Tn-Planet

duShare is a simple P2P direct file transfer service that aims to make the act of sending files between people as easy and effective as possible.

The service enables users to send files of unlimited size to one another though the system, and without having to go through uploading the file to a central server in the process. File transfers are handled through a peer to peer, secure direct transfer connection between the sender and the receiver.

Also as connections are direct between users and don’t go through any central server, files and chats aren’t monitored or viewed by duShare, which gives users a bit of extra privacy.

Basically, the way it works is the sender goes to the site, clicks on the send a file button, choose the file they want to send, and then they get a code/url generated on the site to give to the receiver so they can start receiving the file. The receiver either uses the given code on the site by clicking on the claim a file button, or clicks on the direct link provided by the sender to start receiving the file. A secure connection is established between the two and the file starts transferring.

The sender can choose to further protect the transfer by setting a password for it that they can communicate to the receiver for use when they claim the file.

While the file transfers, the service provides the sender and receiver with an integrated chat window, with a private session open between them; which should come in handy to discuss the file being sent, work that needs to be done around it, hints to help use or read the file …etc.

The service is quite an interesting one, and should come in handy especially for bigger file transfers in shorter times. The interface is pretty simple, slick and straightforward; and the fact that the site doesn’t require registration means users can start sending files easily right away.

duShare is a service of DuLeaf, a company that was founded in July 2010 and is based in Dubai Silicon Oasis in Dubai, UAE.

Cobone is a new startup that is looking at using the power of group purchasing in order to offer its users the best deals, allowing them to save on the things they want.

Cobone aims to offer online shoppers in the Middle East region one deal everyday from every city’s best hotels, goods, services, meals, spas and more; with savings they say will start at 50%.

Shoppers are encouraged to invite friends, colleagues and family to join in on daily deals so as to increase their own chances of successfully making a purchase. Customers will also be given the flexibility to purchase coupons for themselves or their friends using a selection of online payment options, from credit cards to other options like CashU (another Jabbar company) and PayPal.

Cobone’s model is of course also of benefit to retailers too, as it helps them find new revenue streams and gain greater exposure for their products. The startup is also setting out to embrace new companies and support them by generating buzz for their products online without any setup costs.

According to Paul Kenny, Cobone.com’s founder and CEO, Cobone has already signed deals with the top spas, restaurants and hotel chains in the UAE, where it will be launching its services first.

The company is majority owned by Jabbar Internet Group, the group of regional internet companies that emerged as a leader in the region after the Yahoo! acquisition of Maktoob in 2009.

Cobone is based in Dubai and, as previously mentioned, will be initially launching its service in the UAE, although its plans are to then then aggressively make its way into every major city across the Middle East and North Africa.

Cobone will have to compete with GoNabit in this space, who launched earlier this year, already provide deals for Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the UAE, and are preparing their expansion to provide deals in other cities in the region.

Otlob.com, the online food ordering service, is building on their success and experience, by making a new push into online shopping through their recently launched portal called Otlobmall.com.

Otlobmall.com allows users to shop online for a variety of products in different categories, including electronics, mobile phones, beauty products, sports, jewelry, apparel, books and magazines and gifts.

Purchased products are delivered directly to the purchaser’s home or designated delivery address and can be paid for either online or by cash on delivery.

The service is currently only available in Egypt, but could potentially expand around the region as it grows, as was the case with Otlob.com before it.

Otlobmall.com, just like Otlob, is another service owned and managed by LINKonLINE, an Orascom Telecom Holding company.

Dakwak is a new startup that was recently launched from Jordan that aims to provide a solution for website localization into 60+ languages.

The site makes it easy for webmasters to integrate Dakwak’s localization and translation service right into their sites; instantly providing their visitors access to content in the language they’re most comfortable reading in.

All it takes is a bit of javascript code that needs to be integrated into the site pages, and to flag the content that needs to be localized/translated; and the rest is taken care of by Dakwak.

The service automatically detects the country a visitor is connecting from based on their IP address, and changes the language of the content to the visitor’s language, switching all the text without breaking the design of the page; unless the visitor chooses to switch back to the base language.

