Folks at Yahoo are raising the white banner and surrendering their social networking site in the Arab world “As7ab”.

In an email sent to Yahoo Maktoob’s Arabic social network Asa7b members, Yahoo is saying that they will shut down the service as of 18/9/2011 and deleting everything, the email urges members to download their voice and video clips and their photos. It also asks them to look at other Yahoo services: Maktoob Blogs, Maktoob Forums, Yahoo! groups and Yahoo! Puls.

This is no surprise, Facebook has taken over the world by storm and is estimated to have 30 million members from the Arab world according to facebook ad creator ( this number excludes Syria and Sudan as advertisers can not target them on facebook due to U.S government sanctions on these 2 countries.) and Google Plus is growing on momentum with an estimated 20 million members from around the world. Though numbers about Arab members are not yet available I see many common Arab tweeps on google plus and the platform is offered in Arabic from day 1.

Why is As7ab closing? I bet its low traction as the sites says 600,000 members who most likely are active on facebook not As7ab. And why As7ab has not become at the size of facebook? It is lack of social innovation. As7ab was developed by Maktoob before Yahoo acquired the company in 2009. It was something that cross between Facebook and myspace of that time. As members can customize their profile with HTML and is meant to find new friends, rather than connect with real friends with privacy as facebook model is built upon.

Google+ on the other hand is built around studying social behavior and how people interconnect. As people have multiple friends groups. Google+ make it easy to share stuff with those groups without exposing too much to other groups of friends when needed, and share with-everyone when a user things it is appropriate.

Google+ has proven that the battle for social networking dominance is not yet done. The winner is not the one who propose state-of-the-art technology but the one who can use technology to mimic real life social behavior.

3 years old Jordan based Arabic microblogging platform Watwet has closed down, in a massage posted on the site the site admins says that they are pulling the plug on WATWET and All your information on WATWET will be deleted permanently. However they are offering microblogging service to organizations.

Why did WatWet fail and close? I wrote a detailed analysis back in July 2009 saying that WatWet has a very hard chance to match with Twitter even though it had more members at the time.
In short cloning international site into Arabic is a bad idea for startups. However it works in some markets like group buying where GoNabit copied groupon and ended being sold to LivingSocial as they had the local advantage that LivingSocial did not have.

Saying that cloning international startups is bad idea for Arab entrepreneurs, the question is why local social networks in markets such as Russia and China are doing better than facebook while no single Arabic social network has made it?

Early today, Egyptian authorities unblocked Facebook and Twitter, but they went into blocking it again according to ArabCrunch sources in Egypt.

The blocking is an attempt to stifle the Friday of Anger demonstrations tomorrow against dictatorship and tyranny, as Facebook and Twitter are used by activists to inform the world about the Egyptian revolution, rally support to bring more Egyptians  to join the efforts to topple Husni Mubarak regime and coordinate demonstration places and paths .

However there are several ways to bypass blocking: using a proxy server, Tor project and Opera browser with Turbo enabled.

To follow the events in Egypt follow hashtag #jan25 #25Jan. on Facebook we are all khaled Saed Page and RNN (arabic and sometimes English headlines)

#image via RNN.

ComScore released today a report on Twitter stats for the month of June, the report reveals that 93 million Internet users visited Twitter.com -exluding third party app such as TweetDeck- an increase of 109% from last year.

Indonesia the largest Muslim country in terms of population achieved the highest penetration rate, at 20.8 percent of the country’s Internet users. Brazil and Venezuela follows Indonesia in that category.

In terms of users growth, Twitter is growing at much higher rates Internationally than in its homeland in North America as the region’s growth rate is at 22% to nearly 25 million visitors in June. Latin America had the strongest audience growth, surging 305 percent to 15.4 million users. Asia Pacific ranked as the second-fastest growing region, climbing 243 percent to 25.1 million visitors. The Middle-East Africa jumped 142 percent to 5 million visitors, while Europe soared 106 percent to 22.5 million visitors. ( we do not know what the term Middle East and Africa means to ComScore, is it the Arab world plus Iran and Turkey plus all Africa? last time we wrote about Twitter visitors  in early this year via 2 parties it was  about 15 to 30,000 thousand users, so 5 Million is a very massive growth rate)

The report reveals that Twitter is gaining adoption among smartphone users. In the U.S., 8.3 percent of smartphone users (4.2 million people) accessed Twitter.com in a month via the browser on their mobile devices, outpacing each of the European markets. In Europe, 2.8 percent of smartphone users overall accessed Twitter.com (1.7 million users), with the U.K. experiencing the strongest penetration in the region at 5.8 percent, followed by Germany with 3.1 percent and France with 2.1 percent.

It would be great to add third party apps usage, not sure how would that number increase, but many users who use apps like TweetDeck access Twitter.com occasionally over the month period. Another Interesting finding would be knowing who are the active memebrs from those reported and those coming as visitors via referrals like Google.

What is your take, why Twitter growth in Middle East and Africa plus Latin America is exploding?

#image via Si.

The 6 years and so old company Facebook has hit officially a major milestone: 500 Millions active users. Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the news via a blog post.

Looking at the largest countries in terms of population we see China #1 with around 1,3 billion people and India with 1,81 billion. This makes Facebook stands 3rd if it was a real country, USA stands forth with 309 million people.

Facebook has also started an app to celebrate this occasion called Facebook stories where users can share their own story of using Facebook. Users in the Arab world are estimated to be above 15  17 million according to inside sources.

Facebook is poised to be the next Google where they now have  the data of 500 million users (might hit a billion in less than a year) and a vast amount of web data via Facebook like button, thus might make adwords absolute one day!

Facebook has faced recently increased criticism because its privacy policy and in the Muslim world because of the “draw the Prophet Mohamad PBH- pages which resulted in launching Millatfacebook the site achieved unprecedented growth.

PS: ArabCrunch reports also social media and sometimes its political impact, ArabCrunch has no political affiliations, I hope this wont cause us problems with anyone.

