WEBsessed
Razan Khatib's commentary on life on/off the web

Yamli gets reviewed at TechCrunch 1

Posted October 11, 2008

Finaly, a review of an Arab-related startup Yamli (previously reviewed here) at TechCrunch today, read the full article Yamli Makes It Easy To Use Arabic On The Web.

The article also mentions Maktoob!

Congratulates to the Yamli team!

Arab-based startups at Tech-world popular blogs 4

Posted June 11, 2008

I was wondering why I keep reading posts about startups from everywhere in the world at the most popular tech/web blogs, but none come to mention Arab ones. So I did a search on the following keywords in TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and Mashable:

Arab, Arab startups, Middle East, arabia, Maktoob, d1g, yamli, ikbis, watwet, and of course my own startup questler.

and here are the results:

TechCrunch ReadWriteWeb Mashable
Arab 10 Results, 8 with “arab” in “comparable”, 1 with “arab” in “sharable” and one about censorship!!! 57 Results:
1 about Queen Rania YouTube Channel
1 About innvovation in UAE
1 About EgyptianYouTube Channel
7 with “comparable” so I only browsed the titles of rest!		 3 Results, one with Ikbis mentioned!
One mentiones flickr being bloced in UAE and the third one has no mention of the word arab anyway.
Arab Startups 0 0 0
Middle East 6 Results, talking about different web companies targeting the middle east, one about Middle East Oil and one about the Internet cables! 2 posts about World wide Internet Penetration rates Just too many to go through! Sorry!
Arabia 5 Results, all mentioning Saudi Arabia 0 1 Result mentioning Saudi Arabia
Maktoob 0 0 0
d1g 0 0 0
ikbis 0 0 0
watwet 0 0 0
yamli 0 0 0
questler 0 0 0

In comparison, there was a long post on ReadWriteWeb the other day about German twitter clones as a phenomenon. Korean startups, Canadian ones, China of course, Philippines, Spain, Portuguese.

So I tell you, cloning or lack of real innovation is definitely NOT the problem here, So is it because of:

  • That the words “Arab” and “Middle East” are synonymous with Internet censorship?
  • No interest?
  • Not many startups to make the news?
  • Bad marketing?
  • Worse of all, low self worth, that many Arabs suffer, thinking that they won’t make it big anyway so they don’t contact these people?

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