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

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

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

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

Launched at GITEX 2007, Onkosh.com was one of the few Arabic search engines that poped out from the region. The project is part of Orascom Telecom subsidiary. A telecom, mobile, ISP, web hosting and online media and emarketing giant in the Arab world. Where they have a number of online properties including LinkOnLine which operates MSN Arabia in partnership with Microsoft.

Onkush provided search capabilities in Arabic for websites, photos, forums, files and blogs as well as news. The Arabic search engine was one of the first to invent transliteration of Arabic Language, that allows users to search in Arabic by writing Arabic words using Latin Alphabet without having to install Arabic support on your PC. In this front Onkush competes with Yamli, Google Ta3reeb and Micosoft Marin along others.
In Arabic search it competes with Google, Yahoo Arabic Search, Araby and Ayna.
Today we were tipped that Onkush announced on its website that it is closed now

“Goodbye, Thanks for all the support over the past few years…..”

We do not know when Onkush.com was shutdonw, but in Nov. 2008 we wondered why Onkush is not part of MSN Arabia search? The site however was using Microsoft bing, which might be part of LinkOnLine deal with Microsoft.

This might be the reason behind shutting down Onkush as there is a conflict of Interest between Onkush and bing.
I will contact LinkOnLine and update you with their reasons behind this closure.

GoodBye Onkush.
#Thanks Ammar Mardawi for the tip.

Yamli the Boston based startup launched about 2 years ago with a transliteration tool, has extended its offerings recently with its new Dynamic Translator Project, which allows users to translate from Arabic, English, french, German, Spanish and visa versa.

The app which works in realtime is run via Google translate API.

According to Habib Hadadd cofounder of Yamli, the app is smart enough to save users edited translation and learn overt time  to improve the quality of translation ( You can look at older AC coverage of Yamli here.)

Transliteration is typing for example Arabic or Greek using the English keyboard , the user types in English “as you hear it” and the transliteration tool will convert the words into its native script.

Since Google launched Ta3reeb its online Transliteration for Arabic, which changes Latin letter into Arabic, it has been working in improving it ,as it has become more accurate and better in editing transliterated words. Google also launched an API for Ta3reeb and started integrating it with its online properties starting from Gmail, Blogger, Knol and its ejabat.google.com.

Google  first  transliteration tool was for the Indic language but later then launched its Arabic tool, after other several attempts to solve this problem most known example is Yamli, which when debuted Arabic transliteration it was the most accurate. However, to use Yamli, you need an internet connection. the other players in the Arabic Transliteration solutions include:eiktub, Arabic keyboard (ArabCrunch. NET profile) and Onkush.

The IT giant Microsoft went ahead and launched Maren its Native Windows Arabic Transliteration in July 2009, which does not need any Internet connection to complete the Transliteration job, meaning faster than Yamli or any other web based transliteration solution.

Google on its side, launched few days ago quietly Google Input Method (Google IME) which is its desktop version of its international web transliteration products, but does not need internet connection to convert the words. Google IME. is available for download from here (Requires Windows 7/Vista/XP (32-bit) which caused me to waste several hours yesterday in testing) and supports the following languages: Arabic, Bengali, Farsi (Persian), Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

When installed and enabled, Google IME operates as a small bar that by default will be placed at the bottom right corner of your desktop which can also be moved around. It can be used for more configuration and controlling various features of our IME. It has four icons with leftmost being the application icon. Next to it are IME language indicator button, keyboard button and menu button in that order.

Besides offline support, Google IME offers a number of useful features:Remembering user’s correction, Single click on a word to go to google search, visual Keyboard, and the ability to Switch to English at anytime ( for full features list go here.)

All these transliteration solutions are nice when Arabic or other native language keyboards are not present, but represent a danger to the existence of Arabic language and the other 13 languages, imagine a nation that can not use its own script to write, can we call it a nation!

Microsoft today launched Maren a native windows transliteration that works in all most all windows application without a need for an internet connection.