In the late 90s Aljazeera set the stage of political debates that was never seen before since the inception of modern media in the Arab world . As Arab leaders and governments are often criticized, something that was not possible before as each countries population was depending on state run media or often censored private media.

In the 2010s facebook and social media from new comers like Millatfacebook to old players like Youtube and even older such as forums seems to become the weapon of choice for political change and activism.

Facebook today started offering new users in the signup walk through  suggestion for pages for them to follow, these pages seems to be local to each country, which is different from Twitter suggestion as on Twitter they are mostly from the US.

In Egypt facebook is offering users a number of pages on top of them the facebook page of We are all Khaleed Saeed from Egypt who was beaten to death by the Egyptian police according to its admin.

The fanpage in Arabic boost 159,459 members with levels of engagements around 300 likes and 150 comments per status update. According to Egyptian newspeper Almasery Alyoum “Eyewitnesses say that police dragged Saeed from an Alexandria internet café and beat him to death in front of onlookers. Police, however, maintain that the victim died after choking on a package of marijuana that he had been attempting to conceal during his arrest.”

The page which its admins said that they aim to pressure the Egyptian government to end emergency laws and stop torture has managed to organize silent rallies across Egypt the biggest of them was in Alexandra the home town of Khaled and was lead by presidential hopeful Mohammed ElBaradei.

There are 3,581,340 people who said there country is Egypt on facebook, which means the fan page has reechoed around 2 % of Egypt’s facebook population. The page was dispatching status updates encouraging followers to rally and not stay silent with such messages as this one:

“Zeinab: I’m an 18 year old Egyptian-American who wants nothing more than to march down the streets of Cairo with you all, but I will support you from afar. Ohio – USA”

2 days ago Alexandria District Attorney Yasir Rafai has ordered that Mahmoud Salah Mahmoud and Awad Ismail Suliman, policemen from the Sidi Gabr Police Department detained for four days pending investigation into allegations that they had used excessive force against Khaled Saeed. In its blog post facebook said that suggested Pages are based on:

“posting engaging updates. The list of Pages is strictly determined by an algorithm, so none of the suggestions is sponsored and Page administrators can’t pay or ask to be included.”

In Jordan where I am from and currently live- the top suggested page  is what it seems the unofficial page of King Abdullah II of Jordan the page boost around 30,658 members, there is no presence for the king’s wife Queen Rania page which boost around 237,861 members.

Some dude who started around 2 weeks ago a fan page competition for Drawing Prophet Mohammad peace be upon him has sparked anger among Muslims and managed to have Pakistan to block Facebook, youtube and other 450 Web links for carrying objectionable material.

But today a Pakistani court ordered the government to left a ban on Facebook,after Facebook “assured the court no blasphemous material will be available to users in Pakistan.” According to bloomberg.

Facebook “had exchanges with Richard Holbrooke, U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan” Chaudhry Zulfiqar, told Bloomberg.

Startupmeme a famous Pakistani blog about startups and social media called this day a “Let May 31 Go Down As D-Day In Pakistan’s History [BS]” , Startupmeme writer asked before  facebook to delete the fanpage because is it against it terms of service (TOS).

In Islam creating images of the Prophet is prohibited and considered a great insult.

Facebook has been some how respectful to Muslim feelings, they deleted before a fanpage in Arabic for a couple of Guys claiming them selves as “Allah” ( Allah: means one God in Arabic)

#Photo by Startupmem.

In few moment, founder  of ArabCrunch Group is going to speak in Amandla Forum in Kempinski Hotel, Dear Sea, Jordan. The title of speech is “Effective Use of Social Networking”.

You can follow Gaith’s speech from twitter, just follow us on twitter, or by using the hash-tag #arabcrunchnet, and you can follow the Amandla forum in general by folloing the hash-tag: #amandla.

See the live streaming: from here

Facebook is now #1 most visited site in USA ahead of Google. The social network has over 400 million people and most probably you are one of them.

The major traction facebook offers to all of us, is keeping us connected in a clean way with our friends, the third party applications adds another layer of usefulness. However not all of them are useful. (check this question about why facebook is more popular than myspace and other social networks in the Arab world? on ArabCrunch.NET startup Q&A.)

But iDescribe is a fun and a useful utility application that has attracted 2 million users and 312,088 monthly active users, including 47 of my facebook friends.

The app is straight forward, it has a pre defined descriptions that you choose 5 of them to describe your friends.

The secret behind the massive growth the app got, is because of the creative viral growth techniques installed by its Jordanian founder Yazeed Al Oyoun as when you install the app it asks you to describe your friends, which in turn it will invite them to use the app, and when you request your friends to describe you it will also invite them to join the loop. Another factor many facebook developers missed, is that iDescribe was able to readapt as facebook changed its APIs policy.

You can follow iDescribe on ArabCrunch.NET here.

(PS: please do not describe me )

Amman, Palo Alto.

Even though we are still in private beta, our small engineering and product development team has been working hard to improve ArabCrunch.NET , the technology ecosystem community,  to empower more than 1000 members and growing everyday.

Based on many users’ feedback, we have launched a new release with the following features:

Improved Startup Q&A app:

Statrup Q&A: is a place to ask questions, get and find answers and post polls about startups, entrepreneurship and the business of technology, specially in the Arab world.

• Relevant Matching:  If you added tags to your profile that are relevant to your experience or areas of Interest , now you will be able to click on (My Matches) tab  . This will allow you to view  Questions that matches your profile tags. If you did not add your profile tags please do now.
• Best answer: now users who asked a question, can chose the best answer from all submitted answers.
• Crunch Up and Crunch Down: Vote on the Questions and Answers. We call it Crunch Up and Crunch Down. By voting you can voice your say about which question and answer you find more interesting.
• Rearrange and Choosing the Best Answers: To give you better filtering options, you can rearrange answers by oldest, newest, votes. In addition, you can get to choose your best answer.
• Bookmark Questions: Interesting questions could be bookmarked to view them later. Your bookmarked questions will show on your activity stream.
• Sorting Questions: Now you can view Questions based on Recent, Most Popular, My Matches or Unanswered.

