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)

Searching for an apartment, house or an office for rent/buy always have been a stressful matter and concern many people weather for work or study or even for tourism.

The problem is doubled especially if the researcher of the property is not a native or a citizen of the country he is looking to rent/buy in, never to mention that the searching process requires a lot of time and effort by contacting the owner’s of the property and setting date’s to meet and visit the real estate site to review it.

Seeking the real estate offices adds more to the hardship, on the sellers side the global financial crisis caused a decline in real estate sales, which caused real state companies to start searching for more effective advertisement means and methods other than the traditional ones.

Aqarmap, a new Arab Startups came to work in solving these problems, by offering practical and excellent solutions and services for both sellers and buyers by focusing on the most important factor in this vital sector and that is the location (address) of the state itself.

Aqarmap does so by providing the owner with the ability to pin-point his real state location (address) over satellite maps. This will help users how to search for a real state in the Arab world, where customers will be able to search for properties to buy or rent using easy and quick interactive maps.

What also distinguishes Aqarmap website from other similar sites is how easy the process goes, all you need to do is choose the type of property you want to buy or rent and the site will show you the location of all properties available that matches your search over a map on the same page, without the need to go over a lot of pages. At the map you can see the property and a small picture with its price of in a form of a bubble. And by clicking on the picture in the bubble you can get detailed information about the property.

There is also other feature’s that are nice such as a currency converter to know the price of the property without changing the page, review images and videos of the real estate it self and you can also communicate with the landlord or add your comments.

Currently all the above services are free for now, As for monitizing the site , estate sellers can pay to advertiser in order to get priority over others on the maps.

What’s worth mentioning is that Aqarmap won several awards, ranked among the best innovative technology companies in the Arab world and the company’s systems have been developed to work in any language in order to expand to other developing countries in Africa, Asia and South America.

Amad Almasodi from Yeman who founded several startups before is Aqarmap founder.

In a move to counter Google’s Free navigation applications, Nokia just announced that starting March 2010, new Nokia GPS-enabled smartphones will include the new version of Ovi Maps www.nokia.com/maps, pre-loaded with local country map data, and that turn-by-turn voice guidance will be free for 74 countries in 46 languages.

The new version will also include traffic information for over 10 countries, as well as detailed maps for over 180 countries.   The nice thing about Ovi maps is that they come preloaded to your Nokia device saving you time and cost of downloading map data over the cloud.

Here is a video of Ovi maps on N900:




Mapping, GPS and Navigation devices are a very useful tool for any person, while the west and USA in general has more advanced solutions in this area than what is available in the Arab world. There has been local and International attempts to solve this issue.

On the web, google has done a good job in few Arab countries namely Dubai but its awesome Google Maps Navigation is only available for Motorola’s come-back mobile Droid. NDrive a Portuguese mobile developerlaunched last October navigation applications for the iPhone, for United Arab Emirates (UAE) , Saudi Arabia Morocco and Egypt, using TeleAtlas the same company that provides maps to Google Maps and Competes with Nokia’s Navteq.

From the region, Ayna the Lebanese company launched this year “Ayna Maps“that are also available via a number of mobile devices but unfortunately Ayna maps need internet connection to work, and since Mobile Internet connection is still costly Ayna maps is not an idle solution. In Jordan, Inside Jo from Jordan, developed an online map along with its own low cost GPS device that unfortunately did not get authorized by the authorities in Jordan!

Nokia 2710 Navigation Edition, The Affordable GPS Phone:

Nokia on the other hand, has went ahead faster than anyone, introducing mapping solution online via its Ovi maps and on its Mobile devices (From High End to Mid level). To push into mid and low market (the developing world), Recently Nokia unveiled the latest device in the company’s range focused on mapping and navigation, the Nokia 2710 Navigation Edition. The new arrival is GPS enabled and pre-loaded with Nokia Maps, making it the most affordable GPS device in Nokia’s broad portfolio.
Relevant maps are included on the device to save cost and make sure that just because you don’t have an Internet connection, your device isn’t rendered useless, an essential element for mobile mapping in order to be used in mobile handsets by the main stream users since Mobile internet connections are pricey.

Nokia 2710 will be available in the second quarter of 2010 estimated to cost, before taxes and subsidies, EU 110.

