As A U.S companies Google has been in compliance with US export controls and sanctions programs against countries that does not follow the US policy.

In Syria all google software and google code was blocked in the country due to those US government sanctions programs.

We at ArabCrunch wrote about how these sanctions affect the average innocent user in Syria, Sudan, Iraq, North Korea and Cuba, specially with the blocking of open source software repository sourceforge.

Today Google announced the good news as it made Google Earth, Picassa And Chrome available for download in Syria. The announcement was made via a blog post but did not say the reason behind this move possibly the US government is easing restriction as such this move. We will contact google for updates on this story.

Update:
Google responded by saying that the US government allowed them to offer these software:
“Export controls and sanctions are maintained by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry & Security (BIS) in the past they prohibited us from offering software downloads to Syria. We used IP blocking to comply with those regulations.

A combination of regulatory changes by both the Commerce and Treasury Departments have made it possible for us to make certain types of software downloads available in Syria”

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.

Dubai, UAE (February 24, 2012). On his 707th birthday, Google celebrates the famous Moroccan explorer, Ibn Battuta’s by featuring a doodle on its homepage.

Showing across the Arab world on February 25th, the Doodle pays tribute to one of the greatest travellers of all time through various scenes from his adventures across Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and China. The doodle depicts Ibn Battuta’s 70,000+ mile journey and the many different monuments he visited. The interactive doodle cleverly conceals 16 different monuments for the viewer to discover.

Doodles are known as the decorative changes that are made to the Google logo to celebrate different people, events or special dates such as holidays, anniversaries, and the lives of famous artists and scientists. Over the years, doodles on the Google homepage have made searching on Google more fun and enjoyable for its users worldwide. For more about Google doodles please visit: www.google.com/doodles

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.

Google has launched Insights MENA an interactive website that provides research data about the online behavior of urban consumers in five key Arab markets: Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and UAE. This tool comes handy for online professionals, entrepreneurs, mobile apps developers and is alarming for tyrant Arab governments who can see how the shift of media usage and information control is going away from their hands to the internet,

as the research reveals that media usage via the internet is close to TV and newspapers.

The research was conducted by The Nielsen Company Dubai.

For Internet usage rates, UAE comes in top with 84% then KSA with 70% then Morocco with 51%.

Most internet users in UAE are not new to the internet as 52% has been online since more than 5 years, followed by KSA with 34% and only 17% of Egypt for being online 5 years and more. As for being only 1-2 years online Egypt comes first with 29%, jordan second with 23%.

In All countries, 83% of internet users access the internet from home, 26% from office, 20% from cyber caffe, 15% family and friends and 14% in the go. 70% access the internet daily for 11.4 hours from home and 8.7 from office.

The most frequent online activities are: visiting an online portal, using a search engine, send/ receive emails, use instant messaging, visit and access a social network. Reading writing a blog post came also as an important activity with happening an average 4 times a week.

90% of users own mobile, KSA and UAE has the highest percentage of internet enabled mobiles 69% then 58%, morocco at 28%, Egypt 41% Jordan 51%.

Again UAE and KSA has the highest internet usage via mobile 57% UAE 54% for KSA, then morocco 24%, jordan 18%, Egypt 22%. Which means targeting both KSA and Egypt with mobile apps is more important than other markets, even though UAE has a higher penetration rate than Egypt, but 22% percentage from a population of 10s of millions is greater than 57% of few millions in UAE.

As for E-commerce 12% form UAE purchased online, while 19% did online research, then comes KSA with 5% buying online, morocco and jordan stand at 2% and Egypt at 1%. What are the reasons for these numbers? GDP per capita is higher in KSA and UAE than other countries.

Google shows snippet of movies show times in many countries in its search resluts, today google announced that it launched Islamic Prayer Times in search results highlighted from pages across the web.

Google says this feature will be available on all domains for searches in English and Arabic. This feature uses Google’s Rich Snippets technology, which also powers improved search results for other kinds of information like events, profiles, recipes, reviews.

Testing the service in Amman, Jordan it did not work, maybe it needs a day or 2 to work.

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.

Google has launched today Google Maps domains enabling local search within a country in Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman, and Saudi Arabia.

The Interface of these local maps is available English and Arabic as well French in some countries. Google navigation comes enabled with new Google Maps domains. Google Navigation offer directions from one distention to another.

