Tn-Planet

Nahel.com is an online shopping portal based out of Dubai, United Arab Emirates; that aims to become the biggest B2C online retailer in the region.

Nahel.com was founded by Saeid Hejazi, and was officially launched in July 2009. It currently only covers the UAE, although there are plans to expand to the GCC region, with hopes to reach the whole Middle East in the future.

They’ve worked on building an inventory of thousands of new brand-name products covering several categories, from electronics, to games to perfumes, watches and clothing. They source products from wholesalers and distributors in order to be competitive in terms of selection, quality and prices.

Saeid Hejazi was at one of the recent Dubai Tech Nights events where he talked about Nahel.com and some of the plans for the future. The following is a video of his talk:

National Net Ventures N2V, one of the top internet groups in the Middle East just announced its investment in Yebab.com, the Arab portal specialized in organizing wedding celebrations in the United Arab Emirates.

Rashid Al Ballaa, CEO of N2V, stated that the project comes in line with the group’s current and future plans to expand its presence at the regional and the international levels. The plan is obviously to enhance the portal’s growth and presence, expanding it into other Arab Gulf countries, and the rest of the Middle East region, establishing it as the most trusted wedding directory in the Arab world.

Yebab.com, which was launched from the UAE in 2009, has proven really successful in the UAE, becoming a leading portal providing a directory of wedding services in the country; including listings for the various suppliers and services from caterers to dressmakers, artists, photographers and traditional musicians. The site shows strong potential to perform just as well and more in other markets around the region.

Yebab co-founder, Murshed Mohamed said that this investment will enable the team to improve the service and upgrade its quality for users

N2V who also hold HawaaWorld.com in their portfolio, see a big possibility of establishing a seamless integration between the two services, in order to offer bigger value to Arab women online.

This investment in Yebab comes as part of N2V’s new investment program that targets early and growth stage web ventures around the region, mainly Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan and Egypt.

National Net Ventures (N2V) is an internet holding company, whose core business is to develop online and interactive web-based ventures. N2V invests capital in a variety of ventures from startups to more established companies; also offering infrastructure, resources, experience and know-how to these companies to accelerate their growth.

The amount of the investment hasn’t been disclosed publicly.

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.

Abu Dhabi Media Company(ADMC) is “the” pioneer in the digital publishing space in the Middle East, hands down. New digital platform? They implement n’ use it before anyone else. A media company that techno-geeks love to love. Apart from owning some of the best performing titles in print they’ve been busy going digital as fast as they could and in full steam.

AnaZahra is ADMC’s latest addition to their digital/online portfolio of titles. AnaZahra was introduced as Zahrat Al Khaleej’s branch online, or the Online version of the same magazine? It could get one confused as ADMC introduced a new business unit headed by celebrity Zoya Sakr. It was launched with Zahrat Al Khaleej’s brand used as an endorser and a sister brand, even AnaZahra’s branding borrows from Zahrat Al Khaleej, but then once you go online, print content and online are worlds of differences.

AnaZahra launched in a very interesting way, a very offline way of launching an Online venture. A traditional launch with no considerable online Ads or any Social Media involvement which worries me a little given the VERY corporate execution. Is such an online venture to survive in our Twitter generation executives?

First, the digital-savvy Women report

Before their launch they had a press release that everyone on Twitter n’ Facebook re-posted over & over that showed Women in Arabia are digital-savvy and are well versed with online magazines and social networks. Okay, so message reached to Advertisers–Advertise with us Online.

Then, bring in the accomplished & market influencers

In an exclusive event earlier before the launch ADMC hosted a preview event of AnaZahra.com to accomplished, successful, and sought after women in the UAE followed by artists, and celebrities that were treated & pampered with Dior beauty products.

So AnaZahra is not your average Online magazine. Is it? No, it’s not. But hey, it’s not run by Facebook generation executives. From staffing to launch and PR, there’s a smell of big plays being planned and with ADMC in the background, AnaZahra should be looking good on paper and perhaps on the floor.

Content, it’s very early to weight the content or even take a look at where and how it’s getting online, but in a very short time, the number of articles, gossip and News available on AnaZahra is impressive and from writers and bloggers across Arabia.

AnaZahra, jus’ like Zahrat Al Khaleej is all about Fashion, Family, Beauty, Kids, Health and lots of Arabic gossip on Celebrities and pop culture. Even though it shows Blogs on the website it might confuse you with members blogs which they’re not. Blogs on AnaZahra are nothin’ but special columns made for a selected few Celebrities such as Afaf Jnifan(Tunisian-Itallian super model) and others. The website also includes a Community section which looks like an after thought at this stage.

So how digital or online is AnaZahra?

For what it’s worth, it is real time, specially celebrity gossip and News. It doesn’t replicate content from its offline version of Zahrat Al Khaleej which adds great value content-wise.

Experience-wise, it really is nothing digital. Nothing near the expectation from a brand that launches out of ADMC. The section that holds videos & images is called Gallery(معرض). Exactly how it’s done on Forums.

