Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority To Launch Global Technology Fund

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Dubai Silicon Oasis AuthorityDubai Silicon Oasis Authority (DSOA), the region’s largest integrated technology park, is planning to launch a global technology fund middle of next year.

“Some of the investments will be from ourselves, some from local and regional investors and also international investors,” said Ray Milhem, the new chief technology officer of technology investment at DSOA.

He said, it will largely target companies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, as well as global companies. The fund’s amount has not been finalised yet.

The fund is another means to attract research and development and manufacturing companies to set up a base in Dubai Silicon Oasis. And they are already talking to a number of companies to establish manufacturing in Dubai Silicon Oasis, with a concentration on start-ups.

Even though the focus is on the Middle East and North Africa, there are some start-ups in Europe and North America that they are looking at for potential investments, in order to get them to open higher-engineering offices in Dubai Silicon Oasis.

Earlier, the authority announced a budget of Dh25 billion set aside for investment in the coming years at DSOA. The whole project has already attracted foreign investments worth Dh1.4 billion. It has set aside about Dh500 million to invest in start-ups that will be spent over the next five years.

Additionally, private investment into real estate at DSOA is Dh13 billion, while Dh10 billion is budgeted for the third phase of the project’s development.

According to Milhem, the authority is in talks with several companies and should be making some decisions and announcing some deals soon.

[Source: Gulf News]

Twofour54 Ibtikar Launches Creative Lab Media Industry Grant Fund For Young Arabs

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twofour54twofour54 ibtikar, the media industry funding and support pillar of twofour54 Abu Dhabi, has launched twofour54 ibtikar: creative lab, a grant funding scheme aimed at engaging with young Arabs and stimulating creativity in order to build a long term sustainable media industry in the Arab world.

twofour54 ibtikar: creative lab offers grant funding and business support to talented Arab individuals from the UAE and across the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region, helping great media and entertainment ideas that would benefit from seed funding, development guidance and planning to get off the ground.

It offers funds ranging from US$1,000 to US$50,000 for creative and original ideas across all media platforms including television, radio, film, publishing, online, mobile, music, gaming and animation.

twofour54 ibtikar: creative lab and young Arab funding recipients will engage in regular brainstorming sessions to develop ideas into fully fledged creative projects. A key part of this collaborative process will include budget creation and training in project execution and support throughout.

Tarek Ghattas, twofour54 ibtikar: creative lab manager, added: “We want people to come forward with their media and entertainment ideas. We are looking for passion and originality and there is no such thing as a bad idea. This is an opportunity for young Arabs to unleash their inner creativity and have a go at turning vision into reality – coming to us means never having to look back and wonder what you could have been.”

twofour54 ibtikar: creative lab expands twofour54 ibtikar’s funding portfolio, which also includes ibtikar ventures, an investment fund that focuses on start-up and early stage media and entertainment initiatives.

Qanawati, Check Flight Details & Availability Using SMS

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QanawatiQanawati (‘My Channels’ in Arabic) is a new mobile based service that was just launched from Saudi Arabia by Remal IT, allowing you to check for flight reservation availability via SMS.

The service enables you to check for the availability of seats to be reserved specifically for the following airlines: Saudi Airlines, Nas air and Sama; as well as for all airlines using IATA data.

Other than that, the service also makes it possible to check the details and status of a specific flight by entering the flight number, and if needed the specific date for it.

Another available option is  to check the arrival/departure activity in Saudi airports to see what planes are coming in or leaving on that day and the details of the flights.

Qanawati

The service is based on premium rated sms messages, and currently works with Mobily and Zain, with STC support on the way.

Third Edition Of MIT Arab Business Plan Competition Launched

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MIT Arab Business Plan CompetitionThe MIT Arab Business Plan Competition is a competition designed to encourage all entrepreneurs in the Arab world to start their own company and, ultimately, create a nest of leading firms in the Arab world. It also brings to the Arab world all the MIT expertise in entrepreneurship and in running such competitions.

The equivalent of the MIT Arab Business Plan Competition in Boston is called the MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition and has created a number of leading firms and thousands of jobs.

The Launching Ceremony for the 3rd MIT Arab Business Plan Competition is taking place tonight (October 12th) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, at the Four Seasons Hotel. The event will include an address from Mr. Hussein Shobokshi (President, Shobokshi Development & Trading; Managing Director, Okaz Printing and Publishing), in addition to testimonials from last year’s winning teams.

The website is open now for registration by interested candidates. They are required to fill the online application form consisting of a series of questions that summarize their business idea and the means of implementing it.

The deadline for submitting applications is Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 23:59 GMT.

The competition is open to all Arab nationals with a business idea, with the only requirement being to be part of a team, with each team comprising of minimum 3 individuals, of which at least 2 should be citizens of the Arab world. The business concept put forward by the team should also be implemented in a country within the Arab world.

Thirty teams will qualify for the second round of the competition, and invited to Beirut to attend a one-day workshop lead by Ken Morse, Managing Director of MIT Entrepreneurship Center in Cambridge, MA; and designated a mentor who can help with developing their business plan.

After they submit their full business plans, only 9 make it to the final round and invited to Cairo to give oral presentations of their business plans; with 3 winning teams to be selected and announced during the awards ceremony.

All entrepreneurs interested can go to the competition’s website and Apply Now.

# MIT Arab Business Plan Competition

Woopra Real-Time Web Analytics Tool Officially Comes Out Of Beta

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WoopraWoopra, the innovative and real-time web analytics tool, has just officially come out of beta, with the company announcing the beginning of Woopra’s general availability.

With this launch, Woopra have introduced a whole paid plans structure, with registration now open to everyone opting for one of the paid plans, that range from $4.95 per month for sites with up to 100,000 monthly page views, all the way to $99.95 per month for sites with up to 4 Million monthly page views.

