Yamli, the startup that specializes in smart transliteration technologies for the Arabic Web, just unveiled its new official iOS application for the iPhone and the iPad, bringing their technology to their users while on the move on their mobile phones and tablets.
The app is priced at $2.99, works mostly offline, and is pretty straight-forward in how it works. Once a user clicks on the purple Yamli logo, a text area opens up for the user to type in the text they want transliterated into Arabic; this text can then be sent as an SMS or an email message.
Using the app too, users can perform web searches, as well as specific searches on YouTube, iTunes and Maps. Obviously the search options would require an internet connection to work. Read More
Yamli, the company that brought us products like the Smart Arabic Keyboard and Yamli Arabic Search, is releasing an enterprise version of the technology being used for Yamli Arabic Search in the form of a product they’re calling Arabic Query Expander.
The new service provides a solution for search and data normalization problems when it comes to the Arabic language, by analyzing and identifying all the English and Arabic script variations of an Arabic word, increasing the probability to find matches for searches.
Yamli gives examples like the name “Mohamed Mansour” having at least 80 ways of spelling it, “Mohamed Saleh Abdallah” having 7000 variations, “Jumeirah” having 51 spellings, and the song “Habibi Ya Nor El Ein” having 1207 spelling variations; to make the case for the utility of this tool and how much it can help in solving this problem.
Microsoft has gone on and launched a new application called ‘Maren‘, making its entrance into the Arabic transliteration space.
Microsoft Maren was developed to be a Windows extension that allows you to type Arabic in Roman characters (Romanized Arabic, Arabizi, Arabish or Franco-Arabic) and have it converted on the fly to Arabic script. Maren integrates seamlessly with Windows and works in most Windows applications and websites.
Users around the Arab world widely use romanized Arabic in instant messaging and on social networking sites, and Microsoft’s Maren is following in the footsteps of Yamli and Google’s Ta3reeb in offering these users the possibility to have whatever text they type converted into Arabic.
Up to this point Yamli has been the user favorite in the region, with a number of portals integrating their service, a Firefox toolbar extension that many people were glad to get and even an unofficial Yamli extension called Arabzi that exists for MSN Messenger. Yamli also uses its transliteration technology as a basis to enrich and provide better Arabic search online.
What Microsoft’s Maren offers as a plus is the possibility to integrate the transliteration technology into Windows, and use it everywhere, not just online through a browser; so basically users can use Maren while typing in a Word document or on Instant Messenger or any other Windows application.
The fact that the tool is installed on the user’s machine also means that the solution is available to the user even when he’s offline, and it could even be a bit faster than other solutions that have to send requests back to a server.
It should be really interesting to see how much user adoption Maren will get, but however that works out, this is quite a good effort from Microsoft.
Microsoft Maren was developed by the Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center (CMIC), a Microsoft group representing the company interest in applied research and development initiatives in the Middle East and Africa.
Update: I talked to Habib Haddad, co-founder of Yamli, a bit after the publication of this story, and he commented “I guess big companies recognize a good idea when they see it, as an Arabic startup we are flattered to see this happen. As you know our focus has always been on the user so stay tuned for new releases from Yamli.”
Yamli, the startup that specializes in smart transliteration technologies for the Arabic Web, just unveiled its new official Firefox browser toolbar.
A Yamli toolbar or extension has been a user request for quite a while now, and Yamli has answered with this toolbar that extends the possibility to use Yamli’s Arabic transliteration technology to any site or web application a user might need to type in Arabic in. By just going to the website and clicking on the ‘Enable Yamli’ button in the toolbox, all text input areas get the Yamli functionality activated for them. Another option is to just right click on the textbox you need to use and activate Yamli for just it.
Basic text input boxes and areas as well as rich text editors are supported and can be made to use Yamli with the toolbar.
The toolbar also includes a search box, enabling users to launch searches on the web using Yamli’s smart Arabic search functionality; Search is available for Web, Images,Video, News and Wikipedia.
Another interesting feature available through the toolbar is the possibility to send updates to Twitter and Facebook directly, using Yamli’s transliteration to write the updates in Arabic.
The toolbar is currently in beta, and is still being tweaked with more features to be added with the final release. It’s available for Firefox only at the time being; but an Internet Explorer version should follow soon.
On another note, other than the official toolbar by Yamli, the Arab Techies Code Sprint 2009, that was held in Cairo, has resulted in a couple of unofficial Yamli related projects: A Yamli bookmarklet that can be added as a link in any browser and used to yamlify any text inputs on a page, as well as a Firefox extension that automatically yamlifies all text inputs on visited web pages. All this possible through Yamli’s open API.