Profile Activity Stream:
You can track all your activities in your profile activity log. This is the first step in getting your followers to be more engaged with you.

Homepage:
Now you can see a little widget for Startup Q&A in your homepage.

Better Privacy:
Now your stream will never show when you log in and log out of ArabCrunch.NET to other users.

Cross Browsers Compatibility:
Now ArabCrunch.NET is compatible with all popular browsers: FireFox, IE, Opera and Chrome.

Miscellaneous:
Now you can Crop Images, after uploading your picture or logo, go to your profile view and click Crop profile photo right above your photo.

Now that we gave you a brief about this release, Please go ahead and use Startups Q&A by asking Questions and sharing the Answers that you know. To get 1-to-1 help from world class experts or to help others, apply for a mentor or help a mentee whether in starting and running a business or in increasing technical know-how.

PS: tomorrow we will announce #ArabCrunch24 Twitter contest, stay tuned.

Jeeran is an interesting Arab internet company because its story resembles the stories you hear about in Silicon Valley (USA): A Tech startup that starts from the founders’ garage or dorm and then makes it big (example: HP, Yahoo and Google to name a few.)

Jeeran was founded in 2000 by then two Jordanian students and entrepreneurs Omar Koudsi and Laith Zraikat in Amman, Jordan as an Arabic web based WYSIWYG tool to create websites similar to Yahoo’s closed Geocities . The founders learned web development by their own and launched Jeeran.com, first from their homes.

Later on, they got incubated in Amman based incubator iPark. Then Jeeran graduated and opened its own offices and started recruiting more people.

Around 2005, Jeeran added an Arabic blogging platform that is similar to Google’s blogger where users can start their own blogs in Arabic, the platform was in-house developed using Microsoft’s .Net technologies. Today, Jeeran Blogs hosts around 140,000 blogs and competes with Yahoo’s Maktoob Blogs, Albawaba Blogs, along with Blogger and WordPress.com since the last 2 are Arabized now.

In October 2007 Jeeran got funded with around 1 million (JD) Jordanian Dinars according to sources. (0.71 $ USD = 1 JD) From one of the most active regional venture capital firms IV Holdings in the region.

Also in2007 Jeeran launched Khabbr an Arabic clone to the popular social media site Digg. Khabbr has not really taken off like Jeeran blogs or Digg it self. It currently has around 7,500 members and is based on the PHP open source software digg duplicate Pligg.

Around that time, Jeeran also added video and photo sharing and social networking capabilities, however at the time the design of the users profiles was not streamlined like the what you see on facebook, it is more like MySpace HTML customized users’ profiles (MySpace is cleaning up its users profiles design.) In this front Jeeran competes with Ikbis from Jordan, D1G from Jordan AlsoFacebook from USA, Netlog from Belgium and Masrawy from Egypt along with Yahoo! Maktoob’s As7ab.

As a proof that Intel Capital has started to get serious about investing in the region’s tech companies, May 17th 2009 was the day when Jeeran received its second round of funding from Intel Capital along with another IV Holding portfolio, ShooFeeTV. The amount of funding was not disclosed and I have not heard a solid number yet.

As with Khabbr, Jeeran maintained its what I call Give Them A New Brand Name strategy for its new projects, when In June 2009 it launched its new offshoot and a very good replacement for the Forum based Arabic poetry websites: Sejaal.com a web 2.0 community for Arab poets that also offers poetry competitions.
Jeeran is also an Investor in Talasim a Jordan based “Arabic comedy” website, that I referred to as useless website with some silly content. A comment that one of its founders was not happy with when he approached me yesterday during Amman Twetfestival event. (Sorry it is not a personal attack, but I do not like allot of the content on Talasim and I am free to express my opnion )

Very recently Jeeran launched a new subsidiary called Jeeran Research a research agency tailored to the Arab world that competes directly with Yahoo’s Matoob Research.

Today, Jeeran claims a 1.4 million unique registered members and over 7 million unique visitors per month (April 2009). Though, some sources told me that most of Jeeran traffic is going to Jeeran blogs, however this information could not be verified.

Though Jeeran story is similar to Silicon Valley success stories since it got started using very few resources, it took its founders a longer time to get funding, than any of their US based counter parts and has not realized an exit yet.

This is true, partly because back in 2000 and mostly until now there were few, if any active Venture Capitalist (VCs) and tech investors in the region. Let alone that international tech investors did not look seriously to the tech industry in Arabia.

Saying that, I am sure that Yahoo’s Maktoob acquisition of Maktoob is a game changer along with the Internet giant Google’s serious efforts in the region. As I said before when AC broke the acquisition news, now VCs and Investors alike see an exit to their investments, which would diffidently change their view to the returns of their investments in Tech Industry around the Arab world, a view that ArabCrunch has been trying to change for a while now by giving FREE buzz on this blog to tech entrepreneurs and the industry in general in this region along with events such as ARABCRUNCH DEMO.

Stay tuned for more details about Jeeran and IV holding on ArabCrunch as I have promised before to Interview separately Omar Koudsi the cofounder and CEO of Jeeran and Emile Cubeisythe managing director of IV HOLDINGS, but due to the busy schedule the official interviews never took place. But Inshallah soon I will do separate interviews with both of them.

#University of Jordan Photo by Roba Al-Asi.

Seems that facebook has finally just started rolling out its promised new tweaked inbox with a new more Ajaxy layout. On the left bar of the new Inbox page it shows a search bar, your Facebook messages, updates from facebook Fanpages you subscribed to and your sent items.

Messages and Updates can now be filtered into “All” and “Unread” and if you click any message, the page will not reload completely, just the message part, which makes loading a message faster.

By showing updates from Fanpages, facebook is making them more visible to their subscribers than just showing them on the user’s home stream. Though once you click on any updated message from any of your fanpages you can easily unsubscribe via an unsubscribe link beneath the message.