Also users can now in these countries create “My Maps” a customized version of the user’s maps. Say your favorite hangouts.

Google also launched Google Map Maker in Saudi Arabia and UAE, Google Map Makers allows users to use their local knowledge to practically edit the entire map – from roads, businesses, parks, schools and more

There is no doubt that Arabic fonts are one of the most beautiful fonts in the world, however digital fonts optimized for the digital screens (PCs, Tablets, Mobile) we use are behind the rich arrays of Arabic fonts that we have offline.

Shasha Font project (shash means screen in Arabic) comes to offer a hand in creating Arabic fonts that is tailored for the optimum usage of screens, the project is designed by 2 egyptian artists Gaber and Ganzeer and being funded by Google.

Shasha Font’s blog offers documentation of the entire process. The font will be open source and its licensing will be under creative commons (CC).

Thank you Google for funding such needed Arabic project and for supporting the Arabic web.

After Launching an Arabic version, YouTube has started offering local version for Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Yemen.

According to Google announcement local version of YoutTube means people who visit the site will see on the homepage the most popular videos in their home country along with those that are rising in popularity.

This sound like a logical step as YouTube is growing in popularity in the region and many more active users from professional media and immature users are uploading videos everyday to the number one video sharing platform in the world.

YouTube is offering also recommended channels based on watch history, shared videos, and other channel subscriptions.

With this move YouTube is adding more pressure to regional video sharing sites such as iKbis and D1G as another avenue of their value is diminishing: local feel and touch.

Android Market place is currently blocked across the Middle East, however news surfaced on Stuff Middle East that Android market is coming soon to UAE, Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

A source informed Stuff that Google has reached agreement with telecom operators in these countries, though no final date is given but the market is expected to be available in few months. We will contact google and update you here.

Updated: confirmed he was released.

After being missing for around 2 weeks, news surfaced that Wael has been in custody by the Egyptian regime and that he was released few hours ago.

R.N.N one of facebook pages that specialize in updating the public about the revolution in Egypt said that he was released and posted in what appears a pic of him.

Google confirmed his release via a tweet along with CNN, Alarabiya and other TV stations.

Many unconfirmed report said that Wael is the founder or one of the admin of  ”We Are All Khaled Saed” page on Facebook which was pivotal in calling for the current revolution in Egypt. Khaled Saed was beaten to death by Egyptian police in Alexandria for posting a YouTube video about police corruption..

At ArabCrunch we are happy for this news and ask God to protect Wael and all our Egyptian brothers.

Wael was reported by R.N.N. that he joined the demonstrator in Tahrer  square in Cairo after his release. Wael is Google MENA Head of Marketing, we will wait for his tweets on his Twitter account for extra confirmation.

Update:

Wael just tweeted “Gave my 2 cents to Dr. Hosam Badrawy. who was reason why I am out today. Asked him resign cause that’s the only way I’ll respect him #Jan25” and here more picture of him after his release:

#image via ONTevg.

After launching Speak to Tweet service that enables Egyptian to record a voice mail which will be tweeted automatically, Google went ahead and launched a Google Crises Response page for Egypt.

The page contains Google tools such as Google Transparency Report which displays web  traffic to Google services from Egypt, YouTube Channels and Speak to Tweet service.

The page also contains emergency, airlines and embassies phone numbers and Google Maps mashup that displays Protests locations on Google maps . Other info on the page are Google news about Egypt and latest tweets with hashtag #egypt.
Google has a missing executive in Cairo our friend Wael Ghomin, which we pray for his safety and release.

Update: google issued the following statement:

“A Googler, Wael Ghonim, is missing in Egypt. He has not been seen since late Thursday evening in central Cairo. The safety of our employees is very important to Google, so if anyone has any information please call the following U.K. number: +44 20 7031 3008.”

Update2: some people say that it is not Wael in the video, however as I personally know him the person looks like him, but we are not 100% sure, what we are sure about is that he is missing.

The regime in Egypt has apprehended thousands of protestors as the revolution in Egypt grows every day. One of these people who has been apprehended is Wael Ghonim an Egyptian native and who is Head of Marketing for Google Middle East.

Wael has been active in using Facebook and Twitter in supporting of change in the political scene of Egypt. While he was in Cairo to attend a conference ( his work location is Dubai) he joined the demonstrations to later to be apprehended by secret police as the video below shows, apparently as of last Thursday the time of his last tweet.

