Google has celebrated today’s Egyptian presidential election with a doodle at google.com.eg the doodle features each letter of Google participating in the election by standing in line then writing the name they will vote for and then submitting the vote.

Also google has launched a news site that enables users to follow election’s news in general or by the presidential candidate. In this section like Google news google compile the list of news stories from news sources across the web, be it a newspaper online magazine or a news portal.

The American University in Cairo’s School of Business – Entrepreneurship & Innovation Program is organizing Fekrati a national business idea competition open for Egyptians with a prize for top winner of 50,000 Egyptian pounds.

The aim of this competition contribute to the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Egypt by helping the country’s next generation create and lead their own successful business ventures.

The competition application deadline is in 5 days, it is open to Egyptians between the age of 18 and 30 and is open individuals or teams. In case of a team, the maximum number of members allowed per team is 4. The competition will be open to all sectors.

Selected applicants will under go training workshops then they will submit business plans where they will submit Business plans summaries winners of this round will receive mentoring. Then teams will submit final revised business plans and winners will demo in-front of investors and prizes will be awarded.

To apply for the competition go here.

Souq.com and the American University in Cairo’s Entrepreneurs Society have teamed up to launch The Hit 2012, the first product innovation competition for the university’s students, which gives participants the opportunity to win LE 50,000 to start up their business and own a commercial channel through an online store on Souq.com.
The concept of The Hit was developed by Souq.com and the Entrepreneurs’ Society, under the support of Sherif Kamel, the Dean of the School of Business. Its aim is to raise student interest in entrepreneurship and innovation, by providing a platform for a practical learning experience. The process shows young Egyptians that with an innovative idea that is properly researched, they can create a product and develop a commercial model to sell it. Souq.com is giving the students real opportunities to go to market with their ideas.
“Our aim is to spread entrepreneurship awareness and foster an entrepreneurial spirit among AUC students and among the Egyptian youth,” said Youssuf El Samma, CEO, Entrepreneurs’ Society. “We chose to partner with Souq.com because through them students with innovative ideas can build business models for products that will get retailed online and will have real buyers in a matter of days. There are many wonderful ideas and concepts among students, who are the entrepreneurs and business leaders of the future. The Hit has encouraged these innovators to bring their ideas to life.”

In collaboration with the Adham Centre for Television and Digital Journalism, each stage of The Hit 2012 was filmed and posted online as webisodes. Today, out of the 16 teams who pitched their ideas to a panel of expert judges, only 10 teams remain in the competition. These 10 have now received LE 1,000 each to build a prototype of their product and present it.
Prior to the prototypes presentations, Omar Sodoudi, general manager for Souq.com in Egypt, spent an entire day mentoring the teams in his office. “It’s been such a journey, watching the ideas of these young entrepreneurs develop and get nurtured to the stage they’ve reached today. The most important thing for us is that all of these ideas end up on the market, not just the winning “Hit”. The teams or the ‘entrepreneurs’ need to start expanding their thinking beyond the idea, but more into setting up a business operation, and how they’re going to make money. We’re offering them an online retail channel, but we also want to encourage them to learn more about all the possibilities of e-commerce.”
The prototype presentations will be filmed on May 3rd and the videos posted on the website for the public to vote on. The voting results will determine the five finalists who will present their fully developed prototypes to the judges. In the final round, the online voters will get to choose the winner of The Hit, which will be announced in an awards ceremony at the American University in Cairo’s New Campus on May 9th.
The Hit 2012 is supported by Souq.com, the Adham Centre for Television and Digital Journalism and KUWADICO.

The competition is divided into three rounds
 
Idea Generation and Executive Summary
100 teams participate in this round by attending the session on Idea Generation and Product Innovation to incubate their initial ideas and learn about the dynamics of ecommerce in Egypt. Participants are then required to send their executive summaries for evaluation
 
Planning Round
In this round participating teams attend the session on Business Case writing where they learn how to plan, write their business cases and present their elevator pitch to the judging panel. 16 Teams are then chosen to take part in the first episode where they pitch their ideas to the judging panel. The panel of judges will choose eight teams and online voters will pick the two other teams to become the top ten.
 