As we have mentioned in past blog posts, Arabizi which is writing Arabic in Latin characters is popular especially among the young generation in the Arab world, let alone Arabs who reside in the west and do not have any Arabic keyboard. There has been some online application that deals with this problem. But Yamli was the pioneer in making it a business, it has an online editor, API, innovative search that is built on top of the concept and a Firefox toolbar which now is updated to version 1.0. Google followed yamli’s steps and came up with Ta3reeb an online Arabic Transliteration editor and now with an API . Onkoosh on the other hand provides it via its search engine only.

Maren supports the following platform Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista and it supports the following applications: Internet Explorer 7.0 Internet Explorer 7.0, Microsoft Outlook 2007, Microsoft Word 2007, Windows Live Messenger 8.5, Windows Live Messenger 9.0, Yahoo messenger 9.0, Google talk, Firefox 3.0, according to Maren help file.

However under testing I found out that it supports many more: Notepad, Chrome, FF3.5 and TweetDeck. I also found out it is very accurate and much better than Google’s Ta3reeb in terms of accuracy and because you can edit your translated entry easily.

Yamli on the other hand, has recently revealed that 76,645,541 words have been typed with Yamli , many websites and applications has been utilizing Yamli’s API to spread Arabic transliteration elsewhere such as As7ab and Clipat Maktoob, Ikbis,  Yamli messenger 1.0 that works with msn messenger plus live, Yamli wordpress plugin (WP Yamli) and Easy Arabic: a desktop application that transliterate Arabic text and sends them to a collection of applications.

Though the debut of Maren is a serious challenge to Yamli, because if you have it installed, you do not need to use any transliteration software or plugins, to type on msn or the web, since it is already there on the desktop. Habib Haddad, cofounder of Yamli commented on Maren launch by saying:

“It’s a good effort from Microsoft, and I guess they know how to recognize a good idea when they see it. As an Arabic startup we are flattered to see this happen but do remained focused on innovating to better serve our users. We want to thank all who support us in our path and ask them to stay tuned for some cool new releases.”

Marin was developed by Cairo Microsoft Innovation Lab (CMIC), which I visited early this year and met with its team. I emailed Ahmed El-Shimi, Group Manager – Development & Incubations of (CMIC) and asked him whether Marin will be incorporated into Bing and preinstalled with every Windows machine in the future, I’ll keep you updated when he replies.

Arab Techies a gathering umbrella for Arab techies which I am one of its members, has just announced the release of the first outcomes of a four days Arabization Codesprint, which was attended by 15 participants from 8 countries in the Arab World and was held in Swiss Club in Cairo,  Egypt between 20  and 23 May 2009. (Read ArabCrunch coverage of the first ArabTechies gathering here. )

The released outcomes are 10 open source projects including libraries to improve search normalization and indexing of arabic text for PHP, Python and Ruby, Modules and Plugins for Drupal and WordPress that enhance the user experience of arab speaking users. And a Arabic stemmer and Verb conjugator.

These 10 open source projects are:

Qutrub

Arabic verbs conjugator. Download.

Qutrub (web)

A web interface for Qutrub the Arabic verbs conjugator. (Check the conjugator live)

ArPHP integration with WordPress

A plugin for WordPress to integrate with Ar-PHP library. Download.

ArPHP integration with Drupal

Modules for Drupal to integrate with Ar-PHP library. Download.

Yamli for your browser

Integrating Yamli service with your browser. Download.

Arabic normalization Ruby

Preparing Arabic text for indexing using Ruby. Download.

Arabic normalization PHP

Preparing Arabic text for indexing using PHP. Download.

Arabic normalization Python

Preparing Arabic text for indexing using Python. Download.

Ar-Morph Ruby

Stemming Arabic words using Ruby. Download.

Ar-Morph Python

Stemming Arabic words using Python. Download.

“some of the missing pieces in improving and encouraging Arabic content on the web and a providing a better computing experience for Arabic speaking users are not solved by code.” Said Manal Hassan member of Arab techies in a post at the Arabtechies website, she added  “Well classified open access Arabic language corpora and linguistic data is sorely missing, a point that was strongly emphasized in the 1st Arab Techies gathering.”

