Social Networking – Page 2

TwitVid Launches Real-Time Video Search, Virtual Gifts & Analytics

December 17, 2009December 17, 2009 MMM 1 Comment

TwitVid, the service that enables people to easily and quickly post their videos for sharing on Twitter, and that was previously reviewed here, just recently announced the launch of a number of new interesting features.

The new set of announced features is as follows:

Real-time video search: Over the past period, with the continuing accelerated pace at which news and content is shared online, a lot of focus has been going to services that can keep up and offer real-time access to that information and the possibility to search through it. TwitVid attempts to crack that for video, by offering the ability to search through video content posted on Twitter through it in real-time.

Virtual gifts: Virtual goods have emerged as a very effective means of monetization for online games and services. Just a look at some of the companies selling virtual goods through their applications and games on Facebook, and the deals that have been happening around them recently, show how hot that space currently is.
TwitVid debuted its gifting service in November, through which they enable users to buy and send gifts to one another.

Analytics reports: In a bid to offer more value to people who tweet many videos, and who would like more insight on how well their videos are doing, TwitVid has launched a new analytics feature that shows the number of views for a video, its top linkers, the evolution of traffic over time, as well as where the traffic is coming from. Traffic can also be displayed by geographic location and internet domain.

TwitVid has found a lot of success as a platform of choice for video uploaders on Twitter, even attracting a number of high profile and celebrity users along the way.

TwitVid is a product of EatLime, a Sunnyvale based company, founded by Mohammad Al Adham from Jordan and Adil Lalani from Pakistan. The company previously secured a round of funding from investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Amidzad Partners, and XG Ventures.

Nakhweh, A Volunteer Matching Portal For Jordan

October 4, 2009October 4, 2009 MMM 2 Comments

Nakhweh is a new portal that was recently launched in Jordan, aimed at being a tool to foster and develop voluntary work in the community, through bridging the gap between available programs and volunteers.

The site tries to achieve its goal by offering a number of online features to support the networking of leaders and volunteers in the community.

The portal is the brainchild of Kamel Al-Asmar and Hadi Nasereddin of Ideation Box from Jordan.

The following is a little Q&A we got to do with Kamel to know more about Nakhweh, how things have been going so far and their plans for the future. A big thanks to him for taking the time to answer our questions and offer some insight into Nakhweh.

Tell us more about Nakhweh and your goals for it in your own words.

Nakhweh.com is basically a website that aims to help in the matching process between the volunteers who are passionate about serving their communities and the organizations that need the help of those volunteers.
Nakhweh has been launched on the 19th of August with the least options that make the website usable and functioning in a way that serves volunteers and organizations simply yet effectively. That decision of launching the project at its early stages has been taken for two main reasons, which are: The Holy Month of Ramadan and to be the first in taking such an initiative before anybody else.

Our vision for Nakhweh is to make it the official volunteering platform for Jordan in a short time, to help other social entrepreneurs and to plan events every while and then to support a cause.

Talasim One Of Six Winners At Seedcamp Week 2009

September 26, 2009September 26, 2009 MMM

Seedcamp has announced the six winners of this year’s edition of Seedcamp Week, after an intense week of mentoring in London by a diverse mentor, investor and entrepreneur network.

Among the six winners is Jordanian startup Talasim, an online social network and photo sharing service for comedy/funny content, which was founded by Zeid Koudsi and Sabri Hakim, and is one of the projects leading Arab UGC portal Jeeran invested in and incubated.

Each of the six winning teams will be receiving a €50k investment from Seedcamp and active support over the next three months to help develop their products and companies. In return Seedcamp should be taking a stake worth between 5-10% of each company.

These next three months will be spent in London, with the winning teams working with the Seedcamp team on building the product and company together, and with the teams provided access to services worth 2-3 times the invested €50K, with the goal of helping grow and nurture the teams, and putting in-depth focus on developing the product and business.

During the course of these three months, the groups will also have an opportunity to take advantage of the same group of experts that participated in the Seedcamp week through weekly dinners, topical lunches, conferences, and continued mentorship on various issues. They’ll also get to demo their products to other groups from Seedcamp as well as potential investors in two events along the way.

