This is being introduced as a new feature on Etisalat’s ‘More’ Rewards website, giving ‘More’ loyalty program members the opportunity to make significant savings as well as gain ‘More’ reward points when visiting the site for “special deals”. The deals on the exclusive site are powered by Cobone’s deal-of-the-day platform.

This is an interesting move for Cobone, who it seems have worked on some redevelopment and redesign to be able to support such integration, to expand their reach beyond their site and onto partner sites and platforms such as the Etisalat one.

The good thing for Cobone too is that they’re not just gaining more exposure, but potentially more sales too, as Etisalat’s loyalty program offers people more incentive to buy, as the more they buy, the more loyalty points they earn from Etisalat. These reward points can then be redeemed for more than 3000 new product and service options from over 400 brands covering travel, shopping, donations, raffles and auctions, amongst other unique experiences.

It’ll be interesting to see if Cobone will seek to establish and launch other such partnerships around the region, and if other daily deal sites in the region follow suit.

Cobone is wholly owned by Jabbar Internet Group, and currently offers deals to shoppers in ten cities around the Middle East.

The “Dare to Dream” competition is an annual one that is organized by INJAZ Egypt; This year’s edition is sponsored by Mobinil, and will be held at the American University of Cairo.

The 10 winning teams/companies will receive a share of the 285,000 LE (around $US47,000) contributed by the adopting companies. The startups will also be mentored by their adopting corporation to get legally registered and become financially sound, profitable and sustainable.

The event is the culmination of INJAZ’s Company Program, during which students form small start-up companies over the course of the semester, helped by volunteer mentors from the private sector. They think of a product, assign roles like CEO, marketing, finance, human resources, sell shares to raise capital, manufacture and sell their product.

INJAZ also provides students with other courses on entrepreneurship, work readiness and financial literacy for every age level; all aiming towards equipping young people with practical experience, character and skills to drive Egypt’s economic future.

INJAZ Egypt is an education NGO, headed by Dina Mofty as its Executive Director, that addresses the gap between the education system and the needs of the job market by training business professionals and entrepreneurs to deliver INJAZ curriculum and serve as mentors to classes in schools and universities.

Since Its establishment in 2003, INJAZ Egypt has impacted a cumulative of 147,813 students. During the past academic year 2010-2011, INJAZ impacted 61,080 students in more than 167 schools and 11 Universities in 19 governorates with the help of 400 Volunteers from 16 private sector companies.

[Source: Bikya Masr]

Dakwak, the startup behind a tool that enables websites to translate their content into over 60 languages, and which was previously reviewed here, received an investment from IV Holdings, resulting in a 300% increase in the Company’s post money valuation.
Dakwak was launched in July 2010 by Waheed Barghouthi, and was incubated by Oasis500 in March 2011.  Waheed Barghouthi is currently CTO at the company, with fellow techie Zaid Amireh in the CEO role.

The aim of the investment in Dakwak is to help the company grow its business to a bigger scale and develop richer features, enabling them to attract even more customers to use their site translation tool.

As for Masmoo3, a startup that produces and distributes Arabic audio books, the angel investment was made by Ihab Al-Ramlawi, Co-Founder of Esnad Development, increasing their post money evaluation by 400% since joining the Oasis500 Angel Network. This marks Al-Ramlawi’s first angel investment in the ICT field; he’ll also be joining the company as its Chairman.
Masmoo3 was launched in early 2011 by current CEO Ala Suleiman and his sister Alaa, to be incubated shortly after by Oasis500.

Masmoo3 has already turned produced audio version of some 30 Arabic books covering a variety of topics. With this investment they aim to establish themselves as a leader in this space, by growing their list of audio books and making them available though several channels such as Apple’s App Store, Google Android and Windows Mobile 7.

Regarding where the Akhtaboot deal fits in; under this new partnership agreement, Oasis500 will be providing all its eligible companies’ websites with Akhtaboot’s Career Connect platform, equipping them with a customized, fully integrated and branded jobs’ section, that will allow them to post unlimited job listings and receive job applications directly onto the Careers’ section of their websites.

In addition, Oasis500 companies will also receive a wide range of online recruitment and social media services to help post their vacancies across the web.

Oasis500’s second Angel Investment Event is scheduled for September 12th, where new startups will be given the opportunity to pitch to and network with attending early-stage, international and local investors.

Other than spam filters that have varying degrees of effectiveness, another nuisance email fighting tool is the use of a disposable email address, that you just use for that one purpose and that you can dispose of later to avoid getting any unwanted emails.

Mohmal is a pretty similar Arabic service, that enables users to quickly create a disposable email address, that temporarily lives and receives emails for 45 minutes and is then deleted.

This takes the disposable email idea an extra step by imposing a time limit on the email address, limiting it to an immediate use, like signing up for a forum or news site, where you just need an email address for a few minutes to be able to receive the activation email, click on the link within it, and then forget about it.

Users have the option to extend the time period an email address is active by resetting the counter to 45 minutes.

The service, not being intended as a full fledged email service, doesn’t bother displaying HTML emails in a well formatted way, it just spits the content out in whatever way it comes up, which in many cases may not be optimal, but still enough to get the trick done.
It does start acting weird though if the email has attachments, but for the target usage, that’s usually not an issue as the emails mostly don’t include attachments.