Wael is a great friend to AC and one of our fans we ask anyone who knows anything about his where about to call Google’s published UK phone number +44 20 7031 3008.
, which is designated by Google for whoever seen him.

We pray to God for Ghonim safety and peaceful release. And we also pray for the safety of all ArabCrunch team members in Egypt.

Egypt Protest Cairo - Sky News from duncan sharp on Vimeo.

Via ReadWriteWeb, Twitter and CNN.

During his speech at google’s first organized event in Egypt coined G Days Ari Kesisoglu – Regional Manager, Middle East North Africa said that online ad spending in the MENA region is between 110 to 130 Million USD annually. Although there is no real projections of online ad spending, last year it was estimated below 100 million USD, thus annual growth rate is estimated between 20-40 %.

I wanted to ask Ari how he got this number, and where is this money being spent? is it on adwords and the rest of major knowns websites such as sarmady’s and maktoob, jeeran, Jabbar, ameinfo and so on?

We hope he will answer so we update you.

On his part Wael Ghonim – Marketing Manager, Middle East and North Africa said during his Internet trends session that 100 million Arabs will be online in 2015 which is about 30% of the Arab world population. Mr. Ghonaim added that most users are young as this is good because this segment consumes more, and that this is the time to be online and invest online.

Wael also talked about what people are searching for in the Arab world where he said that news is #1 search category for egyptians, then images, music & audio clips.

As for  YouTube and other stats Wael said that region has:

• The highest number of playbacks compared to quiries
• 24 hours of videos in every minute are being uploaded to YouTube
• 10% of search are coming from Mobile devices
• Symbion OS is leading Mobile handsets in the region
• 200$ growth in mobile search quires in mean in 2009.
• Saudi Arabia leads growth in the region followed by egypt.

Anther important stats, Wael revealed that Arabic users speak Arabic as less than 20% of MENA users communicate in English. He suggested that if you target the Arabic market develop the arabic UI first.

Adwords is google’s goldmine where it gets most of its revenues, to those who do not know it allows small and midsize business to advertise on google search engine or via its Adsense partners’s websites using text based ads.

Google ads can be paid based on clicks or impressions, and they have greater targeting options because they are context aware, meaning that you can target an ad based on a certain keyword, to simplify it: if people are looking for Milk and you sell link, your ad will show when users search for the keyword “Milk” on google.

For the Arab world, google has introduced a number of features such as location targeting in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Now google has gone another step by introducing its adwords blog for the Arab world where its says users will get new features, tips and tricks and case studies.

The blog is in English and Arabic and would be helpful for online markers in the Arab region. And is another example of how global tech companies are using social media to reach out to their audience. However we wonder why google call’s it: Adwords MENA Blog in English, while in Arabic it calls it “google Adwords in the Arab world.”

This is the Arab world NOT MENA, most Arabs do not like to be named and coined colonial names . We hope google will rename the english version and keep its English and Arabic names constant.

Number 1 video sharing website owned by Google, YouTube now has an Arabic Interface.

The move is some how late for Google to bring an Arabic interface for YouTube, since most of its other services are already has an Arabic UI.

This move means local Arab video sharing startups such as iKbis and D1G which the later is headed by former Yahoo Data Chief officer Ossama Fiyad has become more and more irrelevant.

Last year, during a Arab Advisors groups telecom conference in Jordan, telecom executives said that 40% of Internet traffic in the Arab world is going to YouTube, now that YouTube has Arabic interface that number is most likely to increase.

Why regional video sharing sites could not be a match to YouTube? first the culture of citizen video creation is much more prevalent in USA and around the world, more than in the Arab world, most of the world does not speak Arabic, they are the majority of Internet users! Second freedom of speech is more guaranteed on Youtube, since it is based in USA ( we hope it stays like that) . Arab startups have to comply with local oppressive laws or risk going to jail. So Arab Internet users go to YouTube because they get content they would not find on sites such as d1g and Ikbis.

Youtube provides more value to Arab users than regional video sharing sites, specially that sites such as d1g contains many pirated videos.

Google forms is part of google free web-based business suite Google apps, which offers anyone with easy tool to create questionnaire without any coding.

You can send the send questionnaire via email and respondents can answer from an email message. The responses are saved in a spreadsheet and can be viewed graphically.

Now forms can be sent in Arabic with right-to-left enabled and is ready to take right-to-left input.

