Category: United Arab Emirates

Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation & PICTI Sign MoU

MMM 6 Comments
Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation
PICTI

Dubai’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation and the Palestine Information and Communications Technology Incubator (PICTI) have signed a memorandum of understanding to work together on projects and opportunities for economic development.

Under the MoU, the two organizations will be co-operating on initiatives aiming to encourage young entrepreneurs in the region and across the Arab world and identifying promising technology projects for incubation.

PICTI will also support the Foundation’s aims of establishing an Arab Incubators’ Network, which will provide an online resource and collaboration for new businesses and other interested organizations; as well as establishing integrated resources for promoting entrepreneurial activity across the Arab world.

The Palestine Information and Communications Technology Incubator (PICTI), is an independent Palestinian organization that has been created through the initiative and support of the Palestinian Information Technology Community. PICTI and its partner organizations have as their mission the revitalization and the sustainable growth of the Information Communication Technology (ICT) sector in Palestine, through an incubation model that will offer professional business services to Palestinian entrepreneurs who have mature concepts for unique and innovative ICT products assessed to have strong market potential.

# More: ITP

Travel Yolk, Travel Industry Online Recruitment Portal

MMM 5 Comments

travelyolkDubai-based travel industry technology solution provider TechTuners recently launched a new online recruitment portal named Travel Yolk that aims to address the staffing requirements of the Middle East’s travel industry.

Travel Yolk is built much like you’d expect a career website to be, providing the possibility for job seekers from the travel industry to build their CVs online, look for new job opportunities in the industry throughout the Middle East, get email notifications of interesting job vacancies and apply directly through the website.

On the other hand, employers can post their job offers and search the database of travel professionals to find people who best suit their vacant job positions.

As with most job sites, the service is free for job seekers, while employers will have to pay for posting their career opportunities. Different plans are provided to suit employers’ needs and activity.

travelyolk screenshot

An online forum where employees can meet their potential employers and vice versa should be added to the portal soon; making it easier and more effective for both sides to connect.

The website is available in English only for the time being.

# Travel Yolk

Dine In UAE, UAE Restaurants Guide And Reviews

MMM

Dine In UAEDine In UAE is a service that aims to be a comprehensive United Arab Emirates’ restaurant directory on the web, serving as a central point, introducing people to good restaurants all over the UAE.

It also helps restaurant owners promote the new and unique aspects of their restaurants while providing diners with an effective way to find and try new restaurants.

Users can search restaurants by name, by area or by cuisine, or go through the highest rated restaurants and most popular ones, to find details about these restaurants, their addresses, telephone numbers, opening hours, ratings, user reviews and comments.

Registered users can rate restaurants they’ve gone to and post their personal reviews of them.

A forum is integrated in the website to add more interaction between the community of users on several food related subjects like dining at home, sharing recipes, special offers and more.

Restaurant owners can add their restaurants and menus to the website by filling out an offline form. Restaurants have to pay AED 2,000.00 (~ $540) to be included in the directory. Obviously, it’d be much more practical if they could take this process online soon.

Dine In UAE screenshot

Dine In UAE was launched by Siankar Comm LLC.

# Dine In UAE

Getmo Arabia To Bring Digital Downloads To The Middle East

MMM 8 Comments

GetmoArvato Middle East Sales and Abu Dhabi Media Company yesterday announced the launch of Getmo Arabia, a new digital media platform for the Middle East and Africa, at the MECOM 2008 conference in Abu Dhabi.

Getmo Arabia will offer services direct to consumers through www.getmo.com where customers can download over three million songs, videos, movies, games and ringtones in English, Arabic and other Asian languages to their mobile phones & home computers.

The content will be available to users at significantly reduced rates, in hopes to kickstart a new era in the market for mobile & PC entertainment in the region.

Abu Dhabi Media Company also announced a partnership with Sony BMG, in which the record label will provide local and Arabic content for the platform, which can be accessed via PC or mobile.

Getmo Arabia is set to service the 33 million internet users and 80 million mobile phone users in the Middle East region.

At the time of this article’s publication, the getmo.com website is still not accessible online.

# More: Zawya, ITP

Logta, Online Service To Help Find Best Deals & Promotions

MMM 3 Comments

LogtaLogta is a new online service aiming to provide shoppers with a one-stop shop for promotions covering Electronics, food items, travel and leisure, real estate, beauty & personal care, clothing, and apparel amongst other categories.

The service also provides retailers and brand owners with a new channel to advertise & publicize their promotions, getting their message and products across to the site’s visitors, who will be able to search through these categorized promotions and pinpoint the location of the product they are looking for with the best deal.

Additionally, visitors can register for alerts and notifications by building special profiles for the products or services they are looking for; making it a lot easier for them to find what they’re looking for, but also building a rich database for Logta.com, with the community member’s preferences and details, making targeted advertising a strong opportunity for them.

Even though Logta is essentially just a place to find promotions for people to use at retailers’ stores; they plan to start providing retailers with online payment & delivery capabilities for certain categories and items in the future.