Arab Techies has also released a classified Arabic Stop-Words list, Manal added” Apart from code and linguistic data some problems are better solved by documenting best practices, we proudly present the first draft of the (RTL design best practices and examples) document.”

These projects are hosted on Arab Techies Projects Space and ArabCrunch thanks everyone who helped in in coding these projects and we encourage you to post feedback on each projects’ discussion pages, whether it’s a bug report or a suggestion.

Habib Haddad the cofounder of Yamli, the Arabic transliteration utility and search engine,  delivered an interesting lecture titled” Idea to Reality” on May 18th at Princess Sumaya University in Amman, Jordan, as part of The Entrepreneurs Week which was organized by Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship (QRCE) from the 16th  tell the 21st of may 2009.

Habib presented an interesting lecture in how to turn your startup into a real thing, he used his experiences in starting Yamli and growing it as an example that Arab startups (and non Arabs) can take lessons from.

I announced originally on my twitter that I ‘ll do a live streaming of the lecture on ArabCrunch Channel on Qik, however the WIFI connection did not work at the event location at the time of the lecture, even though I tested it a day before. Nevertheless the lecture videos were synchronized  latter to ArabCrunch Qik Channel. Only about 10 minutes of the begging of lecture were missing.

Here are the videos I shot using my Nokia 5800 mobile (I think Nokia should thank me for over publicizing Nokia 5800 on  ArabCrunch )

 Yamli which started as an Arabic transliteration service that changes Latin characters into Arabic text, and later went into opening its API to any developer and then launched an innovative search engine, it has just launched a FireFox toolbar in beta ( All ArabCrunch past coverage related to Yamli can be found here .)

The Firefox toolbar is part of Yamli’s attempt to be everywhere, “we want to give users the power of Yamli everywhere they go on the web” said Habib Haddad the cofounder of Yamli.

Now when using the toolbar users can use Yamli’s Transliteration technology anywhere including sending emails using gmail , hotmail, yahoo mail. I also tested it with TwiterGadget and it worked.

The toolbar also enables users to post their updates using Yamli’s transliteration technology (which can be turned off and on)  on twitter and facebook. It also offers the search options offered on Yamli.com which includes: web search, images search, youtube search, wikipedia and news search , the toolbar also comes with a link to Yamli’s web editor .

By large it seems users have welcomed this move by Yamli over Twitter for example:

Stephanie TS aka MissGoogle from UAE said:

“The #Yamli toolbar made me discover Arabic all over again! Loving it. I think there should be a Yamli for every language in the world.”

And Ahmed Naguib from Egypt, seemed also interested in the toolbar: 

“@paradisetossed I love using local stuff to support Tech in the Middle East and that extension is the Yamli toolbar http://twitpic.com/5zxk2“ 

Here are some screen shots of Yamli on Yahoo

Gmail 

And TwitterGaddget:

Habib said that they are looking for users’ feedback and they are planning to add more features that caters to the interest of the Arabic user.

Yamli competes with a number of startups in the Arabic search and Arabic transliteration arenas:

in the Transliteration field they compete with Ta3reeb from Google and onkosh. However Yamli was faster in gaining market adoption with being 1st to release API’s for its transliteration service, in partnering with third party Arabic websites such as Maktoob’s As7ab and Ikbis, and Habib was key in creating a PR buzz around his baby. Nevertheless, I just noticed that Google’s Ta3reeb has released an API here, but I do not know when they released it and if anyone is using it. 

In the search arena Yamli competes with many search engins Google ( which Yamli uses for it text search), Araby.com from Maktoob, Ayna and onkosh.

The Entrepreneurs Week, is one of the most interesting events Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship (QRCE) is organizing this year. And ArabCrunch is proud to be a media partner for this event.

The event will last for a week starting at the 16th  of this month and ending at the 21 st of this month, where every day will have one speaker at a time. The event is open to the public for free and will take place at Princess Sumaya University Amman, Jordan.

