Tag: Social Networking

Mohammad Bin Rashid Establishment For Young Business Leaders To Create Business Networking Portal With Tejari

MMM

Mohammed Bin Rashid Establishment For Young Business LeadersThe Mohammad Bin Rashid Establishment for Young Business Leaders has signed an agreement to create a new online portal for small and medium enterprise (SME) members, made possible through the partnership of Tejari, a Middle Eastern e-commerce network, considered to be the hub of online trade for the region and emerging markets across the world.

The partnership will enable SME to develop a new online business community for members, enabling them to network within their industry, creating business opportunities while giving their businesses international exposure.

The portal will create an extensive online business community where members can find trade opportunities with other SME members and the 190,000 members of Tejari’s network. Members will be able to create online profiles to showcase their products and services on a global scale.

Tejari will create this portal based on SME’s requirements using the most innovative e-business technologies to help trading communities carry out business matchmaking via the internet.

Tejari will additionally offer support services to members to ensure proficient use of the portal and to introduce other e-commerce opportunities.

# More: Zawya

Tvosz.com, New Egyptian Video Sharing Service

MMM 6 Comments

TvoszTvosz.com is a new Cairo-based online video sharing service, which aims to be an alternative video sharing website for Egyptian and global internet users alike, and a place for family-friendly content.

Anyone can have access to upload, download, view, share and experience everything from short clips captured on mobile phones all the way up to full-length, high-definition feature films.
However all videos are submitted for approval by the website’s team to ensure that all posted content is family-friendly non-offensive material.

Every video available on Tvosz is compatible with over all major manufacturers’ consumer electronics devices, making it easy to play back videos anytime anywhere.

Videos can be made public to be shared with the whole world or private for sharing with family and friends, whom they can invite and connect with through the websites social networking functionalities.

Finding interesting videos to watch is really easy by navigating through the several channels and groups; surfing through the different tags; checking out the latest, most watched, top rated or some randomly chosen videos; and of course also by searching the website using the built-in search engine.

Users can leave comments on videos, rate them, add them to their favorites, and even download them to their desktops, which is something other video sharing services don’t usually natively offer.
Users can also always go back and find videos they’ve watched by visiting their online playlists.

Tvosz screenshot

In the same spirit of sharing, videos from Tvosz can be directly posted to users’ favorite social bookmarking services; or embedded in users’ blogs or homepages easily using a provided bit of code.

The website is very well designed, organized and really easy to use. The interface is in English only for the time being.

Tvosz was launched from Cairo, Egypt, by Ahmed Samir, Osama Awwad and A. Abdel Aziz.

# Tvosz.com

Jmami, Online Community For Moroccans Around The World

MMM 2 Comments

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

MBC iMatter, First Social Networking Site For Arab Women

MMM 1 Comment

Saudi media giant MBC Group have made a new online move, this time aimed at Arab women, in the form of a new social networking site for Arab women, called iMatter, that was just launched a couple of days ago.

iMatter invites Arab women to join an online community tailored to their needs and that takes their specific cultural needs into consideration.

Like all the other social networking sites out there, you get to search for and befriend other users, join specific groups and events, post photos, vote on polls and discuss different topics in the forum section.
There is also an internal mail system built into the service, as well as a personal blog/journal feature.

The site isn’t just a social networking site though, as it also aims at empowering Arab women through their iMatter Achievements Awards program, in which women get to submit their entries on or more of four separate award categories: Art Matters (Pieces of art, poems, …), Community Matters (Outline of how to make a difference in community), New Media Matters (Ideas on how to maximize benefit of new media) and Entrepreneurial Matters (Business plan); and then get the chance to win prizes that could change their lives.
All entries should be themed around “Culture” or “Education”, or a collaboration of both.

An online magazine featuring articles on women-related issues is also part of the service.

The site was designed and built for MBC by UK agency Leftfield Digital.

