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

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

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

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

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

Share and Enjoy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share and Enjoy

Watwet the micro blogging & social networking Arabian clone of Twitter has launched a new design today with some new features. ( I have reviewed watwet in the past here)

What is new:

The new design is very nice, sleek and straightforward, I personally like it. And it seems other wawaters did. The new design also comes with a number of pre-built themes.

Huda a watwet users even demanded more:

can we have a dynamic design that changes automatically according to time of day, in the morning and at nite (night)? nice font btw (by the way.)

.

Now Mobily’s customers (the second Saudi mobile operator) can send and receive SMS updates, as well it has been the case for Jordan’s Mobile operator Zain’s customer. But if using any other mobile operator in Jordan KSA or anywhere worldwide you can only now send SMS updates.

Other new features include:  a Badge similar to Twitter’s badge which allows you to embed your wawets updates to your blog or any website, be it your updates or your friends, also a new Facebook app and statistics which list all the user activity stats, such as: number of watwets, friendship request , ..etc.

Public  timeline has been added with latest, featured, and channels: which now has Play FM ( A customer to  Ahmad Humeid’s  other company, he is the CEO of iToot Corp the owner of Wawet and Ikbis) and  Shopping guide. But both at the moment are not functioning. Though this shows that Wawet is introducing social media to businesses so they use it as a marketing tool,  thus watwet will in turn make money.

What is missing:

Wawet’s -as I said before- main differentiation to twitter is its 2 way MMS service and its Arabic interface. Also as I said before Watwet might have benefited from Twitter ending out-bound SMS services to Arabia and most of the world. But anyways Twitter with around 2 million users has not gone main stream in USA yet, let alone in the Arab world!

Though since Watwet 2 way SMS service is limited to Zain’s customers in Jordan, and now Mobily in KSA, there is no real value for users like me in using the service. Plus there is no desktop app that can let me receive and send updates like Twhirl does with Twitter, identica and seesmic. It is really annoying to keep hitting refresh to see latest friends updates or to get my email spammed with tens of updates per day.

Actually by looking at watwet’s timeline it tells you that usage rates seems to be very low with few updates from only few users per day.

I have sent a watwet to Ahmad Humeid with few questions but he did not answer.

Share and Enjoy

3alarasi is an interesting Jordanian startup, which is an entertainment portal that mix its in-house produced unique animated cartoons, caricature, audio productions, and articles, with users generated & sharing of content:Games, videos, audios and photos, with many social networking features.

3alarasi means in local Jordanian dialect: I accept with great pleasure or I appreciate greatly.

3alarasi uniqueness is in its in-house produced content, which currently produced by its cofounder cartoonist Omar Abdallat, his animated cartoons is a distinctive attempt to fill the gap between Arab originated animations and the ones  originating from western and Asian producers. 3alarasi’s edge is in its localized content that understands the local culture more than being competitor in high-tech long animations.

In-House Content:

Currently Omar uses different carton characters, in his cartoons, and animated cartoons, in which they tackle many issues related to the Jordanian society, such as Awad Abu Shifa and Jaber Kawanes, each cartoon character represent a segment of the Jordanian society, 7awa (Arabic for Eve) represent a women who tackle women related issues. Other characters include: saleem abu saleem o um saleem.

Though the cartoon characters and the animation are currently limited to Jordanian culture and dialect, 3alarasi has plans to add Egyptian and Khaleji (referred to the Arab Gulf area) characters and content soon. and While the site Interface is currently in English, an Arabic interface is also coming soon. According to Amer AbuLaila CTO and cofounder of 3alarasi.

The following video is an example of 3alarasi in-house produced animation, it uses slang Jordanian dialect:

Video transcript:

(o 3ard okhti)= by the honor of my sister( he is swearing by the honor of his sister, which is not a classy swearing expression that is somehow common in Jordan among some youth, but not used by officials, and in Islam it is considers (Shirk) – associating a partner to God- when someone swear by anything other than God) -ya jama- you (group of people) and I am not lying (tripping) to you with any word, that from how a professional driver I am, I light my cigarette in Amman, -the capital of Jordan 400KM away from Aqaba-, and finish it in Aqaba, but also I am used to (Tanatat) gays‘ calm way of driving, like once I went back from Aqaba to Amman in (darrs )- i did not understand this word -Amman in the center of the Map- and with the honor of my sister, and with the honor of my sister, I am not a tripper (liar).

MMS:

Beside 3alarasi website which all its service on the web are free-, 3alarasi offers MMS Channels for Zain Jordan subscribers, with 0.20 JD( Jordanain Dinars, (US$ 1= JD 0.70O) fee per message, though it plans to enable this service with more regional mobile operators, “we are negotiating with several operators in KSA, Oman, Yemen, Palestine” said AbuLaila.

User Generated Content:

The Gaming community is one of the other interesting aspect of 3alarasi, where users can upload shockwave apps and share them with the community who in turn can have fun playing them. I do not know if there is any other regional game sharing website available today in the Arab world, so that makes them first also in this area.