Nokia 2710: has a GPRS handset, a 2.2-inch screen, 2-megapixel camera and enough storage for 1,000 phonebook entries. It also sports Ovi Mail and Instant Messaging and it’ll keep the tunes turning with an MP3 player and FM radio. It also has a 3.5mm AV connector. The device will go for up to 18 days between charges in standby mode and will give up to four hours and 20 minutes talk time.

Nokia Adds Jordan to Ovi Maps:

After Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, In the mapping and navigation availability, Nokia recently added Jordan to its Ovi Maps application. Adding rich local content and local maps that can be used directly on users mobile device turning them into a navigation systems.

“Having Ovi Maps on their device gives our consumers a new sense of their surroundings, with the possibility to discover new places and share them with their friends using SMS, MMS or Bluetooth.”said Bruce Howe, Head of Marketing Nokia Levant.

Ovi Maps application for your Nokia device is enhanced through additional features and services: high resolution satellite and terrain maps, rotation, tilting, night view and fly-overs and fly-throughs. Nokia’s Jordan Ovi maps was available during the month of November.

Walk from one place to another using WALK, the pedestrian navigation with routing optimized for those on foot, providing better orientation in a city or outdoors.

Or use DRIVE, the navigation takes you from A to B with visual turn-by-turn guidance. It helps you to locate yourself by giving information about the surrounding buildings, roundabouts and streets and in newer handsets points the direction in which you are walking using the handset’s built in compass for orientation.

Ovi Maps uses vector maps are provided by Navteq, which was acquired by Nokia in end of 2007. The map data of Jordan, is offered free of charge and includes detailed Road coverage of 28,621 Km covering 100 municipalities, including street names and street directions.

By this, Nokia has 100 percent of the total road network of Jordan covered including all the major highways connecting Jordan’s major cities. It also has 13.500 Points of Interests including hotels, restaurants, places of worship, shopping malls, petrol stations and many others.

Maps can be downloaded free of charge over the air directly to selected devices or by using the Nokia Map Loader on a PC. however since my Nokia 5800 died and I am currenlty testing now N900 which Ovi Maps is not supported on it yet, I could not test the new maps in Jordan. (See the video I recorded last month for a preview of Ovi maps in Dubai on N900.)

In addition, Nokia also launched a crowed sourced “Get to good things“website to Jordanian consumers, so that they can add their personal POI’s from Jordan and share with the world.

Ovi Maps for mobile is enhanced through additional features and services, such as:

• Better maps with hi-res satellite and terrain maps.
• Enriched Global POI information by Lonely Planet, Michelin and Wcities.
• Global Weather service with 24h and 5-day forecasts.
• Walk from a place to another – easy to use pedestrian navigation with routing optimized for pedestrians for better orientation in a city or anywhere outdoors.
• Drive with enhanced safety car navigation with enhanced safety features.

You can see Nokia’s Ovi Maps in action in dubai running on Nokia’s best and most powerful device to date -N900, via the below video presented by Nokia’s project manager during Nokia’s N Age Tour in Dubai lats month (Note: i will be posting in Arabic and English N 900 video review soon on ArabCrunch ):




(The video is a presentation of Nokia N900 by a Nokia Project Manager in Dubai. and I was asking him questions during the presentation. N900 has 4 desktop screens and Mac “Exposse” like view for multi view of all open applications.

N900 is a powerful mobile and considered Nokia’s top of the line:

N 900 Operating system is Maemo which is built using Linux, It has 600 Mhz ARM Cortex-A8 processor, 1GB of app memory, 3D Graphics accelerator with OpenGL ES 2.0 support. Built in memory 32 GB, 3.5 G and WLAN, GSM GPRS and EDGE, Integrated GPS, 800 x 480 touch-screen, Hard QWERTY keyboard, G MP cam, Dual LED flash, 800 x 480 resolution video. Maemo Browser based on Mozilla.)

NDrive a Portuguese based company has launched NDrive’s navigation applications for the iPhone, providing mapping solutions for a number of countries around the world with plans for more maps in the future. For the Arab World NDrive has launched 3 iPhone Arabic/English navigations apps for United Arab Emirates (UAE) , Saudi Arabia Morocco and Egypt.
“With NDrive, iPhone users can now benefit from NDrive’s simple, intuitive interface, turn by turn spoken navigation, and unique features.” said Eduardo Carqueja, founder of NDrive.