The other 5 winners are: Boxed Ice (UK), Brainient (Romania), Codility (Poland), Erply (Estonia) and Patients Know Best (UK).

TweetShell, A Web Based Shell Interface For Twitter

August 15, 2009August 15, 2009 MMM 2 Comments

TweetShell is a fun, in a geeky kind of way, new Twitter web application that provides a command line interface for users who are more comfortable working in the shell environment.

The site’s idea is to provide a way to use everyday shell commands to interact with twitter. So for starters, users might want to run a man command to discover the available commands and how they work within the twitter context.

TweetShell is still in early alpha and doesn’t cover all Twitter functionalities yet, but it very nicely covers the most basic ones, enabling the viewing of user timelines (using directory commands like cd and ls), tweeting (using wall), logging in to your Twitter account (using the ssh command) and more.

The site’s tag line is quite a fun one as well: “You know, in linux they say everything is a file. In TweetShell everything is a tweet!!”

Tweetshell is a creation of Monther AbuShaikh from Jordan, who is also CTO at Ikbis, the popular video and photo sharing service.

Tweepi, A Set Of Tools To Help Manage Your Twitter Account

August 5, 2009August 5, 2009 MMM 2 Comments

Tweepi is another project that has popped up from the Arab world to cater to the ever-growing group of Twitter users around the world, presenting a set of simple tools to help users manage their following and followers lists.

The site has started off with four different tools:

Geeky Follow: This tool helps you find users who share the same interests as you and whom you might be interested in following. The way it works is that it asks for the handle of a Twitter user that you like, and it goes and gets a list of people who follow that user too, with their details, so you can see who of them you’d like to follow too.

Geeky Flush: This is for the more sensitive Twitter users who don’t like it when they follow someone and they don’t follow them back. So this tool simply enables you to unfollow people who aren’t following you back.

Geeky Reciprocate: This is the flip side to the previous tool, allowing users to find users who are following them but that they’re not following back, so that they can start following them quickly.

Geeky Cleanup: This tool enables you to go through the list of users you are following to identify users you might want to unfollow, like spammers, inactive users or the likes.

The tools come with Preset Target filters that help you filter the list of users to better identify the users you want to follow or unfollow, depending on the tool. They also show you a number of different indicators for each user like how many tweets they’ve sent within the last week, how many RTs they’ve gotten, how many replies and RTs they’ve sent themselves, …etc. It’s possible to customize and choose which of these indicators are shown as columns in the result set.

The site uses oAuth to link with your Twitter account and be able to perform the different actions it needs to do following your choices on the system.

Tweepi was built by ThoughtPick from Jordan, and is still in its beta version.

D1G Announces Closing Of Its First Round Of Financing

August 3, 2009August 3, 2009 MMM

D1G just announced its closing of a first round of financing; that will go towards funding the site, its expansion and its infrastructure on the Internet.

According to the press release issued by the company, this first round has attracted a number of regional businessmen and international experts in the internet industry to join the site’s management.

Commenting on this round, Abdul-Majid Qasem, D1G Executive Director, said that the first round of investment was able to attract the necessary funding for the next phase, and that the amount raised would help the company improve its products and services to achieve the board of directors’ vision and aspirations.

He also noted that the next round of strategic investment negotiations with some of the leading capital and private equity firms in the region is currently ongoing.

D1G was founded in May 2006, and according to the numbers released by the company have been able to build a community of more than 3 million people per month over the past years, generating more than 20 million impressions and over 15 million online monthly videos. They also claim to have grown 100% in number of users during the first half of 2009 alone.

D1G’s growth has been both organic and through acquisitions, and it seems they’ll be sticking to the same approach for growth in the future.

Just a couple of months ago, D1G announced that Usama Fayyad, Ex- Chief Data Officer and Executive Vice President at Yahoo!, had been appointed Executive Chairman of D1G to help develop the company and take it into its next stage of growth. He was already on their board of directors since September 2008.

D1G also announced that prominent Jordanian business man and investor Karim Kawar will become an Active Advisor on the company’s board of directors. Karim Kawar, who had previously served as Jordan’s Ambassador to the US, is currently advising a number of regional capital and technology companies.