With this update facebook inbox is  looking more and more like Gmail plus Google Reader; this also puts a question into who will be your feed reader? Facebook? Twitter ? or feed readers?!!

Around a week ago, my friend explained to me how cool friendfeed is, and explained to me how its founders are open to its users and engaged with them. That raised my respect to friendfeed and I started using it more often than just linking my Twitter account to it.

You probably heard the news that Facebook has just acquired friendfeed and you might know that Facebook has been copying friendfeed with many of its features (here is a good post from Webware that tackles the issue. )

But unlike friendfeed facebook has a reputation of being a dictator, forcing its well on its users with insane Terms of Service (TOS) , breaching their privacy and censoring freespeech. With 220 + millions members, facebook seems carless if few thousands left the site because it changed its TOS or prohibited some of its members from expressing their free speech right.
What will be the fate of this acquisition? It is highly expected that firendfeed will merge with facebook thus there will be no more friendfeed.

That opinion seems to be shared with devote friendfeed users as around 50% of comments on the official FriendFeed announcement  view the deal as negative. While many others were even commenting  against it on friendfeed blog or congratulated the founders with varied amounts of skepticism. Some other users even started deleting their freindfeed profiles such as April Russo .

I personally congratulate friendfeed founders on this acquisition, but I ask Facebook to respect its users, the way freindfeed did and respect their rights to freespeech.

NOTE: Linkedin GoDaddy and Google are doing the Blocking NOT  the Government of Sudan.)

Update: Linkedin GoDaddy and Google are doing the Blocking NOT  the Government of Sudan. Both Linkedin and Google said before they have to be in compliance with US laws. Google confirmed that nothing has changed from their point. The sanction though does prohibit transfer of technology and it seems accessing http://code.google.com is considered as technology transfer, but what if the code was created by developers outside USA?

We reported about Linkedin blocking Syria and reported their unblocking with an apology, we also reported that Linkedin is still blocking Sudan saying they have to comply with US sanctions. Though by looking at the US Department of Treasury webpage that explains the sanctions I did not seeanything that says US companies must block their websites?

US congressman Brian Baird seems to agree with me, in a video Interview I lived streamed on ArabCrunch channel on Qik during WEF Jordan 09 in the Dead Sea, he said that to his knowledge, US sanctions do not require US based websites to block access to users in Syria and Sudan.

Ironically Linkedin, code.google.com (an Open-source project hosting service by Google , open source means the source-code is developed via contribution from the Global Community for free.) and GoDaddy were reported to be unblocking Sudan at least for one day period. This has happened sometime around June 18th 09, according to Ashraf Mansoor from Sudan and founder of Twffaha the first job site for women in the Middle East . On 16th of June 09 the US government asked Twitter to stay up for #iranElections crises , and on the 19th of June facebook rushed to launch a Persian (Farsi) version of the site for users in Iran, a move that may be in violation of Facebook’s own terms of service. By the way Iran also faces US sanctions along with Syria, Sudan, Cuba and North Korea!

When I asked US congressman Baired about Linkedin blockade, he said he did not know about it, but was not aware of US laws that prevent (web access)!
He also said “it does not make sense to block open source projects and websites.”

He added “the great opportunity of the internet is people around the world learning what people around the world are doing, that can be a threat to a totalitarian society, that is why we have free press part of our constitution and the internet is the free press of the world, “…”political ideology and scientific inventions, those things I think you have to protect access to.”

Mr. Brian Baird promised me to look into these issues, but I have not followed up with him since then, but will start now along with an email to Linkedin.

Speaking of free speech and censoring, some NGOs that claim to fight for free speech and are anti censoring or affiliated to did not reply to /or refused to answer my emails that asked whether the sanction require Linkedin to block Sudan, like Jillian York the Project Coordinator of OpenNet Initiative.

Below is my video Interview with Baird where he talks about different subjects ranging from: Obama’s initiatives to support R&D in the region, Oracle’s Sun acquisition, and the rumored US law that authorize the US president to shut down the Internet!

(PS: most of the questions I asked Baird were forwarded to me by AC readers; also I could not post his picture because his pic along with all the pictures I took during WEF Jordan 09 were deleted from my Nokia 5800 with unknown reasons!)




# Image by Rita Willaert.





Update: localize your current member gadget, at the end of the post.

Google Friend connect, which aims to bring the social world into all over the web, has just announced adding support to 47 additional languages including Arabic. In a blog post, Google disclosed that Friend Connect currently has over 5 million sites using it.

Google Friend Connect enables site owners to add a widget to their website with no programming, which enables site visitors to join the website community using their existing login user name and password in gmail, AIM, Yahoo, netlog or Open ID (facebook was included but later blocked by facebook.) With Friend connect members can add friends,  invite others, and post comments. Site owners can also add other related widgets that Google calls Social Gadgets which add more social interactivity to their sites, while third party developers can add their own apps using Google Open Social. AC has a Friend Connect community like this one:

With this announcement, site owners, can view Google Friend Connect in any of the newly supported languages, and can now choose the language of their sites (which can be different for each of the owner’s sites). Once selected, most Google-created gadgets and any translated third party gadgets on your site will automatically render in that language.

Bravo Google especially for Adding Arabic, however I’ll do some testing of the new Arabization in a bet and update you here accordingly.

Friend Connect’s newly supported languages are: Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lingala, Lithuanian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Oriya, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnames.

Update:

Sami Shalabi, Member of Technical Staff, Technical Lead, Google Friend Connect, provided me with a nice tip in to how to add your local languages interface to your existing community without the need to add a new website, which means keeping your current members list in your local version of your website/blog’s Friend Connect member gadget:
In the English site Members gadget copy the code to Notepad or an editor and look for this at the last 3 lines of the code:

{ id: ‘div-9188267932036459790′, site: ’00193849901959833007′ }, skin);

Before site add= locale: ‘ar’, so it becomes=

locale:’ar’, site: ’00193849901959833007′ },

‘ar’ is for adding Arabic, so if you want to add French add ‘f’ ‘fr’ instead of ‘ar’ for Spanish add ‘sp’ ‘es’, or use your language abbreviation to add.

