Jordan – Page 6 – StartUpArabia

Folowen, A New Social Media Search Tool (Private Beta Invites)

May 31, 2009May 31, 2009 MMM 17 Comments

folowen is a new social media search tool that just went live in private beta and enables users to search for the social profiles of different people and organizations on several social media sites, returning all found profiles in one search result.

The aim is to make it simpler for anyone to find and follow a person or organization’s social activities online, be it a Facebook profile, page or group; a Twitter account; a LinkedIn profile; a YouTube channel …etc.

Currently, folowen uses Google AJAX Search API to find user profiles on 19 different social media sites including three Arab ones: Questler, Ikbis and Watwet.

Search is only the first piece in the bigger puzzle that folowen wants to build, and this ongoing private beta is concentrated on perfecting that to make sure that users are getting the right results for their searches. Once out of private beta, the search will be open to anyone without any need to sign up for the service.

Signed up users also have the possibility of having their search history saved automatically so that they can go back to them and view their results at any time.

The next step after search will be to enable signed up users to link up folowen into some of the supported social services to be able to follow/connect right from folowen without having to go to that service. This obviously will only be available for services that have APIs that are open and allow this.

folowen doesn’t aim to be another social network now, or a social activity aggregator, just a facilitator to help people find and connect to each other over several platforms.

folowen is founded by the same team Jordan-based team that was behind Questler: Razan Khatib, Alma Khasawnih and Hassan Shahin.

If you’re interested in getting an invite to play around with folowen, just drop a little comment below and I’ll send you one as soon as possible.

TasmeemME: An Online Networking Service For Creative Talents In The Middle East

May 25, 2009May 25, 2009 MMM 2 Comments

TasmeemME, Tasmeem Middle East, is a new service that was launched in its beta version from Jordan, and which its creators describe as the first online networking site for creative talents across the region.

TasmeemME recognizes the link between social connections and finding the right job (if you’re an individual) or the right person for a job (if you’re a company), even more so when it comes to creative talent that is mainly available for freelance work.

The site caters to the creative niche by putting together a service that allows creative people to build their profiles, showcase their portfolios, connect with one another and sell their services; and provides clients with the possibility to post their projects and search for the best talents to work on them.

The service being in beta, it might still need some tweaks and fixes here and there, but overall it’s in pretty good shape. Still, there are a number of important features that are still under work to be added soon; among them are the following:

Bidding on projects: Clients will be able to post their projects with certain specifications for interested users to bid on; and then they’ll be able to choose after comparing talent portfolios and proposals.
Marketplace: Users will be able to post some of their work; such as logos, templates, photos and more; as ready-to-buy products for set prices.
An online payment system will be introduced to make the whole issue of payments more straightforward and secure.
A rating system through which clients get to rate the talent’s work, and vice versa.

The site, which is available in English only, was founded by Noor El-Fadl, Tamam Mango and Khaled Abu Gharbieh, and developed by Indemaj Technology.

# TasmeemME

Jordanian Government To Launch Two Venture Capital Funds

May 21, 2009May 21, 2009 MMM

The Government of Jordan, represented by Jordan Enterprise Development Corporation (JEDCO), has launched a Call for Proposals to pre-select one or two fund managers to provide services in relation to the establishment and management of the up-coming Early Stage and Capital for Growth funds in Jordan.

The Funds are part of the Jordan Enterprise Venture Capital Programme 2009 aiming at developing the emerging venture capital service industry in Jordan and at improving access to equity and quasi-equity financing for SMEs in Jordan.

The Funds will have minimum sizes of EUR5M/US$6.9M (Early Stage) and EUR20M/US$27.5M (Capital for Growth), of which 60% and 35% respectively have been committed in-principle by anchor investors.

The Funds will be managed by the private sector with the anchor investors being treated on a pari passu basis with private sector investors, in terms of risks and rewards. Selection of Fund Manager(s) will be determined on a competitive basis.

Bidding for the management of these funds is open to Venture Capital fund management companies, consortia, new management teams or promoters in a position to demonstrate their ability to:

Formulate investment strategies matching the Funds’ investment policies;
Mobilise a management team with relevant track-record;
Raise additional funds from private and institutional investors;
Source deals and actively manage the portfolio to create value.

The guidelines for submitting applications are available under the Venture Capital section on the JEDCO website: http://www.jedco.gov.jo.
The final closing date for receipt of proposals is on 15 June 2009 at 15:00 hrs. GMT + 3.

This is a great move by the Jordanian government to try to help build and enrich a professional VC industry in the country. A move worth following closely, and we’ll make sure to keep an eye on it and bring you any updates and news on how things develop.

[Source: Economist]
[Via: Sindibad]

Watwet’s New Version With Twitter Link, Channels And Better Language Support

May 20, 2009May 20, 2009 MMM 8 Comments

Watwet, the Arab social networking and micro-blogging platform, has released a new version of their web application code named ‘Suzie’, and with it come a bunch of really interesting new features.

With the recent migration to the Rails 2.2 framework, they’ve worked on better language support on Watwet, which translates into better handling of Arabic in this version, but also opens the door for other languages like French, Farsi, Turkish and Swahili, that are in their future plans.