The event aims to open an interactive discussion with a number of interesting international speakers who will speak about several important topics in Entrepreneurship, Business and Management.
The topics to be discussed are the following:
BlueOcean Strategy: How to transform a new business idea into a winning strategy
Speaker: Mohammad Ajlouni (Managing Director, MDS)
Identifying your Strengths as an Entrepreneur
Speaker: Ronald Evans (CEO, SIMA International)
Idea to Reality
Speaker: Habib Haddad (Co-Founder, Yamli.com)
Innovation in Open Networks – Perspectives from an Internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist
Speaker: Joi Ito (CEO, Creative Commons)
Cross-cultural business issues as companies expand internationally
Speaker: Doug Christgau (Director, Cross-Cultural Development)
The current U.S. and world financial market situation.
Speaker: Larry Hutchins (Certified Financial Planner, Wachovia)
Insights into family-owned companies in regards to economic and human resource issues.
Speaker: John Carmon (President, Carmon Community Funeral Homes)
The event is free of charge. For registration or any further information, you can check out their website http://www.qrce.org/eweek or call +962 6 515 4892.
If you’re registered to the StartUpArabia Events iCal feed in your calendar software, the event should already be showing up in your calendar for the days of the event.
The World Economic Forum has announced the Young Global Leaders (YGL) 2009. The honour, bestowed each year by the Forum, recognizes and acknowledges between 200 and 300 outstanding young leaders from around the world for their professional accomplishments, commitment to society and potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world.
The Forum has nominated Young Global Leaders from 71 countries, including business leaders, as well as leaders from government, academia, non-profit organizations, media and society. The new class represents all regions: East Asia (54), Europe (58), the Middle East and North Africa (12), North America (45), South Asia (24), sub-Saharan Africa (20) and Latin America (17). For a list of YGLs honoured in 2009, click here.
On this list we find one of our very own: Habib Haddad, co-founder of Yamli. Habib is behind the original idea behind Yamli, and today drives Yamli’s vision of empowering the Arabic language and users on the web. His responsibilities span from product strategy and design to business development.
Habib often speaks about early stage development and entrepreneurship, and has spoken at venues such as the Harvard Business School, Boston College and the American University of Beirut. He currently sits on the advisory board of Meedan, a non-profit startup that aims to enable cross-cultural dialogs online.
Commenting on the nomination, Habib said: “I am honored to be selected as a Young Global Leader and I am eager to engage with the YGL community. I have always been passionate about entrepreneurship and hope that along with fellow YGLs, we will be able to help foster entrepreneurship activities in the Middle East and North Africa. I am also excited to continue to promote the Arabic web, which I believe has a bright future lying ahead.”
Drawn from a pool of almost 5,000 candidates, the Young Global Leaders 2009 were chosen by a selection committee, chaired by H.M. Queen Rania Al Abdullah of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, comprising 31 eminent international media leaders.
The 2009 honourees will become part of the broader Forum of Young Global Leaders that currently comprises 480 outstanding individuals. The YGLs convene at biannual summits, as well as Forum events and meetings throughout the year, and collaborate on initiatives to tackle some of the key challenges of our generation.
Big congratulations to Habib Haddad for this honour; it’s very well deserved.
Yamli, the startup based in Cambridge, MA, that is funded by ex-Googlers, and that specializes in smart transliteration technologies for the Arabic Web, just unveiled its new search engine that allows users to easily search Arabic content in all its forms.
Various studies show that transliterated Arabic content is ubiquitous due to a large portion of Arabic internet users choosing to write Arabic phonetically using Latin characters in an ad-hoc and informal fashion. Yamli automatically expands Arabic keyword searches to include all of their transliterated variations and returns results for both Arabic and transliterated content. This feature is a breakthrough for Arabic Internet users who are frustrated with having to repeatedly search different variations of their query when searching for music, news or videos.
According to co-founder Habib Haddad, “The challenge with Arabic content is that it’s hard to reach all of it. For example, a simple search for ‘Umm Khulthum’, the famous Egyptian signer, has over 90 transliterated variations – Om Kaltoum, Oum Kalsoum, etc…. Yamli will take an Arabic search term and expand it to include all transliterated variations, returning the maximum number of relevant search results, regardless of whether Arabic or Latin characters were used to write the content. Prior to Yamli, that kind of search was not possible,” concluded Haddad.