Twtri.com developed by Laith Yousi from Iraq, was announced few days ago at GIGAOM‘s  Structure 09 event as one of 2 U.S. grand prize winners for Microsoft’s newCloudApp() – The Azure Services Platform Developer Challenge- . The contest winners were judged by 2 industry leaders Om Malik (founder of GIGAOM) and Michael Cote. ( Submission deadline is on July 9 for the International contest of newCloudApp() opens tomorrow.)

Twtri is a very simple why to keep our friends and family updated on twitter, facebook or email automatically with your flight status,  such as when your plane depart, arrived or if there is any delays in the flight. The web app is useful because it saves you the time and the effort of sending SMSs, Tweets or emails, especially if Internet and phone services were not available at the plane.

I asked Laith to give me an example of what type of info Twtri will update the user’s status with, he said:

“Before the flight depart it will show a message on your twitter like this “DL73 scheduled to depart John F. Kennedy International Airport @ 7:05 PM”

After it depart it will show:

“DL73 en route & scheduled to land on SFO International Airport @ 10:58 PM(earliar 5 Minutes)”

if the flight is delayed in the air, it will show:

“DL73 en route & scheduled to land on SFO International Airport @ 11:18 PM(delayed 15 Minutes)”

after it land it will show:

“DL73 Landed in SFO International Airport @ 11:20 PM(delayed 17 Minutes)”

So the process is keeping the status of the flight updated.

( DL73: flight number, 11:01is the airport time.)

He also said that it also updates if there is multi-leg flight (when ever your flight connects with another flight.)

As for the future plans for Twtri, he said he has plans to integrate it with other services as he sees needed. And plans to develop APIs so developers can provide the features of Twtri on their own services or websites. (Twtri currently gets its flight info from flightstats.com)

According to Laith, the monetization model will be: sponsorship on the website and the renting the service to clients who can have Twtri services as part of their offerings. However he said that it will be always free for users.

Kevin Rohling’s IMPULSELIVE a mobile GPS based exercises tracking and sharing service also shared the grand prize  of  newCloudApp  with Twtir. Azure is a .NET cloud platform where applications are hosted and run at Microsoft datacenters. Azure competes with Google App Engine, Heroku and RackspaceCloud.

(Note: I am not flying to Indonesia.)

Folowen the Jordanian startup which was previously reviewed by ArabCrunch here, has just gone out of private beta, which means people can start using folowen without an invitation code. Folowen is a search tool that uses Google AJAX Search API to help you find profiles of people and organizations in different social media sites (currently 20.)

The new features Folowen has added are:

- Search is now open to the public without sign up.

-Their promised “Direct Follow” feature has arrived, where you can follow or add the person/organization you searched for directly from the search results page to your social media service. This feature is currently available for four services: Twitter, YouTube, FriendFeed and Facebook. Though you have to sign up to follow in and authorize folowen to access these services, under the settings tab.

-Now your search results will list up to 4 links for each service for you to browse through.

Folowen is still working in adding more features such as social alerts and a browser plug-in.

A study run by online business networking service MeettheBoss shows that Middle East executives are spending an extra 11 hours a month online sharing their professional experiences and learning from their peers. MeettheBoss surveyed 6,000 of its 27,000 Middle East members to understand more about what effect Web 2.0 has had on the region’s business world. The survey asked its executive users what direct value they gained from spending time running blogs, writing tweets and connecting with other executives on sites such as LinkedIn (the company that currently blocks users from Sudan,) Xing, MeettheBoss, Ryze, Facebook and Twitter.

The answers revealed that executives proficient with online activities are spending an average of 11 hours more per month online than this time last year – and over 90% of respondents said they felt their time online was ‘very valuable’ to their daily role. Professionals are rushing to the Web for immediate answers to their most pressing questions. “Online business networking is growing at a fast rate in our region,” says MTB member Abdul Rashid, Project Director at Gulf One Bank. “Sites like MeettheBoss and LinkedIn are a great help as they can gather all the information I need on a daily basis. I can create and join discussions to establish new contacts with like-minded professionals.”

Finding answers for your business is one thing, but most Middle East executives have spotted more ‘individual’ advantages to this new phenomenon. Reports show that a higher percentage of Middle East participants are using online networking sites more than any other region. They are being used as a tool for the Middle East to communicate with the rest of the world, in order to create more business, build their brand and ultimately grow.

“Everyone knows that building contacts in the industry can strengthen your career prospects, but sharing your knowledge with the world is a very effective personal branding exercise,” says Adam Burns, Editor-in-Chief of online business channel, MeettheBoss.TV. Many thought leaders agree with him. Michael Noble, VP for Exploration at Jura Energy, Ibraheem Assaadan, VP for Exploration at Saudi Aramco, Manfred Fitzgerald, Director of Brand & Design at Lamborghini, and Vinton Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google have all shared their expertise on the site.

Though most experts agree there is no substitute for face-to-face networking, using social media tools correctly can bring substantial return on your time investment. You can become a thought leader in your niche environment overnight and even pull business to your door. 

Note: This report was published by MeettheBoss a website that competes with Linkedin, the lesson learned here for startups, is that you can manage to get International coverage if you release reports and research about your industry in general.   

#Photo by Ed Mitchell.

Topping all other the category websites in the of  Social Networking Category, fameego.com was awarded the Gold Award at the fifth annual Pan Arab Web Awards. The regional award ceremony was recently held at the Burj Arab – Dubai, UAE. The ceremony was attended by key players in the Middle East web design and development arenas.

Receiving the award on behalf of fameego.com team were Tareq Kayyali, the site’s founder and co-owner along with a representative from the co-owners and development company perennialsys.com – Nilesh Bafna.

