Over the past few months, we’ve been working in a new and streamlined design for ArabCrunch.NET that enables us to take the largest technology community in the Arab and emerging world into Public Beta. In order to do so, we have improved navigation, design and discovery and added several new features and applications that empowers our members.

Today, we’re officially rolling out ArabCrunch.NET out of private beta (after reaching 1,500 members including Arab and International Entrepreneurs, key executives from companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Opera, investors,  startups, organization and open source profiles ). This release has a new user interface that includes several cool features such as Facebook and Twitter integration. The public Beta was announced by Bassel Ojjeh last Thursday in front of around 250 venture capitalists and leading tech executives during Techwadi’s Global Technology Forum 2010 in Silicon Valley, USA.

Login Or Signup using your Twitter or Facebook

We know that you do not like remembering new user names and passwords. As we know most of you already have facebook accounts or twitter or both of them, now you can login or signup to ArabCrunch.NET using your Facebook or Twitter ID, when logging in please make sure to link both of them

New Improved Profiles with your Twitter updates

You Tweet? Share and interact? Now if you link your ArabCrunch.NET account with Twitter account, your profile on ArabCrunch.NET will bring your latest tweets to a nice elegant box (without cluttering the different type of conversations going on ArabCrunch.NET). We made it now easier for you to differentiate between people and companies as people profiles have the green theme and all other profiles in blue.

Grow your Network …Find your Twitter and Facebook Friends

The new UI design brings you a new header with “find Friends” link on the right, click it then choose Find Friends on Twitter or Facebook and we will bring you a list of your Friends on Twitter and facebook who joined ArabCrunch.NET so you can connect with them. If you did not find your your friends make sure you do invite them on facebook and Twitter, thus helping you grow your network which will help the tech community become richer.

Streamlined Mainbar:

Before we had some problems presenting the different sections and applications that ArabCrunch.NET offers to benefit members like you. Now you will find all our members profiles list directory which includes people, Companies, Venture funds, Organizations and Open Source in the main-bar, along with our applications that empowers startups and technology professionals: mentorship and startup Q&A.

New Personal Toolbar at the Right Sidebar

This is your personal companion toolbar that stays with you as you browse the site (if you are logged in) it includes the basic links you need to run your account on ArabCrunch.NET such as: your profile, your inbox messages, your dashboard and a link to invite your fiends.

Under that toolbar you will find another small toolbar that helps you create your company or open source project profile easily.

Green footer.

We also revamped our old footer, now it is greenish and comes with recent community activities feed, recent startup questions and popular tags.

New homepage:

Besides adding a new design for the startup Q&A box at the homepage, we also added 2 new boxes, one for members and one of companies with 2 tabs: Recent members, popular members. so you see both interesting people and interesting startups and companies.

Ask, Answer and Share Startup Questions Quickly

We’re making it easier for you to ask questions that can help you seek advise and make decisions, in the new Startup Q&A you will see a box that you can use to add your question title quickly. We also make is easier for you to contribute to the community and answer questions that are relevant to you and vote them up or down we call them CrunchUp or CrunchDown!

Now you see the question title only along with the number of answers, votes (crunches) and bookmarks in a more stream lined visual way, just hit “my matches” or “unanswered” or “popular”, or see related tags on the sidebar. On the answer view or on the startup Q&A home, you can now share a question you like or your answer on Twitter, facebook and Google buzz or via email with one click. And as before you can vote answers also up or down.

Popular Users:

We would like to thank those users who are most active on ArabCrunch.NET with their valuable contribution to the startup and tech community. So we are about to alter the way we calculate popular users on Startup Q&A and on the homepage.

On startup Q&A popular users will be calculated based on the amount of answers and questions they contribute in a week, which means the more you ask and the more accurate answers you share with the community , the more are your chances to become featured as a popular user.

While for now in the homepage popular users are based on users who have the most visits to their profiles, so the more contribution you bring to the community and the more active your are, either on Startup Q&A or otherwise the will more page views your profile will have.

