Whether an applications’ developer, a techie genius or just a student or an employee with a good idea for a new mobile application and a flair for technology, LINK Development and ArpuPlus will help make it happen through “Bananas Factory”, a virtual community that they launched and that allows them to see their idea come to life .

Both LINK Development and ArpuPlus have pledged to draw on their own domain expertise, business and marketing capabilities to support Arab mobile application developers as well as creative minds, in their quest to populate the mobile applications world with innovative, informative, useful and fun applications targeted at users in the region and around the world.

Developers will get the technical tools and assistance to create new applications, market and monetize them. They will be supported by a downloadable Software Development Kit (SDK) that contains a powerful drag-and-drop, cross-platform application creation tools as well as a “Developers’ Community,” a discussion platform for knowledge exchange.

Already have an application posted on another store and would like it to have wider reach? The Bananas Factory stores will also host these mobile applications, to expand the reach of these applications.

Not a developer? No problem. If someone has the idea but does not have enough technical skills to develop it, all that needs to be done is to submit the idea to www.BananasFactory.com . The engineers from LINK Development will take it from there and develop it for them, while ArpuPlus will help them market the application on stores and different platforms. This will be done on a revenue-sharing basis.

This new venture is being announced to the world of applications developers and innovative thinkers on the second day of Planet of the Apps Arabia, which discusses future trends in mobile applications and the opportunities and challenges they present to businesses.

Both LINK Development and ArpuPlus are part of OT Ventures Group.

Opera Software today announced that it mobile browser Opera Mini has reached 100 million monthly users in March and two billion daily page views

Opera announced 2 month ago Opera 100 million mobile users, though that number represented the combined total for both its mobile browsers, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile. Now, Opera Mini has reached more than 100 million users in its own right.

The number of monthly Opera Mini users across the globe has grown by 11 million since February 2011 and doubled from the 50 million mark in February 2010.

Opera Mini’s twin March milestone, two billion daily page views, already doubles the one billion daily page views achieved in July 2010.

Motorola launched in United Arab Emirates its the QWERTY-less MILESTONE brother: Milestone XT720, called Motoroi  in other markets. MileStone is the non American name for Droid devices.

Other countries in the Arab region will have the devices in the shelves in few weeks.

The new device brings a 8 megapixel camera with Xenon flash, 720p video recording and Android 2.1.

Milestone XT720 packs a 3.7-inch capacitive touchscreen with 480×854 pixel resolution and multi-touch support, 550  Update: upgraded to 720 Mhz ARM Cortex A8 processor, 8GBmicroSD, 256MB RAM, and 512MB ROM.

As per connectivity it comes with the usual WCDMA 1700/2100, GSM 850/900/1800/1900, HSDPA 10.2Mbps (Category 9/10)/7.2Mbps (Category 7/8), EDGE Class 12, GPRS Class 12, HSUPA 5.76Mbps, MicroUSB, GPS with digital compass, Bluetooth Class.

The device also offers HD video capture at 720p, video playback onto HDTV via HDMI cable, Talk Time (3G): up to 270 mins. Talk Time (GSM): up to 540 mins.

Retail price is Retail Price AED 2699 (USD Approx. 739.45)

Here is our video Interview with Motorola product manager Bashar Hafez where he show case Milestone XT720:




What represents new threats and opportunity to mobile operators, a new study from Juniper Research has found that Mobile VoIP services will develop significantly faster in developed markets due to the direct correlation between 3G roll outs and the take up of mobile VoIP. This is the case even though mVoIP traffic volumes may eventually be higher in developing markets due in part to the calling patterns of migrant workers, according to the study Mobile Voice Strategies: mVoIP Opportunities & Business Models, 2010-2015.

“By 2012 we expect significant uptake of mobile VoIP in its various different flavours”, says Anthony Cox, Senior Analyst at Juniper Research. “By that date mobile VoIP will be available over both 3G and WiFi networks. We also anticipate that several more traditional operators will have joined 3UK and Verizon in the US and developed relationships with mobile VoIP players such as Skype,” he says.

Further findings include:

· Alliances between mobile VoIP players and traditional operators may provide the best option for today’s incumbent operators to address the advent of mobile VoIP.

· Revenues from the circuit switched voice market will continue to diminish over the next five years, although this will not accelerate.

· A high percentage of Mobile VoIP carried over applications will be via WiFi networks, bypassing operators’ networks altogether. Such traffic will result in some lost revenues, amounting to around $5bn by 2015.

More info in the mobile voice report.

Mobile devices are being used in many ways and every day they are getting smarter, as a result there  are new markets being opened by the abilities of smart phones. Today, Juniper Research published a report that estimate a “mobile retail market” to exceed $12 billion by 2014.

The mobile marketing and retail strategies report found that the mobile retail sector – defined by Juniper as comprising mobile coupon redemption values, smart poster fees and advertising expenditure – would initially be dominated by coupons.

The report found that mobile advertising expenditure would exceed coupon redemption values by 2013 as digital adspend is increasingly transferred into the mobile space.