Free ad-supported plans, with a monthly page view limit of 30,000, will be made available via invitations that will be sent out by existing users, as soon as they get the whole invitation system up and running.

All current beta accounts will be automatically transformed into free accounts, but their users can choose to upgrade to any of the paid plans.

The different plans bring different levels of service as well as the page view limits, with differences in the number of users they can create for their account, the number of months that data is stored for, SSL support, email reports, and whether they have full or limited access to some of the more advanced features.

For more details on this launch, you can check out the official blog post here: Woopra officially exits beta.

Arab Technology Business Plan Competition 2009 Semi-Finalists

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The Arab Technology Business Plan CompetitionThe Arab Technology Business Plan Competition, which is a regional Technology investment competition organized by Arab Science and Technology Foundation (ASTF) in cooperation with Intel Corporation, has just announced the list of semi-finalists for this year’s edition of the competition.

The list of 12 semi-finalists includes, in no particular order:

  • AqarMap (Yemen): An online real estate marketplace.
  • Telephone line powered lamp (Palestine): A solution to the frequent power outages in Gaza.
  • EDOM (Jordan): A system to produce green energy.
  • m-CASH (Palestine): A mobile payments solution.
  • Human Heater (Jordan): A new innovative heating product.
  • Therapeutic Vaccines (UAE): Vaccines to help treat chronic inflammation and cancer.
  • NovelMed (Egypt): New medical device.
  • Eye Controlled Typing (Palestine): Technology to help people with physical disabilities use computers.
  • Collapse Analysis (Egypt): Software applications to analyse building structures.
  • Wiphone (Egypt): Technology to convert earth frequency into wifi frequency and vice versa.
  • Blue Soft/Blue Phone (Egypt): Solution to minimize train accidents.
  • HFF (Egypt): Technology to  extract hydrogen from water and use it to generate green energy.

The competition provides the Arab entrepreneurs with a number of needed tools and skills through training and mentoring, in order to turn their Technological innovation into business opportunities.

The top 3 winners will get cash prizes of $10k, $6k and $4k respectively; and will have the opportunity to show their business plans in front of venture capitals, angel fund and investors in the ASTF Investment in Technology Forum.

The top 2 winners will also get to represent the Arab World in the world wide finals of the Intel + UC Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge (USA).

Nakhweh, A Volunteer Matching Portal For Jordan

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Nakhweh

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.

Read More

Bedkash, A New Palestinian Free Classifieds Portal

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BedkashBedkash is a new free classifieds portal for Palestine that was just recently launched in its beta version, providing the service for users in all Palestinian cities.

The service enables users to post the objects they want to sell or the service they can provide, or what they are searching for, for free on the site for other users to search, navigate through and reply to with their offers.

The ads are organized under categories and subcategories, as well as by city, enabling users to go through all posted classifieds narrowing down the selection either by the available categorizations or by specific cities or a combination of both.

Only registered users can get in touch with the person who posted the classified ad, otherwise they just get to see the different details of the posting without any information about the poster.

Bedkash

Bedkash is a new product of Sadaf Technology Development, a Palestinian web development company based in Gaza. The site is available in Arabic only, and the company plans to monetize it through selling online advertising.

WebDialn@ Study Of Algerian Internet Users Results

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AlgeriaA new study entitled WebDialn@ (meaning ‘our web’ in the Arab Algerian accent) by Med&Com and Ideatic that polled about 6,000 Algerian internet users on ADSL, mobile internet, online advertising and e-commerce, estimates that 4.5 million people (12.8% of the Algerian population) use the internet, and that they heavily rely on it for news, research and activities such as social networking.

75% of Algerian internet users call the web an “indispensable tool”, with more than 90% confessing to “not being able to get by without going online ‘at least once a day'”. Most users reported spending two hours on average in front of their monitors.

The study also shows a gender gap and regional disparities in internet use. The typical Algerian Web user is described as male (72.2%), aged between 20 and 29 (29.2%), educated at least to the baccalaureate level + 1 (66.2%), and living in Algiers (29.28%). However, women represent just 25.8% of Algerian Web users.

The researchers reported that 82.6% of Web users communicate via email. Of this percentage, 42.5% also use instant messaging (such as MSN or Yahoo Messenger), 33.8% visit discussion forums, 33% make telephone calls over the Internet (Skype), and 9.9% use video conferencing.

Online media are the Algerian web users’ top online destinations, with 80.8% reading online newspapers, 19.9% listening to the radio, and 11.4% watching TV programmes. The internet is also used for research (80.7%) and making business contacts (22.9%). Social networks seem to be quite popular too with 40% of respondents having profiles on Facebook.

The study also shows that Algerians aren’t very active contributors, with 82.2% visiting online media-sharing sites (YouTube, DailyMotion, Flickr), but only 23.5% contributing.

Numbers from the Algerian Post and ICT Ministry say that there are 585,455 residential ADSL subscribers in the country. Nearly 65% of those surveyed said they can log on from home, compared with 24.6% who log on at work. Over 61% of web users say there are at least three people using the internet in a single home. Youth clubs and libraries with internet access, which used to be crammed, are hosting fewer users.

Some 72.1% of users say they are unsatisfied with the speed of their connection at home, and 79.7% complain about frequent service outages. 53.8% of Web users think the connection rates are affordable, while 43.8% of them think subscription rates are expensive or very expensive.

A presentation of the study results is available here in French: WebDialn@ Study Results (PDF)

[Source: Magharebia]

Talasim One Of Six Winners At Seedcamp Week 2009

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SeedcampSeedcamp 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.

TalasimAmong 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).