As for how the localization and translation happens exactly; it’s a combination of two approaches:

Crowd-sourced translation: Just like the approach followed by Facebook and a number of other sites, the site owner can rely on the user community to help translate the site to other languages. Of course, the site owner can choose who they want to be able to contribute and can moderate the community translations.

Automatic machine translation: Dakwak uses both the Google language and translation APIs as well as its own translation engine to provide automatic machine translations of content that hasn’t been translated by the community yet. The Dakwak translation engine is also built to learn better translations as site owners and community members get more involved in translation.

Webmasters also get to choose which languages to provide on their sites through their site settings on Dakwak.

People interested in contributing to translations and localizations of sites can also find a list of all open projects on the site itself, where they can vote on existing translations, flag the ones they think are inappropriate, or suggest new ones.

Dakwak was launched from Amman, Jordan by Waheed Barghouthi; who counts among his previous projects the work he did on building Watwet, the Arabic micro-blogging platform.

Tadarrab.com is a new service that was launched from Jordan and that aims to be an internship portal / guide for the Arab world, linking companies and interns.

This is made possible through a platform that was built to enable companies to post and promote their available internship opportunities, and on the other hand make it easy for fresh graduates and students to find these opportunities and apply for them as interns.

The goal of the service is of course to try and help youth to find interesting internship opportunities in different companies, in order to start gathering work experience and begin paving their career path. It also helps companies open up their internship positions to a wider group of people enabling them to find and pick better candidates who might go on to become full time team members in the future.

Tadarrab.com is a product of Ideation Box, the same company that previously launched Nakhweh, the volunteer matching portal that was reviewed here. In fact, the need for this kind of service was identified while working with youth and students through the Nakhweh project.

Tadarrab.com’s basic internship posting services will be offered to all companies for free until the end of 2010. As for applying for these internship opportunities, they should always be for free.

Book Trader is a project that was launched by two students at the American University of Dubai, Alexander Fuchs and Jamal Al Bloushi. It’s a website that allows students to buy and sell their used textbooks, the idea being to enable students to save some money on books and make some money out of their used ones.

The website is only available within the AUD (American University of Dubai) campus for the time being, but the founders hope to be able to expand it to other universities and publicly for all students.

As is the case with other online trading services, students can go onto the site and add the books they have and want to sell, putting in all the details for them and how much they want to sell them for. On the other hand, users can search through the site for books they have to buy for their courses and find what available options exist, what their prices are and pick what they need..

When a book is to be sold, the buyer and seller’s contact information is exchanged and the transactions is carried on offline.

The following is the Book Trader presentation at DemoCamp Dubai last week.

Monaqasat is an online tendering service that covers all middle eastern markets, and aims to be a central hub for all tendering activities, from sharing of documents to online bidding.

The idea is to enable users to manage their tendering and procurement process in an easy, efficient and secure way; catering to the needs of all types of institutions of all sizes and industries in the Middle East region.

Monaqasat aims at offering a full experience to the institutions using it, by implementing the complete tendering process, allowing its users to create tenders, invite stakeholders, submit and review tender documents, submit their online bids and automatically generate tender reports the instant the tender is completed, all from the confort of their own offices.

Monaqasat’s pricing structure and the way it generates revenue is setup as follows:

• Institutions using the service need to pay a yearly membership fee (AED 2000 / year) to access the majority of features of the system and be able to create and manage an unlimited amount of tenders.
• On the other hand, a tender access fee needs to be paid by participating bidders; this fee is defined as a percentage of the tender documents fees (30%).

The company recently announced that in just a year since the company launched in 2009, Monaqasat.com has attracted more than 500 companies to use the platform, and that project tenders worth over Dh1 billion ($272 million) have been managed and awarded through their online platform.

Companies using the system include banks, consultants and contractors such as ADCE (the engineering branch of ADCB), KEO, ACG, Helal & Partners, Syrconsult, Heberger Engineering, Dar Al Omran Abu Dhabi Architectural Engineering Consultancy and Al Meedan, Al Fara’a, Dhafra Intl Projects, Dhafir Development & Contracting LLC, Group 3, Q Construction LLC and Al Mezin General Contracting.