As the retailing industry and brands are becoming aware of, and implementing the mobile device into, the retail cycle. According to report co-author Howard Wilcox, “Retailers have recognised that, even ahead of their wallets, people will usually make sure they do not leave home without their mobile device.

The mobile channel offers merchants the opportunity to differentiate from their competition and acquire customers that become loyal.” Meanwhile, additional factors such as the growth of the mobile web, the availability of high speed mobile broadband networks, and the ever-growing usage of SMS were offering retailers, brands and merchants new opportunities to communicate with customers and potential customers and to offer the ability for them to shop by mobile.

Other findings from the Juniper report include:
·         For brands and retailers, mobile offers the ability to change campaigns quickly (for example by time of day), and crucially the ability to track the success and customer acquisition rates.
·         Usage of the mobile in a live shopping situation can be particularly effective – for example for product price comparisons.
·         While the mobile will be an effective channel for younger users who organise their lives around their mobile phones, older demographic groups are likely to be less receptive to using their mobiles in a retail situation.

#image by hiromy.

Winners of Nokia’s Calling All Innovators “Bil3arabi” 2009 contest, a developer competition for Arabic-language mobile applications, have been announced by Nokia.

The grand prize winner of $100,000 went to “Here I am” from Enpronomics in Egypt.  It is a geo-presence application with personal safety features that enables users to call for help in emergencies, share their location with family, close friends and know the location of their beloved.

In second place, and winner of $25,000 in cash, is Elmathbakh created by private developers Senai Refai and her husband Kamel Seghaier from Tunisia.  Elmathbakh is an application that helps people keep track of their daily calorie intake. Its various features have been designed especially for Arabic diets.

The other top 10 applications that have received the Judge’s Choice Award will get a one-year membership in Forum Nokia Launchpad, which enables members to receive access to exclusive resources and support to accelerate mobile application development and elevate developer’s business visibility in the mobile world.  These applications are OI2ot by Inficron, Arabian HawkGood by News 4 me, AlMoosiqar by Quirkat, Yoolki, Sarhan by Good News 4 me, Messagei, Wassal  by Inficron, Moodi by MT2, Konooz, and Frenzo.

In addition to the cash prize, the grand prize winner will receive a “spotlight” placement featuring the winning application for 4 weeks on the top page of Nokia’s Ovi Store; and paid travel to demo the winning application at a Nokia specified event.  The winning application will also be reviewed by Nokia for possible preload on future Nokia devices.  Second place will also receive a “spotlight” placement featuring the winning application for 3 weeks on a relevant category page on Nokia’s Ovi Store.

Update: Kzalek was on private beta, the download link has expired, sorry for late update it was  a miss communication with its founder.

Last month, I nagged and was wondering why the current Twitter AIR based Desktop apps such as TweetDeck and Seesmic do not support Arabic text on Mac or Linux? But now I can breathe the sigh of relief. ( Arabic is written from right to left. Arabic letters are connected to each other unlike the Latin words).

Few hours ago, Kzalek, founded by Mustafa Farghay from Egypt, launched in beta. Kzalek did not only solve the problem for Mac and Linux users but has a complete Arabic Interface for both platforms, Windows and any platform that can run by Adobe AIR.

Whats more wonderful, I think that this app has the best Arabic right-to-left (RTL) support. Usually on the other Twitter desktop apps, when you tweet something in Arabic and add some English word(s) to your tweet, the tweet text gets scrambled as the English letters go South. But with Kzalek app, the tweet stays clean and organized. The same way you would write an Arabic document in MS Word when you add some English text to it. ( Even though I am currently a Mac user, I did not see any other office suite that is better than MS office).

Currently Kzalek, offers many Twitter basic functions with some more new features:

1. Complete Arabic UI.

2. You can see the tweeted pics in thumb view.

3. You can see the original Tweeted long URL without having to leave the app. Since Kzalek uses the popular Untiny service from Saleh Al Zaid from KSA. (LINK)

4. You can tweet pics and shorten urls directly from the app using bit.ly, Twitpic and yfrog APIs.

6. Kazlek can translate tweets into Arabic. It uses google language API (Although Google translation is funny in most occasions).

7. Favorite tweets get replies and DMs and you can reply, Retweet and DM.

8. Search feature.

As a twitter user with multi Twitter accounts, and since the app is still in beta,it does not meet my current needs. Although it might help me manage my ArabCrunch Arabic Edition on Twitter.

Mustafa Farghay told ArabCrunch about his future plans to add more features that would make Kazlek even more useful to any level of Twitter users. These features will include adding multi accounts, sending DMS to many users, friendship methods (add, block…etc), support for Twitter native users lists, Twitter trends, audio embedding, saved search Farsi interface and increased performance to make the app consumes less RAM. Although Mustafa assured us that currently Kzalek consumes less RAM than any other AIR clients. He also added that he might offer SMS support for replies and DMS in many Arab countries.

As for the web, Arabic Twitter is available via ArTwitter.

I told Mustafa about the most popular video sharing service on Twitter, TwitVid which is cofounded by Mohammad Al Adham from Jordan and Adil Lalani from Pakistan, and he said that he never knew about them but he will start reading their API to see if he can add TwitVid to the list of twitter services supported by him.

