Category: Content

MBC iMatter, First Social Networking Site For Arab Women

MMM 1 Comment

Saudi media giant MBC Group have made a new online move, this time aimed at Arab women, in the form of a new social networking site for Arab women, called iMatter, that was just launched a couple of days ago.

iMatter invites Arab women to join an online community tailored to their needs and that takes their specific cultural needs into consideration.

Like all the other social networking sites out there, you get to search for and befriend other users, join specific groups and events, post photos, vote on polls and discuss different topics in the forum section.
There is also an internal mail system built into the service, as well as a personal blog/journal feature.

The site isn’t just a social networking site though, as it also aims at empowering Arab women through their iMatter Achievements Awards program, in which women get to submit their entries on or more of four separate award categories: Art Matters (Pieces of art, poems, …), Community Matters (Outline of how to make a difference in community), New Media Matters (Ideas on how to maximize benefit of new media) and Entrepreneurial Matters (Business plan); and then get the chance to win prizes that could change their lives.
All entries should be themed around “Culture” or “Education”, or a collaboration of both.

An online magazine featuring articles on women-related issues is also part of the service.

The site was designed and built for MBC by UK agency Leftfield Digital.

Along with previously reviewed Twffaha, this new service signals a push from Arab businesses and entrepreneurs towards women-oriented services, in an attempt to empower Arab women, and help them reach their full potentials in community.
Both are great initiatives, and hopefully we’ll see more soon.

Qaym, User Generated Restaurant Reviews

MMM 2 Comments

Qaym is a Saudi based service, built around user reviews and social rating of restaurants and eateries from around the world, that just came out of private beta and launched publicly.

Users fully generate the content for the service through their contributions; Every restaurant gets a page, which shows the current user rating for it, tags that describe what the restaurant offers, a list of the countries and cities that restaurants has branches in, as well as reviews and photos submitted by users.

The way the content is organized, you not only get access to reviews of certain restaurants you want to check out before going to, but you can also access a directory-like listing of all restaurants, or of eateries in a certain country or city.

The idea behind it is quite simple and straight-forward, as is the interface and design, which makes it all the better and easier to use. The interface is in Arabic only for the time being.

Saudi Jihad al-Ammar is behind this project, he began working on it last year, and beta tested privately for a bit over 9 months before launching last week.

Markkit, Web 2.0 Text Highlighter

MMM 8 Comments

Markkit is a very simple and straight-forward online service, yet a really useful and interesting one; It is, simply put, a web 2.0 text highlighter; it provides you with a bookmarklet that you can use whenever you need to highlight text in a web page: you simply click on the markkit bookmarklet, select the text you want to highlight, and voila it’s done. You don’t even need to create an account or anything.

An option is also provided for site owners to easily integrate a markkit button on their web pages to give their visitors the possibility to highlight text right away.

Users can then access a mark log to see all the latest highlighted texts by everyone, organized by day, or they can search through the archives of marked texts. The possibility to see highlighted texts by everyone actually gives it a bit of a social highlighting touch.
It’s still not possible to view only your highlights, as the functionality to create a user account that you can save your highlights to is still not available.

Markkit, which was launched by Tunisian Slim Amamou, is still in its early stages of development, and only works with Firefox for the time being.

I think it’s really interesting that we’re seeing these new really simple and unitary web tools popping up from the Arab world, addressing one problem and solving it in a really neat and effective way. It’s a sign Arab startups are maturing and realizing that they don’t have to be everything for the user, and that if they do one thing well enough then that is a success.

# Markkit

Pressera, Online Newspaper & Magazine Hosting

MMM

PresseraPressera are a Lebanese online publishing service that offers an easy and interesting solution for Arab newspapers and magazines to take their publications online.

There isn’t much detail on their website about the setup phase, but they promise it is an easy process, and that the service is 100% automated, enabling newspapers and magazines to publish online daily, and have their publications viewable through a fully customized viewer panel.

Newspapers and magazines from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar and Syria are currently using the service.

The publications are available for free to all readers through custom subdomains of the Pressera website; they can also download them in pdf format.

It seems like quite an easy and interesting solution for offline publications that want to extend their readership and offer their content online, although it’s a shame that the content isn’t in an indexable and searchable format.