Mentorship Back to Order as Our Team Grow:

Since we were a team of 2 guys, I didn’t have the time to do the mentorship matchmaking myself all the time, But now we have Saud Banawi as our new community officer who will handle the mentorship matchmaking and answer any support questions you need, we also have Waleed Asender handling both ArabCrunch Arabic blog and UI design.

More to Come:

All what you see is the beginning for our ambitious plan to empower everyone in the technology ecosystem with more applications and tools. We will get down and dirty and work hard to solve any problem we can solve along with the help of our fans and community to reach our ultimate mission.

Lastly, let me in this occasions thank ArabCrunch team and fans for their hard work and devotion especially Zakwan AlHajjar who was recently engaged and yet chose to spend days and nights to make this release possible, Mahdi AlFara for creating the UI, Waleed Asender who helped in CSS and HTML and Saud Banawi who helped us with testing the release.

Yesterday I visited Citex Software’s ( the company behind Adhere) office office in Cairo Egypt, met its founder and CEO Hussein F. Salama also met with Citex team. We spent  many hours talking about Adhere, mobile advertising and starups in the Arab word. He also displayed to me Adhere and showed me a
demo of how it works. This post profiles in general Adhere, As you can get better insight of the Platform when Citex Software demo Adhere during ArabCrunch DEMO next February.

Adhere the free open source mobile advertising platform which consists of a suite of software products that serve the needs of the mobile advertising industry.

Adhere beta was released recently, its core is the free open-source Adhere Ad Server. The platform also includes the Adhere User Profiles Server which is key to Adhere’s ad targeting capabilities. Adhere Ad Server is built on the popular open source ad server, OpenX.

OpenX and Citex Software are currently working together to build a group of community members, to help push forward mobile functionality as this blog post by OpenX mentioned.

In Adhere, the server works in similar way to OpenX ( which I am test currently)  for example advertiser may have multiple campaigns. Each campaign may consist of multiple ads. Adhere supports a variety of ad formats to serve different mobile advertising channels. Campaigns and ads may be targeted in order to be more effective.

For example, SMS advertising: both text and pics ads can be embedded inside person-to-person SMS or server-generated SMS. MMS advertising: pics, audio and video. Mobile web advertising: banners with stats. Advertising in audio calls such as inside voice mail and ring tones: this work for example when you receive a call, the ring tone plays an ad. The server offers also Advertising in video calls, idle screen advertising … etc.

Adhere Ad Server presents a comprehensive set of ad targeting and selection criteria. These criteria include: Time of day, Day of week, Ad language: English and Arabic currently supported, Maximum ad size, Recipient’s mobile number or number prefix, Recipient’s age, Recipient’s gender, Recipient’s purchasing power, Recipient’s location, Recipient’s handset type, Keywords describing the recipient’s interests.

Adhere offers more mobile advertising control to the advertiser, the publisher and the mobile operator, for example each campaign has a budget, specified as the number of impressions to be served. In addition, the advertiser may specify a daily limit on the impressions served for a campaign.

Citex Software was founded in early 2007. Adhere is Citex Software’s first product. The company specializes in custom software development and has clients from USA  and the UK.

UPDATE: see Editor’s note bellow.

I have received from Delphine Eddé the founder of Wikeez an email answering my questions and giving more insight into Wikeez:

Who are we ?
An online community for fans !
As you said it  in your article we’re a social entertainment site, it defines it very well !

Wether your are fan of a movie, an actor, a football club … you can share your passion on Wikeez  with other fans and find all the latest information you need

Wikeez is a platform that will allow crowd sourcing via blogs, discussions and comments from members. We want to focus more on quick and personal post , not only text but also videos and photos.
Every member can discuss with other, create its own group of fan, vote, comment, create a blog or add post from an existing blog, and even add a celebrity/ movie/tv shows … if he finds enough fans to support him !  etc
Wikeez will give the user every feature and functionality to help him be an even more active fan.

