What’s nice  about the site, is that it’s free for everyone to participate and all what it asks the developers for, is the promo codes which they receive from the Apple Store so it distributes them to its online users, thereby maximizing exposure and potential revenue for the developers in the future from direct links and referrals.

The AppGiveaway, which is founded by Al Lijee who is originally from Yeman and a resident of UK, looks updated every day. It promotes newly launched apps as well as existing applications that are featured in the Apple store.

The apps at the site are categorized in a sidebar, categories include Books, Business, Entertainment, Finance, and Games. AL told me that the site was launched a month ago and already has given away well over 1000 iPhone and iPod applications.

The idea of AppGiveway developed after Apple agreed to provide developers 50 promo codes each: “I heard Apple was providing Developers upto 50 iPhone promo codes for new apps and/or updated apps featured in the Apple Store. I thought, ‘That’s it, why don’t I provide Developers and Publishers a central platform where they can giveaway their promo codes whilst promoting their app much more effectively?’ Then I thought I might as well include categories, too, as this will give visitors a much more convenient way of looking for apps.”Al said.

Al has future plans that include adding a download and forward feature and an iPhone app version of the App Giveaway website.

AppGiveWay was featured last month on CNET, where Rick Broida wrote some ideas to improve the site. In my part I would add: why not develop a user profile, where users can add a iPhone apps wish list and their family or friends can buy it for them? How about integrating with meOwns Egypt based social wish list tool from eSpace? Also why not turn the article section into a blog? People like blogs more than traditional reporting sites!

Note: AppGiveaway is not useful for me since I do not have an iPhone, but I am open for a gift

As we have mentioned in past blog posts, Arabizi which is writing Arabic in Latin characters is popular especially among the young generation in the Arab world, let alone Arabs who reside in the west and do not have any Arabic keyboard. There has been some online application that deals with this problem. But Yamli was the pioneer in making it a business, it has an online editor, API, innovative search that is built on top of the concept and a Firefox toolbar which now is updated to version 1.0. Google followed yamli’s steps and came up with Ta3reeb an online Arabic Transliteration editor and now with an API . Onkoosh on the other hand provides it via its search engine only.

Maren supports the following platform Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista and it supports the following applications: Internet Explorer 7.0 Internet Explorer 7.0, Microsoft Outlook 2007, Microsoft Word 2007, Windows Live Messenger 8.5, Windows Live Messenger 9.0, Yahoo messenger 9.0, Google talk, Firefox 3.0, according to Maren help file.

However under testing I found out that it supports many more: Notepad, Chrome, FF3.5 and TweetDeck. I also found out it is very accurate and much better than Google’s Ta3reeb in terms of accuracy and because you can edit your translated entry easily.

Yamli on the other hand, has recently revealed that 76,645,541 words have been typed with Yamli , many websites and applications has been utilizing Yamli’s API to spread Arabic transliteration elsewhere such as As7ab and Clipat Maktoob, Ikbis,  Yamli messenger 1.0 that works with msn messenger plus live, Yamli wordpress plugin (WP Yamli) and Easy Arabic: a desktop application that transliterate Arabic text and sends them to a collection of applications.

Though the debut of Maren is a serious challenge to Yamli, because if you have it installed, you do not need to use any transliteration software or plugins, to type on msn or the web, since it is already there on the desktop. Habib Haddad, cofounder of Yamli commented on Maren launch by saying:

“It’s a good effort from Microsoft, and I guess they know how to recognize a good idea when they see it. As an Arabic startup we are flattered to see this happen but do remained focused on innovating to better serve our users. We want to thank all who support us in our path and ask them to stay tuned for some cool new releases.”

Marin was developed by Cairo Microsoft Innovation Lab (CMIC), which I visited early this year and met with its team. I emailed Ahmed El-Shimi, Group Manager - Development & Incubations of (CMIC) and asked him whether Marin will be incorporated into Bing and preinstalled with every Windows machine in the future, I’ll keep you updated when he replies.

I remember the first PC I used in my life was from Sakhr back in the late 80s, running its own property Arabic Operating system, where I used to play games. But during the 90s, Sakhr PC met the dust for Win-tel based PCs. However this announcement is significant because, I think it is the first time an Arab tech company acquires an American IT company (There are rumors of the other way around deals coming soon).

Today, Sakhr ( which competes with ARABCRUNCH DEMO 09 presenter alKhawarizmy in the Arabic search technology category) is specialized in Arabic and NLP software solutions selling basically to government and corporations, with products in the fields of: Speech to Speech Translation, Arabic/English Machine Translation (MT), Arabic/English Text to Speech, Arabic ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) Arabic enterprise &Internet search, Text Mining, Arabic OCR. Arabic CMS and (LMS.) While Dial Directions enables users to dial a special number, ask for an address, business or event, and Dial Directions send an SMS with the address or an intersection. Dial Directions has also released an iPhone voice apps “ Say Who” and “Say where” .

The merger will bring together, Sakhr’s skills in Arabic language and Dial’s skills in network-based speech recognition technology and mobile applications expertise. Both companies have released a beta version of the first real-time speech-to-speech Arabic and English translations for iPhone and Black Berry (see Video below.)