As mentioned earlier 3alarasi also offers to its users the ability to upload and share content and offers social networking services.

Users can upload for free videos, audios, and photos, with many privacy options, while Video upload can take any format,  uploaded from Youtube or Google videos, or an immediate capture from your personal cam.

The social networking aspect of 3alrasi has all the usual social networking featuers: Profiles, adding friends, commenting on each profile, sending messages and discussing topics on the forum ( which interface is not inline with 3alarasi theme). Users Profile for example can be customized either with an HTML code or through what-you-see-what-you-get customization option.

Business Model:

3alarasi business model is based on MMS subscription revenue sharing with mobile operators in the region and in selling ads on its website.

According to ERUM Creative Productions L.L.C that owns 3alarasi, during the last 18 months, ERUM has served over 600 unique animation episodes where more than 51,000 mobile users in Jordan enjoyed our MMS channels, 3alarasi, 7awa, and Falla7. I estimate 3alarasi mobile revenues to be around 142,800 JD monthly (US$ 1= JD 0.70), which would be 1,713,600 JD yearly. ( Based on 0.20 JD per message on the assumption of 7 MMS per user per week, with 50-50 MMS revenue sharing with Zain Jordan, with 51,000 subscribers)

But according to AbuLaila the company has been funded privately and recently 28% of the company was sold to 2 Jordanian investors, who valuated the company at half a million JD (US$ 1= JD 0.70O), in which I suggest this valuation is too low if you look at my estimated revenues above, that does not take into account the expected increase when 3alarasi’s MMS is enabled in other regional countries. Let alone the expected ads revenues from the website.

3alarasi online ads offers, Banner Ads: with three locations on each page on the website. Videos and audio Ads format can be: a text ads rotator on the video or audio player; also the video ad  can be played before the video or audio (Pre roll ad).

I could not get information if 3alarasi developed the video and ad insertion technologies or if they are using a third party application, since AbuLaila, went offline before answering all my questions, but I hope he can send me some more information soon.

Though according to the company advertising system has Ad tracking System , that enables advertisers to track their campaigns, view reports, breakdowns, and with graph tools.

Areas of Improvements:

3alarasi has a rewarding system that currently does not function, and I could not get much info about it from AbuLaila, but my take is that they should offer revenue sharing with the users who upload content on the website, and their best focus should be with cartoonist and creative producers across the Arab world, where 3alarasi should reach them and open dedicated channels for them on 3alarasi, so they can submit creative content from cartons to animations. And share with 3alarasi  their 3alarasi’s web site contents’ ad revenues, and the revenues from their MMS distributed content, in  which this would make 3alarasi the creative producers  socialnetwork platform in the Arab world.

3alarasi stats (according to ERUM):

According to  ERUM, 83% of the site viewers are coming from Middle East, and GCC (Arab Gulf Council ) countries, and its highest five ranks are in Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, and Libya.

S ince early this year, 3alarasi.com has served over 5 million video views and over 4 million photo and caricature views for worldwide users.

And today 3alarasi.com is receiving over 12 thousand unique users per day, while new visitors to the website are increasing due to the continuous marketing campaigns on Google, Facebook and other networks and websites.

Other stats of 3alarasi.com according to ERUM study on Alexa

* Over 350,000 Unique Visitors per month.
* Over 1,200,000 Page views per month.
* Over 40% traffic from Jordan & Middle East.
* Over 33% traffic from GCC area.
* Subscribers are between 14 – 45 years Old.
* 70% are between 18 – 29 years Old.
* 56% males, 46% females.

Company Background:

3alarasi started 18 months ago for few content it produced which was distributed only via MMS to Zain Jordan subscribers, then to a website with cartoon content, produced by cartoonist Omar abdallat. The current new Beta version  started when Amer AbuLaila CTO joined the company for the IT development 9 months ago, According to Abulaila.

3alarasi is owned by ERUM Creative Productions L.L.C whose Founders are: Amer AbuLaila as CTO, cartoonist Omar Abdallat, writer Rajae Qawas, Fahed Oweidat as CEO.

3alarasi in Main Stream Arabic Media:

Yesterday 3alarasi was featured on BBC Arabic radio find the audio bellow (in Arabic )
While AbuLaila will be on Future TV (Lebannies Arabic Satellite Channel) 10 – 11 am (Jordan time +2GMT)

Besides 3alarasi, ERUM provides creative content via all media; they have created TV advertisements using their characters. They also have a daily show on Ramadan with Nourmina TV Arabic Satellite Channel from Jordan.  And started to broadcast their cartoons on other Arabic Satellite Channels, like Future TV, and soon on other popular TV Channels across the Arab world.

Share and Enjoy

Javi is a free mobile social networking service, developed by the Jordanian wireless   applications and software solutions company Javna.

Javi V.1.0 lets you send and receive free messages with your friends locally and around the world. Also it allows you to receive your facebook notifications on your mobile handset at no charge. ( I have not yet tested the service.)