NDrive navigations apps take advantage of iPhone’s GPS and Touch capabilities, so it can be used for navigation in the car, while walking or on an outdoor adventure and has turn by turn voice navigation commands. The apps run on iPhone 3G and 3GS and can be purchased from iTunes. The apps cost 99.99 USD. Maps on NDrive are provided from TeleAtlas the same company that provides maps to Google Maps and Competes with Navteq a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nokia.

NDrive Navigation System seems to have a number of useful features among them that users do not need a data plan, other features include:

• Three different routing modes: auto, pedestrian and adventure.
• Fast search that can search by initials.
• Advanced graphics so as to approximate reality more closely. 6-10 FPS/sec makes for video like navigation.

Routing and maps:

• Turn by turn spoken navigation
• Quick routing calculation algorithms
• Route demo or map of route when trip planning
• Alternative route selection options
• Adventure mode for off-road, air or at sea use
• Thousands of important buildings represented in 3D
• Publish and share location based information with other users directly from your device.

Personalization:

• User interface fully optimized with iPhone, rotate iPhone and map will adjust.
• Innovative Multi-touch gesture recognition for zoom, tilt and rotate that allows you to control and interact with the map. Kinetic scrolling.
• Call, SMS or visit websites of POIs directly from NDrive’s interface.
• User interface available in 28 languages

Founded by Eduardo Carqueja and Joeo Neto in 2001, NDrive Navigation Systems is a Portuguese company that began developing navigation software in 2005. Since 2009 NDrive has turned its focus to developing GPS programs for mobiles. NDrive software is compatible with iPhone, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Android platforms on hundreds of mobile devices.

(In the future I will test the apps and post more here Inshallah. )

User generated locations directory for places in Dubai, Places.ae, which ArabCrunch reviewed last year here, has launched recently a new service that allows you to send an email and get requested information right to your email inbox, a concept that is similar to what an IVR system can do but via email.

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

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

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

Remember Aljazeera crowd-sourced mapping mashup “Mapping the War on Gaza” we reported last January 2009 ? the story ? that got ArabCrunch on Slashdot?

Well, the crowed sourcing news concept is hitting the region again, but this time it is about the Lebanese June 7th parliamentary election with sharek961.org.

Like Aljazeera’s “Mapping the War on Gaza” with Sharek961.org people across Lebanon can send in reports related to the election through SMS, Tiwtter, email, and the web and Sharek961 will anonymously publish these citizen reports alongside news reports, blog posts, photos, videos and tweets in one place, on an interactive map.

Sharek961 displays incidents on a map that are Mashedup with Google Map, you can click the dots on the map to view the reports. Incidents can be filtered into: reports, news, pictures and videos. While categories can be filtered into election related events such as: illegal campaigning, interruption of voting procedures.

In Sharek961 users can report incidents at any city or location in Lebanon, and anyone can subscribe to email alerts.

To Report an incident to “Sharek961 ” via Text Message (SMS) in Lebanon, you can send a text message to: 7118 9118, from outside Lebanon (+961) 7118 9118 , via Twitter,  email to report@sharek961.org  or via web here.

According to a press release sent by someone from Sharek961 “Sharek961 does not attempt to verify reports and makes no claims as to their accuracy, as a neutral platform it publishes all material reports without editorial or censorship.”

Sharek961 is based on an open-source project called Ushahidi. Early Ushahidi deployments include Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the 2007 war on Gaza , as well as Vote Report India.

The people behind Sharek961 describe themselves as volunteers including: Abdallah Chamas, David Munir Nabti, Katherine Maher, Mustapha Hamoui, and Sacha Tueni. Plus orginazations such as eMoksha and Sawt Ashabab.

Inside Jo is the 1st Jordanian startup to develop a GPS car navigation system. The company is a joint venture between Jordan based, Delaware, USA incorporated award winning backup company Genie-Soft  which was founded by a Jordanian young entrepreneur Muayyad Shehadeh in 2001, and Jordan based companyREBORN INDUSTRIES which specialized manufacturing of automation and electrical switchgear.

Inside Jo offer GPS Car Navigator device plus an online mapping portal for Jordan. It provides details of every street level with the names of each street in Amman (The capital of Jordan), something I never saw in any of its online mapping competitors. Inside Jo provides mapping solutions that not just tourists badly need but also a very handy solution for the residents’ of Jordan.

Online Mapping:

Inside Jo online mapping portal is up and running in beta mood, the website which is in English and Arabic promised soon, offers maps, city search, weather and entertainment guide in Amman.