The voice translation solution enables English and Arabic speakers to speak their native language, hear the audio translation, and read the text translation – all with an iPhone or Blackberry. According to TechCrunch the application is currently in testing with select enterprise customers, with plans to release a consumer version around the end of the summer. It appears that the voice will be translated on the cloud via Sakhr translation software, and then the translated input will be sent back to the phone in audio and text, with a matter of seconds. So if there is no Network there won’t be translations.

I do not know how accurate the translation will be, but for short sentences I think it will do fine, however I doubt it will do well in complex long sentences.

Sakhr already sells products to the U.S. departments of Defense, Homeland Security and Justice, as well as to corporate clients. It provides Arabic and English translations for computers.
Adeeb Shanaa, Dial’s co-founder and now CEO of privately held Sakhr Software, told Investor’s Business Daily that the technology will be used by to at least some U.S. military personnel serving in Arabic-speaking nations such as Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

According to Sakhr US press release, the merged firm will keep the Sakhr Software name, all Dial Directions employees have joined Sakhr. The combined company has 200 employees, and will be led by Shanaa as chief executive officer. Fahad Al Sharekh, Sakhr’s previous chief executive, has become Chairman and remains actively involved in developing strategic partnerships for the company. Sakhr’s management team will be based in Silicon Valley and Washington, DC, with an offshore development office in the Middle East. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
( Via: Investor’s Business Daily, TechCrunch and Sakhr.)




Twtri is a very simple why to keep our friends and family updated on twitter, facebook or email automatically with your flight status,  such as when your plane depart, arrived or if there is any delays in the flight. The web app is useful because it saves you the time and the effort of sending SMSs, Tweets or emails, especially if Internet and phone services were not available at the plane.

I asked Laith to give me an example of what type of info Twtri will update the user’s status with, he said:

“Before the flight depart it will show a message on your twitter like this “DL73 scheduled to depart John F. Kennedy International Airport @ 7:05 PM”

After it depart it will show:

“DL73 en route & scheduled to land on SFO International Airport @ 10:58 PM(earliar 5 Minutes)”

if the flight is delayed in the air, it will show:

“DL73 en route & scheduled to land on SFO International Airport @ 11:18 PM(delayed 15 Minutes)”

after it land it will show:

“DL73 Landed in SFO International Airport @ 11:20 PM(delayed 17 Minutes)”

So the process is keeping the status of the flight updated.

( DL73: flight number, 11:01is the airport time.)

He also said that it also updates if there is multi-leg flight (when ever your flight connects with another flight.)

As for the future plans for Twtri, he said he has plans to integrate it with other services as he sees needed. And plans to develop APIs so developers can provide the features of Twtri on their own services or websites. (Twtri currently gets its flight info from flightstats.com)

According to Laith, the monetization model will be: sponsorship on the website and the renting the service to clients who can have Twtri services as part of their offerings. However he said that it will be always free for users.

Kevin Rohling’s IMPULSELIVE a mobile GPS based exercises tracking and sharing service also shared the grand prize  of  newCloudApp  with Twtir. Azure is a .NET cloud platform where applications are hosted and run at Microsoft datacenters. Azure competes with Google App Engine, Heroku and RackspaceCloud.

(Note: I am not flying to Indonesia.)

Updated.

Aljazeera Arabic the well known Qatar based TV network, has just added listeners tweets to its “ Minbar Aljazeera” talk show. This move makes Aljazeera the first Arab TV to integrate with twitter.

Minbara Aljazeera, (which mean Aljazeera Forum) is a weekly Arabic listeners live talk show, that tackles different issues and topics, where listeners call and say their opinion about the current show topic. Users have been previously able to send emails to the show’s email address and the show presenter would read them.

But now, users are able to tweet (via Twitter) their voices about the current program topic to twitter.com/minbaraljazeera , today’s topic was “new media and Iran”.  The presenter today, did read some of the users’ tweet. However she said she had difficulties in reading all tweets.

This is a nice move by Aljazeera, but it would be nicer if users’ tweets and their user names are displayed on the TV screen.

Aljazeera has been doing many new media projects via its new media department, they previously integrated twitter with a mashed up news mapping website for the coverage of the War On Gaza.

Twitter is not massively popular in the Arab world, but this move will help twitter become popular in the Arab world, especially if other Aljazeera Arabic shows follow steps.

I have suggsted before to the founder of WaWet to ask Alajzeera to do the same with WaWet.

Update: Aljazeera English TV channel which is blocked by Cable operators in North America has an online campaign to request the English version of the channel to be on-air in North America.

The Al Jazeera Network Consists of:

• Al Jazeera Satellite channel (Arabic)

• Al Jazeera English

• Al Jazeera Documentary

• Al Jazeera Sports

• Al Jazeera Mubasher (Live)

• Al Jazeera Media Training and Development Center

• Al Jazeera Center for Studies

• Al Jazeera Mobile

• Al Jazeera.net (the English and Arabic web sites)

This service is useful and saves time, since you do not have to open a new browser tab write places.ae in the address bar and then enter your search query. If your email is open all the time just hit “compose mail” enter ask@places.ae and in the subject line you set your search query, for example “pizza in Jumeira”. You don’t have to put something in the body of the email, since it will be ignored anyway.

