Bandoora: A place for independent and local Arab musicians across the #MENA
Bandoora.com is a music discovery website that aims to disrupt the current state of music in MENA region by presenting independent and local Arab musicians. The site currently has over 250 Band/Musician covering over 32 Arab cities and providing 33 musical genre. We had a quick chat with Abdullah Al-Khaldi the CEO and co-founder about bandoora, and he was kind enough to share with the us some information. What is Bandoora.com? The term “bandora”... Read More
Q&A with Marka VIP’s Ahmed Alkhatib (Part 2 of 2)
This is a continuation of our previous article about Marka VIP’s operations and marketing the questions are answered by the founder and CEO Ahmed Alkhatib. General & Operations How does MarkaVIP view e-commerce in the region? The current state of e-commerce in the Middle East is comparable to the U.S. 10 years ago or Turkey seven years ago. However, despite the relatively nascent state of e-commerce in the Middle East, we firmly believe... Read More
Qa2ed.com a new portal looking to find the leaders of tomorrow
So where do you go when you want to find out information about creative and bright young minds from the region? Your best bet is Google (or any other search engine). But I managed to find two very busy entrepreneurs that are hoping to change all of that, Sana Mahmoud along with her partner have recently launched a portal called Qa2ed.com (Qa2ed which translates to Leader). The portal which is still in Beta and in Arabic only hopes to achieve finding... Read More
Menwayn.com – Your Shopping Guide to make a smart choice
How many times have you went shopping for a specific product only to find yourself visiting different stores and driving all over town to buy what you were actually looking for? This has happened to Lisa Kawar as she was looking for a 2-in-1 washing machine/dryer; she wasted some valuable hours spread over several days wandering around Amman until she finally found the product she was looking for. Lucky for us, she decided this problem must be solved.... Read More
Q&A with Marka VIP’s Ahmed Alkhatib (Part 1 of 2)
E-commerce is gaining a lot of popularity in the MENA region and the competition is heating up between a few of the bigger portals. Recently Marka VIP was in the news for raising USD 3 million in funding from high profile U.S, European and Middle Eastern investors, in order to expand and increase their presence across the region. MarkaVIP quickly captured the attention of shoppers across the Middle East when it launched in Jordan and Saudi Arabia... Read More
Meet the Geek: Hosam Abu Alam
In my latest trip to Jordan, I have managed to sit down and meet with some very interesting people and experts in the Online and Digital industry in the MENA region. My first meeting was with Hosam Abu Alam, who has been working in online marketing for quite sometime now, he has experience managing and marketing web portals and e-commerce properties for international and regional brands. He is currently a Project Manager at the well-known Yahoo!... Read More
Meet the Geek: Osama Romoh
We’ve had the pleasure of meeting Osama Romoh (@osamaromoh), who is a prominent Jordanian Blogger at osamaa.com with over 1,800+ Followers on twitter and with more than 13,900K likes on his facebook page. Osama now works in Dubai with Dubizzle where he is the Digital Marketing manager, we thought we’d share his wisdom with the world when it comes to Digital marketing so we sent him a couple of questions and he gracefully replied. Below... Read More
Middle Eastern countries growth on Facebook last month
A new article released on Inside Facebook today gives an interesting look about the traffic on Facebook from the Middle Eastern countries. And although there were upto 7 countries which have gained 100,000 users in the past month there is a bit of surprising and unexpected loss of users in a couple of the major countries of the region. Below is the chart prepared by Inside Facebook, as you can see Egypt is leading the pack with 500K users as previously... Read More
Q&A with Dakwak’s CEO & Co-Founder Zaid Amireh (Part 2)
This article is a continuation of yesterday’s discussion with Zaid Amireh, CEO and Co-Founder of Dakwak. Yesterday we discussed Dakwak’s background and how they came to be along with some technical details. Today we will be discussing how they secured funding to start such a venture and if they have any tips or information for anybody thinking of starting on their own. Business 1) Do you have or had any investors if yes can you please... Read More
Q&A with Dakwak’s CEO & Co-Founder Zaid Amireh (Part 1)
A while ago I read about a startup from Jordan called Dakwak, they provide an easy and fast way to translate and localize any website to a language your audience and visitors want. I thought it was a pretty cool idea so I got in touch with them and wanted to know more about them and see if they had any advice for people starting up new ventures in the region. Below is the discussion half of the discussion we had, the rest will be posted later on... Read More
Democamp Amman Tomorrow
Democamp Amman will be held at 7pm (8pm UAE time) tomorrow, and according to a press release there will be around 400 people attending the event from techies, investors and startup enthusiast. The six finalists that will be demoing were chosen from a total of over 35+ submissions so hopefully people who will attend will get a chance to see some innovative demos. For the people who will not be able to travel to Amman to attend the democamp a post on... Read More
Jo Bedu: Social media can be fashionable
Our friends at JO Bedu a clothing company founded in 2007 by two young entrepreneurs Tamer AlMasri and Michael Makdah from Jordan with the mission of promoting Arab pop culture using art, humor, silliness, creativity, and style. The decision was made to broadcast these messages on t-shirts designed by Arabs, a lot of their T-shirt designs are actually crowdsourced, they use social media networks to run competitions for new T-shirt designs and with... Read More
Why do people in the MENA region love flash so much?!