After Yahoo acquired  Maktoob last year, many of Maktoob group companies were merged under one independent brand called Jabbar. Somehow similar precedence happened with Orascom Telecom’s LinkDotNet 150 million USD buyout to Mobinil, but at a larger scale.

Orascom Telecom which is one of the largest tech and telecom groups in the Arab world, has been facing legal disputes with France Telecom as the 2 are biggest shareholders of Egyptian Mobile operator Cairo-based Egyptian Co., which operates under the brand Mobinil.

So on July 3rd 2010 Mobinil agreed to pay 130 Million USD to  acquire the ISP unit of Orascom’s LINKDotNet SAE and Link Egypt SAE as part of an agreement that settled the legal dispute between Orascom and France Telecom SA.

However,  the non-ISP business unites were not part of the deal, so OTVENTURES was born as a new addition to the Orascom Telecom group.

The birth of OTVentures was announced on July 6th but overlooked by the mainsteam media, so here is quick profile of the new company which seems to be the largest indigenous Arab Internet play in terms of reach:

- OTVentures CEO is Hanan Abdel Meguid who is former CEO of Link Development.

- OTVentures says it hires 700 team members operating across over 17 countries.

The holding companies:

LinkOnlLine:

Founded  in 2002, now one of the largest, if not the largest Arab Internet company with the following Portals:

MSN Arabia:

MSN Arabia is the result of LinkOnLine partnership writhe Microsoft, MSN Arabia is available in English and Arabic. It covers Windows live services and the MSN Arabia Portal.

MSN arabia portal offers wide range of content such as: news, business and financial guides, technology, health, fitness and diet tips, entertainment games, and celebrity gossip games. The site is also integrated with other LinkOnLine products such as Otlob.

MSN Arabia uses MS bing as the default search engine after it abandoned LinkOnLine’s own search Engine Onkush. As a Portal MSN Arabia main competitor is Yahoo Maktoob and as Bing is available in Arabic, Google is the main search competitor. However Aljazeera and other news and vertical sites might also be considered as competitors.

Masraway:

One the most popular Arabic portal geared towards egyptians, Masrway offers a wide array of content and services:

News, Classified, Jokes, Video sharing, Games (single and Multi player ), SMS ( 1-Egyptian and Saudi user subscribe can get news at the of cost 4 EP per month, 2- online paid service to send SMS to other mobile phones), TV Guide, E-Gov Services (links to e-gov services) Jobs ( integrated with Linkonline careermdieast job portal), Women channel, Thanaweya Amma ( high school results), Anti Women Harassment ( good job ), Music, Travel, Food Delivery (via LinkOnLine’s otolb) Ketabat ( user generated Arabic content and news -citizen journalism), greeting cards, Hosting and Domains and webmail.

Yallakora:

In operations since 2002 providing Arabic English, news and content for football leagues in the Arab region especially in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Tunisia & Morocco and most of the European and other regional tournaments in the world. The site also offers an Arabic fantasy Football competition and iPhone app.

YallaKora key competitors are: kooora.com, Filgoal (from Sarmady a Vodafone company in Egypt), Goal.com and Yahoo Maktoob Sports. Yallakora English version still has Onkush as a default search engine, seems the developing team forgot to add bing instead.
MSN Maghreb:

MSN Maghreb is a French version of MSN Arabia targeting French speaking users in countries like Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria.

Mazika:

Arabic Music Portal offering legal Music Audio and Video streaming and Islamic Nasheed with the option to buy via “Credit Card”, the site also provides online Audio & Video streaming and celebrity news.

On the entertainment front Saramady Vodafone company has Filfan a portal with content related to Music and cinema.

On Mobile, Nokia X6 Comes with Music offers free Music download for one year.

Otlob:

An online food ordering site through which orders can be placed to many restaurants in Egypt, UAE, KSA and Bahrin. And otlobmall.com a mall shopping site.

Yallabina:

Entertainment and city guide for Cairo, covering major events, concerts, and cultural events.

CareerMideast:

Job recruitment site for the Arab world, according to the about page the site has 500,000 CVs which is 25% of Bayt’s claimed CVs  number. Careermideast currently offering free job posting for employers.

LinkonLine ID: is linkdotnet single login to all its sites.

