Knowledge – StartUpArabia

Loomni, A Knowledge Sharing & Educational Platform

June 8, 2010June 8, 2010 MMM 2 Comments

Loomni is a new service that’s being launched today for the region that promises to reshape and transform continuing education, making it more accessible and affordable to everyone.

The problem Loomni is trying to solve is that of education outside of public schools and universities being out of reach for most people as it takes the form of limited, relatively long and expensive courses offered up by training institutions.

The idea of the startup is to fill the existing gap and provide learning opportunities for people who can’t afford expensive courses, nor have the time to spend locked up for long hours in a training venue somewhere. It aims to do this by providing focused practical courses delivered in 90 minutes, at a fraction of the price available in the market.

To be able to provide these lower prices, Loomni goes after another profile of instructors, mainly experts on certain fields who can share their knowledge and experience, educating people about their areas of expertise, but also helping market themselves and their services along the way.

Kngine Introduces Statistics Platform Called Kngine Stats

May 8, 2010May 8, 2010 MMM 1 Comment

Kngine, the semantic web search and question answering engine, that was previously reviewed here, recently launched a brand new statistics platform called Kngine Stats.

Kngine Stats goes out and collects, organizes, and indexes a large number of records of statistical data from resources such as: the UN, the World bank, the CIA Factbook, and a number of other important sources.

What it does with that collected data is crunch it together to come up with different statistics that users can tap into by selecting a certain topic, viewing the statistics for it and even filtering them; in hopes of making these large datasets easier to explore, visualize and share.

Google Launches Knol In Arabic As One Of The First Languages Worldwide

August 26, 2008August 26, 2008 MMM

Google has just launched their service Knol in Arabic, as one of the first languages supported by the language worldwide. Knol is a new service from Google that in some way competes with Wikipedia, it is a free tool encouraging people to write articles about the things they know about most, and that they’re considered experts on.

So whatever their area of expertise, the service lets users write, share and participate in a community of information and knowledge.

Arabic is one of the first languages that Knol is launching globally, showcasing the importance of the Arabic market to Google.

Mohammad Gawdat, Managing Director for Emerging Markets explained: “The Arab region is a high priority for us at Google and we are excited to provide more tools in local language such as Blogger and now Knol.”

For more information and to start writing on your subject of expertise in Arabic or English, or explore existing knols (articles and posts), all you have to do is visit the website at: knol.google.com

‘The internet is huge, but still a lot of expert knowledge remains untapped,’ said Ahmed Gaballah, spokesman for Google. ‘Knol provides a way for people to share their expertise with others–and get credit for their contribution. In the same way that books have authors’ names right on the cover, knols have authors’ names–and links to their other articles–right there on the page.’

Knols are a great way to tackle the lack of Arabic content on the internet. ‘We are delighted that beyond providing a forum for Arabic speakers to share their knowledge, readers can now access information they are searching for that they otherwise could not get in Arabic,’ Gaballah stated.

Knols allow authors to include references, link to additional information, and interact with readers. And readers can easily submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol.

Questler Online Learning Network Launches New Version

July 9, 2008July 9, 2008 MMM

Questler, the online learning and knowledge network, just launched a new version of their service today, with a sleeker looking logo and a new navigation system.

This new version brings a number of changes beyond the design, like:

Channels: New channel pages have been introduced for each user, where you can browse all their contributions, whether quests or comments, per their learning interests or all tags of their posts. Users can go to their settings to customize the design of their own channel.
They plan to launch specialized channels from companies and organizations that have quests to share soon.

RSS Feeds: It is now possible to subscribe to Questler’s everyone feed, as well as to RSS feeds for any specific user channel. RSS feeds are also available for tags and keyword searches, enabling you to follow topics of interest to you.

Extra Tagging: Now everyone can add more tags to any quest when they post a comment on it, this way other users will be able to filter through the Quest View page to see their comments per tags they’ve added.

Quest creation from a comment: Users can now post a comment on a certain a quest as a new Quest; the two will be linked and can be viewed in the Related Quests tab.

Related Quests: When viewing a quest’s details, all related quests will be listed on the same page, enabling interested users to further explore the topic. Recent quests as well as latest quests by the same user are also available now.

Home/Dashboard: To make posting quests easier, it is no longer necessary to go to the quest page to post, it can be done directly from the home page. A new dashboard also helps browse through the latest conversations quickly.

Another detail worth mentioning is that the Beta moniker has been dropped from this version, which does feel more mature as an online service, more organized and better rounded at the corners.

# Questler

Questler, Online Learning And Knowledge Sharing Network

April 10, 2008April 10, 2008 MMM 3 Comments

Questler is a new online service that was launched into public beta a few months ago and which has an interesting social networking approach to acquiring and sharing knowledge online.

The idea of the website stems from the belief that everyone is a learner, seeking to know more about certain topics of interest to them, and that a free-space interactive approach between different individuals is the best way to learn, share knowledge and collaboratively create ideas.

So in other words, the goal is to try to tap into the collective knowledge of the crowd to acquire and share knowledge.

Questler users can put together a learning network by inviting and constructing a list of their contacts, as well as finding other individuals who share their same interests on the site.

Together they can use the service to start conversations about those topics and engage in knowledge sharing through posting their quests and discoveries on different subjects.

The interface is really simple and clear; well designed; well organized and straight to the point. I really like their simple logo and visual identity too.
It’s in English only for the time being; no work on if they’ll be adding Arabic soon.

It’s a really interesting approach and service, worth checking out for your quest for knowledge online.