The event will feature interesting and outstanding International speakers such as the Arab innovator Habib Haddad Co-Founder, Yamli.com and Joi Ito a Japanese entrepreneur and venture capitalist who invested in many web 2.0 icons, such as Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, Six Apart and Technorati. The event will tackle important topics for entrepreneurs such as “how to make your idea a reality”,  and “the current world financial market situation,” which has a great impact on any new startup.

During the event interactive discussions are excepted to tack place between the public and the speakers, thus provide a richer knowledge sharing platform.

Here is the list of all events’ topics:

• BlueOcean Strategy: How to transform a new business idea into a winning strategy. Speaker: Mohammad Ajlouni (Managing Director, MDS)

• Identifying your Strengths as an Entrepreneur. Speaker: Ronald Evans (CEO, SIMA International)

• Idea to Reality. Speaker: Habib Haddad (Co-Founder, Yamli.com)

• Innovation in Open Networks – Perspectives from an Internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist. Speaker: Joi Ito (CEO, Creative Commons)

• Cross-cultural business issues as companies expand internationally. Speaker: Doug Christgau (Director, Cross-Cultural Development)  

• The current U.S. and world financial market situation. Speaker: Larry Hutchins (Certified Financial Planner, Wachovia)

• Insights into family-owned companies in regards to economic and human resource issues. Speaker: John Carmon (President, Carmon Community Funeral Homes)

For registration and further information, Please call +962 6 515 4892 or visit the events page here 

Funded by ex-googlers, yamli.com is first to introduce

expanded search engine technology

Yamli.com, a startup targeting the Arabic Web, unveiled its new search engine that allows users to easily search Arabic content in all its forms.  Transliterated Arabic content is ubiquitous among many Arab Internet users due to a large portion of Arabic Internet users choosing to write Arabic phonetically using Latin characters in an ad-hoc and informal fashion.  Yamli automatically expands Arabic keyword searches to include all of their transliterated variations and returns results for both Arabic and transliterated content. This feature is a breakthrough for Arabic Internet users who get frustrated with having to repeatedly search different variations of their query when searching for music, news or videos.

According to co-founder Habib Haddad, “The challenge with Arabic content is that it’s hard to reach all of it.  For example, a simple search for ‘Umm Khulthum’, the famous Egyptian signer, has over 90 transliterated variations – Om Kaltoum, Oum Kalsoum, etc….  Yamli will take an Arabic search term and expand it to include all transliterated variations, returning the maximum number of relevant search results, regardless of whether Arabic or Latin characters were used to write the content.  Prior to Yamli, that kind of search was not possible,” concluded Haddad.

I did a similar search on Al-mutanabi the famous old Arabic poet  and I got results ranging from al-mutanabbiel, el-mutanabbia, to al-motanabbi, though the search comes short on narrowing the results according to the words’ spelling, which is a tip to our friends at Yamli to add in the future.

Yamli Search comes with a rich and easy-to-use interface that has been optimized for slower connections according to Yamli. Under the hood, it uses APIs from search engines such as Google for text, Microsoft Live Search for images and YouTube for video. Yamli Search also includes Yamli’s award-winning Smart Arabic keyboard that allows users to type Arabic without an Arabic keyboard.

According to one of the early ex-Googlers Georges Harik, “The web is universal, and speakers of every language should get equal access to information. Yamli continues to do a great job of extending access to information to all Arabic speakers,” concluded Georges Harik who is also an investor in Yamli.

Yamli’s new search engine was first announced at Harvard Business School’s MENA Conference on Saturday, December 4^th during a panel discussion on Entrepreneurship in the MENA region in which co-founder Habib Haddad participated.

This launch puts Yamli in direct competition with Araby, Ayna, Google, Live, and Yahoo.

Araby has launched a number of search featuers such as suggested and thematic search which adds value to the Arab Internet user  and is an attempt to differentiate itself with the number one search king Google, but Yamli’s approach to transliterated Arabic search makes them more unique and adds better value. Now Yamli is better positioned to fight back at Google, when Google chose to compete with Yamli with the launch of Ta3reeb , but will Google Copy cat Yamli and launch a similar service? Time will tell but Google has to fix its Ta3reeb’s transliteration quality first.