You will receive an answer a few moments after you send the email, giving you the 10 closest places to the requested location. It also sends you little Google maps in the email. Under testing it took less than 1 minute to get the reply.

It will be cool too if places.ae can release a gmail gadget.

The MENA 100 Competition addresses innovative entrepreneurs, from the 18 Arab countries participating in the MENA OECD Investment Program (Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen)

The primary objective of the MENA 100 business plan competition is to encourage existing and inspire potential entrepreneurs and connect the 100 best of them in the Middle East and North Africa region with potential sources of finance to generate business transactions.

The MENA 100 Business Plan Competition will recognize top performers with cash and in-kind services awards. In-kind services represent professional services donated by sponsors of the competition as well MENA business angels (BA) - venture capital funds (VC) for all participants

The 100 finalists will have the opportunity to present their projects at an event in Manama the capital of Bahrain.

There will be one winner per country and a selection of regional winners:

-The best three regional projects.

-Winners will be invited to participate in the MENA-OECD Business Day

-Networking opportunities in the region and worldwide.

-Possibility to share your ideas, develop them and enter new markets.

The MENA 100 is a competition for nationals from the 18 participating Arab countries in the MENA-OECD Investment Programme . At least one member of the applying team must be a national of one of these countries. Candidates from other nationalities are not eligible to participate .The competition is for new, independent ventures in seed (at the business plan first stage), start-up, or early growth stage. For more info about eligibility criteria go here.

Applications will be accepted until 31st August and MENA 100 event will be held in November 2009, for more information and to access the on-line application form which is available in French and English you can visit the competition website: www.mena100.org.

(Via Mohammed Khawaja)

UPDATE: More details of the deal at the end of the post.

WebProNews reports that Google and the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology have signed a $10 million contract regarding business and workforce development in Egypt.  According to the site the deal was signed in Washington D.C during the Egyptian Minister of ICT, Dr. Tarek Kamel, visit this week along with a representative for the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA) .

WebProNews news says that The Google deal was made for the promotion of Egyptian products and services using Google’s advertising platforms. And under the agreement, Google will invest 25% of the money back into the Egyptian economy. “Over the medium to long term, Google’s USD $2.5 million investment agreement may include: growing digital media start-ups, incubation venture capital, angel funding of the ICT sector and potentially training students in online advertising.”

So this seems like Google is winning a major advertiser for its Adwords (and possibly DoubleClick) in the region, however giving back 25% of the deal to support entrepreneurship in Egypt is something great for Egypt’s IT sector and the Arab region in general, and something that we at ArabCrunch applaud Google for. I’ve never heard of any International tech company giving some money it makes from government deals in the region back to help the IT startup seen of that country (excluding AMD). I know Intel, Cisco, and Microsoft offering many initiatives to support in bridging the tech divide. (Sun Microsystems donated several servers to universities in Jordan during the last years.) But these were not cuts from a deals they made, if anyone knows otherwise please let us know.

I encouraged before here on AC and else where; Arab governments to ask International IT companies to open R&D centers when they consider buying their solutions with millions of dollars. We need R&D centers in the region because they transfer technology and skills that are very much needed to take the IT industry in the region to its next level. I’ve heard that the Emirate of Abu Dhabi has plans to open a chip factory for AMD in UAE soon, since it has acquired about 20% of AMD through its sovereign fund vehicle Mubadala Development.

Google has been moving strongly in the region with new products and initiatives, such as Google Online Business Plan Award with Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship. That’s why ArabCrunch has added a new Category titled “Google” which marks Google’s related posts in our Category list.

I’ll contact Google to get more details of this deal and update you here accordingly.

Update 1: According to Wael Ghonim, Google’s Product & Marketing Manager, Middle East & North Africa, Egypt will promote by using Google advertising technologies the following sectors: Tourism, IT and Industrial Business.

Campaigns will have a global nature and will target audience in US & Europe as well as the Arab countries. He added nothing has been decided yet in terms of the details, but the ad campaigns are expected to be combination of text / display ads. Sources say MCIT will be managing this for all the different Egyptian ministries, and there will be different landing pages created to brand Egypt and specific businesses. Egypt has been doing a nice job online with sites such as Egypt Memory and Eternal Egypt web sites.

As for the $2.5 million reinvestment, sources say it is part of MCIT policies (so it’s not specific to Google), this is what Microsoft also do in Egypt .

“We are really excited about this partnership as we are committed to add value to Egypt.” Said Wael.

An email will be sent to Egypt’s MCIT to get a better understanding about the reinvestment policy.

Traditional money transfer and credit card companies are trying to be part of the mobile payment loop in order not to lose their business, while mobile operators and software vendors across the world are deploying different schemes to capitalize into this opportunity. Putting ideas into action, Kuwait based Zain, which is considered the fourth largest mobile network in the world in terms of geographic presence, with a footprint in 22 countries spread across the Middle East and Africa with over 60 million active customers, and Western Union, a global leader in money transfer, recently announced that they will work together to deliver mobile money transfer services in countries in Africa and the Middle East through Zain’s new Zap platform.