El3ab:

Online bilingual gaming offering  flash based single player & multiplayer games. The site says they will add Game Reviews Channel for reviewing the newest games worldwide. And a Fan Shop, for buying different elements “which will enhance gaming experience on el3ab.” The site offers traditional Middle Eastern games such Tarneeb and chess.

Other regional players in the Arab Gaming include: Tahdi from Jabbar, Tarneeb.com, kammelna popular baloot game from Saudi based remal IT and Wizard productions ( merged with Go3Media, it has recently received funding from Ossama Fiyad former Data Chief Office Yahoo and Chairman of D1G and Oasis 500.) and Yallagamescafe.

Baraca Arabia:

News and content for FC Barcelona Arabic fans.

Shofha:

The first Arabic legal video service, or the HULU of the Arab world. Shofha is made possible with strategic partnership with Rotana the leading Arabic entertainment company. The site offers users to: buy: download and view for a life time, renting: download and view for 48 hours and online streaming. Payment is via credit card or Linkdotnet cards.

Shofha uses unforunityly Microsoft’s Silverlight platform instead of HTML 5.

Yahoo Maktoob on the other hand has formed recently a partnership with Rotana to use and stream Rotana’s wide range of multimedia content, including music, videos, movies, concerts, TV channels and radio, through its upcoming Video Network channel for the Arabic speaking world.

Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Tala who owns Rotana is planning to launch a new Arabic television news channel in partnership with the Fox network. The Prince  is also an investor in Rubert Murdoch’s News Corp who in his part made recently a $70m investment for 9.1% of Rotana.

Arab Finance:

Arab Finance Provides online trading for the Egyptian stock market, financial news, tools and analysis. It also has “Isharet el Borsa” desktop app offering real time stock quotes info, charts and other technical info.

Arab Finance also has free iPhone application for the Egyptian Stock market, providing real-time access to the Egyptian Stock Market.

Other indepandant players in the Stock segment include the following:
-Awarmer: from Suadi based Remal IT offers online trading for the Saudi Stock Market.

-Argaam: UAE based Gulf-focused financial news portal.

-Saudi Based N2V’s Mubasher.info offers comprehensive financial news and analysis tools for Saudi Stock Exchange, Dubai Financial Market, Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange, Egyptian Stock Exchange, Amman Stock Exchange, Kuwait Stock Exchange, Muscat Securities Market, Doha Securities Market, Bahrain Stock Exchange, and Palestine Securities Exchange

-From National Technology Group the mother company of N2V, Mubasher Trade offers trading for Egyptian stock market and UAE stocks. And Mubasher NET for retail investors, offering market data desktop app.

-From Jordan Tickerchart: Stock analysis software for Arab  stock exchanges.

Link Data Center:

Offers a range of hosting solutions for enterprise and small and mid size business, notably: Managed Dedicated Hosting ,which offers firewalls and load-balancing devices. However we do not know which environment is supported, like the different Linux distributions, as all Otvenutres is based on Microsoft .NET technologies.

The other regional Data center we know of in the region is Bahrain based Kulacom data center in Jordan

Link Development

Is one of the largest  regional ISV, software developer and out-sourcing companies in the region. Link Development is a key regional partner to Microsoft and its products such as MS Dynamics. Link Development most notable in-house developed product is: Tempo, an Enterprise 2.0 product which is based on Microsoft Sharepoint, offering corporate blogging, employees profile, document sharing, forums, HR forums and so on.

Link Development competitors are widespread from other Microsoft ISVs to small website development companies to Oracle and its partners to open source software that offer free alternative to MS products such as Sharepoint and Dynamics.

ARPU +:

Launched in October 2003, specialized in providing Value Added Services (VAS) and platform solution in the Mobile in the telecom field. Competitors are  in many of the verticals  the company operates in. This include: Eskandenia and Globitel from Jordan and info2cell.

ConnectAds:

Is the online adverting arm of O2Ventures, it represents many sites of o2ventures and is the official representative of Facebook in the Arab world.

Other advertising networks in the Arab world include: Sarmady, iKoo which resulted from Jabbar buying e-marketing MENA and N2V’s Net Advantage . More regional online advertising companies can be found here.

If we missed anything please let us know.

On March Google Launched an innovative new Google Labs Arabic tool called Tashkeel, a tool that adds the missing diacritics to Arabic text.