Yamli comes with a rich and easy-to-use interface that has been optimized for slower connections. Under the hood, Yamli uses APIs from proven search engines such as Google, Microsoft Live Search and YouTube. Yamli Search also includes Yamli’s award-winning Editor that allows users to type Arabic without an Arabic keyboard.
According to one of the early ex-Googlers Georges Harik, “The web is universal, and speakers of every language should get equal access to information. Yamli continues to do a great job of extending access to information to all Arabic speakers,” concluded Georges Harik who is also an investor in Yamli.
Yamli’s new search engine was first announced at Harvard Business School’s MENA Conference on Saturday, December 4th during a panel discussion on Entrepreneurship in the MENA region in which co-founder Habib Haddad participated.
StartUpArabia got access to test Yamli’s new expanded search features early on, and got to follow the development of the product up until today’s official release; and what truly stands out is how helpful and time-saving the service really is, how simply it is integrated in the interface, and how fast it all actually works.
eSpace, the Egyptian software company behind services like meOwns and weNear, has been a supporter of the advancement of Arabic content on the web, through contributing to Wikimania2008 in Egypt and other various activities, in their attempt to realize the true potential of one of the World’s most spoken languages.
The company is currently taking another step to try to promote and simplify the use of the Arabic language on the internet, and that is by integrating Yamli‘s award-winning transliteration technology, that enables users to type Arabic using Latin characters by converting their words in real time into Arabic text, as a rich text formatting option in a number of the most prominent and popular online text editors, such as FCKeditor, TinyMice editor, as well as in popular forum software like VBulletin and PHPBB.
By bringing Yamli’s technology directly into the tools people are using to write on the web, publishing Arabic language content becomes even easier and more straight-forward, eliminating the fuss of having to keep going back and forth between the Yamli website and whatever other website or tool is being used to write and publish content.
It’s great to see Arab startups and companies working with each other’s technologies and tools to advance a common goal like promoting Arabic content on the web. I certainly wish we see more efforts like this in the future.
Yamli has gone on and released a new iGoogle gadget that allows easy access to its award-winning Arabic transliteration technology directly from users’ customized Google homepages.
Yamli’s Smart Arabic Keyboard allows users to type Arabic using Latin characters by converting their words in real time into Arabic text.
The gadget integrates the functionality to convert words from Latin characters to Arabic in order to launch Arabic searches on Google, or to write words and paragraphs that can then be copied and used elsewhere.
To add the Yamli gadget to your iGoogle homepage, you can use the following link: Add Yamli iGoogle Gadget.
Google recently launched a new Arabic transliteration tool, that allows users to use their Latin keyboards to type in Arabic text. This move puts them in direct competition with Yamli, a small startup that has proven very popular and generated great feedback; simulating a modern day tech reenactment of David vs. Goliath.
This isn’t the first time Google works on transliteration; they actually launched transliteration services from English to various Indian languages like Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu on Blogger and through Google Talk bots over the past year.
Now with Google’s push in the Arab world, they’ve gone on and launched ‘Google Ta3reeb’ (Google Arabization). The new tool was one of the services visible at the Google booth at Gitex Technology Week in Dubai.
From my initial usage of the tool, and comparing it to Yamli; Yamli stills seems to maintain the advantage, by being faster and offering more relevant transliterations and word suggestions. But I expect the Google tool will get better with time, as more people use it, and its inner workings optimised.
According to an anonymous tip that was picked up by TechCrunch, actually searching for ‘Yamli’ or ‘Yamli.com’ on Google’s Arabic versions like (Google.ae or Google.com.sa), users get a search results page that prominently displays ads for Google’s competing service alongside the search results, which suggests that Google is using Yamli’s name to target ads for their new service.
I’ve contacted both Yamli and Google for their comments on this story and should be following up with their responses pretty soon.
Update 1: Google has gone on and retracted the above mentioned ads.
Update 2: Responding to my enquiry about the story, Yamli co-founder Habib Haddad said “We are happy to see Google serving the Arabic web and we welcome healthy competition. Our primary focus as a young Arabic startup is and will remain on innovations for the Arabic user for whom we think we can continue to make significant contributions.”
Yamli, the startup that specializes in smart transliteration technologies for the Arabic Web, just unveiled its new official iOS application for the iPhone and the iPad, bringing their technology to their users while on the move on their mobile phones and tablets.
On this list we find one of our very own: 