Here is a Video that shows how Yamli now works.

Last week, search engine Onkosh distributed prizes to the winners of the Soduko competition held during Ramadan on www.onkosh.com.

Sudoko Winners:
Soduko relies on logical mathematical analysis and has recently gained popularity amongst young and old. Ten thousand three hundred and fifty-one players (10,351) from 90 countries, 20 of which were Arab countries, took part in the competition with first place going to Bassem Ibrahim who won a Nintendo Wii game console. The second prize went to Taha Alaa who won a Sony Cybershot digital camera while Rana Mustapha came in third place winning an LCD monitor.

Participants in the competition had to solve 81,924 soduko puzzles at the rate of 26 puzzles per participant. The puzzles were divided into three levels of complexity to accommodate all players.  The first level attracted many participants solving 54,901 soduko puzzles while players in the second level solved 14,196 puzzles and players in the third and most advanced level solved 12,827 puzzles. Winners received their prizes at the company’s headquarters in the presence of the technical team responsible for the development of Onkosh.com.

Onkush Competition:

Launched at GITEX 2007, Onkosh.com provides a host of search capabilities to Arab users who can search for sites, photos, forums, files and blogs as well as news services available on the website. In its Arabic search product, Onkush competes with Araby from Maktoob, Ayna.com Google, Yahoo and (MSN) Live.com.

Onkosh.com also was one of the first to invent transliteration of Arabic Language, that allows users to search in Arabic by writing Arabic words using Latin Alphabet without having to install Arabic support on the device. In this front Onkush competes with Yamli, though it does not have an editor, an API facebook application and iGoogle Gadget like Yamli. A quick test between the 2 services reveled that Yamli is more accurate and faster, take “waladu” for example and test them in both sites.

The other Arabic transliteration product which launch caused allot of criticism is Ta3reeb from Google, I have reviewed Ta3reeb here.

Onkush is Orascom Telecom subsidiary. A telecom, mobile, ISP, web hosting and online media and emarketing giant in the Arab world. Where they have a number of online properties including MSN Arabia in partnership with Microsoft, which is the Middle East version of MSN. Which makes you wonder why Onkush is not integrated with msn Arabia search?

Yamli‘s the Arabic transliteration technology now available on iGoogle custom homepage.Yamli’s  gadget now allows users to type in English and get Arabic letters right  from their Google homepage, to search the web, news, images, videos, wiki, or to use the notepad to copy and paste somewhere else.

This is a smart move by Yamli to enable its translation engine available every where in the web, wherever the user is. The obvious benefit for the current iGoogle users, is that they do not have to open a new browser tab to use Yamli, though for users like me who uses Netvibes that option is not available yet, so I will be waiting for Yamli to release a Netvibes widget.

UPDATE: Google removed the ads on .jo .ae .com.sa

UPDATE 2 and 3: see end of the post.

UPDATE 4: response from Google.

It came to my attention today that when you search for Yamli on google.jo .ae or com.sa you get ads for google’s own Arabic transliteration editor called Ta3reeb (Arabization) that competes with Yamli.

To my understanding you cannot use keywords that does not match your ad when advertising on Adwords, so here Google is going against its Ad words policy and leveraging its monopoly,  so where is your Don’t Be Evil Google? (UPDATE: Only if you have a registered trademark! see end of the post) (Note I have not used AdWords but people who used it told me that policy). ( An email to  Google Global Communications and Public Affairs Manager Middle East and North Africa will be sent for comments)

Ta3reeb is way behind Yamli in terms of features accuracy and ease of use:

First: It is inaccurate when I type my name Ghaith I getغايته (ghaitoho) which means (his aim),  Ghaith in English means Smooth rain, so from now on my new name is (ghaitoh)! this is inaccuracy seems like a pattern with Ta3reeb for example: typing Amman the capital of Jordan you get أمان (Aman) which means safe, kalb means dog gets you قلب  (heart),  ordon the Arabic word for Jordan you get عرض  which means length or honor. On the other hand Yamli returned accurate results for these words.