We mentioned  on AC at that time some of the differences between Arabic and English languages as Diacritics

“describe how arabic text is pronounced, they are called in Arabic Tashkeel for example in Arabic a (ـِ ) kasra (i) can make the whole meaning of a word different. In Arabic AL-Tashkeel is based on Arabic grammar.”

And that Tashkeel is a important step for several Arabic text processing applications.

Over the weekend, Google Arabia team launched Tashkeel’s JSON API as part of google language API.

To use the API Just make a call to: http://www.googleapis.com/language/diacritize/v1. The parameters are:
message: Arabic text you want to diacritize
lang: Language code for message language. Set to “ar” for Arabic.
last_letter: Set to true to diacritize last letter of each word as well.
callback: Name of JavaScript function to call with results structure
Here is a full HTML example from google team showing the API in use:

And If you have any questions about how to use this API or any other question in any programing language  head to ArabCrunch.NET Developers Q&A and post there.

This launch give us another example about the difference between Google and Yahoo in the Arab region: Google is focusing more on engineering problems, While Yahoo Middle East is focusing on content, in fact Yahoo hired recently Hosam Sokkari former Head Of BBC Arabic as head of Audience In Yahoo! Middle East. Yahoo Middle East or Yahoo Maktoob until this moment did not launch a single API for any of Maktoob site which it bought last year.

Also here as we objected when Google used the name “Middle East”, we object to the name Yahoo Middle East and ask Yahoo to call its regional arm: Yahoo Arabia or the Yahoo The Arab world. As this area is mostly lived by Arabs and have been known for a long time as the Arab world!

In social media and online marketing monitoring your brand, your competition and your industry is one of the important pillars to carry out a successful social media and online marketing strategy.

Google alert has been here for some times now enabling you to enter a keyword and get alerts to your email inbox whenever that keyword is mentioned online, for example you get an alert whenever your brand is mentioned thus it also works as a media monitoring tool.

Yesterday Google has launched Google Alerts in Arabic so now you can use Google Alerts to find content in Arabic as well monitor your brand mention in Arabic and do intelligent monitoring of your industry in the Arab world.

However Google Alert is not totally optimized for social media namely Twitter, but since google alerts covers blogs too and they are a social media type google alerts is useful in some social media fronts. Back in February we covered the launch of SocialEyez which called it self “the first dedicated social media monitoring service designed to capture and analyze Arabic content online” but until now we did not test socialeyez.

I advice you to read the help section of google alert in order to set the right types of Alerts here (Arabic link). As for international social media engagement measurement  and monitoring tools check out PostRank and uberVU.

Former regional marketing manager for Google in MENA Nagi Salloum who launched yesterday dead simple sharing tool loomn.it is launching today his new startup loomni.

Lo0mni is trying to solve the problem of education and knowledge. As after university most people tend not to learn and take new courses as most traning courses are geared towards executive and sneior managment due to the expensive rates they are offered at (1000+ USD.)

Loomin is able to offer affordable cousres at the rate of 50$ with a new conecpt to attract instructors: “marketing by teaching”:

“here experts can share their knowledge, educate people about topics they are expert in, and with extensive practical experience. ex: as a social media company, market your services by teaching people about social media stuff. If they are interested and understand the benefits of social media they will contact you for professional advice and services. Instructors are incentivized to deliver high quality course as the delivery will impact their reputation in the market. “ Said Nagi

Nagi is also introducing Loomni vouchers, prepaid codes charged with a certain monetary value (typically 200 AED, avg price of a course). This allows businesses to provide the Loomni courses to their staff by purchasing these vouchers and distributing them to their employees. Employees would then book courses on Loomni without any cash transaction.

“With this, companies can now fund education as part of their corporate social responsibility in a new way, by purchasing Loomni vouchers and distributing them to non-profits to educate disadvantaged people, Government can now easily support the Emiratis continuous education by providing them with Loomni vouchers.” Nagi added.

Quick Questions and Answers:

The elevator pitch in 140-characters?

Loomni is a knowledge sharing platform organizing a variety of short,attractive,in-venue courses, delivered by experts at unbeatable prices.

• Who is the target audience?

Loomni is aimed at university students, small and medium businesses and general audience. The website has been designed with a very user friendly and simple interface, creating a fun and nice branding.

• What is the story behind choosing “Loomni” as your start-up’s name?