Branding Round
In this round the top ten participants are not yet announced which gives a chance to all 16 teams to brand their businesses and products. The 16 participating teams will attend the session on Branding and Marketing where they learn how to fully develop a marketing campaign and brand their products.  In the second episode top 10 teams are announced and they get a chance to present their full marketing campaigns to the judging panel.
 
Production Round
In this round the top five are not yet announced and therefore all ten participating teams will attend a session on Supply chain and Building a prototype. Participating teams are then funded with 1,000 EGP to build a prototype of their product and present it to the judging panel. Voters will then choose the top four teams to present their fully developed prototypes and the judges bring one of the bottom six back in the competition to present his prototype forming the top five.
 
Final Round
Voters get to choose this year’s Hit through online voting on our website.

Egyptian hacking group Team Hacker Egyp took over Barack Obama http://barack-obama.co.il/ Israeli site in retaliation for the conspiracy against Islamic Egyptian presidential candidate Hazim Salah Abu Ismael.

Salah Salah Abu Ismael are talking about a US government conspiracy in partnership with the rolling military council to dismiss him from presidential raise in Egypt’s first free presidential election.

The conspiracy according to his supporters is the attempt by the US government and the Egyptian regime to prove that Abu Ismael’s mother is an American citizen which would disqualify abu Ismael from presidential race if proven.

Abut Ismael has talked about a US government plot in partnership with the rolling military council against him and Egypt because he calls for Islam to role Egypt and to make Egypt free from American imperialism that aim to keep the country weak and poor.

http://barack-obama.co.il/ has completely been taken over by the hacking group Team Hacker Egypt, they raised the Egyptian flag and left the following message:

“Message Team Hacker Egypt: much away but come back strongly and this is not the final blow, but the next strikes a much stronger
Message Soly Hacker:  Fuck Cops Alectornic And Fuck InterPool And Fuck FPI ( maybe the mean FBI)
we Are : Soly Hacker , Dr.Silnt Hill , Mego

https://www.facebook.com/TeamHackerEgypt

Greats : To All Egyptian ppl =)
./e0f”

As for the Egyptian hacker group affiliation with the famous international hacking group Anonymous, he hacker said that there is no alliance but they help each other.

Other American Israeli and Danish sites that Team Hacker Egypt are:

http://harley-checks.com/

http://hellokittypersonalchecks.com/

http://bingosignupcodes.com/

http://obamassecrets.com/

http://mickeychecks.com/

http://lejlux.dk/

http://ppm.dk/

http://axinaweb.dk/

http://dansktelefonpasning.dk/

http://gilru.co.il/

http://nekudotaim.co.il/

http://gil-peretz.com/

YouTube, Lenovo, and Space Adventures announced last Thursday the two global winners of YouTube Space Lab (b), the worldwide science competition that challenged 14-18 year-olds to design a science experiment that can be performed in space. Amr Mohamed from Egypt (17-18 year old age group) and Dorothy Chen and Sara Ma from the U.S. (14-16 year old age group) were awarded the honor at a ceremony in Washington, DC, attended by members of Space Lab partners including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The students will have their experiments conducted by astronauts 250 miles above Earth aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and live streamed to the world on a Lenovo ThinkPad laptop via YouTube later this year.

“Humanity’s future relies on moving beyond Earth,” said renowned scientist, Professor Stephen Hawking. “Realising this goal will require an entrepreneurial spirit and a new generation of scientists and astronauts. YouTube Space Lab is a wonderful initiative that helps inspire young minds around the world to take a greater interest in science and the future of space exploration.”

Amr Mohamed, 18, from Alexandria, Egypt, came up with an experiment to explore the question: “Can you teach an old spider new tricks?” Amr proposed investigating the effects of microgravity on the way the zebra spider catches its prey and whether it could adapt its behavior in this environment. “The idea of sending an experiment into space is the most exciting thing I have ever heard in my life,” said Amr. “Winning YouTube Space Lab means everything to me, to my family, and to the people of the Middle East.”