Monaqasat is a product of NuServ O.T.S. L.L.C., an Abu Dhabi based company, that was founded by Karim Helal and Vlad Romascanu.

Twtrtales is a new project that was launched out of the UAE, which aims to enable collaborative story writing through tweets.

Users would basically get to start a new hashtag for a story, and then they’d start contributing to writing the story one tweet at a time by appending that hashtag. On the site, readers would be able to say whether they like a specific contribution or not, and through that decide what goes into the story and what doesn’t.

So in essence, it’s a new kind of publishing platform that hopes to unite tweeters/writers of all kinds, to create and tell stories, which could be general stories or written for a specific cause.

All contributions are considered intellectual property of the contributors, but will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike license.

Twtrtales was founded and built by Kedar Iyer, Rami Kayyali and Nagranee Channa.

The team were at DemoCamp Dubai last week where they presented twtrtales. The presentation they gave can be found here, and the following is the video of their presentation.

[Sorry for this video being of lower quality than other ones from the event.]

AdGoing is a Saudi based company that bills itself as an online ad marketplace, aiming to make it easy to buy and sell advertising online, giving advertisers and publishers a platform to find each other.

The service supports both banner and text ads, as well as their variations. The system is mainly targeted at smaller publishers and bloggers who want to make money out of their advertising spaces, as well as advertisers who want to tap into the system for cheaper advertising rates and to have their ads go on a variety of sites and blogs.

Ads served up on the system are on a CPC (Cost per click) basis, and the system displays ads on a real time auction basis.

Now for people who know the online advertising space, something will seem very familiar when you view the AdGoing site, a bit too familiar in fact, and that’s normal as the site is basically a copy of AdBrite down to the last tiny detail. Even the text describing the service, how it works, the company and all is basically lifted off the AdBrite site.
The difference is that AdGoing also has an Arabic interface for it.

AdGoing was founded by Saleh Ali from Saudi Arabia and was one of the startups presenting at DemoCamp Dubai.
The deck that was used for the presentation can be found here, and below is the video of the presentation.

The Question Company is a UAE based company that provides a question and answer sms-based service, that enables users in the UAE to sms any question to them and get an answer back in a few minutes time.

The guidelines to use the service are really simple, you basically just think of a question, text it to the number 4644 and then wait for them to send you the reply back. The target on their side is to have replies sent out in less than 10 minutes, and they say their current average is 6.55 minutes.

The service is available for both Etisalat and Du subscribers and costs 3 Dirhams per question, answering all types of questions, but refraining from providing any legal, financial or medical advice.

SMS messages sent to their Dubai office go through a bespoke computer system, and are passed on to the first free person in the team, with six people available in the team at any time around the clock.
All asked questions are also saved in the system for future reference, even though the company aims to have a good level of personalization for every answer they send out.

The Question Company was launched at the beginning of April 2010, and is run by Andrew Meikle (Founder, Managing Partner) and James Oliver (Sales & Marketing Manager).

The Question Company was one of the startups presenting at the last DemoCamp Dubai, and the following is the video of their presentation.

O-Minds is a Jordan-based IT company with a focus on open source and web development. They’re active participants in the Drupal community, and work on advanced Adobe Flash development.

Ashraf Amayreh from O-Minds was the first startup person to present at the DemoCamp Dubai event that was held on June 23rd at Dubai Knowledge Village’s Auditorium, and the main focus of the demo and presentation was a tool called FlashFirebug that the company built to help Web and Flash developers.

FlashFirebug is inspired from the highly popular Firebug add-on for Firefox that enables developers to go under the hood of their web pages and debug them straight from the browser; However Firebug hits a wall when it comes to Flash, and that’s where FlashFirebug comes in.

FlashFirebug was built to go on and cover that specific area of weakness for Firebug, giving a similar set of debugging possibilities for Flash files that are embedded on web pages, and enabling developers to dig into the details of these Flash files and debug them on the fly right through the browser.