Loomni is a blend between illumination (illuminate people’s minds) and alumni (I used to pronounce it Alumnee). i wanted a simple fun easy to spell/pronounce word, and available as a domain name

• What is the monetization model ?

the business is designed on a revenue share model between Loomni and the instructors, share varies based on course, instructor, frequency of course, audience…

• why you decided to leave Google?

Prior to moving to Dubai as the regional marketing manager in Google, I worked in Procter & Gamble, as a regional brand manager for Near East markets, based out of Beirut, Lebanon but decided to quit Procter & Gamble in 2008 to launch a start-up aimed at fixing the scattered private tutoring market. Only few months after launch, due to harsh political instabilities in Beirut, I decided to leave Lebanon and settle in Dubai, which offers a solid infrastructure for businesses to prosper. I took the time while at Google to fine the business model I had launched, and when the time was ready, decided to relaunch it in Dubai. So in short, yes, these 2 situations are related

#Loomni at ArabCrunch.NET.

Former regional marketing manager for Google in MENA  Nagi Salloum launched  today his new startup  Loomn.it (pronounced Loomnit, ArabCrunch.NET profile) a  new service that provides users with a simple way to share with anyone and across any platform, links, email address, images, video, documents (up to 3MB) and other digital content.

The idea is providing a short link to any shared item, say a long Tweet, just upload hit loomin.it and then you get a short link that you can customize and share on facebook, Twitter or anywhere in the web.

The nice part of the service that it takes away  the hassle of registration and using email, ”Loomn.it is ideal for those moments when users want to share stuff quickly with their friends without the hassle of using their email.” said Salloum. However the downside is that all content will be automatically deleted 14 days after link is created.

Some of Loomn.it services compete with Bit.ly and other URL shorteners and with Jordanian startup YouConvertit in the file sending feature.

Salloum is from Lebanon but currently living in Dubai,  he is also  CO-Founder  of other websites  such as Cineklik a movie and cinema guide for Lebanon, Ahlein.net a real estate finder for Lebanon, and Yoolki.com a latin to Arabic transliterator  that competes with Google Ta3reeb and Yamli.

Update: Google spokesman  said “Yes, filtering is up to 11 categories (limit of 5 doesn’t apply anymore).”

AdSense is  the advertising platform from Google that any website publisher can use to monitaize part of his traffic via ads coming from Google’s self service  online ad solution for advertisers: adwords.

However, publishers did not have control on the type of ads that pops up on their sites, and many of these ads caused embarrassments for many serious publishers specially in the Arabic region.

I have communicated before to Google team about this problem, and I am happy that yesterday Google announced that adsense publishers can now filter and ban ads in the following categories “under category filtering beta feature”:

Cosmetic Procedures & Body Modification

Dating

Drugs & Supplements

Get Rich Quick

Politics

References to Sex & Sexuality

Religion

Ringtones & Downloadables

Sexual & Reproductive Health

Video Games (Casual & Online)

Weight Loss

According to Google Arabia’s blog post, the new feature is available in beta to publishers in a number of English-speaking countries including, but not limited to, Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, the U.K., and the U.S.A.

The feature is also available in many Arab and African countries:

Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq, Chad, Djibouti, Arteria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Mauritania.

Google’s English blog post announcing this service, says that category filtering lets you prevent ads from up to 5 specific categories, but the Arabic posts talks about 11 categories. When I tested AdSense ( we do not use adsense here at AC) adSense accepted filtering all 11 categories, my location is Amman, Jordan.

So I wonder if only publishers from Arab countries can filter all 11 categories all together while other parts of the world can filter only 5!

I will ask Google and update you here if category filtering is limited to 5 in non Arab countries.

For more info you can go to Google help center here.

Google announced 2 days ago the launch of it’s Arabic and other 35 language search tool, which allows users to type queries in Arabic on any keyboard by providing a virtual Arabic keyboard. Google decided to introduce this feature:

“Many users are more comfortable formulating questions for search in their own language. Though English transliteration (typing other languages in English script) works well for some, success varies greatly on users’ fluency in English. Input Method Editors (or IMEs for short) are also very useful but require users to know the standard conventions about how to switch languages using mouse or keyboard shortcuts. “(Google Arabia Blog)

The keyboard utilized is the standard windows configuration, which may hinder users who are used to Apple’s Arabic keyboard.

Google has also Google Ta3treeb, an online transliteration tool that converts latin letters into Arabic and comeptes with Yamli and other solutions.