The service has built-in analysis tools that retailers and brand owners can use to measure the effectiveness of their promotions and advertising campaigns by analyzing traffic from the site vs. products sold at their stores.

Logta screenshot

Logta was developed by Dubai based Danat e-ventures, and is available in Arabic & English. The service mainly targets users in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, with future expansion plans to the GCC and other Middle Eastern markets.

# Logta

PixiPost, Digital Photo Printing

MMM 2 Comments

PixiPostPixiPost is a Tunisian startup, that was launched back in June 2006, specialized in digital photo printing, and aiming to provide customers with quality photo prints at good prices.

The service gives users the possibility to upload their digital photos, organize them in photo albums and order prints of them. The photos are then printed and sent through the post according to the chosen delivery mode.

Payment for the print orders can be done either online with all major credit cards, using the Monétique Tunisie secure payment platform, or using cashU payment accounts, or for people in Tunisia through transfer of mobile phone prepaid credit.

The user interface is available in both English and French.

I think digital photo printing services are pretty interesting and could come in very handy for the shutterbugs among us who would like to get their photos printed quickly and simply. What would be even greater though would be to see partnerships formed between photo sharing sites like Ikbis and such photo printing services, providing an added-value to both site’s users and making their lives a tiny bit easier.

# PixiPost

DemoCamp Dubai 2 – Radisson SAS, Dubai Media City (May 27th)

MMM 1 Comment

DemoCamp DubaiThe second DemoCamp Dubai; the Dubai-based launch event for new products, technologies and companies; will be taking place at the Radisson SAS in Dubai Media City on May 27th at 7:30PM.

It comes only a couple of months after the first DemoCamp in Dubai, but this time around a bigger room was reserved so as to make the event open to everyone, so if you’re interested in attending, you’re more than welcome.

There are already two confirmed demos scheduled for the event, but there are still openings for a couple more; So, if you’re going to be in Dubai around that date, and you are working on an interesting new web application that you would like to present, then just send an email to: contact@spinbits.com or leave a comment on the blog post announcing the event.

Startups and web applications presented at DemoCamp Dubai will also be reviewed here on StartUpArabia.

Places.ae Release Places Answering Machine (PAM)

MMM 6 Comments

Places.aePlaces.ae, the cool Dubai location based directory, previously reviewed here, have released a new interesting feature called “Places Answering Machine (PAM)”, which acts as an interface for Places.ae with other communication channels on the internet, thereby enabling users to ask Places.ae for places directly through these channels without having to visit the website.

They’ve currently launched with Google Talk and Twitter support, and more channels should be added soon.

For Google Talk users, all you have to do is add places.ae@gmail.com in your contact list then ask PAM to find you something by sending a message in the following format:
find me <something> in <area> (e.g. find me pizza in jumeirah).
You can also use a search term without an area, using find me <something>.

If you’re using Twitter, you’ll have to start following the user places_ae, and once it starts following you back, you can send it a direct message to search for a place:
d places_ae <something> in <area> (e.g. d places_ae pizza in jumeirah).

PAM is still in the beta stage, and more work is currently being put into it’s communication skills and the layout of the sent answers. But it’s still a really nice feature, worth checking out and using for quick searches.

# Places.ae

Places.ae, Dubai’s Location Based Directory

MMM 8 Comments

Places.ae is one of those simple, small, but very useful services that we really wish we had more of all around the Arab world.

In short, and using their own words which I think say it best, places.ae is a location based directory for Dubai.
Integrating Google Maps, the website helps you find, positioned on a map, anything in Dubai by simply asking you what you are looking for, and the neighborhood you’re looking for it in; from businesses to restaurants to clubs to hospitals to any other place you would want to go to in Dubai.

The interface is very simple and really easy to use; you start typing what you’re searching for and the website helps by giving suggestions, and then it delivers a list of nearby places sorted by how far they are from the location you typed in.

You get to click on each one of these places to see it located on a map, find how other people who have been there rate it and read their comments on it.

Users can also add other places that they know of to the website, thereby giving the community the possibility to further enrich the service.

Places.ae currently only covers Dubai, but should be adding other emirates soon. The service is free, both for users and for businesses for the time being.

This very cool service is a product of the collaboration of code.ae and spinbits.

# Places.ae

Muslim Heritage Images; Manuscripts, Artwork, People & Architecture

MMM

Dubai based Muslim Heritage Consulting recently launched the world’s first Muslim history image library online.

The library, at MuslimHeritageImages.com includes manuscripts from the 10th Century as well as contemporary images of people, architecture and museum artifacts.

Collections telling the story of Muslim civilisation have been brought together from museums, archives and private collections across the world. Many images recreate pivotal moments in history such as pioneering early surgical work carried out in the Middle East centuries before similar treatments were available in Europe.

The images are available for sale as downloads or prints, and with specific usage licenses, mainly a single country and single language licence for commercial users, suitable for print and publication use.

Images are organized by category and searchable by keyword; and detailed descriptions are provided for each image.

# Muslim Heritage Images