Egypt – StartUpArabia

INJAZ Egypt Competition To Provide Seed Funding For Student Startups

September 8, 2011September 8, 2011 MMM 2 Comments

As part of the INJAZ Egypt Company Program in 2011, over 1000 university students from across Egypt have formed start-up companies. On Saturday, September 24th, the top 500 of those students, organized in 22 teams from 11 Egyptian universities, will be taking part in a trade fair and will be competing for 10 seed funds plus incubation from corporations such as Mobinil, Exxon Mobil and Abraaj at “Dare to Dream: Empowering Egypt’s Young Entrepreneurs 2011“.

The “Dare to Dream” competition is an annual one that is organized by INJAZ Egypt; This year’s edition is sponsored by Mobinil, and will be held at the American University of Cairo.

The 10 winning teams/companies will receive a share of the 285,000 LE (around $US47,000) contributed by the adopting companies. The startups will also be mentored by their adopting corporation to get legally registered and become financially sound, profitable and sustainable.

TechWadi Marks Launch Of Entrepreneurship Initiative In Egypt

October 22, 2010October 22, 2010 MMM 5 Comments

On October 25-26th, 2010; TechWadi, the Silicon Valley-based non-profit organization working to promote entrepreneurship in the Arab world, will be hosting two days of free events that are focused on developing the entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem in Egypt and the MENA region.

On October 25th, at the Smart Village Convention Center in Cairo, Egypt; hundreds of entrepreneurs, executives and investors will join together at the Rising Tide Forum to build their networks, discover synergies, and learn from US and regional business leaders. [Agenda]

Panel leaders will address targeted topics of direct value to entrepreneurs and investors alike: venture capital and angel financing best practices; challenges and opportunities in Egypt; the role of mentors, incubators, and entrepreneurship education; mobile and Facebook applications; enterprise software; and a host of proven strategies ready to be transplanted into the MENA region.

ContactCars Launches Arabic iPhone App For Egyptian Car Market

September 30, 2010September 30, 2010 MMM

ContactCars, the Egyptian portal that provides news and car specs and prices in for the Egyptian market has gone on and launched an Arabic iPhone app for their service, aiming to make it easier for users to access the information they provide while on the go.

The application, just like the site itself, provides a variety of information about cars available in the Egyptian market, with the goal of providing the information a user needs to be able to choose the best car that suits his budget and needs.

It offers the possibility of checking the latest car prices and their features from the various car models out in the market, with photos of each car and its specifications, as well as a list of similar cars the user might be interested in. Cars can be browsed and searched through either by model or price.

Euro-Mediterranean School 2010 Open For Entrepreneurs’ Applications

August 31, 2010August 31, 2010 MMM 8 Comments

The Euro-Mediterranean School (EMS), which is an initiative that aims to offer young entrepreneurs from the Euromed countries an opportunity to follow a learning program in the field of business management and entrepreneurship, has opened up applications for the fifth “Introduction to Entrepreneurship” course taking place this year.

EMS was founded by the Milan Chamber of Commerce, the Lombardy Region, and the Fondazione per la Sussidiarietà (‘Foundation for Subsidiarity’). These sponsoring bodies offer full scholarships to all participants covering travel costs, room and board, tuition fee and teaching materials for the entire duration of the course.

In 2010 EMS will host the fifth edition of the course “Introduction to Entrepreneurship”, in which the Chambers of Commerce of Naples and Reggio Calabria will also participate.The sponsoring bodies offer full scholarships to all participants, covering travel costs, room and board and teaching materials for the duration of the course.

Otlobmall.com: A New Online Shopping Destination For Egypt

August 11, 2010August 11, 2010 MMM 1 Comment

Otlob.com, the online food ordering service, is building on their success and experience, by making a new push into online shopping through their recently launched portal called Otlobmall.com.

Otlobmall.com allows users to shop online for a variety of products in different categories, including electronics, mobile phones, beauty products, sports, jewelry, apparel, books and magazines and gifts.

Purchased products are delivered directly to the purchaser’s home or designated delivery address and can be paid for either online or by cash on delivery.

ITIDA And Vodafone Egypt Launch MobileAppsAcademy For Egyptian Mobile Developers

June 19, 2010June 19, 2010 MMM 1 Comment

Egypt’s Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA) is partnering up with Vodafone Egypt to launch MobileAppsAcademy, a contest and a program for sponsoring developers of mobile programs and applications in Egypt.

The initiative aims at preparing a generation of talented developers and helping them generate innovative ideas conforming to the needs of the Egyptian and Middle Eastern market.

Another purpose of this initiative is to highlight Egypt as a regional hub for projects and ideas and to encourage the creation of high-quality mobile applications. It aims to work on raising the local production through encouraging and sponsoring the skills of local developers, offering opportunities for talented Egyptians and turning their ideas into real projects that can contribute to the development of the ICT sector.

