Why Startups Fail

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David Feinleib from venture capital firm Mohr Davidow Ventures recently published a great post about why some startups fail. He answers that they fail because they run out of money.

But then he develops it a bit further, listing a number of points that get them there. In this post, I’ll be quickly listing them here with my thoughts on each one, and then let you read the details over on his blog.

The main reasons he mentions are the following:

  • They spend too much on sales and marketing before they’re ready: I couldn’t agree more with this point, many people launch with a half-baked product, mainly in an attempt to be the first-to-market with the idea, and they start promoting the product heavily and sending out people to sell, when the product wasn’t ready enough to be sold.
  • The startup doesn’t move fast enough and is outpaced by the market: This is very true too, it’s somehow the opposite of the first point, where the startup takes too long to launch their product, or they fail to keep up with the market developments; it’s a very thin line and big balancing act.
  • The entrepreneur behind is unable to take the idea and transform it into a well defined product: Whether we like it or not, not everyone who launches a startup is an entrepeneur and has the necessary energy and commitment to make it work.
  • The market takes too long to develop: This is a risk every entrepreneur who launches a new idea faces; the idea might be perfectly awesome, but still it might take just a bit more to develop than the startup is able to hold on; leaving the big win for someone else who launches later on or for someone who can manage to hold on that bit longer.
  • Risky Business: Well every business has a percentage of risk built in to it, some more than others, and depending on how much research and planning went into it; In the end it’s really up to the investor to decide how much risk he is willing to take.

Read the full post here: Why Startups Fail

Jmami, Online Community For Moroccans Around The World

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jmami logoJmami, is a Moroccan service that uses the phrase “Moroccans of the world” as its tagline, and just that mainly explains what the website’s goal is, to create a central community place for Moroccans from all over the world to connect with old friends, make new ones, as well as write and share content with each other.

The service has all the major social networking features we can expect; enabling users to invite their old friends, search for and make new friends, establish connections with them, message them through an internal messaging system, and create private or public groups around their shared interests, where they can launch different discussions.

Jmami also provides a light integrated blog platform giving its users the possibility to publish their thoughts and news, share and start discussions around them.

Another feature is the event agenda, where users can post and promote events that might be of interest to Moroccans around the world.

jmami screenshot

The service is available in 3 languages: Arabic (Moroccan accent), French and English.

The website is mainly targeted at Moroccan youth inside and outside of Morocco, and the fresh design shows this clearly, even though it’s not limited to just them, and registration and use of the service should be just as easy and simple for older generations.

# Jmami

Ikbis Launches It’s First Comedy Channel “Ground Zero”

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IkbisWhen Ikbis, the popular video and photo sharing service, launched their new design last week, there was a little teaser ad showing two primitives and a mosquito, promising a new surprise soon, without any details or hints.

Well now we know what that surprise is, it’s a new comedy channel called “Ground Zero” that was just launched on Ikbis yesterday.

Ground Zero is an online show created by Mike Derderian and Mohammed Jaradat.

The show has three segments:

1- Doblage (Dubbing): where they choose a scene from a classic movie and record a new funny conversation over it.
2- Lost in translation: which makes fun of translations with “Professor Eshmael”.
3- Pirates of down town Amman: which will take you on a trip to see the newest pirated DVDs in town.

Ikbis Ground Zero

# Ground Zero

Logta, Online Service To Help Find Best Deals & Promotions

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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

MSN Arabia Partners With Propertyfinder For Real Estate Listings

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Propertyfinder.ae, the popular UAE real estate web portal, and MSN Arabia have announced a new deal today, maximizing propertyfinder.ae’s exposure for real estate agents using their service and their listed properties.

The deal gives Propertyfinder.ae access to MSN Arabia’s large user base, a potential regional audience of more than 10 million unique visitors a month.

On the other hand, the added-value for MSN Arabia is the ability to offer their visitors quality real estate listings, to satisfy the demand for that kind of information by users, as property markets boom throughout the Arab region.

Propertyfinder - MSN ArabiaMSN Arabia is the only network with an international presence covering the Arab region, with a dual-language interface catering to all Arabic and English speakers in the MENA region. MSN Arabia is managed by LINKonLINE, a subsidiary of Orascom’s LINKdotNET.