Wikeez is an arab world dedicated web site : today we feel there are not enough sites focusing on arabic stars or football players for example, and we don’t want to be in a content dominated by Hollywood stories.

It is by default in arabic, with an English version available.

The business model is based on advertising revenues only.

Our difference:
It is close to digg in regards to the voting system for contents, and the possibility for blogger to highlight their contents.
It is close to facebook in the creation of groups.
It is unique as it is linked to users passions centered around (on) movies, celebrities, tv shows, music and football (more sports will be added later)

Our target
Middle Eastern Young Adults, 20-35 years old

The Launch
Our launch strategy is in 2 steps

First: use social media to diffuse the information for the alpha and béta versions. We had 235 friends in facebook in less than one week, and 70 in Flickr …
We are planning to launch the Alpha version in 3 weeks, it will be on invitation only – and of course you’ll be one of the first to get one!!

Second: Go to general public when we have a full web site (full in terms of content, (whether) from journalists or members). There will be media promotion.
The general public launch is planned for January.

The Founders
Delphine Eddé ,33 years old (female).
Work experience: in France for 11 years in advertising, web strategy (DDB) and online media (CondéNet) .

We are today 5 in our team, planning to be 8 in 2 weeks and around 12 in two months.

Editor’s note:

The most famous Arab Sports destinations are Kooora and Maktoob’s Sport4Ever ( aL Rihad Lil Abad)

Kooora (which means a ball and Arabic) has the most comprehensive sports information, locally regional and Internationally, TV schedule, and a forum with 4810 members, and it is ranked 255 on Alexa, making it the most visited sports website in the Arab world. Koora’s content is produced in house.

While Sport4Ever has less visitors but it has web 2.0 features where users can upload and share videos and photos related to sports and commenting on different content, plus posting sport news and features (citizen journalism for sports), while editors do add most of the content they chose which of the users content goes to the front page. Sport4Ever has also a forum but with 509 members only (even though it emerged from being a popular Arabic sports forum and then was acquired by maktoob and changed to today’s shape). It has more things than Kooora such as: Dream teams, Casual games for different types of sports, and SMS subscription.

Though Kooora is more famous because it was one of being the first in the market, and the depth and comprehension of its sports content but the site design is not old fashioned.

So there are an established competitors in the sports category who miss Wikeez in a number of features: Aggregation, voting, groups, and social networking, but who in turn offer timely news and other features that Wikeez does not have yet.

Though the concept of users building a fan group, where the celebrity that gets the most traction, is unique way in determining the most famous celebrity, mine would be Zain Eden Zedan .

As for TV shows and movies I do not know any such service if you know please let us know in your comment.

It would be rather interesting see how Wikeez actually will work out, I Think for TV shows that silly Turkish show Muhand and Noor will be in top.

If you are outside USA, Canada and UK, you no longer can get your twitter friends update via SMS, though a number of starups came along to offer you twitter SMS but with hefty charge per SMS. Well that change now if you use Brightkite (BK)- which is still in privet beta- because BK now supports international SMS updates via a UK number, in-bound SMS receiving is free, I keep getting them! (I have 30 invites thanks to Martin May cofounder of BK, please leave a comment below this post with your valid email address)

Brightkite is a location based social network, I reviewed it few months ago here and where I gave them some ideas based on a startup project I wanted to do. BK basically lets you update your location via SMS and web, and get Free SMS or web updates from your friends locations and blurbs; you can also see who of your friends is near you via the both platforms, and get to know and meet real people around you.  On BK you can also post photos via mobile email, email or web and see what your friends has posted. So basically the application is twitter plus facebook but location aware.

Brightkite has taken some of my advice lately; they added comments on photos, and users’ status update. But no sign for video updates yet! Other adds include tabs for: Updates from me and Friends, around me, mentions, comments and universe (Updates of everyone in the community). The most recent BK’s redesign includes instant updates from the universe on BK’s homepage, Ajaxly done, which is cool  and much better than hitting refresh all the time!, with a cool new homepage design. Though these ajaxy features seems  not to work when you login!