“Maps” is the main section of the website and it offers you away to search the map by address or location, Inside Jo has added thousands of interest points that users can search for or add the missing ones.

Once you search for an interest point say “KFC” in this example, it shows you all the available locations of that interest point, when clicking at one of these locations, you get the telephone number and the address of the interest point and if you click read more you get to see the latest reviews of that spot or you can add your, though reviews are moderated before they can be displayed.

The other beauty of the system is that it can give you directions to that location from anywhere in the map, just right click on the map and choose “Drive to Here” and then go to your start point location in the map and chose “Drive from Here”. The website then displays a detailed map with the best route you can get, it also calculates the distance and the Taxi charge. In this example driving from Jordan University South Gate to KFC near six circle, is 8.8 KM long and costs 1.77 JD by Taxi, which is about what the Taxi fare costs. “The Get Directions” feature is the most important feature, because it provides direction from any location on the map to any other one you chose, this comes handy using the GPS device, however the web version comes short at providing written step by step directions just the rout.

Sharing came to the mind of the developers of Inside Jo, you can share the location of the map using a URL or an Embed option, or you can send current map by email or print it.

The “City Search” of the Inside Jo website provides you with a directory of interest point that spans from Restaurants with all its types, such as Arabic and Fast Food, to Religious Organizations which includes Churches and Mosques. Browsing through the interest points leads to a page for each interest point with its location on the map and the spot phone number, you can also see reviews or add yours and even bookmark or print the page. 

On Inside Jo website the entertainment section offers you with Cinema, TV guide and Radio sections. However for the time being, only cinema section works offering you what is currently showing and when in all Amman Cinemas and the location and phone number of each cinema house.

GPS Device:

The GPS Car Navigator device is called GNav and comes with no monthly fees only one time buying payment, however it is not available yet in the market, but will be available in July 2009, according to InsideJo website.

GNav comes with a touch screen visual and voice navigation system. Auto re-route, 2D or 3D map view, built-in point of interest  database and Customizable Route Methods an important feature to use during traffic jams, where you can  choose the way you want to navigate to use the most freeways, least freeways, fastest time, shortest distance and avoid toll roads. Exclude specific streets or freeways after a route is calculated to get there the way you want.

GNav is 4.3 widescreen, high-quality touch screen,  Weight220 g  and buttery life up to Battery life up to 4 hours, however the battery can be recharged via the car electric outlet (Lighter, 5V). The full list of GNav’s features can be found here.

Here is a video of how the device works:




# Inside Jo
 

For over five thousand years, from the dawn of the pharaohs to the modern era, Egyptian culture is one of the world’s richest -if not the richest – with historical wonders, which made it the touristic destination to millions of tourists every year.

 Even though the web is full of images about Egypt, the recent announcement of “Egypt Memory”, an Egyptian Heritage Online Shop of offering more than 2,000 free images, would provide the web venue for those who seek high quality and professional images that are hard to find elsewhere.

Egypt Memory is a result of a joint collaboration between Egyptian Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage (CULTNAT) of Alexandria Bibliotheca and with IBM ( which provided the grant and the technical expertise) .

“Egypt Memory” online shop includes complementary high-resolution images that cover all the Egyptian culture throughout different eras: Pharaonic, Roman, Coptic and Islamic. Though I hope they can add more detailed categories and tags such as artifacts, people, and places.  The website also shows different CULTNAT project publications such as the Atlas of Archeological Sites, Guide to the Plants of Ancient Egypt, Encyclopedia of Great Arab Music Figures, Thesaurus of Egyptian Folklore, and many other publications.  The free images available on the web site are periodically updated and can be easily saved and used without any restrictions.

Besides images, the website offers shopping for books,  CD’s and DVDs, Maps and Atlases, Postcards and Gift items.

The content of Egypt Memory online shop supports three languages (English, Arabic and French.)

The site provides several delivery and payment methods where users can choose between downloading their purchases electronically or through shipment. Users also have the choice to do their payments through bank transfers, credit cards, or upon cash on delivery (to Egyptian residents.)

Another interesting website about Egypt’s heritage is the awards winning Eternal Egypt web site ,which is also a product of IBM and CultNat partnership.