Dorothy Chen and Sara Ma, both 16, who attend Troy High School in Troy, Michigan, created an experiment that asks: “Could alien superbugs cure disease on Earth?” Dorothy and Sara want to send bacteria to the space station to see if introducing different nutrients and compounds can block their growth in the hopes of providing new tools to fight germs on Earth. “The idea that something that is your experiment being sent up into space and actually becoming a reality is incredible,” said Sara. “I definitely want to pursue science as a career,” added Dorothy.
Amr, Dorothy and Sara joined the four other regional winning teams in Washington, DC, this week to honor their achievements, with prizes including a ZERO-G flight, a Lenovo IdeaPad laptop and a special tour and dinner at the Udvar-Hazy Air & Space Museum at Dulles. YouTube and Lenovo held the awards ceremony at the Newseum in downtown Washington.
In addition to having their experiments performed in space, Amr, Dorothy and Sara will get to choose one of two unique space experiences: either a trip to Japan to watch their experiment blast off in a rocket bound for the ISS, or once they turn 18-years old, a one-of-a-kind astronaut training experience in Star City, Russia, the training center for Russian cosmonauts.

As 2011 is about to end, history was rewritten in 3 Arabs countries and counting. Bu Azizi started something that can not be stopped.

But what where the top search terms coming for Egypt and Saudi Arabia? Google released today it is annual Zeitgiest a look into the year’s top google searches. We would like to note that Facebook and Twitter and news where the among raising trends. meaning more new users for both Facebook and Twitter and more interest from the general public in political news.

Fastest Rising Searches in Egypt ( we translated them to Arabic)

Jan 25th revolution

Mydan Al Tahrir

Facebook

Jocks 2011

7th day ( a newspaper)

Mubarak Trail

Twitter

Finance Ministry

Google Gravity

Love forbidden serias.

Egypt’s Fastest Rising People:
Mubarak

Wael Ghonim

Hisham Al juokk

Isam Sharaf
Tamer Ashour

Omar Katamesh

Hussien Salem

Ahmed Al Shahat

Ahemd Iz

Jamal Mubarak

Egypt top Google news:
Al Youm Al sabaa
Al Maser Al youm
Youtube
Masrway
Adustour
Facebook
news
google
al jumhuria
al shourok

http://www.googlezeitgeist.com/en/top-lists/eg/google-news

As for KSA: fastest raising searches:
Youtube
Facebook
hafez
games
twitter
spongup
aljazeera
heart heart song
al arabiya
bank Al tasleef

KSA fastest rising people:
Ghadafi
Myriam Fares
Ali Abdallah Saleh
Maher Almaakulai
justin Bieber
Mohamd Abdo
Manal Aalem
Khaled Abdul Rahman

KSA Googel news:
Mohamed Abdo
manal Al alem
Khaled And Al rahman
Itihad sports club
Egyptian league
Al Yaman
Reyal Madrid
Al Nasr sports club
Egypt
Barcelona

Google has launched recently a website dedicated to Egyptian parliamentary election that starts today.

The site http://google.com.eg provide a number of services, news about the election aggregated from the web and that can be filtered according to any egyptian political party or issue.

It also has a section which provides a google map mashup that asks users for their national number to get info about where to cast their vote and other voting information, this is done using Egypt’s supreme juridical comity for elections sites.

Also google has a YouTube Channel dedicated for the election called “sayyedqararak” that features videos from elections candidates. The channel is in partnership with BBC, Egyptian Satellite Channel On TV and Egyptian news Maser Al Youm.

As today is the election and if you were an Egyptian who did not vote yet, this is a useful service for you.

According to sources in Egypt, Mobile service is offline in Tahrir square in Cairo Egypt, the square is witnessing a new revolt against the military rule in Egypt with around 1 million people demonstrating.

We do not know if it was switched off intentionally by mobile operators -after a request from the government in Egypt – or not. Vodafone one of the mobile telecom operators in Egypt says over Twitter that the service is running and the outage might be due huge traffic.

In the first version of the Egyptian revolution in January this year , one of Husni Mubarak tactics -which did not save him- was to switch mobile network off.

#image credit.

On Wednesday dozens of mental health doctors in the general secretary of mental health in Cairo Egypt protested in front of Abasia hospital against transferring Dr. Basma El Aziz manager of media at the secretary to investigation, after she issued a statement that rejected transferring political activists and those with opposing opinion to mental health hospital.

This comes after transferring Egyptian blogger Maikel Nabel to a mental hospital, he was sentenced of 3 years in person over charges of insulting the military on a tweet. Maikel was sentenced by an Egyptian Military court and he was on hunger strike since then.