Winners Of The MIT Arab Business Plan Competition 09-10

June 5, 2010June 5, 2010 MMM 18 Comments

The MIT Arab Business Plan Competition is a competition designed to encourage all entrepreneurs in the Arab world to start their own company and, ultimately, create a nest of leading firms in the Arab world.

The current version of the competition was officially launched on October 12th 2009 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The competition went through a number of rounds, including different teams covering the following sectors: Energy, Engineering, Healthcare, Internet, Software and Telecom.

The final round just took place at a ceremony in Cairo, Egypt, and the awards for this year were handed out. The winners of this edition of the MIT Arab Business Plan Competition are as follows:

First place: The Little Engineer (Lebanon) – Prize: $US 50,000
An after-school edutainment center which introduces kids and teens [age 4-16+] to pre-engineering courses such as robotics, physics, electricity, electronics, renewable energy and more.
Team: Rana El Chemaitelly, Albert Shamieh, Nadia Alamah, Marwa Harb.

Kngine Introduces Statistics Platform Called Kngine Stats

May 8, 2010May 8, 2010 MMM 1 Comment

Kngine, the semantic web search and question answering engine, that was previously reviewed here, recently launched a brand new statistics platform called Kngine Stats.

Kngine Stats goes out and collects, organizes, and indexes a large number of records of statistical data from resources such as: the UN, the World bank, the CIA Factbook, and a number of other important sources.

What it does with that collected data is crunch it together to come up with different statistics that users can tap into by selecting a certain topic, viewing the statistics for it and even filtering them; in hopes of making these large datasets easier to explore, visualize and share.

Shofha.com, Arabic Movies & Series Online On Demand

February 13, 2010February 13, 2010 MMM 88 Comments

LINKonLINE, a subsidiary of LINKdotNET (an Orascom Telecom Holding company), has announced the launch of a new entertainment service called Shofha, in collaboration with regional movie and series producers and rights owners.

The new service, which is available in English and Arabic, allows anyone from anywhere in the world, to legally watch the latest Arabic movies and television series online on the same day of their international release. Movies and series are provided in high resolution, commercial free, through online streaming or download; with the video files being all DRM protected, most probably using Microsoft Windows Media DRM.

Shofha.com comes with a good back catalogue of movies and series, either on rental or purchase basis, that can be downloaded or watched online. TV series will be available in both full series form as well as sing episode form; even 5 minute episode highlights are provided for those without much time on their hands.

The available options are to: Buy the video, where a user gets to download the video to their pc and play it anytime they wish indefinitely, with the ability to download the movie up to 3 times; Rent the video, where a user can download the video to their pc and watch it as many times as they want within a 48 hour time-frame; and finally there’s the Internet Cinema option where the user gets to instantly start watching the video through online streaming as many times as they wish in a 24 hour time-frame, with the quality of the video depending on the connection speed the user has.

The prices for each option seem to vary depending on the country, for example international users paying in US dollars would have to pay something like: $US 6 to buy, $US 3 to rent, and $US 9 to stream online; on the other hand, someone in the UAE would pay 9 Dirhams to buy, 5 Dhs to rent, and 7 Dhs to stream online, which is much cheaper.

Kngine, A New Semantic Web Search Engine

January 18, 2010January 18, 2010 MMM 14 Comments

Kngine is a new semantic web search engine and question answering engine that was launched from Egypt, aiming to provide more meaningful search results to users.

Unlike other regular search engines that focus more on the ranking of pages to serve search results to users, Kngine attempts to understand what the user is searching for exactly or what question they are asking, and then tries to come up with the best information, answers and results it can find.

This is done by analyzing the entered keywords to discover the relationships between them, linking the different found data together and then displaying united sets of related information from around the web.

The kinds of information and details provided by the search engine, along with the search results listings, are: Semantic information about the keywords/concepts, direct answers to the entered questions, comparisons between entered keywords/concepts, and possible links between different types of data such as movies, subtitles, photos, store prices, user reviews and more.

Kngine, which stands for Knowledge Engine, currently contains over 1 billion of pieces of data, and features about more than 7 million concepts; 70,000+ companies, 700,000+ movies, 1,100,000+ personalties, 450,000+ locations, 150,000+ books, and more. The interface is currently only available in English.

Even though the product is still in beta, it already shows promise in the way it searches, analyzes and returns relevant results; and we expect it to get even better with time as more work is put into its engine.

The search engine was launched from Cairo, Egypt, and founded by Haytham A. Abd ElFadeel, a Computer Science researcher, focused mainly on the semantic web and search, as well as parallel and distributed computing.

According to the founder, the long-term goal for Kngine is to make all human beings systematic knowledge and experience accessible to everyone; collecting and organizing all objective data, and making it easily accessible to everyone.