Syria – StartUpArabia

Mohmal: An Arabic Temporary Disposable Email Address Service

September 7, 2011September 7, 2011 MMM 4 Comments

In this online world we’re living in, we’ve all received one too many annoying spam emails in our inboxes, and we’ve all been in front of a subscription form, at one point or another, scratching our heads, thinking if whatever service we’re signing up to is worth the ton of spam “marketing” emails we’re going to be receiving after it.

Other than spam filters that have varying degrees of effectiveness, another nuisance email fighting tool is the use of a disposable email address, that you just use for that one purpose and that you can dispose of later to avoid getting any unwanted emails.

Mohmal is a pretty similar Arabic service, that enables users to quickly create a disposable email address, that temporarily lives and receives emails for 45 minutes and is then deleted.

Msrofi: An Arabic Personal Finance Tool To Track Your Budget

October 5, 2010October 5, 2010 MMM

Msrofi is a an Arabic personal finance tool that was created to help users keep an eye on their budgets and cash-flow; to be able to track their income and where they’re spending their money.

In a region where users are still weary of buying online, let alone sharing private information such as their finances, it is quite a challenge for a service like this from the get go; but still Hala Deeb and Mohammed Zaher Ghaibeh from Syrian web company Creative Web Group seem to have taken on that challenge head on by building and launching Msrofi.

The product is simply designed, and should be pretty straightforward for users to create their different categories and record their sources of income as well as their spending under those categories in multiple currencies. Everything has to be added manually at this stage, and that is obviously because of limitations with the banks and banking systems, as well as due to the lack of resources.

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.

Revisiting Arabic Social Bookmarking And Content Discovery

June 23, 2010June 23, 2010 MMM 2 Comments

A bit over two years ago, I wrote a post about the Arab social bookmarking services out there, listing the existing options, how good they looked and how well they seemed to be doing, identifying the top ones at that time.

If anyone were to pull up that same list today and go check on each one of the sites, they’d find that some have shut down, others have become useless and spam ridden, some others have become pretty much inactive, and only one or two are still holding on. What’s clear though is that these social bookmarking services never caught on with Arab web users, and never achieved their founders’ initial dreams for them.

However there are some new kids on the block, who are here to take another stab at social bookmarking and facilitating content discovery for users in the Arab world.

LiveTweeting, Real-Time Event Coverage With Crowdsourced Translation

December 9, 2009December 9, 2009 MMM 1 Comment

LiveTweeting is a new real-time interactive web application that was launched as a tool for multi-language live coverage of events around the world, based around the popular micro blogging service twitter.

The way it works is that a group of people present at a certain event would tweet their updates covering the event as it happens, while on the other hand a number of multi-lingual twitter users would simultaneously translate and tweet the updates in another language. Both versions, the original and the translation, are aggregated on the LiveTweeting site.

People following the live coverage of the event (both original and translation) on the service are able to vote on the tweets they like by starring them. No user registration is currently required to follow an event’s coverage or to vote on the updates for it.

LiveTweeting was officially launched earlier today (Dec 9th 2009), just in time to be able to cover the Le Web 2009 conference in English and have its translation crowdsourced into Arabic.

The idea behind the service was conceived by Samer Karam (Lebanon), developed by Beshr Kayali (Syria) and designed by Maya Zankoul (Lebanon). Everything was put together over the span of one week.

# LiveTweeting

Mohammed Bin Rashid Foundation Signs MoU With Syrian Computer Society’s ICT Incubator

November 17, 2008November 17, 2008 MMM

The Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation of Dubai today announced it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Syrian Computer Society’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Incubator.

Established to build the information society in Syria and nurture entrepreneurial ideas, the ICT Incubator currently provides a variety of services and training to projects that are commercially viable.

This announcement came during the fourteenth annual Information and Communication Technology exhibit which was held at Exhibition City in the Syrian capital Damascus. The MoU was signed by Sultan Lootah, Vice President of Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation’s Entrepreneurship and Employment sector, and Dr Rakan Razouk, Chairman of the ICT Incubator, Syrian Computer Society, in the presence of senior Foundation officials and key Syrian officials from the private sector, public sector and academia.

The agreement marks a new milestone in the Foundation’s Entrepreneurship and Employment sector, which seeks to develop cooperative programmes to advance the creative talents of Arab entrepreneurs and create new job opportunities, as well as enhance research methodologies and information exchange.

The agreement mandates the creation of an extensive online network for regional incubators to encourage interaction, share experiences, discuss best-practices and exchange information between entrepreneurs and incubators throughout the Arab world.