Maikel is one of more than 10,000 Egyptians tried by military court since Mubarak’s ouster, according to human rights groups.

One of the tactics used by tyrant regimes is to accuse its opponents, journalists and others of being mentally ill. In many cases mental doctors work as undercover agents for secret police to pass whatever they like or they would be subject to blackmail.

This story reminds us of some suspicious people who wrongly accused ArabCrunch founder Gaith Saqer of being mentally ill after the site last year revealed parts of governments plots against the site and free media.

#image credit.

Ideavelopers, managers of the Technology Development Fund (“TDF”) and is a subsidiary of EFG-Hermes, recently lead a Series A investment round in Offerna, Egypt’s first group buying site.

Established in March 2011, Offerna provides its customers with deals that feature discounts of 50-90% for various products and services, in return guaranteeing merchants a minimum number of buyers.

Offerna competes with regional group buying sites such as GoNabit which was acquired by living social and Cobone which is part of Jabbar group. Offerna which currently focuses on the Egyptian market is planning a regional expansion.

Offerna is lead by Abdullah Assal, founder and CEO, who returned to Cairo after completing his MBA at Stanford to bring the group-buying model to Egypt.  Offerna’s founding team includes also Sinan Khatib, previously Director of Business Development at BuyWithMe, one of the leading U.S. group buying sites, Yasser Lotfy, previously manager of Etisalat Misr’s Mass Market Revenue and Retention, and Tamer Adel, regional e-commerce expert.

Offerna is TDF’s fourth investment in e-commerce-related companies, recently the VC invested in nefsak. Through its e-commerce investments, Ideavelopers aims to build a network of companies that not only jump start e-commerce in Egypt, but also allow for Ideavelopers’ companies to benefit from portfolio company synergies.

EFG-Hermes was one of the early investors in Maktoob around the year 2000, Maktoob was acquired by Yahoo in 2009.

When learning one of the common programming languages like C++, English language in most cases is a barrier for young Arab kids to learn software programing at a young age.

Kalimat comes to bridge the gap by offering an Arabic educational programing language for kids in which developers write the code using Arabic letters.

According to Mohammed Sayed, the language is easy to learn but provides enough features to allow for complex programs and it has attributes that are familiar to developers such as Object-oriented programming, Dynamic typing , Garbage collection and creating .exe files.

The language is open source freely available on Windows , Ubuntu 32-bit and Ubuntu 64-bit here is a book in Arabic to teach kids how to use Kalimat.

Update: Samy the author of Kalimat says ” Just wanted to tell people who downloaded the September 2011 edition: There’s a bug that prevents the creation of .exe files! I fixed it in the October edition, available now from the official site (http://www.kalimat-lang.com) or from http://code.google.com/p/kalimat/downloads”

This project is important and I would like to ask fellow developers to joins the community and further develop it and enhance it. It would also be very useful for Arab schools to add it to their curricula and teach it for kids at a young age.

The project is founded by Mohamed Samy from Egypt, many thanks for this great offer.

2 days ago I arrived  to my beloved country Egypt. I am planning to stay here for few days, in mind with  a new project that would help push entrepreneurship in Egypt and the region and I would like to meet the startup and tech community here.

The post title says that ArabCrunch is in Egypt, not that ArabCrunch is not here, it is. We already have Arabic tech writers and team members who are Egyptians like Mohammad Sayed and Moemen Mohammed, our security partner Spirula Systems and above all our readers and fans.

I would like in this trip to meet with everyone startups, VCs, geeks and our readers. So we might have a small meetup soon.

Microsoft Corp. announced the promotion of Ali Faramawy to Corporate Vice President Microsoft Corporation and President – Microsoft Middle East & Africa. The promotion recognizes Faramawy’s strong leadership and his contributions to helping “to fuel growth across the region. ” It also underlines the growing role of MEA (Arab world) as an area contributing to the overall success of Microsoft.