Also BK is finally currently testing a native iPhone app, which they have been late releasing  it (you can throw tomatos at Martin there ). Moreover BK has now some cool applications that works with it via its API, such as Guess My location right from your Wi-Fi connected laptop, powered by Geode and  Loki and Brightkite Map Visualization with SpatialKey (Brightkite Map Visualization with SpatialKey)  Though the missing app I am waiting for is desktop  AIR app and support for Twhril. since the current AIR app socialAddict is not cool at all.

If you wonder what is BK business model since twitter does not have one. Well it is location based advertising that caters to any business from big corporate and mom and pop shops. let’s say you’re a coffee shop owner, you can send SMS ads to people around several blocks away from you announcing happy hour with discount via BK.

Again do not forget to leave a comment with a valid email so I send you the invites.

Next  the first experiment project of Zero2Beta  which aims to develop and launch web apps in a matter of days has just been launched  after developing it in 2 days, with a team of  7 people. ArabCrunch  previously covered Next  here.

I just had tested of the application; it is a very simple and limited to-do-list application. It allows you to add one task a time with 140 characters per task, and 20 tasks maximum.

Other features: On the main page Next displays one task at a time, with an option , to delete when task in done, or show next task, in Ajax fashion,  or add a new task which will lead you to another page. On the Add a task page you can drag and drop tasks to change their arrangements also delete any task.

I congratulate Zero2Beta team in this achievement in 2 days I really liked the app design. But will I use it, well currently no, unless more useful features are added. I ll wait and see.

You can try next here.

I am looking for a part-time Arabic writer for ArabCrunch, to write for the to be launched Arabic version of the blog.

You can be a high school student, a student at university or employee at a tech Company.

All you have to have is passion for tech, the web and cool mobile apps.

You should also understand web 2.0 and mobile 2.0 terms (is a must). Have some business sense or experience, excellent Arabic and English, and the love to write for fun.

Job description:

• Work from home or anywhere there is a PC/Laptop and the Internet.

• Translate stories from English to Arabic.

• Write posts in Arabic, profiling and reviewing Arab originating startups and newly launched services by established companies in the Arab World.

• From time to time you will be conducting interviews with senior executives using email, IM, twitter, phone and even face to face meetings.

Qualifications:
• Passion to tech blogging in Arabic.
• Excellent Arabic and English.
• Tech savvy.
• Basic business and management skills.
• BA in Management, Marking, MIS or Computer Science is preferred.
• Having a personal blog is a plus.
• Management experience with a Web 2.0 or Mobile 2.0 company is a plus, plus.

Send your CV to Arabcrunch@gmail.com with 2 of your best written articles, and mention to me your favorite tech blogs.

After about 2 month of testing ArabCrunch in Alpha version using blogger, we finally moved to beta and being hosted using the self hosted wordpress.

The beta launch came kinda late because I was busy with my life, and trying to sort out things. Now I will dedicate more time to ArabCrunch, and update it regularly with more great stories about Arab originating web 2.0 and mobile 2.0 startups and established companies.

The beta launch uses a nice custom theme, which provides many new features such as categories, tag cloud, and sponsoring. We also added pages, such as (submit startup) and (submit news) pages, where we allow startups and companies to notify ArabCrunch about their product(s)/service(s) and news using forms. While others can share with us tips of an inside news they have.

These new features are common in any professional blog, so it was necessary for ArabCrunch to have them in order to grow, and because blogger does not offer the same great features wordpress offers.

Under beta launch we will still have some bugs to fix, so bear with us. and stay tuned for our the full launch which is coming soon.

We have a list of features to add to our blog, and as time passes we will add them gradually.

If you are an Arab originated startup or an established company in the areas we cover, we would like you to notify us about what you do and what is new with, so we can profile and review you here, providing you with advice and help spread the word about you.