Recently I met a designer/developer who was a partner at a small boutique agency in Dubai, and we started discussing on how business was going and what clients are requiring nowadays for their online and social needs. And we quickly came to the conclusion that we both hated flash! No offense to the flash lovers out there, there are instances where it is useful but these are (and should be) very limited circumstances obviously depending on your website... Read More
Wizards Production: Another gaming player from the MENA region
Not too long ago we wrote about Aranim Media Factory and how the online and social gaming field is changing in the MENA region, so I decided to look for other companies region that are taking a crack at developing games in the region. Which led me to discover Wizards Production a company funded by IV holdings and founded in December 2008 to address the gap in the Arabic Focused Massive Mulitplayer Online (MMO) Social Gaming. Shortly after they’re... Read More
New Teaser Campaign: A Daily Life Of An Entrepreneur
Oasis 500, a premier Jordan-based early stage and seed investment program, which includes entrepreneurship training, mentorship, incubation, and follow-on and seed investment funds, has announced today over facebook the release of “Fareed Dairies” campaign. “Fareed Dairies” is one of a series episode that will be talk about “A daily life of an entrepreneur”. This teaser campaign is aimed to attract aspiring... Read More
Mustaqil.com is now live
A while back we mentioned a new startup from Jordan called Mustaqil.com an online portal for freelancers purely in Arabic. It seems now that the site has launched not sure if it is in Beta stage or not, however users are slowly signing up. I have checked the site and there are currently two jobs posted. The interface is really easy to use and there are some interesting features on the portal. Once you create an account you will be able edit your... Read More
Q&A with Aranim Media Factory
Not too long ago I published a post about social gaming in the MENA region and mentioned how Aranim Media Factory among other companies who are working on providing the region with relevant social games mostly on Facebook. So I decided to get in touch with the Aranim team and get a little more information about them and the story behind the name. Unfortunately as you can see from the answers below, they didn’t tell us what the name meant, however... Read More
Event: Global Game Jam Middle East
The Global Game Jam which is a project of the international game developers association (IGDA) is coming to Jordan on January the weekend of the 28th till the 30th of January. The event will be free of charge and held at the SAE institue of Amman with the help of int@j , a non-profit organization dedicated to serving and growing the ICT and ICT Enabled Service Sector in Jordan. The Global Game Jam event usually gathers people for 2 days and then using... Read More
Browser battles in the MENA region
As you may have read recently Firefox has overtaken Internet Explorer as the most used browser in Europe, according to statcounter a free web analytics company. “This appears to be happening because Google’s Chrome is stealing share from Internet Explorer while Firefox is mainly maintaining its existing share,” - Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter chief executive. Google Chrome is currently in third place (but not for long) in Europe... Read More
Google Days event in Jordan
In an effort to push the online industry in the Middle East, Google are holding their Google Day event in Jordan for the first time between December 12th – 14th. Google are planning on exposing students, professors, developers and aspiring entrepreneurs to the latest Google products through demonstrations and they even will host a VC/Entrepreneur panel who will share their expertise in funds and launching technology ventures. To register or... Read More