I also asked Mustafa if he is willing to support Twitter’s regional clone from Jordan, WatWet, but it turned out that he hasn’t heard about them either. He added that he will read their API and consider the idea.

With this Launch, Twitter will become even more popular in the Arab world, especially as AC broke Twitter talks to strike SMS deals with major operators in the Arab region. In addition, Twitter did another recent SMS deal in India. Not so good of a news for WatWet!

The launch Apple’s biggest innovations in years, the iPhone and its app marketplace was the biggest earthquake that shacked all mobile manufactures and forced them to rethink their strategies. Though, in the Arab world, Apple has shown little or no care to the market even though Steve Jobs, the cofounder and CEO of Apple, is from Syrian origins, as my sources told me that it was the mobile operators in the region who begged Apple to be Apple’s iPhone operator of choice in their countries, normally it is the other way around. On the other hand, Nokia the finish company enjoys the largest market share in the Arab mobile market and has shown big care to Arab users, as they pump 10s if not 100s of millions of dollars to Nokia, every year.

Nokia realized what iPhone did to the industry so it made a series of efforts to regain its status as the choice for smart phones. Nokia late last year went ahead and launched Express Music 5800 (my own mobile and my thoughts about 5800 and N97 will be published on ArabCrunch later,) then launched its app market place calling it Ovi Store, though since then the available apps on Ovi Store are not a match in quantity or quality to what is available on the iPhone app market place at Apple’s iTunes.

Nokia then organized several competition for developers worldwide and few months ago Nokia announced its app development competition for Arabic application calling it -Bil3arabi (which means “in Arabic”) contest, in a bid to draw developers to submit Arabic and other relevant apps to its Ovi Store, a smart move to bring pioneering local and relevant apps to the Arab world on Nokia devices, which would put Nokia in a leading position before its mobile competitors specially the iPhone. As the Mobile OS apps game of today is no different than the PC app OS game of the 80s, the Mobile OS that draws more developers would emerge as a winner.
Though Bil3arabi is a smart move by Nokia, it had a major shortfall: it was not open to individuals and students!! But today Nokia corrected its mistake with an announcement that it is now allowing additional submissions for its Arabic-language mobile applications competition, Calling All Innovators – Bil3arabi, by welcoming individuals as well as companies, and accepting direct submissions from those developers whose apps can not currently be uploaded to Ovi Store!!! Nokia is also giving developers more time, by extending the deadline to 15 November 2009

“Since announcing the competition in June, we have received a lot of feedback from developers, many of them small developers and individuals, including university students, who requested that we accept their participation.  Therefore, the Calling All Innovators – Bil3arabi developer competition is now open to all developers and individuals with bold ideas and tremendous talent, including professional and independent developers and university students,” said Wendy Weckstrom, Services Marketing Manager for Ovi Store, MEA.

Nokia should have thought about this decision before starting the competition, if the people behind the competition were reading ArabCrunch they would know that most mobile and web startups in the region are either students or individuals, many doing it on a part time bases, and since we have few mobile app development companies in the Arab world, it would make more sense to open it to the solo crowed.

The party who will create an eco-system for Nokia devices is not companies but small teams, students and individuals; this was the case with iPhone app when it started with solo developers. These are things we understand very well at ArabCrunch DEMO The Launchpad Event for Emerging Technology in the Arab World, which our first version was open to anyone last year, and the next version which will be announced soon will also be open to anyone to submit their applications, actually at ArabCrunch we care more about small teams, individual students and startups who have no or little funding than big and well funded companies, this was clear in the event’s website and all other communicated messages.

Nokia also announced more corrections as Wendy in Nokia’s press release said more interesting stuff, “We can assist registered developers, especially through our Forum Nokia developer program, during the development process by giving them the opportunity to share with us the application and content in progress and we will do our best to support them.  The competition also now accepts direct submissions of applications that are ready but not yet Symbian signed or Java verified.”

The competition is open to mobile and web application developers to submit entries for Arabic content in any category within Ovi Store (Applications and Widgets, Video, Personalization, Games, Audio, Flash & Active idle widgets) with a focus on Internet Innovation, Flash, Mobile Games, and social location.

The entries can be submitted to Ovi Store and registered on this website until November 15th 2009 and winners will be announced by December 7th 2009.  Criteria for choosing the winner include quality and functionality; uniqueness and innovativeness; usability and creativity; and local relevancy.
Grand prize winner will receive $100,000 USD in cash; “spotlight” placement featuring the winning application for 4 weeks on the top page of Nokia’s Ovi Store; and paid travel to demo the winning application at a Nokia specified event.  The winning application will also be reviewed by Nokia for possible preload on future Nokia devices.
Second place will receive $25,000 USD in cash; and “spotlight” placement featuring the winning application for 3 weeks on a relevant category page on Nokia’s Ovi Store.

The remaining top ten submissions will be given the “Judge’s Choice Award,” which will give them a one-year membership in Forum Nokia Launchpad, and enables members to receive access to exclusive resources and support to accelerate mobile application development and elevate developer’s business visibility in the mobile world.