Tag: Araby

Jabbar Internet Group: The New Group & Its Companies

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JabbarIn the previous post about Yahoo! acquiring Maktoob, there was a brief paragraph about what will happen to the rest of the Maktoob Group. Here, we’ll get into more details about what’s next for the group and its companies.

A new group entity has been setup under the name ‘Jabbar Internet Group’, to group the remaining sister companies of Maktoob Group that weren’t part of the Yahoo! deal, which are: Souq.com, CashU, Tahadi, Ikoo and Araby. This group is owned by the current investors, including Tiger Capital (a hedge fund out of the United States), the founders and other investors.

Samih Toukan, one of the two original co-founders of Maktoob, will be heading the group as CEO and Chairman. He said that the group will be receiving a fresh capital injection of $20 million and will continue to expand aggressively.

As for the companies of Jabbar Internet Group, they are as follows:

Souq.comSouq.com: Headed by Ronaldo Mouchawar; Established in 2005, Souq.com has grown to become the largest e-commerce site in the Arab world covering Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, with plans to expand to new markets.
Site: www.souq.com

cashUCashU: Headed by Martin Waldenstrom; Launched in July 2002, cashU is a prepaid Internet payment service, through which users can purchase products and services online through cashU’s merchant base. The company has seen a spurt of growth over the past couple of years as a result of the spread of online gaming.
Site: www.cashu.com

TahadiTahadi: Headed by Steve Tsao; Established end of 2008, Tahadi was established as a publisher of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG’s) targeting the Middle East and North Africa region. Their first game is Arabic Ragnarok Online (ARO).
Site: www.tahadi.com

ikooIkoo: Headed by Isam Bayazidi; After Maktoob Group’s acquisition last month of leading MENA advertising network E-Marketing MENA (a company founded by ex-Maktoobian Khaled Jabasini in 2005), it has merged it’s Kalimat Text Advertising product into the company, and re-branded the lot as Ikoo.
Site: www.ikoo.com

ArabyAraby: This is the group’s search engine offering, providing advanced Arabic-language search capabilities, and a lot of the technology actually used to power search in different channels on Maktoob.
Site: www.araby.com

Jabbar Internet Group and its companies should continue to cooperate closely with Yahoo! Maktoob through commercial partnership agreements.

Araby Search Engine Launches Redesign And New Features

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ArabyArabic search engine “Araby“, which is a subsidiary of Maktoob Group, just launched a new design and a number of new functionalities and services to make it easier for users to reach what they’re looking for faster.

Among the new services is a thematic search feature, where the most used keywords on Araby are grouped and categorized by theme; these themes cover all tastes and interests, from sports, to technology, to Islam, to women’s issues, to art and celebrity news, to finance and business related topics, and more. The themes are displayed on the homepage with their most popular keywords, that are clickable, enabling users to directly access their search results.

Araby screenshot

Other new features include auto completion of search keywords as the user types in the terms he’s looking for, refreshing the list with suggested popular user searches with every typed letter.

Another new addition is the search help section that displays a number of searches that are related to the one entered by the user, to provide other options for them to take their search further and find results of interest to them.

New Version Of Kalimat Araby Advertising Platform

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The new version of the Kalimat Araby advertising platform, by Maktoob subsidiary Araby, will be released in private beta soon for current users of the platform, both advertisers and publishers, to try and get their feedback on the new system and integrate any important suggestions before its official launch.

Kalimat Araby was originally launched in June 2007; and the new system will bring a set of technical and functional enhancements.

While the old system was displaying keyword-related ads on search pages, the ads displayed on publisher’s content pages were pretty much random ads; with the new platform the displayed ads are contextual ones for both content and search pages.

Another feature being rolled out for Ad Agencies is the addition of a new special interface and an API to make their work buying ads and setting up campaigns for their customers easier.

From the publisher’s point of view, a set of new features are being introduced as well; from Ad filtering, to registering multiple sites under one account, to management of ad zones and more; making it easier for them to better serve and optimize ads from the Kalimat Araby network.

Technically speaking, the system will be able to scale a lot better with the changes that were made under the hood; and a very important and interesting addition for advertisers is a new click audit mechanism that should eliminate most common click fraud issues.

The new system’s interface will be in two languages now, both Arabic and English, instead of Arabic only for the old system; with the possibility to add more languages.

With Kalimat Araby maturing into a well-rounded product, I expect we’ll slowly start to see it spreading onto more publisher websites and being generalized on to the whole Maktoob network of web sites and properties, making it a sort of one place stop for placing ads on Maktoob’s content network, online services, and even newly launched Maktoob TV; as well as a list of other publishers’ web properties.

# Kalimat Araby