The more you browse through the website the more you get the sense of individuality in content and how they cover it first, but at the same time you get back to thinking what does AnaZahra really have more than the competition? Say 7asnaa of d1g, or 7elwa by Yahoo-Maktoob, or Zeina at Jeeran? Or thousands of highly populated and visited Arabic forums that ADMC itself advertises on? But then when you get back to AnaZahra you figure out that the other websites had actually been of type that consumed content from the likes of Zahrat Al Khaleej offline and then posted them as second hand content and editorial. So content-wise AnaZahra has the edge over the rest having fresh first hand content produced by its journalists & reporters.

Content is king, fair & square AnaZahra wins, they are hard to beat, but the tough question to ask is, how is AnaZahra going to survive online apart from hiding behind the great Zahrat Al Khaleej brand & ADMC’s resources and presence? It’s early to say but if they don’t go Social and Open, Sharable and Interactive they have no chance in surviving given the big bucks being spent prior to launch and start up period.  But then the obvious answer might be just in front of us, 32 years of great relationship with Advertisers, Zahrat Al Khaleej can always feed AnaZahra with Ads, may be?

Now, all we gotta’ do is wait n’ see, personally as I grew up seeing Zahrat Al Khaleej around at home and every where n’ would like to see it prosper online,  looks good so far. This shall have a part two in a three months time to review and see what changed n’ what really has worked for’em.

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.]

Loomni is a new service for the region that aims to empower continuing education, making it more accessible and affordable to everyone. The service was previously reviewed here.

The overall 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, by working with 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.

Loomni’s founder Nagi Salloum was one of the presenters at DemoCamp Dubai last week, talking about Loomni and how it works.

Below are videos of the Loomni presentation at DemoCamp Dubai.

Part 1:

Part 2:

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

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.

The second DemoCamp Dubai event to be organised by Dubai Internet City took place at the Dubai Knowledge Village Auditorium a few hours ago, and I have to say the reaction I had and the one I saw and felt from the people in the auditorium was a lot better than it was at the previous one; the presenting startups were interesting, and the setup felt a bit less formal, which was a good thing.

If there’s one thing I still think needs to be addressed in future editions it’s that the presenters should spend more of their time on stage showing us how their projects work instead of taking us through powerpoint slides.

The event kicked off with a non-startup presentation by Marwan bin Haider, the CIO of DEWA (Dubai Electricity and Water Authority), who talked about DEWA’s iPhone, BlackBerry and iPad apps as well as the process of building such mobile apps and how developers could go about creating apps themselves.

The startup presentations kicked off after that in the following order:

O-Minds: An open source and web development company, who presented their free FlashFirebug tool that allows developers to debug Flash files on the fly through the browser. They also talked about the use of Unity to create rich virtual 3D environments that can be accessed online through the web browser.
Presenter: Ashraf Amayreh (Founder).

Book Trader: A university project launched by two students in the form of a website that enables students to buy and sell their used books, in order to make and save money.
Presenters: Alexander Fuchs, Jamal Al Bloushi (Founders)

AdGoing: A platform that is basically an ad marketplace, enabling publishers to put their text and display ad spots up for sale, and making it easy for advertisers to find and buy them. A new feature that was announced at this DemoCamp was the notion of Agents, whereby other parties would be able to setup their own marketplaces based on AdGoing’s platform, with a cut of their revenue going to AdGoing.
Presenter: Saleh Ali (Founder).

twtrtales: A project that enables collaborative story writing through tweets. People would get to start a new hashtag for a story, and then they’d start contributing to writing the story one tweet at a time, with users being able to say if they like the additions and through that deciding what goes into the story and what doesn’t.
Presenters: Kedar Iyer, Rami Kayyali,  Nagranee Channa (Founders).

The Question Company: An 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 service is available for both Etisalat and Du subscribers and costs 3 Dirhams per question.
Presenters:  Andrew Meikle (Founder, Managing Partner), James Oliver (Sales & Marketing Manager).

Loomni: A new project that was recently reviewed here, attempting to make continued education and learning cheaper and more accessible to everyone through shorter, better targeted courses given by specialists.
Presenter: Nagi Salloum (Founder).

Stay tuned for more about this DemoCamp Dubai event and the startups presented at it. There’ll hopefully also be some videos from the event too.

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.

Dubai Internet City has announced another edition of DemoCamp Dubai, the event enabling tech entrepreneurs, students, professionals and engineers to showcase and launch their new products in front of the tech community. The event will be taking place June 23rd at the Dubai Knowledge Village Auditorium from 6:00PM to 9:00PM. From web to mobile applications, English to [...]

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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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Quirkat, the Middle Eastern game development studio has announced the launch of a new online ‘Fantasy Football’ game just in time for the South Africa 2010 World Cup.  The game was developed exclusively for the Facebook platform and can be played in Arabic, English or French. The game offers players the range of features they’d come [...]

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