As corporate vice president, Ali Faramawy will continue to be responsible for Microsoft’s operations in the Middle East & Africa (MEA) area. MEA is one of thirteen areas that comprise Microsoft’s worldwide operations. Microsoft said that “the area represents one of Microsoft’s fastest growing and most dynamic markets – and certainly its most diverse.” Microsoft MEA is comprised of 32 offices representing 79 countries across three continents. Faramawy has led the region for seven years .Ali Faramawy’s previous title was Vice President Microsoft International and President – Microsoft Middle East & Africa.
Throughout his twenty years career in the IT industry, Ali held different Technical, Sales and Managerial roles in different parts of the Middle East and in Europe with companies like Dun & Bradstreet Software, NCR Corporation, Yokogawa Marex and finally Microsoft Corporation.

Ali joined Microsoft in October 1997 as the General Manager of Microsoft Egypt. After a successful four year spell in that role, he moved on to assume additional responsibilities for the area of Eastern Mediterranean, which encompassed Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Cyprus & Malta.

In May 2002, Ali moved to take on the newly established position of Regional Director – in charge of Sales, Marketing & Services for the Middle East and Africa Region.

Ali graduated from the Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University, majoring in Computer Science & Automatic Control and has an MBA in Strategic Marketing from the University of Hull in the UK. He is married and has two sons.

Traffic james is a major problems in condents Egyptian cities, there were several attempts to develop an application to tackle this problem.

Bey2ollak developed by a group of Egyptian developers tackles this problem at the heart it update users with traffic conditions in major egyptian cities and users themselves report conditions.

The site has an iPhone, BlackBerry، Nokia and Android app and is also available in web version and mobile web version. The app can get more useful if it can suggest alternative routs to jammed streets.

(Via ArabCrunch Arabic Edition)

Hacktivists group Anonymous has organized a protest against USA San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART ) for shutting down cell phone service to four stations in downtown San Francisco in response to a planned protest. The protest was planned against killing an innocents man by BART police.

EFF called the action Pulling a Mubarak in San Francisco. Hunsi Mubarak shut down cell phone connection and the internet during the Egyptian revolution.

So here we go Arab Spring has reached USA with governments in US emulating Arab Tyrants tactics this time at home , for decades the backing for dictators was abroad .

here is the live stream: follow the protest live on Twitter hashtag #opBART



Here is another feed:



Live video for mobile from Ustream


Below is surveillance video from the Civic Center BART platform on July 3 when Charles Blair Hill was shot.



It’s arguably proven that the internet had played the most important role as a tool that led to the successful revolution in Egypt, eMarketing Egypt made a study to explore how Egyptians dealt with the internet during the revolution.

Ossama El-Badawy, the Online Competitive Intelligence Manager, stated that it is obvious that the internet in Egypt witnessed a dramatic growth after the revolution; the following figures just give a quick view for the current interment status in Egypt:
- 23+ million Internet users,
- 7.7+ million Facebook users,
- And 100%+ Twitter users growth during recent months

The survey was dedicated to explore in details the way Egyptians dealt with the internet during the revolution, the main findings can be listed as below:
-  28% of internet users purely relied on the Internet to stay tuned with the revolution news and updates
- This percentage goes up to 63% among those who participated in the demonstrations
- The Internet had solely shaped the views of 17% of users regarding the recent events
-  As expected, Facebook had been the prime tool used to tie up with events and news as mentioned be 71% of users
- Finally, 45% of users will increase their reliance on the Internet to tie up with coming news and events

I hope more Arab tyrants are toppled soon.

E-commerce in the region is reaching the tipping point, as the market seems more mature to deal with this type of commerce, yesterday LivingSocial one of the leading group buying sites in the world acquired GoNabit.

Earlier this month, Ideavelopers closed a deal with Sherif Nassar, Founder and CEO of nefsak.com, where Ideavelopers will invest 10 million EGP (1.67639 million U.S. dollars) in his company. Founded in 2008.

Nefask says it has been the fastest growing Egyptian online retailer with sales increasing five times year over year. Today nefsak’s online catalogue has over 18,000 products covering a wide range of categories from computers and electronics to home decoration and fashion. The investment according to a press release will help nefsak develop into a household brand and scale its operations to meet growth expectations.

In his comment on the investment, Ideavelopers Managing Partner, Tarek Assaad said, “We are delighted to work with nefsak, we believe they are the leader in their market. The level of dedication and passion that Sherif Nassar demonstrated while building this company is impressive. These characteristics are essential in an entrepreneur whose aspiration is to build an amazon.com for the Middle East”.