Something interesting they’ve also gone and opened up is the possibility for anyone to create a channel of their own, without having to go through the Watwet team like they used to in the past.
It should be interesting to see how many people and businesses start using this feature; and when/if we’ll start seeing the concept of sponsored channels.
Complementing this move, the public timeline of Watwet now also shows the watwets coming from channels too, along with the watwets coming from the users.

Another good move with this version is the possibility to link a Watwet account to a Twitter account, in a way that anything posted to Watwet gets automatically posted to Twitter and vice versa. A simple settings page available under ‘Twitter Link’ turns this on for the user.
This makes it easier and more efficient for people who mainly use one of the services, but also want to try out the other, or who want to streamline their status and lifestreaming activities across both platforms.
I expect more focus will be put on the integration with Twitter in the future to try and lure more Twitter users to play around with Watwet, growing their user base and activity level through it to make the service even more interesting to use.

Other than these mentioned points, they’ve also worked on some design and layout tweaks for the interface, as well as on browser compatibility issues.

Some really exciting moves in this release by Watwet, paving the way for some pretty interesting possibilities in the future and for some other features they seem to have hidden up their sleeves.

Launch Of Global Business Opportunities Program’s 2nd Version

May 19, 2009May 19, 2009 MMM

The second version of the Global Business Opportunities program was officially launched yesterday by the Al-Ahli Holding Group in partnership with the Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship (QRCE), in a ceremony presided over by HRH Princess Sumaya Bint El-Hassan.

The program aims to train a group of young entrepreneurs of various nationalities in order to prepare them for the launch of global companies. The opening ceremony was attended by a number of prominent figures, businesspeople, ambassadors and participating delegations from Jordan, Argentina and South Africa.

The Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship and Al-Ahli Holding Group signed an agreement earlier this year to cooperate on this version of the Global Business Opportunities program; and this launch is a step forward in the frame of that cooperation.

Joi Ito, the CEO of Creative Commons, who was present at the launch ceremony, gave a motivational speech for participants, in which he emphasized the role of entrepreneurship in achieving comprehensive development and the significance of creativity in the success of companies starting up and increasing their ability to compete in global markets.

Husni Khuffash, Google’s UAE Country Manager, went over the different challenges facing entrepreneurs in their endeavors to establish global corporations, and offered solutions for these challenges.

There are 25 young men and women participating in this program from Jordan, Argentina and South Africa. They will be undergoing intensive training for three weeks, during which they will be introduced to administrative, marketing, financing, financial and human resources skills, along with others, presented by the Cisco Entrepreneurship Institute at the Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship.

Participants will then be divided into a number of groups made up of people from different nationalities to work on a complete business project, using the skills and ideas acquired throughout the program.

The first version of the program took place in Argentina with the participation of 20 young men and women from the United Arab Emirates and Argentina. Preparations are underway to implement the program in Brazil and South Africa in an expanded capacity and with a larger participation of youth.

Intel Capital Invests In Two Jordanian Companies Jeeran And ShooFeeTV

May 17, 2009May 17, 2009 MMM 2 Comments

In a joint press conference today in Amman, Jordan, Intel Capital‘s latest investments in the Arab internet scene were announced.

These new investments from Intel Capital are in Jordanian internet companies Jeeran, one of the leading user generated content portals in the Arab world, and ShooFeeTV, a free online Arabic television guide. Both companies are also IV Holdings portfolio companies.

This comes among Intel Capital’s ongoing push in the region, supporting local entrepreneurship in the Middle East and funding companies in the internet and technology sectors through its $50 million Intel Capital Middle East and Turkey Fund, which is aimed to assist the companies in pursuing regional growth and development plans in addition to extending their product offerings.

Under the umbrella of this fund, Intel continues to increase its investment in four key areas: local entrepreneurship, education, digital accessibility and specialized technical competencies, to help promote technology skills, knowledge transfer and jobs creation.

As has become custom for most such investments in the Arab world, the size of these investments has not been disclosed.

Jawaker Adds To Advertising Options With Game Table Changes

May 14, 2009May 14, 2009 MMM 2 Comments

Jawaker, the online multiplayer card games website that was previously reviewed here, and whose co-founder Mohamad Haj Hasan was interviewed here, has introduced some new changes to their game table, expanding the available advertising options on the platform.

The upgrades on the game table aimed to make it more user friendly for users, but also to adapt to the needs of their advertising clients.

Among the major changes on the game table is a re-organization of certain elements like the information bar and chat box, to make it easier for users to see more information in a more convenient way.

But more importantly, in addition to their original ad serving model of branding the back of cards, they’ve introduced the possibility to have a watermarked logo of the brand on the game table itself as well as a text ad on the right side of the table that pushes the message that the advertiser wants to relay to their audience. This text ad has a link to the advertisers target URL.

Jawaker currently have the popular cards games: Trix, Trix Complex, Solitaire and Tarneeb; and plan to roll out more multi-player card games in the future.

Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship Organises The Entrepreneurs Week – May 16-21 (Amman, Jordan)

May 11, 2009May 11, 2009 MMM

The Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship is organizing a really interesting event ‘The Entrepreneurs Week‘ between 16th-21st of May, in Amman, Jordan.

The event aims to open an interactive discussion with a number of interesting international speakers who will speak about several important topics in Entrepreneurship, Business and Management.

The topics to be discussed are the following:

BlueOcean Strategy: How to transform a new business idea into a winning strategy
Speaker: Mohammad Ajlouni (Managing Director, MDS)
Identifying your Strengths as an Entrepreneur
Speaker: Ronald Evans (CEO, SIMA International)
Idea to Reality
Speaker: Habib Haddad (Co-Founder, Yamli.com)
Innovation in Open Networks – Perspectives from an Internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist
Speaker: Joi Ito (CEO, Creative Commons)
Cross-cultural business issues as companies expand internationally
Speaker: Doug Christgau (Director, Cross-Cultural Development)
The current U.S. and world financial market situation.
Speaker: Larry Hutchins (Certified Financial Planner, Wachovia)
Insights into family-owned companies in regards to economic and human resource issues.
Speaker: John Carmon (President, Carmon Community Funeral Homes)

The event is free of charge. For registration or any further information, you can check out their website http://www.qrce.org/eweek or call +962 6 515 4892.

If you’re registered to the StartUpArabia Events iCal feed in your calendar software, the event should already be showing up in your calendar for the days of the event.

Online Media Creativity Workshop – Amman, Jordan (18-22 May)

May 4, 2009May 4, 2009 MMM 1 Comment

The Royal Film Commission of Jordan and Creative Commons, in cooperation with the SAE Institute in Jordan, are launching the first “Online Media Creativity” workshop to be held in Amman, Jordan.

The free workshop will be held from the 18^th till the 22^nd of May 2009 at the SAE Institute, for four hours daily from 1:00 pm till 5:00 pm, during which both theoretical and practical instruction will be offered.

Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, is going to conduct the workshop, which is developed in cooperation with Royal Film Commission of Jordan.

The workshop is the first of its kind in the Arab world, and will be dealing with issues like how to produce and distribute an audiovisual with the help of social media and networks. It is open to all Arabs of all nationalities and countries (they just have to make it to Jordan).

This step comes to try and open the field of cinema and traditional audiovisual production to new media and try to understand how creativity could be improved through peer-production and network distribution by using open licenses such as Creative Commons.

Participants will benefit from Joichi Ito’s extensive media expertise in:

Acquiring knowledge on the major changes occurring in the audiovisual field with the advent of digital media.
Acquiring necessary technical skills to start producing and distributing one’s own digital media.
Enabling young Arabs to professionally produce online content and share it with the rest of the world.

To apply, you should email the following to programs@film.jo:

A personal resume, indicating any relevant previous experience.
A cover letter indicating, in at least 100 words, the reason for applying.
Clearly including your name, email and telephone number.

Deadline for submission is Tuesday 12^th of May 2009.
For more information, you can contact the Royal Film Commission on: +962 6 461 3835 Ext. 101

[Via: mediaoriente]

Interview With Mohamad Haj Hasan, Co-Founder Of Jawaker & Akhtaboot

April 22, 2009April 22, 2009 MMM 2 Comments

Going back to our interviews with Arab internet entrepreneurs, we bring you a new interview with Mohamad Haj Hasan, co-founder of Jordan based Boundless, the company behind online cards game destination Jawaker, and online job portal Akhtaboot.

Of course, before anything I’d like to thank Mohamad for taking the time to answer our questions about Jawaker, their experience with it and where they aim to take it.

How did you get the idea for Jawaker? and what made you passionate about it as a project?

The idea of Jawaker came about when my partner, Yousef Shamoun, and I were bored one day and felt like playing cards online. We knew that there were a bunch of sites offering a wide variety of card games, and we thought that there must be at least one that has the card games that we grew up with (i.e. Trix, Tarneeb, Basra, etc.). Of course, we knew there were many programs that allowed us to play with a computer, but we wanted a multi-player experience of playing with other people. After spending time searching for such a site with no success, we decided to build our own site.

We decided to have our gaming infrastructure be based in Javascript (without the need for any downloads) in order to allow us to rapidly develop new games for the site. It is very easy to be passionate about Jawaker, because everything we do is very fun. Testing literally means playing, and since you are the first mover in the market, the thrill of innovation is a huge motivator.

What were the main challenges you faced while bringing Jawaker to life?

We originally thought that a gaming website would be simple. But we soon realized that there were so many issues and hurdles, even beyond the obvious technical ones. Gathering the “official” rules for these games and applying the UI based on these rules is not an easy task. Also, having the game play be user-friendly, fun and as close to playing in reality is quite challenging. There were huge debates on how and what information to show and also how to design gaming transitions that would scale across multiple games.

Then came the users and all the issues that come with putting yourself out there in front of people. We were always focused on a multi-player gaming experience, and that means that a critical mass of concurrent users needs to be on your site in order for the site to become alive. Tweaking the options around the game play itself was a big challenge that we solved by gathering statistics, listening to our users and reading the logs.