Accorrding to Fameego, its mission is “to provide users with a tangible set of tools that will allow them to easily CONNECT, SHARE and RELATE through the Internet in an innovative and powerful way. This “Connect, Share, & Relate” methodology, is the core business principle driving FAMEEGO’ uniqueness.”

Fameego.com is considered the first English-arabic social networksing website that is built entirely with  Adobe Flex technology that allows more control over the flexibility of the product and also giving the user a unique user experience, But the downside is that you do not get an instant access as you have to wait until the flash based website to load.

The complete list of Awards 2009 winners is here.

Update 1&2 at the end of the post.

After Linkedin the business social Network, blocked Internet users in Syria and then unblocked them and apologized (as ArabCrunch has reported.) It was confirmed to us that Internet users in Sudan (an African Arab country) still cannot access Linkedin, who were blocked by Linkedin since several months ago.

Kay Luo Linkedin, Sr. Director of Corporate Communications told me that also the Linkedin Outlook add-on will stay blocked.

“ Regarding the download, we (are) complying with the US law, so it is blocked in Syria.  For the same reason, Sudan is blocked from accessing our site.”

You can find more information about the US sanctions enforcement aginst Sudan here.

I am not a legal expert but by looking at the law, it says nothing about blocking website access? Some US based Linkedin competitors like ecademy and Plaxo are still accessible in Sudan and the vast majority of US based websites. So the question is: why Linkedin only blocks access to Sudan?

I have emailed Lou the following questions:

So in this regard how did you make the block decisions and who does it inside Linkedin? A Linkedin lawyer told you so? Or it was wired by a US government official to Linkedin?

One might wonder whether Linkedin is making a political statement against the people of Sudan (majority are African Muslims) or the US law is not understood or is confusing. Since they have unblocked Syria and not Sudan?! Let’s wait and see what Linkedin will say. On the other hand I have contacted few US based lawyers to explain if the sanctions include websites and software downloads and I will update you soon.

Ashraf Mansoor serial young entrepreneur and founder of the first job site for women in the Middle East Twffaha, told ArabCrunch:

As an entrepreneur in Sudan I find this appalling and disappointing, while these same companies claim that they pursue open standards to make the web a more open place, they ban specific countries, this is a total hypocrisy. What’s next? we will not be allowed to edit our own Wikipedia pages? In an era where we call for different people to sit down and engage in fruitful conversations, we should allow these people to use the tools and platforms available like everyone else. I’m worried that other companies will follow suit and eventually Sudan and others will be web outcasts.

According to him GoDaddy hosted websites and any Google Downloaded product (Gtalk, Google Gears ..etc), are blocked and cannot be accessed from Sudan.

In the her call to me Luo suggested to me to write a guest post for Linkedin Blog, however I think they might change their mind, since I am actively reporting this  

Update: just to clarify, the US sanctions against Sudan is different than the one against Syria, as it is tougher, and it forbids the transfer of US Technology to Sudan excluding some items such as medical devices. So we are not really sure that blocking website access is a must in the law, and whether it is a miss understanding of the law by Linkedin or have been miss communicated to them or not, we will wait for a legal opinion regarding this law.

Update 2:

Google spokesperson told ArabCrunch:

“Per US export law, we cannot allow downloads to embargoed countries (Cuba, iran, north korea, Syria, sudan); this would include google download server and code.google.com. We do not block access to publicly available sites where there are no dowloads.”

We are still looking for a legal saying from a Legal expert regarding this matter, and we will update you accordingly.

Last month I reported on ArabCrunch that facebook launched Arabic beta, but as of today yeserday its officially launched along with Hebrew according to Ghassan Haddad, ‎Director of Internationalization‎ at facebook.

As with all other Facebook international languages translation, facebook Arabic and Hebrew was translated by the community of volunteers, with around 2.130 Arab translators while in Hebrew it is 2,103 , Arab translators submitted 29.294 Translations, while the Hebrew translators submitted 34,666 translations.

Both Arabic and Hebrew are Semitic languages and both are different than English thus have some challenges when used on the Web. Both languages begins in writing at the right-hand side of the page and ends on the left, so Facebook managed this challenge by making the design and the layout of the interface for both languages accommodate both languages’ special features.

Another challenge that facebook managed to tackle is that in Arabic and Hebrew, two words with the same meaning are used differently based on whether a person is male or female so they developed a feature they called “dynamic explosion”, which detects a person’s gender and selects the matching translation according to Haddad.

Arabic is the official language of more than 20 different countries including Palestine, Iraq, Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, but each country has a different dialect, in which not every person from a certain Arabic dialect understand all others, and many times a certain word means something else in another Arabic dialect. So facebook used the official Arabic called Al Fusha ( الفصحى) – the Arabic dialect of Quran – which is the standard language used in media, publishing and other formal and religious circles.

Testing the Arabic interface of facebook, revels that facebook and the community have done a great job, the translation is accurate and I would say better than the translation I see in many Google products! However there are more Phrases that needs to be translated to Arabic such as “Email Friend Finder” , according to facebook Translations app there are still 9.420 untranslated phrases to Arabic while for Hebrew the number is 586 (Hebrew speakers are around 5 million!)

This launch is a mile stone for Facebook and Arab Internet users especially in countries where Arabic is the only language people know such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, (Arabs are around 400 million people, and only around 35 million are internet users.)

Facebook has regional competitors such as Maktoob’s As7ab and Jeeran, ArabFriendz and Kalam.

But to my perception and from the perception of the people I know Facebook by far is the most popular social network in the Arab world, even before launching the Arabic version, and it seems facebook is doing ok in monetizing its Arabic user base, I always see ads on facebook using its DIY advertising application, in Jordan where I am based, the same case happened while logged in to facebook in my last visits to Egypt and Lebanon in the last 2 months.

Facebook is now available in 40 languages with over 60 more in development, but according to Haddad facebook “goal is to make Facebook available in every language across the world.”