I thank every one who contacted me and giving their feedback. I also would like every one to help spread the word about ArabCrunch which in turn will help Arab originated startups to excel and grow. You can do so by doing the following:

1- If you are a blogger or a news reporter please write a story about ArabCrunch.
2- Email all your friends telling them about ArabCrunch.
3- Link ArabCrunch to your blog or websites.
4- Follow us on twitter here.
5- If you are using twitter, wawet, Brightkite, or any other microblogging platform, please do repost our posts.
6- Join ArabCrunch Group in facebookand linkedin and invite all your friends.
7- Social Media: Submit and vote posts from ArabCrunch on facebook, digg, reddit, stumbleupon, mixx or any of your favorite social media website.
8- Subscribe to our RSS feed here.
9-  Add ArabCrunch to Technorati.
10-Tell every one you know about ArabCrunch .
11-Use any other innovative way to spread the word.

We also urge our readers to post comments to our posts, to create a conversation where every one can benefit from.

Finally, many thanks to Feedoor.com and its founder Mahomoud who made this release possible. And I thank them for being ArabCrunch first sponsors. We wrote about feedoor here. I ask everyone to open their feeds with feedoor, whether it is a blog posts or comments feed, social activity feed , or any other feed.

About feedoor:

Feedoor is the ultimate feed service where you can add many items, create and merge many feeds from outer sources with different feed formats (RSS,ATOM,RDF) in one single feed, you can also customize the look and the feel of your feed the way you want.

I’ve been privileged to receive an invite to Brightekite privet beta a few days ago, for those who do not know the service it is a location based micro blogging and photo sharing social network, my profile is here.

On BrightKite you can use both the web and mobile to send your status update or photos. From the mobile you have to check in your current location using SMS for example: @2911 Walnut St, Denver, CO, from the web you check in to a location by writing it down and when sending your updates your updates is attached to your latest checked in location.

You can send photos via mobile through email: Email your photo to: s1650@bkite.com and enter a caption for your photo in the subject line of the email. The service is mashed up with Google maps. You can also control the privacy of the of your posts, photos, and locations’ visibility.

The beauty about BK, is that you can know the where about of your friends, and the location of their photos and updates, also you can know who is around you at the moment in 20, 200, 2000, and 4000 radius  whether they are your friends or other BK members, using your web browser or your mobile.   if you are using iPhone, BK’s recently launched cool iPhone interface is ideal for you, BK also allows you to link your updates to twitter.

Currently Brightkite only support the following US carriers: AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Nextel and Boost Mobile.

Imagine if Brightkite would add features such as video posting from the web, and mobile with geo-location, enabling users to tag both photos and videos into relevant tags other than location, add comments to them and provide the option to view photos taken in any location, this could be done through SMS, MMS, and a special mobile application (check twitpic.com- BrightKite will launch mobile application for checking in soon) and adding more profile fields that would give more information about the user than the current Brightkite limited profile information.

These features where basically part of an idea of a startup I was planning to launch 2 years ago and the developers who signed my NDAs know a bet about it. (Note to the people who signed the NDA: it is still valid and you cannot use or share its’ content with others specially the other aspects not mentioned here.)

If these features were added, it would open the world to web 3.0 that could be used in a lot of useful ways such as: Trip planning, hanging out, and discovering places and location based instant social networking.

For example you want to visit a certain street in a certain city; you could go and look at the associated photos and videos to that street. Also you can filter them into any tag type you want -Yahoo has a working privet beta project for sharing your location called Fire Eagle and Google added recently Video locations to its’ map- these videos and photos has comments so you can read them or add yours and get a bigger picture of what is going on. Moreover you can see who has visited this location or is already there and send them messages asking them about the best places to go to. At the end of your trip you can post your videos, photos and updates, such as a photo of a Sushi dish from a Japanese restaurant, giving users insights of the restaurant’s food.

Another example is: If you go to an event, and you want to see who is who? you just login via your mobile browser and view the profiles of people around you, just nudge the people you wana connect with, and if they nudge back, you can start a conversation and build a relationship. See TechCrunch story here.
–Disclosure: ArabCrunch is not affiliated with TechCrunch-