Along with previously reviewed Twffaha, this new service signals a push from Arab businesses and entrepreneurs towards women-oriented services, in an attempt to empower Arab women, and help them reach their full potentials in community.
Both are great initiatives, and hopefully we’ll see more soon.

MBC2 Movies In Motion, Social Networking & Video Sharing

MMM

Media companies in the Arab world don’t usually have much more than a standard website/portal with which they mark their presence and just showcase their programme alongside a bit of content here and there; but in one of the Arab world’s first moves of its kind, the Saudi media giant MBC Group, which is based in Dubai Media City, has gone on and launched a major online service called ‘Movies In Motion‘ in association with the Dubai International Film Festival.

The service is available in English and Arabic and is really well built and pretty rich in features, mainly revolving around social-networking and video-sharing.

Users get to put together their network of friends; join or create groups around which communities can be built; they can list their favorite Movies, Actors and Directors; post articles, gossip, news, …etc; have access to reviews of movies playing on the MBC channels and the possibility to comment on them.

Another important part of the service is the video sharing one, where users get to upload and rate their own short movies, that could earn them prizes like the Nokia N95 and get their short movies played on MBC2; another possibility is to play around with current MBC on air promotions creating their own mashups.

Read More

Watwet, Social Networking And Mini-Blogging Platform

MMM 12 Comments

Watwet is a new Arab social networking and mini-blogging platform, quite similar to Twitter, that was launched in December 2007 by the TootCorp team, who brought us services like the photo and video sharing site Ikbis and blog aggregator Toot in the past.

The concept is very simple: Using watwet you can post short messages (watwets) updating your status, through which you can stay in touch with your friends. These watwets can be posted from the web or by sending SMS to Watwet. These updates are then shown to your friends on the Watwet website, as well as sent to them by email and SMS.
You can also send your friend direct private messages too or whispers (Washwishes) as they call them.

Watwet doesn’t stop at short text messages though, it goes even further supporting photos, that can also be uploaded through the web interface or sent by MMS.

The website is well designed, pretty straight-forward and easy to use, and work is currently underway on an AIR based desktop client. The only two points I found a bit inconvenient are that users’ timelines, their lists of updates, are only accessible to registered users even if they choose for them to be public in their privacy settings; and the public timeline (updates from all users) can only be seen if you logout.

The service is available in both English and Arabic, and is open to users from all over the world, although the SMS service is only available in Jordan for Zain subscribers now. Not sure when they’ll be expanding to other operators around the Arab world.

Something I think Watwet should do though is open up their system a bit, either through an API or through modules they develop themselves to enable users both to pull information from Watwet onto their own blogs/websites/services and push updates from other services to Watwet automatically.

For more on how to use Watwet, you can take the Watwet tour.

# Watwet

LEBConnection, Access To Lebanese People And Projects

MMM

Newly launched LEBConnection is a business oriented social networking service that caters directly to the specific everyday needs of the Lebanese people around the world: finding jobs, promoting people and projects in the Lebanese community and finding housing.

The project started a year and a half ago while co-founder Patrick Sayegh was staying in Paris and various parts of France, and was exposed to the difficulties many Lebanese faced in getting jobs in French companies even if they were qualified for them.

So the idea was to create a platform that enabled Lebanese people all around the world to tap into their extended network of contacts to identify connections who can help them take advantage of certain business opportunities they wouldn’t have access to otherwise.

LEBConnection provides an intuitive interface that enables users to easily build their network of connections through importing contacts from other accounts as well as easily sending invitations to their friends and acquaintances. Information on the site can be accessed in many ways, and the search engines have broad or narrow searches to look for people or jobs according to specific criteria.

On one hand, businesses and people can post ads on the website, to their network of connections as well as to the whole community, about their open job opportunities, projects and deals; and on the other hand, users can search for these opportunities as well as contacts they have in certain companies and places who can help them in getting jobs, deals or resources.

An internal email system LEB mail is built into the system to enable the sharing of information between contacts.

The service is a free one, and the interface is in English and French for the time being with the possibility of adding Spanish as its next language.

# LEBConnection