Eternal Egypt  has high-resolution images, three-dimensional reconstructions of Egyptian monuments and antiquities, as well as virtually-reconstructed environments, panoramic images, and panoramic views of present-day Egypt captured by robotic cameras located from the top of Karnak Temple to the streets of Old Cairo. It also has an Interactive map and timeline that guides Eternal Egypt visitors through Egypt’s cultural heritage, while a “context navigator” presents the complex relationships between objects, places and personalities of Egypt’s past in a unique, web-like display. It also uses IBM’s Text-to-Speech technology which generates spoken audio versions of any textual content in English, French, or Arabic

Eternal Egypt is also accessible by handheld digital guides in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, by cell phone for visitors to the pyramids at Giza or the Luxor Temple in Upper Egypt.

Allot of effort has been put into these 2 projects, at cost of a couple of millions of dollars, thanks to IBM’s grant.

# Egypt’s Ministry of Communications and information technology & CULTNAT

You know UPS, DHL, ARAMEX, well meet Darrb which means “way” in Arabic. It is a crowd based shipping online community, or shipping 2.0  which was beta launched recently.

Unlike conventional shippers who have paid staff to deliver items, and charge a predefined charge. Darrb shippers can be any one (including you !) who is welling and can deliver items in exchange for payments. While people who wants to ship items, can get better rates compared to DHL and others, through a reserve auction based marketplace, where members who wants to deliver items (Darrbers) can bed price and delivery time.

The user who asked for a delivery can sort the bids based on time (delivery duration) or cost. At the end of the auction, the user could choose the Darrber (deliverers) who best fits his requirement.

Becoming a Darrber is an easy process, you fill up a profile: About you, choosing your delivery method, Aeroplane, car, motorcycle, public transportation and/or others, and which areas you can deliver the items to.

Sending an item is also an easy process: you fill up info such as: weight, quantity, dimensions, description. Then you define from where and when the item is sent from and to where and when it is to be delivered. You also decide when the bid ends and your expected charge.

As for payment methods Darrb does not provide one, it is to be decided by the delivery parties, where the payment can be any method from paypal to barter.

The item page shows  details the delivery requester has entered, also he/she and Darrbers can post questions and answers, privately or publicly. Besides that Darrbers can post their beds (I described above.)

To insure trust with Darrbers, senders are able to rank the service of the deliverers (Darrbers) and leave comments on their profiles once the deal is done. This ranking system will allow the public to see how other people, that have used the service of a specific Darrber, found the quality, price and speed of the delivery. If a Darrber is proven to delinquent or misbehave, Darrb.com has the right to immediately suspend the Darrber’s account and stop dealing with him.

Darrb platform is free for both people who add delivery orders and Darrbers. But it is planning to charge  membership fees for Darbbers.

Darrb recently added Statistics and some miner design issues:

Statistics:

Now Darrbers can know how much money they can make if they delivered all the items available! This is an indicator that helps Darrbers know how much money is available to run for.

Some other changes are like showing the number of new items available instead of items delivered.

We thought Darrbers want to know what is new to deliver, not what was delivered.

According to Darrb:

One of our main roles main roles is to help reduce the unemployment rates worldwide.

And this is true, people can do it on part-time bases to earn an extra cash delivering items. For example you can use your car, public transportation, bicycle or any other method to deliver items, or may be you it happened you are going to the same location that an item needs to be delivered to, where If done, you can at least cover your gas/transport cost.

Some other people might even make it as a living. For example in major US cities, you find people cruising the city with bicycles to deliver couriers; they are self employed or work with a small courier company. To them Darrb would be the market place to find customers. And it would be an opportunity for others to start a business out of it, just like many others who started their businesses solely auctioning at eBay.
Now here is some of my tips to improve Darrb:

1-    Chian Darrbers (multi Darrabs) for one delivery:
Currently the system allows one Darrber to deliver the item if he is qualified by the item submitter. But in many cases there would be a Darrber who can deliver the item halfway or partway, at which point another Darrber can collect the item from that location and deliver the item to the final destination or to another Darrber who can advance the item further along the chain. This would be the case in big cities, or across cities or even across countries. And to make it happen it requires coordination between the Darrbers who can deliver items from point A to B to C,.. etc. until the final point.

SMS and GPS:
SMS: For serious Darrbers, it would be great for them to get SMS notifications of recent matches to the locations they can deliver to, at the same time be able to accept/bed on them. This also helps item submitter to get Darrbers bed in real time. (Integration is Twitter is an option.)
GPS: You know when using UPS you can track your shipment online, it would be beneficial for the item submitter to track his/her item in real time, and Darrb do not need to develop their own Mobile GPS platform, they can use existing platforms such as WeNear or Brightkite and Yahoo’s FireEagle through their APIs.
Knowing the Darrber Location would also help other Darrbers coordinate in a (Chain Darrbers) situation I described before.