For the time being, for FlashFirebug to work there are a couple of lines of code that have to be included in the original Flash file before it is compiled into a swf file.

Another topic that was touched upon in the presentation is the use of Unity to create rich virtual 3D environments that can be accessed online through the web browser, and how the company is looking at diving more into this area to create rich experiences around places and more.

The following is a video of the O-Minds presentation at the DemoCamp event.

A bit over two years ago, I wrote a post about the Arab social bookmarking services out there, listing the existing options, how good they looked and how well they seemed to be doing, identifying the top ones at that time.

If anyone were to pull up that same list today and go check on each one of the sites, they’d find that some have shut down, others have become useless and spam ridden, some others have become pretty much inactive, and only one or two are still holding on. What’s clear though is that these social bookmarking services never caught on with Arab web users, and never achieved their founders’ initial dreams for them.

However there are some new kids on the block, who are here to take another stab at social bookmarking and facilitating content discovery for users in the Arab world.

The first of these services is Merkab, which was launched in March of this year, from Morocco, by the well-known Arab blogger Mohammed Sahli.

Merkab is geared towards helping users discover interesting new content by surfacing the best content that other users have found and submitted to the site, and that other users just like them liked and voted up.

The service combines elements from popular social bookmarking sites Digg and StumbleUpon; mixing Digg’s straightforward interface for listing content and letting users vote on it, with StumbleUpon’s toolbar enabling users to jump from site to site without having to go back to the main Merkab site each time.

Future plans for the service include growing the social aspect of it, allowing users to create a social graph on the site, and building more intelligence into the system to be able to surface content that would be interesting for the user based on their preferences, content they’ve viewed, liked and added to favorites, as well as what their friends on the site liked. That would be a key differentiator from other such services out there.

What the service is currently missing are bookmarklets that users can use to bookmark content directly from their browsers, and buttons that webmasters can integrate into their sites to make bookmarking their pages easier.

Another new service that has just been launched in the same space is a project called Thabbet, that was launched by a company called Exyria Studies that operates out of the UAE, Syria and Canada..

The service of course allows people to post and share content through the site and have other users rate it, pushing it either up or down in importance, and also making it easier for everyone to find the best and most interesting content.

The site also offers the ability for users to comment and create a conversation around each piece of content that is posted to the site, whether it be a link, photo, video, or topic of conversation.

Bookmarklets are offered for users to add to their browser’s link bar and automatically bookmark pages to Thabbet. Webmasters also have the option to integrate Thabbet buttons on their sites so viewers can directly bookmark using them.

Both of these new services are available in Arabic only, and aren’t too far from other social bookmarking sites in terms of concept and design, with Thabbet looking a lot more like digg though.

Now the thing is, whipping together a basic social bookmarking site isn’t all that complicated technically speaking, in fact a number of free software options such as pligg exist out there that anyone can setup and get running in a few minutes; the biggest challenge of all is actually building the active community around it to find and share interesting content that will draw users curious to find new content they can enjoy, which in turn will draw webmasters who want to get more traffic going their way, therefore giving the site more exposure and helping its community expand more.

Maybe the older services were too early for their time, maybe they didn’t give as much importance to community building as they should have, or maybe they were just unlucky; however, the fact they weren’t able to crack this nut doesn’t mean someone else won’t succeed at doing so.

It’ll be interesting to see how things go with both these services, or if things pick up with any of the old ones, how they go about growing it and making it relevant and interesting in this time when sharing seems to be moving away from such independent services and more towards general all-encompassing social networks like facebook.

Tweet to Email is a service that was recently launched from the UAE, that aims to make it easy for twitter users to share tweets of their choice directly with groups of their friends, who aren’t on twitter yet, through one of the oldest and most established sharing mediums online: email. The concept is very simple [...]

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GoNabit is a new online group-buying platform, that was recently launched for the region from Dubai, and that helps people come together to save and discover locally with some really interesting deals. Each day GoNabit features one huge deal per city; People sign-up online to receive the deals, and if they wish to participate in the [...]

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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 [...]

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