Jordan – Page 2 – StartUpArabia

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.

Dakwak: A Tool For Website Localization Into 60+ Languages

July 27, 2010July 27, 2010 MMM 4 Comments

Dakwak is a new startup that was recently launched from Jordan that aims to provide a solution for website localization into 60+ languages.

The site makes it easy for webmasters to integrate Dakwak’s localization and translation service right into their sites; instantly providing their visitors access to content in the language they’re most comfortable reading in.

All it takes is a bit of javascript code that needs to be integrated into the site pages, and to flag the content that needs to be localized/translated; and the rest is taken care of by Dakwak.

The service automatically detects the country a visitor is connecting from based on their IP address, and changes the language of the content to the visitor’s language, switching all the text without breaking the design of the page; unless the visitor chooses to switch back to the base language.

Tadarrab.com: An Internship Portal For The Arab World

July 11, 2010July 11, 2010 MMM 2 Comments

Tadarrab.com is a new service that was launched from Jordan and that aims to be an internship portal / guide for the Arab world, linking companies and interns.

This is made possible through a platform that was built to enable companies to post and promote their available internship opportunities, and on the other hand make it easy for fresh graduates and students to find these opportunities and apply for them as interns.

The goal of the service is of course to try and help youth to find interesting internship opportunities in different companies, in order to start gathering work experience and begin paving their career path. It also helps companies open up their internship positions to a wider group of people enabling them to find and pick better candidates who might go on to become full time team members in the future.

Video: O-Minds Presents FlashFirebug At DemoCamp Dubai

June 24, 2010June 24, 2010 MMM 1 Comment

O-Minds is a Jordan-based IT company with a focus on open source and web development. They’re active participants in the Drupal community, and work on advanced Adobe Flash development.

Ashraf Amayreh from O-Minds was the first startup person to present at the DemoCamp Dubai event that was held on June 23rd at Dubai Knowledge Village’s Auditorium, and the main focus of the demo and presentation was a tool called FlashFirebug that the company built to help Web and Flash developers.

FlashFirebug is inspired from the highly popular Firebug add-on for Firefox that enables developers to go under the hood of their web pages and debug them straight from the browser; However Firebug hits a wall when it comes to Flash, and that’s where FlashFirebug comes in.

MENA ICT Forum – October 10-11, 2010 – Amman (Jordan)

June 21, 2010June 21, 2010 MMM 7 Comments

The MENA ICT Forum is an Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and Information and Communications Technology Enabled Services (ICTES) industry event for the MENA region, that is held in Jordan on a bi-annual basis. The event was previously known as Jordan ICT Forum in it’s previous incarnations.

This year’s event is scheduled for October 10-11, 2010; and expands to focus on the whole region’s ICT and ICTES success stories, trends, opportunities, and future outlook and plans.

The MENA ICT Forum 2010 will be held at the King Hussein Business Park in Amman, a modern and high-tech business park dedicated to the ICT and ICTES industry.

Quirkat Launches Fantasy Football Game On Facebook

June 12, 2010June 12, 2010 MMM 1 Comment

Quirkat, the Middle Eastern game development studio has announced the launch of a new online ‘Fantasy Football’ game just in time for the South Africa 2010 World Cup. The game was developed exclusively for the Facebook platform and can be played in Arabic, English or French.

The game offers players the range of features they’d come to expect out of a fantasy football game. They’ve also featured all 736 players from the 32 teams participating in this summer’s World Cup in South Africa in a visual playing environment.

As users play on in the game, their teams are ranked against a number of real-world player events, such as scoring, successful defending, and bonus points for Man of the Match stature.

The game also allows users to create their own leagues in which they can compete head to head against selected friends.

Oasis 500, A New ICT Seed Capital Fund For Jordan’s Startups

May 4, 2010May 4, 2010 MMM 2 Comments

King Abdullah II Fund for Development (KAFD) in Jordan is planning to launch a new ICT seed capital fund in two months with the aim of solving the problem of innovative new startups in the country that need to secure some early stage funding.

The new fund will be called Oasis 500, and the goal is for it to provide an initial capital of between $50,000 and $100,000 to 500 startups. It will be mainly focused on funding new ideas, especially in media, online, content, applications and the service industry.

At this point, it seems that it’s still undecided though whether the fund will be expanded and made accessible to startups from outside Jordan.