Integrating with existing e-commerce sites:
You know currently in e-commerce the delivery option is even free or charged via traditional delivery. In the latter case it would be an added value to have an option to use Darrb platform to deliver the purchased item/s, This requires Darrber to publish an API where other e-commerce sites can use to do the integration.
Existing e-commerce sites Darrb can use: Souq El Arab (tag), Souq.com, Amazon, eBay and other small and big e-commerce players. And by doing so, it would a win-win for both. For Darrb it would be a great viral marketing, and an added value for its users. For the e-commerce company it would give the option to their customer to get cheaper delivery rates, and once Darrb goes mainstream it would be even faster than traditional delivery companies.

Finally Darrb should reach those self employed bicycle couriers in USA, for example they can Google them. Or even try to make new once through finding the most active movers, and that could be done by targeting them with an Ad on BrightKite, or any other LBS (I do not know if Brightkite started to deliver ads yet, but Darrb team can contact them, and if you guys needs an invite to Brightkite privet beta just ask me : ) )
Will shipping 2.0 like Darrb.com go main stream and be a killer to big players such as UPS, DHL, Aramex? I’ll leave that to your comments.

#Darrb is a UAE based company .

Places.ae BlackBerry version allows users to find locations near them by using GPS, making the process of finding locations of restaurants, hotels, shops and so on, more easy and more convenient when on the go.

This move puts places.ae in the LBS (Location Based Services) market, but currently Places.au services are only available in Dubai while more Emirates to be add soon.

Places.ae is a useful, convenient and simple service; it started as a web locations directory for places, submitted by the users, and then expanded into other communications channels such as IM, mobile, and twitter.

Places.ae web interface is very easy to use and straight forward; just type the place (ex. pizza) and where it is near by, while you are typing these entries the web site suggests related words, just like Yahoo search suggestions.

Then Places.ae yields to you the search results where you can click in one of them, once in the place page for example: Oregano, it shows the location on Google map, phone number, descriptions, associated tags, and you can even rate this place and add comments. thus providing users with reviews of each place.

The service does not stop short,  it also provides you with the option to add the place to your favorites so you can find it easily next time. And it lists you at the place page similar places, a way to help you discover more places.

Even though Places.ae is currently useful it can be even more useful if it add more features and services such as: The user can optionally add his default location -such as home and work) on his profile, thereby when searching; he does not have to type his location.  Just type find places near me, and places.ae will retrieve places near his location and how far they are from him. At the same time providing the user with directions to reach that place.

Another one would be adding location based social networking , or possible integration with location based photos and videos from flickr.com and YouTube.com for example when I am at starbucks @ Ibn Battuta Mall page, it would be useful to find photos and videos taken in that location.

I also suggested to Michael Hendrickx the founder of places.ae to add GEO-RSS to the site, allowing users to subscribe to a location’s feed and get that location places update. ( I recommended ArabCrunch sponsor Feedoor to manage the feeds.)

The BlackBerry version has my first suggested feature: it detects the user’s location via GPS to find places near him and it shows how far they are from him. ( my suggestion was for the web)

When the user click the place entry he will see a little static map of the place, And phone numbers are often detected, so it’s very easy to call that place, in case the user wants to.

To access this service you need BlackBerry with GPS device, a mobile data connection and Java script enabled browser.

The BlackBerry version is part of Places.ae ongoing mobile version development , which can also server Windows Mobile and iPhone clients. but for the latter two, places.ae is currently optimizing the interface.

since they have slightly better browsers (and UI) than a BlackBerry.

Before launching the BlackBerry Places.ae launched PAM (Places Answering Machine) to support other communication channels.

Pam is what links the places.ae search engine with other communication channels available on the Internet.

According to places.

Currently PAM supports Gtalk Windows Live Messenger and Twitter. SMS, E-mail and possibly Yahoo! Messenger will be added to PAM soon.

On the future places will launch API

so people can start their own “version” of places.ae”

According to Hendrickx.

Places is the work of Michael Hendrickx -from Belgium is IT security expert who currnelty lives in UAE-   and Spinbits . It was developed using the Rails framework.