The Zap service provides Zain customers access to a wide range of transactional services from their mobile phones. Customers can interact with select bank accounts, top-up or transfer airtime, and move money to businesses, friends and family. The service allows customers to pay bills such as electricity, and can even be used to settle grocery bills in the supermarket. Zap has been operational in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda for several months, making mobile banking services available to more than 100 million people in East Africa. Zain has also announced plans to introduce Zap in 22 markets. (ArabCrunch will do a follow-up story about when Zain will launch Zap in Middle East, by next week, inshallah.)

As Zain’s Zap is only available for Zain Mobile subscribers, this agreement with Western Union will enable Zain’s Zap to reach far beyond its members; Because Western Union has a global agent network of more than 334,000 locations in 200 countries and territories.

When the service is launched, consumers will be able to send cash money transfers from participating Western Union locations around the globe in the same way they do today. Zap customers who are enrolled in the service in select countries will be able to choose whether they want to receive their money in cash at a Western Union Agent location or in accounts tied to their mobile phones (their “mobile wallets.”)

Money-transfer receivers who receive funds in their mobile wallets will be able to pay bills, buy airtime or cash out through the Zap service at more than 12,000 Zap agent locations in East Africa.

The service will be introduced in select countries when regulatory approval has been secured. The service with Zain will be operational in countries with significant international and intra-Africa remittance activity.

Dr Saad Al Barrak, Zain Group CEO, said in a press release,

“This service will enable the millions of people who are abroad to send money home swiftly to their friends and families not only in the cities but also directly to the villages across these countries.”

Western Union has established cross-border Mobile Money Transfer pilots in a variety of corridors around the globe. The Western Union service currently allows mobile subscribers in the Philippines to receive funds sent from select Western Union Agent locations directly into their mobile wallets. In the future, Western Union will also offer consumers the option to send funds directly from their mobile phones for pickup at Western Union Agent locations globally or directly to another mobile subscriber. Western Union is extending its global distribution network through alliances with mobile network operators.

Zain brand is wholly owned by Mobile Telecommunications Company KSC, which is listed on the Kuwait Stock Exchange (Stock ticker: ZAIN). Zain is listed in the Financial Times’ Global 500 Index which ranks the world’s largest companies based on market capitalization.

In 2008 , Zain Group recorded all time high consolidated revenues of US$ 7.44 billion, an increase of 26% compared to 2007 and net profits of US$ 1.2 billion, an increase of 6% on 2007. Year on year customer growth across the two continents in which Zain operates was 50% with the Zain Group serving 63.54 million managed active customers at 31 December, 2008.

Zain operates in the following countries: Bahrain, Burkina Faso, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Malawi, Madagascar, Niger, Nigeria, Palestine (currently operating as Paltel Group), Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. In Lebanon, the company manages ‘mtc-touch’ on behalf of the government. In Morocco, Zain owns 31% of Wana Telecom through a joint venture.

The released outcomes are 10 open source projects including libraries to improve search normalization and indexing of arabic text for PHP, Python and Ruby, Modules and Plugins for Drupal and Wordpress that enhance the user experience of arab speaking users. And a Arabic stemmer and Verb conjugator.

These 10 open source projects are:

Qutrub

Arabic verbs conjugator. Download.

Qutrub (web)

A web interface for Qutrub the Arabic verbs conjugator. (Check the conjugator live)

ArPHP integration with Wordpress

A plugin for Wordpress to integrate with Ar-PHP library. Download.

ArPHP integration with Drupal

Modules for Drupal to integrate with Ar-PHP library. Download.

Yamli for your browser

Integrating Yamli service with your browser. Download.

Arabic normalization Ruby

Preparing Arabic text for indexing using Ruby. Download.

Arabic normalization PHP

Preparing Arabic text for indexing using PHP. Download.

Arabic normalization Python

Preparing Arabic text for indexing using Python. Download.

Ar-Morph Ruby

Stemming Arabic words using Ruby. Download.

Ar-Morph Python

Stemming Arabic words using Python. Download.

“some of the missing pieces in improving and encouraging Arabic content on the web and a providing a better computing experience for Arabic speaking users are not solved by code.” Said Manal Hassan member of Arab techies in a post at the Arabtechies website, she added  “Well classified open access Arabic language corpora and linguistic data is sorely missing, a point that was strongly emphasized in the 1st Arab Techies gathering.”

Arab Techies has also released a classified Arabic Stop-Words list, Manal added” Apart from code and linguistic data some problems are better solved by documenting best practices, we proudly present the first draft of the (RTL design best practices and examples) document.”

These projects are hosted on Arab Techies Projects Space and ArabCrunch thanks everyone who helped in in coding these projects and we encourage you to post feedback on each projects’ discussion pages, whether it’s a bug report or a suggestion.

The new features Folowen has added are:

- Search is now open to the public without sign up.

-Their promised “Direct Follow” feature has arrived, where you can follow or add the person/organization you searched for directly from the search results page to your social media service. This feature is currently available for four services: Twitter, YouTube, FriendFeed and Facebook. Though you have to sign up to follow in and authorize folowen to access these services, under the settings tab.