Second: Ta3reeb does not show you the little word menu that shows corresponding words in Arabic when you start typing in English that Yamli already has. The existence of this feature at Yamli enables you to see and if want hose which word down the list of the possibilities. With Ta3reeb this is done by right clicking on the word, after you type it and hitting space. (if you noticed any other inaccuracy please comment)

Third: You cannot edit the word and you cannot change a letter in the middle of the word after you type it unless also you hit right click and chose edit, then if you do that, you can only edit using a visual key board, which is against the  purpose of the tool.

On the good side Ta3reeb matched Yamli is memorizing your entered keyword and their matches at the same session only.

Though Ta3reeb is still in Google labs I expect them to fix these features, and I do not know if the system gets smarter by using it, like Yamli does in sense of using the users chosen matching words to show more accurate results. ( I will email  Google’s PR director of Middle East).

I was tipped around 2 weeks ago that Google started using Hindi transliteration in India recently so when you type English in search you get Hindi matches. Google has not been implemented this feature with Arabic search yet but I expect it will.

Google entering the Arabic market is appreciated and I personally use allot of its services, I Love them, but this advertising on Yamli search results is not ethical, it is leveraging monopoly, similar  to Microsoft using its OS monopoly and installing IE to kill Netscape back in the 90s.

With this Ad tactic or without it Google is still the most used search engine in the Arab world, far ahead of Yamli, Habib Haddad cofounder of Yamli comments on this both events by saying:

“In the end what is good is that the Arabic language will be the winner. Our vision as a young Arabic startup is to keep innovating to empower the Arabic language and culture on the web and we believe we will make a difference even in the toughest competitive environments”

Yamli can fight back with its recent API release, and should work harder to partner with all major news websites, blog platforms and portals to use it, and partner with leading forum providers those Arab forums sites use since forums are big time in the Arab world. (many of them already use the API and this week ArabCrunch will start to inshallah)

Yamli has a secret search project that Haddad told me once, It is gona revolutionize Arabic  search, where it is gona be something completely new not yet offered by anyone else,  However he declined to tell me more details, but said it will be launched in around 2 weeks. If this product proved to be much better then Google I am sure media will buzz it and users will use word of mouth to help it grow.

UPDATE 2:

Seems like Google didn’t violate its AdWords policy Startupmeme suggests, as it only bans names trademarked outside of the U.S., U.K., and Canada, from being used as an ad keyword. And since Yamli CEO stated that his trademark is filed in the U.S. there isn’t an issue. This could be a first though as, usually, searches on Google don’t return results for Google products.

UPDATE 3: The comparison to this matter to MS IE and Netscape browser war is not very accurate, since switching cost on the web is one click away, and during MS Netscape war there was no alternative to Windows on IBM based PCs, though Google still maintains a monopoly power in the browser and online Ad market.

UPDATE 4:

Here is the response from a Google spokesperson.”

“Google uses AdWords to market some of its own products. We are proud of AdWords as a means to effectively advertise one’s products or services, so it seems natural to use it ourselves. Such house ads are also standard practice across the advertising industry.
While the Google house ad in question did not violate any of our AdWords trademark or content policies, we have decided to discontinue it.”

Google’s Trademark Policy states “With Google AdWords, advertisers may select trademarked terms as keywords or use them in the content of the ad.” thus google did not violate its Adwords policy, but I suspect they discounted the ad campaign on Yamli keyword because of the wave of objections across the blogosphere.

A clarification for Google AdWords policy regarding trademarked terms, can be found here

Yamli .com takes on major challenge to arabic content on the web

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. –  Yamli.com one of my best Arab startups has released a free API that allows the easy integration of its award-winning Arabic transliteration technology into any website. Yamli’s Smart Arabic Keyboard allows users to type Arabic using Latin characters by converting their words in real time into Arabic text. Third-party websites using the API can reach a larger group of Arabic speaking visitors who would otherwise find typing Arabic difficult.