This investment comes as Ideavelopers’ third investment in an e-commerce related company. In mid 2008, Ideavelopers had invested in SMART Cards Applications, a company that runs an electronic network for distributing food rations. Later that year, it also invested in Fawry, the leading provider of payments services. “We believe that e-commerce is reaching an infliction point,” said Ziad Mokhtar, Partner at Ideavelopers, “the people who were 10 years old when the Internet first came to Egypt in the late 90s are now entering the workforce. Adding the increased proliferation of broadband, this translates into a critical mass of users who feel safe, spend more time, and can spend more money online.”

Sherif Nassar started attracting the attention of local and international investors in late 2010. “I chose Ideavelopers”, Sherif says, “because I knew they can help support the company as it grows. They can provide necessary funds, sound strategic advice, and access to local networks”. Both, Tarek Assaad and Ziad Mokhtar from Ideavelopers, as well as Mr. Sameh Farid have joined the board of directors of nefsak.

Ideavelopers is Egyptian based venture capital firm a subsidiary of EFG-Hermes Private Equity. The firm manages the Technology Development Fund – a $50 million fund focused on early stage technology companies. To date, the firm invested over $25 million in 17 companies operating inside and outside Egypt.

Shutting down the internet cost egypt millions of dollars according to studies in the mater, however that crime did not go unpunished.

An Egyptian court has ordered former egyptian president Husni Mubarak and other former officials to pay 90 Million USD for shutting down the internet and cell phone networks during the Egyptian revolution.

According to Aljazeera Mubarak is sentenced to pay 200 million Egyptian pounds (1 Egyptian pound = 0.16787 U.S. dollars), former prime minister Ahmed Nathef 40 million EP, and former interior minister Habib Al Adli 300  million EGP for damages that “the national economy has suffered.”

It is worth mentioning that the former regime blocked Twitter other websites before shutting down the internet.

#image credits.

A team in University of Alabama in Birmingham, USA have discovered 1,000 tombs, 3,000 ancient settlements and 17 pyramids via satellite infrared survey.

According to BBC the team analysed images from satellites orbiting 700km above the earth, equipped with cameras so powerful they can pin-point objects less than 1m in diameter on the earth’s surface.

Infra-red imaging was used to highlight different materials under the surface.

#image credits

Jabbar’s group buying site Cobone has expanded to Cairo, Now offering special offers to the resident of the city.

Like Groupon and Livingsocial Cobone works by offering special deal with deep discounts on restaurants health club and so on, users commit to the deal and if enough people buy the deal it goes live.

With this move Cobone competes Cairo specific group buying site: offerna. It also competes with other regional group buying sites: GoNanbit , Groupon, Fustuq, and Hmizate.

Egypt’s Ministry of communications and information technology  (MCIT) has released ICT indicators in brief for February of 2011. The report says that there are 71.46 million Mobile subscribers in January growing at 1.13 % from previous month with annual growth at 27.95% while Mobile penetration rate is at 91.32 %.

As for the Internet the report says that there are 23.51 millions internet users in January growing at 2.12% from previous month and growing 39.61% annually. Internet penetration rate in January was 30.05% from the population growing at 8.14% annually. While the Proportion of households using the internet from home was 32.76% growing at 7.25% annually.

Another interesting point from the report is that the number of Internet Mobile subscribers is a growing trend: as in January 11.32% of Mobile subscribers use Internet via mobile handsets that is around 8.09 million mobile internet users, ADSL subscribers are 1429.40 thousand.

As for the number of ICT companies ( Information and communications technology companies) the number is 3972 companies in January growing around 1% over the previous month and 13.49% over the previous year, these companies employed 205.28 thousand people and have issues capital of 44870.5 Million Egyptian Pounds.

To get the full report you can view the embed below:

Wael Ghonim Google’s head of marketing tweeted that he is taking a sabbatical from Google to start a tech Non government organization to “fight poverty and foster eduction.”

Wael has been one of the admins of Facebook page We Are All “Khaled Saed” page, Khaled Saed is an activist from Alexandria who was beaten to death by Egyptian secret police for posting a Youtube video that shows evidence of police corruption. The page attracted 10 of thousands of followers and so far has 1,173,996 members. The page call for protests in the events that lead to the ousting of former Egyptian president Husni Mubarak was crucial.