Conclusion:

OF all the other Arab social Networks, I find As7ab the most advanced, it has the nicest and easiest to use interface among its rivals ( excluding facebook), and shares many features of both facebook and MySpace such as profile customization using HTML, Networks, Groups, Events, Photo and Video sharing, Blogs, Gifts, and Celebrities (like facebook Fan page).

Maktoob which is the largest Arab home grown portal with around 14 million visitors per month and other Arabic social networks are challenged by Facebook move specially in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but as Ala’a A. Ibrahim a Zend Certified Enginer commented “believe me a lot of the users who are using Jeeran or As7ab or … etc, already have facebook accounts, but they think of it as another place to get dates.”

Though Maktoob is stronger in other features as a full regional Arabic portal like Yahoo, I think they need to integrate all their sub sites and features with As7ab and release an API for third party developers, in order to make As7ab more of a Social network for Arabs rather than one of those sites I have account at or dating website. Until this happen I see Facebook will remain the Social Network of Choice for Arabs.

UPDATE:  3 Q&A with STEVEN VAILE, CEO of H2O New Media, bellow.

UPDATE 2: full interview here.

H2O New Media , the technology company focused on white label Social Media applications in Dubai, UAE has confirmed its first round of funding from Equinox International. An undisclosed yet “significant investment” has been sanctioned for H2O New Media, who is looking at the investment as an opportunity for growth and expansion of its operation within the MENA and APAC regions.

The company’s social media platform enables companies (events, Real-estate, education, etc ) to have social networking and social media websites, where members can socialize, upload and share photos and videos among other things.

In USA there are tons of white-label social networking and social media vendors, a crowded market. But in The Arab world, H2O New Media is one of few (if there is others let me know), where to me I think that they have the opportunity in this region since US competitors do not have presence here.

Established in 2007, the company was founded by Steve Vaile – Founder & CEO,  and operates in line with Islamic ideals of Shariah compliance. 

H2O New Media is also evolved with social media consulting and online marketing, they recently launched “Tiger Fish” an online advertising network in the Middle East with a reach to over 300,000 locally based consumers on both English and Arabic content platforms, a small amount of reach compared to other online advertising networks in the region.

 August 2007 H2O New Media received some initial seed capital of 150,000 USD from the Ascala Group to help develop its social media applications. H2O New Media plans to further advance into key markets across MENA , H2O New Media’s immediate plans are the opening of new offices in Oman and in the to implement an APAC office based in the Philippines.

The operation in Muscat, Oman is the first of several regional MENA (Middle East & North Africa) offices that are scheduled to support the growing customer base as the company moves forwards. H2O New Media has a number of applications that have been developed over the past two years which are set to roll out into the market in the next few months. With a new regional office opening in the Philippines and planned regional offices for other APAC & MENA markets over the next 12 months, H2O New Media intends to expand its footprint and subscriber based of niche social media applications in the global emerging markets. 

 The company is also planning to Arabaiz its platforms,  and to close partnership deals with Mobile operators in the region .( partnerships in mobile advertising or Content distribution for its white label social media platforms? An email will be sent to the company, and their answer will be updated here inshallah.)

UPDATE: Here is 3 Q&A with STEVEN VAILE Chief Executive Officer of H2O New Media:

UPDATE 2: full interview here.

eSpace was founded in the year 2000 at the hands of eight fresh graduates from the Computer Science Department, Alexandria University, Egypt. They started the company with a mere investment of 200$, using initially a shared apartment. During its 9 years, eSpace has undergone a series of changes and today it is seen as a leader in Open Source software development, with several significant contributions.

During my last visit to Egypt, eSpace’s team invited me to visit their office. While visiting, I was impressed by the tech and the geeky work they had accomplished. (Disclosure: eSpace paid for my travel expenses from Cairo to Alexandria, and for my accommodation expenses.)

Open Source Contribution:

Ruby On Rails:

eSpace has developed “NeverBlock, a Ruby library that allows developers to write non-blocking, concurrent code in a transparent manner - meaning that you will keep coding in your traditional ways while, at the same time, benefiting from non-blocking IO operations. “This helps in developing scalable web apps, using fewer resources on the server” explains Hamdy A. Khalil, Products Manager at eSpace. NeverBlock was released in Q3 2008, and caught the attention of the ROR community (for example see: RubyInside igtiva and infoQ).

eSpace’s team added MySQL Database driver for NeverBlock, thus the second database driver for NeverBlockafter the PostgreSQL driver. “The only way to achieve concurrency in Rails 2.2 and Ruby 1.8 in MySQL is to use eSpace MySQL driver, so now we can do more than one connection to the data base.” added Hamdy. This achievement was also greeted by cheers from the Ruby community.

“Version Cache” is another achievement by eSpace; it is A Ruby on Rails (v2.1.0) plugin that provides additional caching features. It solves the problem of having to expire your cached stuff via the provided Rails methods and, instead, it relies on versions.

“Method Cache” is an additional eSpace contribution to ROR. It is a Rails (v2.1.0) plugin that tries to solve the problem of having to call a method repetitively.

Those achievements were rewarded by the Ruby community with an invitation for eSpace to speak during the 2008 RubyConf, which took place in Orlando, Florida, USA.

I do not know of any other ROR contributor in the Arab world, but eSpace sets the road map for Arab evelopers and software houses to follow the path and make open source software a strategy to accomplish their visoions.

iPhone:

As iPhone currently does not support Arabic, eSpace has done some work in Arabizing the iPhone with some libraries as an open source initiative. The other solution to using Arabic in iPhone is using iPhone Google Maps Component was also developed by eSpace as an Open Source component that you can add to your iPhone application to access all the basic features of Google Maps (similar to Android’s MapView); see it in action here.

Why Open Source?

Samer El Sahn, CEO of eSpace, says “first, (we) are trying to provide part of the equation, not just as technology users, but as a technology maker. The second aim is to prove our technical competence to the world. Thirdly, we want to promote an open source culture which helps the community grow, in which we will benefit and grow. Regretfully, we do not see any Arabic contribution.”

The company started as an outsourcing house from 2000 to 2002, using C, Java, Visual studio to develop apps for the Web, the Desktop and for Windows Mobile.