According to co-founder Habib Haddad, “We are very excited about making this technology available to any website for free.  We hope it will encourage every user to be more engaged with the Arabic language not only on Yamli.com but on all Arabic sites and blogs. Our approach makes a significant contribution to the Arabic web by actually reducing the proliferation of transliterated Arabic words and converting them into real Arabic words,” concluded Haddad.

Various studies show that a large portion of Arabic internet users shy away from typing Arabic, choosing instead to write Arabic phonetically using Latin characters in an ad-hoc and informal fashion.  The transliteration of Arabic words and the limited availability of Arabic keyboards have stymied the use of Arabic on the web.  By making it easy for everyone to type in Arabic, Yamli.com is making the Arabic language more accessible for every day users, and helping to promote Arabic content on the web.

According to George Akra, Co-founder of Ikbis.com, “I think Yamli is one of the most innovative and useful services in the region, plugging the API to our site was easy and lead to the increase of Arabic comments on Ikbis.com. The simplicity and accuracy of the service is just remarkable,” concluded Akra.

The technology allows users to fully engage with Arabic content on blogs, e-commerce, social networking, education, government, video and music websites.  The API, which has been undergoing testing since March with selected partners, such as Maktoob, Annahar (Arabic Link), Moheet) Arabic Link), ART TV (Arabic Link), 3alarasi, and Babnet (Frensh Arabic Link) has already been used by hundreds of thousands of users already.

According to Sami Tueni, the General Manager of Naharnet.com, “Yamli is the best contribution to the Arab web. So easy to implement, it was the long awaited tool to help the Arabic language flourish online,” concluded Tueni.

You can get more info about the API at here.

Yamli according to Haddad is currently working on a massive project revolving around oneline Arabic search engine, Haddad did not tell me more, but I speculate it might be semantic Arabic search. Who knows we’ll wait and see.

ArabCrunch will add Yamli API very soon, accordingly I will write a review. stay tuned.

About Yamli.com

Yamli.com is a property of Language Analytics LLC, a software startup based in Cambridge, MA, that specializes in smart transliteration technologies for Arabic and other languages.  For more information, visit their website, at www.yamli.com

his is a press release from SouqElArab.com and Yamli.com, i will post more about them soon.

The Arab social Web shopping portal, SouqElArab.com has partnered with Yamli.com, which offers tools that allows easy access and expand the Arabic Web, to offer Arabs the facility that allows Arabic speakers to write Arabic using English alphabet.

Embedded within the SouqElArab.com Web site is Yamli’s API technology that allows the user to easily access the vast product lines without the need of an Arabic keyboard. The technology has been implemented in the search engine, as well as the use of User Names for the Networking facility offered, and for placing reviews, messages and text fields. The technology is simply “Write in Arabic – Type it the way you say it” as Yamli creators put it.

“I am really excited for this partnership and looking forward for more collaboration with SouqElArab.com. Our mission at Yamli is to empower the Arabic language on the Web and we firmly believe that in unity and collaboration we can and will achieve our goal” says Yamli.com Co-Founder, Habib Haddad.

Further to this facility, numerous co-operations and partnerships are in process of implementation to better serve both companies in terms of exposure, accessibility and branding.

Fadi F. Dababneh, Founder & CEO of SouqElArab Inc. added:
“This new technology has started to revolutionise the Arabic language’s use on the Internet. More and more Web services are offering this technology from Yamli.com to better serve and understand the needs of its user-base. I believe nothing like this has come along since the first Arabic e-mail service was offered in the late 1990’s.”

Language Analytics LLC, which created and operates Yamli.com is an Internet startup based in Cambridge, MA, (USA) specializes in smart transliteration technologies for Arabic and other languages.

SouqElArab.com, operated by SouqElArab Inc., is a growing Arab on-line marketplace in the making. It offers visitors a social shopping experience whereby they can network with like-minded people and shop at the same time. The shopping experience is based on members’ recommendations and feedback, where visitors rate and review products and come together to form a community based on their hobbies, interests and traits.