Zoofs, The Most Talked About YouTube Videos On Twitter

May 3, 2010May 3, 2010 MMM 1 Comment

Zoofs is a new simple and pretty fun service, offering users a destination where they can start to discover the YouTube videos that are proving popular with people on Twitter. So basically what the service does is scour twitter to find the most tweeted videos, ranks them according to popularity, and serves them up for users to enjoy.

The project is yet a new offering from TootCorp, the Jordan based company that brought us the video-sharing portal Ikbis and micro-blogging service Watwet in the past.

Visitors to the site can browse through videos by category, and also filter videos to show only the freshest (ones that were uploaded to YouTube in the past 72 hours only). The Zoofs team also mark some of the videos they really like as “Zoofs Picks” to highlight them for users.

Amman Tech Tuesdays 1st Event, May 4th 2010 (Amman, Jordan)

May 2, 2010May 2, 2010 MMM

In just a couple of days time, a new series of tech oriented events is kicking off in Amman (Jordan), in the form of Amman Tech Tuesdays, which is an initiative to bring engineers, business people, experts, investors, marketers, entrepreneurs, students and regular enthusiasts from the technology community together on the first Tuesday of every month in an unconference style setting, with the main goal being to organically strengthen the ties between the tech community in Amman, open up doors for collaboration and encourage the sharing of ideas.

The first event will be taking place at 7PM this coming Tuesday, May 4th 2010, at the Friendship Hall of the Princess Sumaya University For Technology in Amman, Jordan.

The idea is for Amman Tech Tuesdays to be a flexible platform, with the possibility for a different group to manage and host the event each month, in order to cover more specialized areas and get to know about innovations from across all tech fronts.

The first event’s sessions are as follows:

Open Tech Session
Usama Fayyad, Phd. (CEO – Open Insights, LLC.; Exec. Chairman – d1g.com; Ex. Senior VP & Chief Data officer – Yahoo! Inc.)
In hopes of weaving ties between industry experts, inspirational and renowned figures in technology, Dr. Fayyad will be delivering an open tech session, throughout which he’ll also be accepting attendants’ tech & business questions.
Get Inc.’d!
Omar Al-Taweel, Lawyer (Al-Taweel Law)
Having trouble with registering your business or idea? Afraid of making mistakes? Omar will be taking everyone through the process of incorporating your companies and ideas in Jordan; he’ll also be addressing the new Cyber Crime Laws in Jordan.
What’s Up With E-Commerce?
Ibrahim Manaa’ (Wheels-express.com)
In this interactive session, Ibrahim will be presenting his experience and findings on E-commerce in Jordan, and the discussion will be opened on what difficulties exist in this space in the region, and what can be done by the community to push things forward and open up doors for e-commerce startups.

These events are also a great networking opportunity to meet the different players from the Jordanian tech scene, and get to share experiences as well as exchange thoughts and ideas.

The Amman Tech Tuesdays events are free and open for everyone to attend; all you have to do is show up at the event’s venue on the right time.

Photojonet Shuts Down, To Be Relaunched Under New Name

December 19, 2009December 19, 2009 MMM 4 Comments

Photojonet, the online photo service that was launched from Jordan, to provide digital photo printing services at good prices, and was previously reviewed here, was shut down all of a sudden a few days ago. The service’s twitter account then promised a new version would be up under a new name soon.

We got in touch with the CEO and co-founder of the service, Issam Hijazi, and he gave us some insight into what’s happening.

Photojonet was initially 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. The service was launched in July 2009, and apparently just a few months into the life of the project, some differences started surfacing between the co-founders related to managing the project, that finally led them to decide to go their separate ways. Hence, the service was shut down.

Anyway, according to Issam Hijazi, he has been working on getting resources and relationships back together to relaunch a similar service under a new name. The code is currently being re-engineered, as well as the whole infrastructure for the web application.

A number of new features are being implemented too, as well as the use of other new technologies. The plans are also to expand it to beyond just photo prints, to include an online store covering more photo related products.

Issam shared the name of the new service with us, but asked for it to remain confidential for the time being. We’ll bring you more information about the new site once it’s launched.

This story though also highlights one of the challenges that face entrepreneurs when launching a startup, and that is working with the right co-founders and clarifying all the important details from the beginning, so as not to run into any big hurdles like this while the focus should be on building and growing the business.