-Now your search results will list up to 4 links for each service for you to browse through.

Folowen is still working in adding more features such as social alerts and a browser plug-in.

I am sorry for not posting much on AC during the last week because I was -and still- busy with multiple projects, however today’s post is about my recent interview with an interesting and successful Arab serial entrepreneur, Kamal Nasser, CEO of Dubai, UAE, based, Conservus International winner of the Red Herring 100 Europe in 2009.(Kamal Bio at the end of the post.)

Conservus provides digital targeted advertising medium known as the MyConservus Portal. The MyConservus Portal is an e-concierge service which highlights services available at a single location and provides advertisers with direct access to potential consumers while generating revenue from these advertisements. MyConverseuv is currently available in the hospitality sector and is growing into other sectors. In February 2009 Conservus was one of the three UAE based technology companies that got an investment from Intel Capital. The company is also one of Jordan based IV Holdings portfolio company.

Via skype, Kamal walked me through a demo that shows how MyConservus works in a hotel, the demo in this case was for Burj Al Arab.

The portal appears as a default homepage to the hotel’s guests, and it provides multi lingual information that you find in some other local portals such as a guide to Dubai, latest headlines, art and cultural, travel, fun and games. Though the difference is the portal also offers hotel related information and e-concierge services such as, ordering laundry and room service, accessing business center services such as printing and faxes as well as spa reservation.  And while Internet access in most hotels in the Arab world is paid, the access to the portal is offered free of charge to the hotel guests, and is being subsidized with paid ads. The information the portal offers to the hotel’s guests is useful, it assists a guest in deciding where to go around the city, check upcoming events, shop and use the travel section to do travel related reservations and get printed receipts.

Conservus portals’ competitive advantage is basically all about location - instead of being a general online portal that competes with others for eye balls, it’s the default browser page for the hotels guests, who in 5 star hotels are mostly in the higher income segment, and would be more apt to purchasing luxury products. Thus the type of advertising offered inside MyConservus Portal is much more targeted than other mediums in this segment. Kamal told me that the type of Ads Conservus offers are more effective for many reasons:“We provide a micro sites for the advertiser, it is not a banner and it is not site, it is a full page Ad, a landing page Ad.”  Kamal adds that the ads are related to the section; say in a travel section, you’ll get an Airline Ad. “The idea is to get a targeted audience to your Ad, It is also designed -in a way to make –the visitor- interested in your products.”

The Ads are flash based and interactive. For example in the Emirates Airline Ad Kamal demoed to me, users are able to check-in directly through the Ad and have the boarding pass printed in the business center in the hotel automatically “This is the most powerful targeted ad medium: because firstly it opens by default in front of a defined audience, second: they are based in pull-Ad concept, which means a user can only go to the Ad if they are really interested in the product, there are no pops or banners. 3rd, the placement of Ads on relevant sections.” Said Kamal, he adds “We are charging $3 per ‘engagement’, our rates are more expensive than the traditional CPM models because they are far more targeted and provide great value add to the advertisers in terms of space, content and functionality”.

Here is the full interview where Kamal provides more insights about his company and the other communities portals they are going to launch soon. (Many Thanks to Kamal who offered me his time.)

AC: What are your main products?

Kamal: Adaptive explicit portals, portals that are targeted to specific audience and carry information relevant to the geo location as well as the psychographic and demographic of the users in that particular location, our main 3 products, hospitality portals, enterprise and community life style.

AC: Do the enterprise and community life style portals have similar features to the hospitality portals?

Kamal: The hospitality portals carry information relevant to guests in a hotel, the enterprise portals carry information relevant to the trade conducted in that particular environment allowing people to interact within their community. And the community life style portals carry information relevant to those communities such as bringing on the nearby schools, retail, restaurants, and blogging within the community, finding activity partners, marketplace and other.

AC: who can use these portals?

Kamal: Only people within the community.

As there are many resources for learning Arabic, like books to DVDs or private lessons. But Arabicpod.net takes it into a different direction.

Launched in UK, in February 2007 by Mohamed Moshaya from Saudi Arabia and Ehab Saleh from Jordan Arabicpod is mainly a podcast, hosted by Mohamed and Ehab who offer lessons in a fun and enjoyable style making learning Arabic easy and downloadable for free, so you can listen to Arabic lessons using your PC or any MP3 player, iPod, iPhone, or any MP3 supported mobile. According to Ehab, currently Arabicpod podcasts experiance around 100,000 downloads per month.

The podcasts teach both Fusha (classical Arabic) and colloquial lessons. However, the colloquial language used is a standard dialect that can be understood everywhere in the Arab world. Ehab told ArabCrunch

“We tend to avoid terms that are used just in one country and not understood in other Arab countries.”

Mohammad and Ehab record 2 lessons per month two sessions each month, where the session can have up to 5 lessons. They publish 2 lessons every week to thier listeners and each lesson are around 12 minutes each. The lessons suite all levels, they have lessons for beginners, lower intermediate, inter, upper inter and advanced.

