arab world covering Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, with plans to expand to new markets.
Site: www.souq.com

CashU: Headed by Martin Waldenstrom; Launched in July 2002, cashU is a prepaid Internet payment service, through which users can purchase products and services online through cashU’s merchant base. The company has seen a spurt of growth over the past couple of years as a result of the spread of online gaming.
Site: www.cashu.com

Tahadi: Headed by Steve Tsao; Established end of 2008, Tahadi was established as a publisher of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG’s) targeting the Middle East and North Africa region. Their first game is Arabic Ragnarok Online (ARO).
Site: www.tahadi.com

Ikoo: Headed by Isam Bayazidi; After Maktoob Group’s acquisition last month of leading MENA advertising network E-Marketing MENA (a company founded by ex-Maktoobian Khaled Jabasini in 2005), it has merged it’s Kalimat Text Advertising product into the company, and re-branded the lot as Ikoo.
Site: www.ikoo.com

Araby: This is the group’s search engine offering, providing advanced Arabic-language search capabilities, and a lot of the technology actually used to power search in different channels on Maktoob.
Site: www.araby.com

Jabbar Internet Group and its companies should continue to cooperate closely with Yahoo! Maktoob through commercial partnership agreements.

Bezaat, A New Classifieds Portal For The Arab World

August 24, 2009August 24, 2009 MMM 52 Comments

Bezaat is a new free Arabic classifieds portal that was just launched out of Dubai in its beta version, and targeting all Arab countries and their major cities.

Even though there are local classifieds sites around the Arab world, with different levels of success, there hasn’t been one that covers the whole region and that has been that successful, and Bezaat hopes to fill that space by providing a region-wide platform for classified ads, aiming to solve users’ needs around the Arab world.

The Bezaat team chose to widen the scope and target the whole Arab world from day one so as to not be branded as a local classifieds site, limiting their chances to grow later on and expand.

To make the system more relevant for each country, the interface is customized according to local needs and interests, highlighting the more popular categories.

The interface is in Arabic only, and is really simple, straightforward and organized, making it easy to surf through the existing ads or to go through the process of posting a new one.

Bezaat is a product of Danat, the same company behind Logta and Laazi.

Wheels Express, Another Take At E-Commerce In Jordan

August 23, 2009August 23, 2009 MMM 5 Comments

Wheels Express is a newly launched Jordanian e-commerce portal, taking another hit at cracking the e-commerce nut in the Arab world.

The company’s activity lies somewhere between an online shopping portal and an offline delivery service; providing a catalog of products covering DVDs, books, magazines, t-shirts, tickets, snacks, pre-paid mobile cards and more; and delivering orders directly to your doorstep in Amman (within the 12 daily delivery hours).

Users get to sign up and put in their orders, which for most types of products should be delivered within an hour, if within the 12 hours of service, with payment in cash upon delivery.

Wheels Express does not keep a stock of its own. What it does is list products provided by third party stores, and then acting as the middle-man; handling the order, delivery and payment process.

Wheels Express was founded by a Ibrahim Manna’, Ibrahim Al-Mani and Mohamed Al-Mani.

The web solution was developed by the new Jordanian web company Ideation Box.

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.

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]

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.

Mo3jam, A User Generated Dictionary Of Colloquial Arabic

August 2, 2009August 2, 2009 MMM 6 Comments

Mo3jam is a new interesting service which aims to build a user generated dictionary of colloquial Arabic. (Mo3jam is an Arabic word that means lexicon or dictionary.)

The idea of the website is that users from all around the Arab world will be able to come in and share the different spoken terms and expressions used in the various accents and dialects available in all the Arab countries.

Mo3jam hopes to create a central, multilingual knowledgebase of colloquial Arabic, emphasising ease of use and breadth; with the service open to anyone to contribute without any limitations.

Terms can be defined using Arabic (which is the preferred language), English, or French. And even if a term is already defined in the system, users can still their own definition for it, with the best quality definitions bubbling up to the top through users voting on them and adding them to their favorites.

Most major dialects of Arabic are currently listed, but the list is not a fixed one. The system was designed to have multiple levels of dialects and sub-dialects. So suggestions for adding dialects or sub-dialects can be made to the site’s founder.

Registration to the site is not mandatory to start using it or adding terms, although users who want to can either use the regular site registration or login using Facebook Connect.

The site is nicely designed, simple and usable; and is currently available in both Arabic and English.

Mo3jam was created by Abdullah Arif who is from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, but currently living in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Globalvations.com, A Global Search Engine Focused On Innovation

July 14, 2009July 14, 2009 MMM

Multilingual Global Marketing (MGM), a global consulting firm, just announced the launch Globalvations.com, a new search engine specifically focused on global innovations.

The search engine was founded by Malik Laibi, an Algerian entrepreneur currently based in Australia, and developed by SearchChannel, LLC of Oak Brook, Illinois. It currently indexes and categorizes thousands of highly relevant sites that deliver valuable information focused on the world of innovation, aiming to connect its visitors to new technologies, innovative companies, products and business opportunities throughout the world.

The simplistic interface allows visitors to search for editorials and news about a certain topic and industry or to look for startups, with the possibility to choose a specific industry of interest or to search across all industries.
The search results page is very straightforward, offering a listing of what was found and linking out to the respective sites and pages containing the information.

Explaining the idea behind the project, Malik Laibi says that “Working with clients internationally, we found the pace of change in the global marketplace speeds up every single day. With new technologies being introduced so rapidly, and with economies changing across the world, staying up to date on innovation is increasingly difficult. We saw an opportunity to create a global information tool in our search portal, Globalvations.com. For the user, we answer swiftly and directly one simple question: ‘What are the most cutting-edge business and technology innovations that I should know about?'”

SearchChannel president William Furlong makes the point that “Globalvations.com offers only very specific, innovations-oriented content. Users stay up to date on what they’re truly looking for: research, current news, upcoming conferences, and the actual technologies constantly turned out by the most reputable global businesses and institutions,” and continued that they are “expressly excited about what this tool can do for entrepreneurs, business executives, scientists, government officials, academics, or just for the curious mind!”

Malik Laibi shared his plans to establish a base in the MENA region for Globalvations.com, and that he is currently looking for suitable partners in the region.

# Globalvations.com

Iconty: An Arabic Search Engine For Website Icons

July 12, 2009July 12, 2009 MMM

Iconty is a new niche Arabic search engine, specifically created for web designers and developers, to provide them with an easy way to search for and find icons to use for certain functions on the websites they are building.

Iconty aims to be a central repository for icons, where users can come and search for icons using Arabic keywords, or even English ones, to find the ones best suited for their needs.

Users can sign-up to the service for free and start uploading their own icons to share on the site so that other people can download and use them as well.

Users can add icons individually through a simple form where they specify the file, the owner and the tags; or upload a zip file with a whole icon set, and then input the details for each icon.

Iconty is still in beta; work on it started in February 2009 by a team of three family members: Mahmoud, Mohamed and Alia Rida. The team are currently working on enhancing the organization of the platform and how icon result sets are displayed, as well as making it even easier for users to find icons.

# Iconty