In February Wael went missing in Egypt to later we get the info that he was arrested and was released on 7th of February to emerge as one of the Egyptian revolution leaders.

We will update you here with more info about the NGO once we get them.

Egypt’s Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA) signed an agreement with the Social Development Fund (SDF). The agreement is about cooperation between both bodies to offer loans to companies working in the IT sector at a total value of EGP 150 million at an interest rate of 6%, half of which will be covered by ITIDA.

Via Cairo ICT.

“What happened in Tahrir  was a miracle by all mean, having a young generation lead the liberation of a nation with technology in the heart of this revolution changed all the standards and rules well known by the all of us. The World stood still watching what is going on and will continue to watch how we will accomplish the next wave of the revolution by liberating our economy and building a nation of startups from entrepreneurs rather than tycoons. Our belief in these values made us take the step to build the accelerator that will seed the revolution spirit, unlock the youth potentials and help them through their journey in building their empire. ” Said Samer El Sahan cofounder of Tahrir Sqr.

Startups in Alexandria egypt can now rejoice, Mohammed Gawdat who is heading Google emerging markets and businesses in Southern, Central and East Europe, Middle East and Africa. along with Samer El Sahn former CEO of eSpace a well known web development house in the region is launching Tahrir Sqr a web and mobile startup accelerator and cowering space in the city that was built by Alexander the great.

Tahrir Sqr offers startups physical location, mentorship and funding. We asked Samer El Sahan who acts as the CEO of Tahrir Sqr about how much they would invest and how much equity they would take from each startup he said that it is It is dynamic and will be handled case by case and would be around 15,000 USD and up. the seed funding called tahrir seed fund and the incubator would bring funding from other angel investors.

As for how much each startup will stay before graduating Samer said it is also dynamic and will be handled case by case.  As for corworking space, it will be offered for entrepreneurs for free.

The incubator currently accept applicants and will be launched officially April 1st. Mohammed Gawdat is the investor and partner in Tahrir also sets in its board of directors, Samer El Sahan is founder and CEO.

# Mohammed Gawdat’s image via TedX Dubai.

The revolution has succeed in Egypt by ousting the US government poppet, the dictator Husni Mubarak. Though the transition period did not end yet. The Army is in command paving the way to elected president and parliament, but there are forces who try to launch counter revolution.

The former regime in Egypt relied in 2 forces the corrupt members of its National Democratic Party (NDP) and State Security Investigative (SSI) or in Arabic AmenDawla, SSI was trained by the FBI as Wikileaks cables reveal and was working as a torture heaven for the CIA. Both of SSI and NDP existence was based on corruption, torture, spying on the Egyptian people and illegal methods to achieve unjust objectives.

Many members of NDP and SSI members are not happy about new Egypt because corrupt people like them have no place in post revolution Egypt. Many reports from Egypt suggest that remnants from both forces are trying to hijack the revolution by acts of bullying theft and so forth. Not to mention drug gangs who are taking advantage of power vacuum in some places on the country.

Here comes Zabatak which means I caught ou as a platform to eliminate corruption incidents which would help clean Egypt from such evil behavior.

On Zabatak user can report theft, bribery, violence, and commercial cheating incidents from the web or via an android app. Moreover users can pinpoint the location of the corruption incident and the site owners say they will report to authorities to take action.

The site also offers custom email alerts about incidents from certain locations and it is integrated with Google maps.

You may question that some users can abuse the system. Well, first users can vote each incident up or down and I think since each incident can be verified and investigated then abuse would be minimal.

One of the incidents that related to tech is about corruption case against Arab Science Foundation (ASTF), the report says forgery, theft and firing employes happened at the NGO, plus not reporting on foreign Aid ( disclaimer: we could not verify this report.)
Corruption is wide spread in the Arab world among the oppressive regimens who rely in AmnDawla (ISS) copycats to oppress the population. I hope that reform comes to the rest of the Arab world, all AmnDawla copycats are dismantled and we  will see projects such as Zabatak in every Arab country.

Zabataj uses open source Ushahidi platform