So if you want to start learning Arabic or just require a few key phrases to help you on your trips to the world of Arabia. The Beginner’s level would be the best place to start. And once you have been exposed to Arabic and are familiar with the phonics then you can go up the lessons level as you learn and master more Arabic language skills.

Each podcast comes with features that are offered only to premium users, such as a downloadable “PDF transcript” where you can listen to the sentences while reading them; they are very useful to improve the listening skill. And a “PDF Audio transcript” that shows the actual dialogue that is used in the podcast written in Arabic, translated to English and with the pronunciation too. It also contains Key Vocabularies and Supplementary Vocabularies. Each lesson also contains a flash exercise so you can test what you have learned during the lesson.

The website has also SharePoint section which is only available for premium users, where they can upload lessons whether they are application, doc, audio, images, videos etc.

In January 2008 Mohamd and Ehab launched the video podcast section which contains videos that are a reflection of the real life of speaking Arabic, some are showing people in the street greeting each other in Arabic or in restaurant ordering food, other videos are materials that are taken from Arabic TV Programs and were analyzed by the hosts. These videos are also only available for premium users however a free preview for each video cast is available in the site.

As Ehab and Mohammad recorded more lessons that contain more and more translation, Arabicpod launched in November 2008 a dictionary tool that partly auto updated. So the words that are used in the exercises are used also in the dictionary. And it also records what people search for, and the most popular words that people are looking for are given priority to be added as Ehab told me.
Arabicpod also has a shopping section where users can buy t-shirts, books, CDs, keyboard stickers, and rice jewelers.

The job Ehab and Mohammad do, is highly appreciated, these lessons are not easy to do, they take allot of hard work. However, the design of the website is not appealing, and the user generated part functionality can be done in a better way, The Japanese based website Smart.fm provides a good example of a crowed sourced learning portal.

Here is the video of the first podcast lesson recorded by Mohammad and Ehab in March 2007:




In this interview Hussein tells us that his startup has grown now from a part time project to a full time business with the support of $21,000 a grant from SRTD and his startups’ first product “Ciapple Clustering Tool” is currently in beta testing.

We also discussed many other topics, such as the support Microsoft is offering startups like CIApple. Just play the interview to know more:




(Disclosure: Hussein Al-Natsheh is a friend of mine, he is also Technology Transfer Program (TCP) manager at Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship (QRCE)  who was an organizing partner in the 1st ARABCRUNCH DEMO event)

The competition announced the 4 winners last week, who were chosen among the top 10 finalist, but who are the winners and what do they do?

Here is a brief profiling of each one of them, note that most of them are not launched and operational yet:

First place: Shared by Syphir team from Saudi Arabia and HAYATI Healthcare LLC from UAE.

A-Syphir which mean “Zero” in Arabic, solves lost productivity problems that are related to non-relevant email traffic, through highlighting email messages that are likely to be important using an algorithm Syphir team developed at MIT which analyzes the connections in the users’ email social graph and generate a rating for each message.

Syphir social graph and data mining idea  is similar to San Francisco, CA startup Visible Path which raised around $ 20 million from high profile VCs, And  last year was acquired by Austin-based  Hoovers for an undisclosed sum. The service which is now called HooversConnect is like Syphir, where HooversConnect uses your social graph, but to find common sources and contacts you share with coworkers so you can approach them to do business. The site keeps tabs on whom its users communicate with by e-mail through Outlook plug-in. And it ranks the strengths of those relationships based on how often people communicate. For example: if you are looking to contact someone in another company to sell him something, HooversConnect finds the contact inside your company who has the strongest relationship with that person, who in turn can introduce you to him/her.

Unlike Syphir HooversConnect does not rank the importance of the email messages you receive and only works with Outlook, while Syphir in the 1st phase will be offered for consumers to manage their existing mailboxes (gmail, Yahoo, etc) and in face II, the service will be offered for Enterprise customers using their existing email systems.

Syphir team members: Abdulrahman Tarabzouni, Courtland Allen, Fiasal Alibrahim, Ghassan Fayad and Husain Al-Mohssen. (Saudi Arabia)

B-HAYATI Healthcare: from United Arab Emirates is the first Patient financing company in the Arab world. That has launched recently an online portal where Patients can apply fully online for their patient financing needs, search through the network of healthcare providers.

HAYATI Healthcare Financing  covers any medical or dental treatments that are not covered by medical insurance plans or are an ‘Out of Pocket’ expense for patients such as Dental, Cosmetic, Vision, Orthodontics, Fertility, Obstetrics and Maternity and Non Elective Treatment.

HAYATI Healthcare serves as a financial intermediary between physicians, their patients and partner banks in the medical industry, HAYATI in turn sells patient financing loans either through healthcare providers to their patients or directly to patients. The startup offers low monthly payment and with No initial down payment. The company’s website claims that their rate is lower than any credit card.

How they will make money?  I guess it is the interest on their loans, but I just hope they abandon the interest (reba) based method and use Islamic interest free financing methods.

It is worth mentioning that HAYATI Healthcare is one of the first companies to be funded by the Arab Business Angels Network LLC, a member of Dubai International Capital, and the Gulf Finance Corporation PJSC.