In 2002, the company started developing its own products; they developed PharmaSpace, an Arabic application for pharmacists. Later in 2003, they developed SalesBuzz, a mobile Sales Force Automation (SFA) targeting FMGs. Among the customer were Nestle, Cadbury, P&G. Between 2005 to 2006, eSpace sold SalesBuzz to Bitechonlogies and focused again on outsourcing. When Web 2.0 started to kick off, they used Java and J2EE, selling to American clients through a technology consulting firm in USA which brought sales to them.

Concerning the period from 2007 to 2008, El Sahn says “we started to explore different grounds; we had some cash from our outsourcing business, and (we) started realizing the vision of eSpace. We started testing the web and mobile market with 2 projects: weNear – a Mobile Location based Framework- and meOwns- a social sharing tool to what you own.”

Why ROR?

The company started using ROR along with Java in 2006; SalesBuzz admin was in ROR. In 2008, eSpace totally shifted to ROR. But why ROR?

ElSahn  El Sahn says “1- It is easy to develop apps using it. 2- (Less) design and development time is needed; something that takes 6 month (using other languages), takes 2-1 month on Ruby. 3- High adoption rate. 4- ROR is more powerful than PHP for the Web and is richer.”

A Technology Company:

ElSahan El Sahn says “we brand our self as a technology company; we consider the past 8 years (as having been a period to) build our technological experience. We aim to help others realize their ideas- mainly startups or anyone with ideas but without technical capabilities.”

Some of the company’s  recent customers include Microsoft, Google (doing gadgets for their iGoogle,) AlSaha and Yamli.

The company has developed technologies in Data mining and Matchmaking; ElSahan El Sahn says “we are taking social networks to the next level”. These technologies can be used in meOwns, for example: at the first level it can be used in recommending things and people as friends based on interest. At the second level, it can be used to detect what people own what things and what items are similar, ex: iPhone, Apple and iTunes. The matching system detects relationship between dispersed pieces of information.

Economic Crisis:

ElSahan El Sahn says “we are not affected by the current economic crisis; the reason (is that our rates are lower than other technology firms with the same level of technological experience in the Western Hemisphere.”

He added, “so we are benefiting from the current economic conditions because we are more cost effective.”

Fadi Francis Dababneh the founder and CEO SouqElArab.com ( a social shopping e-commerce website) was a smart and motivated entrepreneur. I met him once before I started ArabCrunch and told him about my plans for it, we discussed different plans to take SouqElArab to the next level, but he told me he lacked funding to do that.

I have suggested few ideas to him, in order to drive SouqElArab growth and sales such as creating a smart widget for books and items that SouqElArab sells, so web site owners and bloggers can embedded it in to their blogs or websites, the widget would suggested contextual books and items related to each post, and SouqElArab would share revenues with the blogs and websites that are part of this widget network.

ArabCrunch has been following SouqElArab and published few of its stories. We will continue to follow SouqElArab and we ask the people who mange it now, to keep sending us their news and updates.

Fadi has been very passionate about his startups, he was treating it as his baby and he even stopped his day job as an academic lecturer at the German-Jordanian University to focus on SouqElArab. I used to chat with him over the Internet every once and while and get to know his news and what is happening with SouqEl Arab.

Fadi like any Arab entrepreneur had a hard time getting VC funding, he asked me once to publish a guest post about his experience with a Jordanian VC, a very negative post, but he backed off at the last minute.

Fadi had an MBA in e-commerce from UK, while there, he founded a user generated magazine. In Jordan he was Project Manager of AdabWaFan.com and Business Development Manager and founder of Fast company a printing company.

As I am writing this post few tears dropped from my eyes, I feel so touched since I know Fadi and he is like us very much involved in the Arab entrepreneurs’ community. This makes me think how death can be close to anyone of us, what remains when we die is our deeds and work in this life which Allah SWT will judge.

We will miss you Fadi, my deepest condolences to his wife family and everyone. He is a deep lose to us here too, in the Arab starup community.

Fadi favorit qoute on Facebook was :

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” Cyril Connolly.

Good bye Fadi .

The Social Networking World Forum will showcase leading global brands analysing how to successfully implement a social media marketing and PR strategy.

 Brands such as GM, Coca-Cola, Cadburys and P&G have been invited to discuss incorporating social media into existing and traditional marketing plans, analysing new methods of measuring and monitoring and examining to how to control and respond to social media.

BMW Groups Innovation Manager, Tony Douglas, who is participating in the conference, summarises the importance of social media insisting “companies must look to find the right balance of traditional marketing and emerging media.” BMW’s case study highlight this point. They incorporated a mix of value-add rich media and social networking with such examples as www.bmw-web.tv/ and the BMW Concept X1 pre communications.

Brands participating in the conference include:

Michael Donnelly, Director, Worldwide Interactive Marketing, The Coca-Cola Company

Emma Jenkins, Head of Interactive Marketing, Procter & Gamble UK

Natalie Johnson, Manager Social Media Communications, General Motors

Frances Dovey, Interactive & Emerging Media Manager, Cadburys

Chris Davies, Digital Marketing Manager, British Airways

Jonny Freeman, Digital Marketing Manager, Honda

Ben Rotheray, UK Digital Marketing Manager, Land Rover

The event will take place on the 9th and 10th March 09 at Olympia Conference Centre, London.

Other companies speaking at the show include: Myspace, Bebo, Google, Yahoo, Habbo Hotel, Endemol, Friends Reunited, Orange, O2, Netlog, Friendster, LinkedIN, Vodacom, Reunion.com and many more.

A co-located two day conference on mobile social networking  is also taking place at the show, which in addition will feature a free-to-attend combined exhibition and networking area. It is expected that attendance to the event will exceed 1000 people.

There is an early booking discount for the conference which ends on the 31st January, delegates can register online at www.socialnetworking-forum.com by fax or via our telephone booking hotline +44 (0) 117 321 8301.