All you have to do is to install and activate small software on your mobile handset to start using the service, and enjoy free SMS messages, but your friends need to have that application too in their handset.

I do not know what is Javna exact business model with here, but does twitter has one anyway? I guess it would be embedding ads on Javi application or within the SMS messages.

That would be true since Javna launched two days ago MobiAd, a mobile advertising platform with multiple delivery channels, (I knew about MobiAd since few months ago when it was under testing with selected advertisers, but for technical reasons I postponed writing about it, however I will  post an analysis about MobiAd very soon.)

I called Javna CEO today to get, his explanations, but all my calls where returned unsuccessfully, I was told he was busy in a meeting.

According to Javi’s website, the future releases of Javi will include, MMS & email composer, inbox, outbox, sent messages & reports, Javi Blog, sending and receiving pictures, and multi language support.

Since few months ago Javna was running periodically facebook ad campaigns for Javi, but the ads were directed to Javi’s website that has very few info, just few words telling you when you to install the mobile app and you’ll get free messages and FB notification, but not how or any other info, there were no tutorials, and no about us page!

This is an example of a wrong launch strategy which I mentioned to Javna’s business development director, Sammy Tuffaha (an ex-IBMer) at the time: You do not expect people to download an application to their mobile if you do not offer them enough information about it and about you.

When I recently checked the website it had more info, but not everything, for example, How to use Javi,   Installation guide, and User Manual sections where empty!

I hope Javna will fix these minor but important pitfalls, and as I promised about MobiAd I’ll try to get you more information from  Javna.

Beside Javi and AdMobi, Javna is working in launching MobiNet, which Javna website has little info about:

Mobinet provides a groundbreaking technology that allows enterprises to enjoy a distinctive and strategic presence on the mobile network .It allows users to utilize their mobile handsets and to access relevant information in the form of text, audio, or video using real time update and content management capabilities over a user friendly interface.

Share and Enjoy

Watwet was launched to the public about a 2 months ago After being for a while in privet beta.

The services is similar to twitter, it lets you to send your status update to your friends and receive their updates, via web, email and SMS. Unlike Twitter, on WatWet you can send and receive photos to and from your friends via web and MMS. And the service is available in both Arabic and English. (You can find my profile here.)

How you can use it:

1-For example you want to update your friends about your where about, you just send your wawet via SMS to a predefined number provided by wawet or via the web and all your friends receive your update, on web and SMS if they have activated their mobile number on wawet’s website and wish to follow your updates.

2- You take a cool photo and want to instantly share it with your friends, all you have to do is send it to a predefined number provided by Watwet from your mobile, or via the web and all your friends receive the update instantly via MMS and the web.

At this stage The SMS and MMS service is available in Jordan only and to those who have Zain mobile numbers only, but the web services is available worldwide, and soon Watwet will be available in more countries according to their FAQ.

Think that WatWet chose Zain,  because it is the most popular mobile operator in Jordan, with more than 1.4 million subscribers.

So instead of paying the cost of every SMS and MMS you want to send to each friend, you only pay the cost of one SMS or MMS and all your friends receive your update for free. On the other hand if you update from the web your cost is zero.

One of the neat things I liked about Watwet is that it automatically shorten any URL you enter when you submit your status, so you do not have to go to tinyurl, insert your URL, copy/past your tinyurl and then go to twitter to post it.

Unlike Twitter which has public timeline -status updates- from its’ users, the public updates on Wawet is available only at the front page for non singed in members, you can not see them when you sign in unless they are coming from your friends. I think they did that in order to encourage users to invite and network with their current real world friends, instead of hocking up with new people. But I advice them to enable public wawets, to helps users -like me- to promote their posts! And get answers to questions from the community.

How it can be improved:

Well I will give the idea of a project I had in mind few years ago but I did not implement it – the developers who signed the NDAs know a bet about it. –(Note to the people who signed the NDA, it is still valid and you can not use or share its’ content with other, especially the other aspects not mentioned here –

The basic idea is to make the service location aware, and that requires developing a mobile application that detects the location of the user, or use special SMS tags to check in location.

So once the user sends a photo from his/her mobile it detects his/her location and adds it to the photo properties. Also when sending from the web the user can check-in to the location that matches his/her current one, and the location’s photo is tagged with the location. The same applies to Status updates and videos, sine Watwet is part of  iToot copr,  the services should be also integrated with the other iToot Property: Ikbis.com thus providing photos web and SMS geo-location status updates and social networking, these thing are being implemented now partly by an American startup called BrightKite – to get a better understanding read my next post (How brigthtKite could evolve to web 3.0.)

One other thing they probably know is to open watwet’s API to third party developers so they can to build applications on top of wawet, which would add more value to its users, and would helo wawet  become a defacto standard in the Arab world.

Lastly you can have your own Watwet or Twitter by buying a software that costs a few hundred bucks.  but it is not just the idea, it is execution.

Share and Enjoy