HAYATI, which means ‘My Life’ in Arabic, is founded by a team of three people:

Dr. Michael Matly, MD, MBA

CEO & Chairman a a first generation Arab-American and U.S. trained Medical Doctor, who  completed his Medical Degree from Mayo Clinic and his MBA from Harvard Business School. And has over 10 years of experience in healthcare including R&D, pharmaceuticals, and entrepreneurship.

Tariq El-Titi, ACMA, President & COO  a British Palestinian with over 10 years of international experience in the Telecommunications and Healthcare industries.

And David Matly as business development manager.

Second Winner: Rice Straw Fertilizer Company (Egypt). Is a Green and Alternative energy startup, who is addressing a major problem in Egypt: The yearly black cloud in the delta area and Greater Cairo, which is mainly attributed to rice straw burning. The startup will develop a multipurpose Eco-park. At face one they will convert the rice straw into high quality compost at economic rates. future phases are planned to include bio-energy and diverse alternative uses of various wastes.

Rice Straw Fertilizer team members:  Ibrahim Khater, Youssef , Ahmed El Dorghamy and Mohamed Abdel Raouf, (Egypt.)

Third Winner: Blog Souq, From Jordan.

Unlike blogshares, a fantasy stock market where weblogs are the companies, Blog Souq will be the world’s 1st real blog stock market to finance blogs and as an investment vehicles for anyone. This idea solves the traditional capital raising problem that professional and semi-professional bloggers currently face, thus can help them improve their performance by employing more team members and acquiring more resources. According to Ahmad Takatkah the CEO of Blog Souq, the startup has a legal structure to enable stock trading in blogs that even are not registered as companies.

So now when Blog Souq is launched anyone can buy stocks in any of the qualified blogs, and sell them at anytime. Blog Souk will provide tthe needed information for investors to determine the value of each blog stock such as blog visits and views and other web auditing and performance reports. Blog Souq will also deploy security methods, as Ahmad told me but he did not disclose more. He added that his team is currently working in developing the Alpha version.

As you might know the popular blog Gigaom received second round of funding, so  will Blog Souq be an exit option for its VC investors?

Blog Souq team: Ahmad Takatkah, Adey Salamin  and Ammar Ibrahim, (Jordan.)

The competition’s  first prize of USD 50,000 was divided equally between Syphir and HAYATI Healthcare and both of them will be given the opportunity to attend the MIT Global Startup Workshop (GSW), Rice Straw Fertilizer received a check of USD 10,000 and Blog Souq got USD 5,000.

Unlike Google Translate which is a machine based, Google Translator Toolkit enables you to use its WYSIWYG editor to edit the machine translation, invite people to collaborate with in your translation efforts, use  transliteration from English to 10 languages including Arabic and many more features. The big thing in the Toolkit is that the translations it offers it is a mixture of  Artificial Intelligence (AI) and  crowed sourced translation.  It can learn from everyone’s corrections and translations, thus as more translators start to use it gets smarter and more accurate, saving you time and effort.

To use in translation with Google Translate Toolkit you can upload up to 1MB for free of Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, text, Wikipedia articles and knols or any webpage , when you finish uploading, it automatically pretranslate your document as follows:
1. It divides your document into segments: sentences, headers, or bullets.
2. It searches all available translation databases for previous human translations of each segment.
3. If any previous human translations of the segment exist, it pick the highest-ranked search result and ‘pretranslate’ the segment with that translation.
4. If no previous human translation of the segment exists, it uses machine translation to produce an ‘automatic translation’ for the segment, without intervention from human translators.

Then you can start using WYSIWYG editor a workspace where you can see the original document on the left side if you are using vertical panel or down the page if using horizontal panel. However when I used the editor after I added a webpage from ArabCrunch, the vertical panel did not work well on Chrome but it did great on FireFox.
To quickly distinguish human translations from machine translation,  Google Translator Toolkit uses a gray font for all segments that were originally pre-filled with human translation.

To start editing you click anywhere in the translated page and you will see a box which Google calls
“Translating segment” and the editor will highlight the corresponding segment in the original document in the left panel. This feature eliminates the need to copy and paste the English sentence into a word document and start translating underneath it.

Google Translator Toolkit also offers an automatic transliteration (called Ta3reeb) option for converting Roman characters to Arabic or the Indic characters used in Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Tamil, and Telugu. However when I tested it in Arabic it had a problem: you cannot edit manually the word you checked, it only shows you the matching Arabic option. The good thing you can turn transliteration off, which was better off for me. Update 2: Yamli does a better Arabic transliteration job, you can edit easily and it is more accurate, I hope Google ditch Ta3reeb and start using Yamli instead.

The other neat thing I found in the toolkit is “finding and replacing text”, So for example when I used the toolkit to translate “Inside Jo” post on ArabCrunch, it translated the company name into Arabic ” داخل الأردن” but I want to replace ” داخل الأردن” into the English name of the company: “Inside Jo”, so I used the “finding and replacing text” which sounded accurate.