Propertyfinder.ae specialises in real estate and investment in Dubai and offers agents and developers access to a potential global audience of 9 million unique visitors. Propertyfinder.ae is a subsidiary of REA Group and forms part of the global online real estate advertising company.

# MSN Arabia, Propertyfinder.ae

# Source: BI-ME

Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Competition (3rd Edition)

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QRNEC LogoThe Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Competition (QRNEC), which is in its 3rd year now, was created to be a platform to increase the interest of Jordanian entrepreneurs and innovators in designing a path to achieve their dreams.

It strives to advocate entrepreneurial skills as students and mature entrepreneurs coalesce their knowledge with their resources along with their competitive drive to create a business plan that is both practical and innovative.

The competition is now open for all Jordanian entrepreneurs, whether they are a university student or an aspiring entrepreneur, to enter for the opportunity to compete for US $70,000 in cash awards. They can submit their innovative business ideas in any discipline of science and technology to the Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship (QRCE) through its website www.qrce.org.

The vision of QRNEC is to evolve and expand into a comprehensive entrepreneurship enabler, involved in fostering creativity, incubating viable concepts, and facilitating the success of entrepreneurial ventures to a level that affects the cultural orientation of the Jordanian community.

The additional interesting points for this year are that Google is offering an additional cash award for the best online business plan, and that KADDB is offering another cash award for the best business plan for defense and security.

# Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Competition (QRNEC)

Is trust an issue for you when it comes to Arab startups? [Poll]

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A new poll has gone live on StartUpArabia, you can find it on the first sidebar on the right or vote straight from this post.

This poll addresses the question of trust, and it asks:
Is trust an issue for you when it comes to Arab startups?

Is is an issue for you? Do you think trust is a bigger issue when it comes to Arab startups? Do you as a user need a bit more assurance from Arab startups for them to earn your trust?

What do you think?

Feel free to further expand on your response in the comments section of this post.

FotoArabia, Arab Stock Photography & Image Service

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FotoArabiaFotoArabia is a new Arab stock photography service dedicated to the Arab community of photographers and artists; that was just launched a few days ago from Kuwait.

The service aims to provide an online place for Arab photographers and artists around the world to submit their high-quality material and put it up for sale. On the other hand, FotoArabia will work on attracting interested buyers from the photo and graphic design market segments from around the world; such as newspapers, magazines, web publishers, and others to search for and buy photographs, illustrations and other artistic material through the website.

Buyers can purchase Download Credits from the FotoArabia store, with credits starting as low as $1 each, with a minimum purchase of $13; these credits are valid for one full year from the date of purchase and become less expensive when bought in bulk. Buyers can use these credits to download images for 1, 3, 5, or 10 credits, for x-small, small, medium, and large files respectively. Even larger resolution images are available, for 15 and 20 credits and video clips are available for 10 to 50 credits.

All uploaded files are inspected for quality and legal integrity before becoming available for sale; and the revenue generated from the sales is divided between the contributor and FotoArabia.

FotoArabia Screenshot

FotoArabia have a limited time introductory offer for the first 50 photographers and contributors. These first 50 contributors will be making 80% of the sale of their photos and/or art work for their first year, after that the earned royalties will be 50%.

The service was developed by Generation Four Company LLC, a Kuwaiti technology company.

# FotoArabia

Do Arab Startups Really Need An Arabic Interface? [Poll Results]

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In the latest poll on StartUpArabia, the question to the readers was:
Do Arab startups really need an Arabic interface?

The result of reader voting came out as follows:

– 41% of readers thought it was preferable for the website to have an Arabic interface.
– 32% of the readers thought it was a must.
– 20% of them thought that it wasn’t necessary.
– The remaining 8% said they didn’t really care

Personally, I’m somewhere between ‘preferable’ and ‘must’, shifting between the two depending on the case, I guess.

A big percentage of internet users in the Arab world are most comfortable using the Arabic language online, instead of English or French, and deciding not to launch an Arabic interface for a website directly alienates those people, cutting out an important part of the service’s possible target audience, which can’t really be good business-wise no matter how you look at it.