If you are confused about the exact meaning of a specific word, you can use the ToolKit’s “Dictionaries and Glossaries” feature in the” toolkit tab” Dictionaries contain translations coming from Google’s database of multilingual terms, it shows the different meanings of the word.  To use it you need to click show toolkit and then click the dictionary tab. while Glossary translations are crowed sourced from Google Translator Toolkit users. And unlike dictionaries using glossary is more automated: As you translate each segment, the toolkit will highlight the glossary match in the segment if it finds it, to view the translation Hover your mouse over the over the glossary match or click the Glossary. But as Google toolkit is just launched you won’t find now many matches in the glossary.

Glossaries also support bulk-upload of terminology for use with your translations. However they should be stored in a comma-separated value (CSV), UTF-8 format file and each uploaded glossary can be up to 1MB per upload  and you can upload up to 1GB of glossaries per year.

Sharing, publishing and collaboration features in Google Translator Toolkit are also important and time savers for translators.  You can invite many people easily by entering their email address inside the toolkit or workspace and set the permissions they can do with your document : edit, comment or just read. This feature replaces the manual process of having to compare and consolidate each individual translated files, if more than one person is collaborating in translating a document. Instead, collaborating translators can work and edit now a single document.

You and  your team can also insert comments alongside your regular translation and they will be visible to other translators working on the document. Comments are a great way for communicating with collaborators about specific parts of the translation, as well as making notes about changes you’ve made or would like to make. (I expect the collaboration feature will be real time when Google revolutionary real-time collaboration platform “Google Wave” will go public.

When you finish your translation you can publish the document –toolkit auto saves while you work - to Wikipedia or Knol or download it to your hard drive. Though the downloaded format can only be the same as uploaded document ‘s native format. I hope Google will enable format conversion in the toolkit, If they offer an API,  the popular conversion website  “YouconvertIt “ for example can be integrated and finish the job.

As in translating from English into another language is not based on-word-by-word translation but is more based on the understanding of a sentence. Google has an advanced feature called Translation Memory (TM) which is a database of human translations. TMs are saved once you finish translating documents in Google Translator Toolkit. TMs will show in real time as Google help says:  Google automatically search all available translation memories for previous translations similar to your new sentence. If such sentences exist, it ranks and then shows them to you. By default, the toolkit saves your translations to a shared, publicly searchable translation memory, but you can make them  private. And you can also upload your TM, up to 50MB per and with up 1GB of storage space.

These entire features are currently free, but in the future, as the toolkit’s websites mentions, Google plans to charge users whose translations exceed high-volume thresholds. As I mentioned earlier the translation toolkit is great app, it will be the translation application of choice from me. However, besides some of the feedback I wrote in this post, I also would suggest that Google adds, Arabic spell checking and synonyms, so it saves the translator another minute of time to use other websites, application or books to fine tone the translation.

Currently in Google Translator Toolkit’s machine translation supports the  following list of languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese

I can also say, that Google Toolkit is the most innovative Arabic solution Google came up with until now.
Here is an overview Video of Google Translator Toolkit; I also recommend reading the help section if you are serious about translating and for more tips in how to use the app.



Update: Official Arabic launch announcement at Google Arabia Blog post.

TwitVid.com which we recently reviewed here, announced a partnership with TwitterFon. With this partnership iPhone users will very soon be able to tweet Mobile videos to their followers by using Twitvid.com which has very recently add a feature that allows Twitter follower to watch those videos instantly- even before finishing the upload-

This represent a good news  for the US users of the just announced iPhone 3G S in USA, since even though the new iPhone 3G S supports MMS, but the only iPhone carrier in America AT&T  seems not ready for this service yet.

Other new cool features TwitVid.com has added  recently are:

• Mobile uploading via Email/MMS.
• Videos conversion to High Quality.
• Chatting with people when watching a TwitVid.
• Ability to make playlist by uploading many videos at once.
• Ability to Send your video to YouTube after it’s on TwitVid.

Eatlime.com is behind the TwitVid.com  which is founded by  Mohammad Al Adham from Jordan and Adil Lalani from Pakistan.

While posting this, they announced that Apple sold more than 40 million iPhones.

In this event Apple usually announce its new products. Here is the live video stream:



Note: please be patient the connection is not so great and it goes on and off all the time . When it goes off, it will say, simply refresh the page from time to time. The connection usually comes back within a minute or so.

Update: The new iPhone is called  iPhone 3G S ( “S” stands for speed) it will be available in the U.S on June 19, and will be available in much of the rest of the world on July 7.

Highlights:

•  OS 3.0 supports over 30 languages including Arabic.
• The new iPhone is significantly faster than the current model.
• MMS: Support for sending Photos, contacts, audio files, etc over the cell network
• 3 megapixel camera with auto-focus.
• Voice control.
• Apple claims that the iPhone 3G S will get 9 hours of web surfing now when on WiFi — that’s up from 6 hours on the current iPhone. 3G talk time will be the same 5 hours.
• iPhone 3G S will come in two sizes, each with two colors: White or Black. The low-end 16 GB version. The high-end 32 GB .

Update 2: here is a 30 sec. video commercial of the new iPhone 3G S:



Via: Ustream, CrunchGear and TechCrunch.