The project was developed by Mohamed Fares of FaresSoft from Aleppo, Syria.

KACST’s Badir Technology Incubator signed a cooperation agreement with The Investor for Securities Co., a boutique investment banking firm, to set up the fund. The agreement was signed by Prince Turki bin Saud, vice president for research institutes, and Abdullah Al-Fowzan, chairman of The Investor for Securities Co..

In a statement on the occasion, Muhammad Al-Suwaiyel, president of KACST, said the agreement would boost the Kingdom’s technological development.

Prince Turki said the new fund would encourage young Saudi men and women to carry out a number of investment projects in the field of technology.

The King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) is an independent scientific organization administratively reporting to the Prime Minister; which is both the Saudi Arabian national science agency and its national laboratories.

The Badir incubation program is a KACST initiative that was launched in January 2008 to help innovators and entrepreneurs develop their research findings into technology businesses. Its mission is to stimulate economic growth, which in turn would help solve the Kingdom’s unemployment problem.

BADIR-ICT, an ICT technology incubator, was the first incubator of the program to become operational, focusing on information and communication technologies.

CareZone is a new check-in service that aims to make a difference and add purpose, by creating a link between users’ check-ins and spending at different places on one hand, and channeling benefits to those in need on the other.

The platform offers a location-based mobile app that suggests and rewards users for choosing and checking in at a CareZone partner (shops, restaurants, …etc.) Users earn CareZone Coins for their check-ins; spending money at the CareZone partner’s business will earn them even more Coins.

Collected coins can then be distributed, half as “CareCoins” towards a good cause of the user’s choice, and the other half as “MyCoins” that can be redeemed in the form of a chosen reward, or also given away for a favorite cause.

CareZone also integrates a social media component that allows users to share their good deeds with followers, friends and family on Facebook and Twitter, encouraging them to follow suit and support a cause through CareZone too.

This whole idea and approach obviously benefits both companies and consumers while also enabling support for a number of charitable causes, hoping to make it a win-win-win situation. And obviously CareZone would win from being the facilitator of all this, so you could add an extra win in that equation.

The company also has plans to expand the platform and offer even more ways to accumulate coins and make a difference through everyday activities.

CareZone already has a handful of partners on board and a dozen various causes they’re supporting; but obviously, the focus at this point for the system to work should be to get more and more partners on board, and to grow the application’s user base; two goals that are understandably closely tied.

The mobile application is currently only available for the iPhone; with plans to support Android, BlackBerry and even Symbian soon. CareZone is also only limited to the United Arab Emirates for the time being. The startup hopes to expand to make their service available in more countries around the region and elsewhere.

CareZone, which is based in Dubai (UAE), was launched by Innoventa, a provider of integrated solutions in the areas of management and marketing, and is headed by Ritesh Tilani. The development work was done by Dubai based CloudAppers, a small/agile apps development company specialized in Web Applications and Social Media.

In a press release, the company stated that a group of Arab and Foreign angel investors invested in its technical capabilities and future visions aiming at developing a full-fledged mobile advertising platform and mobile media monetization solutions targeting the massive mobile growth in the Middle East.

This first round of investment is aimed at providing the company with the required liquidity to enhance its capabilities, boost its growth, and attract the needed skills and competences to meet the increasing demand on its mobile media solutions.

Noqoush’s main product is called AdFalcon, a specialized advertising platform developed to bridge the gap between regional mobile application developers and mobile website owners on one hand, and regional advertisers on the other. This way app developers and site owners have an easier regional channel through which they can sell mobile ads and start monetizing; while businesses and advertisers get the benefit of being able to get their ads on the mobile apps and sites developed from the region, for a regional audience.

As with any modern day advertising platform, AdFalcon focuses on the relevance of the ads served and on providing targeting options that make it more interesting for advertisers.

As statistics over the past years have been showing Mobile penetration is high in the region and continuing to grow, with some core markets showing important growth in smartphone penetration too; however, mobile advertising is still in its very early days in the region. There obviously is a lot of promise in this space and big potential for growth, and that’s the main logic behind this investment of course, still it could take some time for the market to develop and for ad money in the region to start flowing into mobile advertising; Noqoush seem to be in a good position technology- and team-wise to be able to take advantage of and contribute to the growth of this nascent advertising medium, they just need the patience and stamina for it.

Noqoush currently have offices in Amman (Jordan) and Dubai (UAE); with plans to expand soon in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

The core founding team behind Noqoush consists of: Ashraf Habib (Chairman), Shorhabel Ghoneim (CTO) and Mahmoud Iswaid (Business Development).

At this initial stage, the products available on the site are mainly electronics (cameras, home theatre televisions, software, laptops, scanners, computers …etc.), but the plan is to incorporate additional categories on a monthly basis to include items like books, clothing apparel, kitchenware, cosmetics and more.

Mizalla, which means Umbrella, aims to provide shoppers, the main focus being Lebanese shoppers at this point, with a comprehensive solution that enables them to easily search for products from different brands, compare them, order online and get them shipped as quickly as possible, all from the comfort of their homes or offices.

The idea is that by signing contracts with different merchants, and opening stores for them within the platform, the site is able to make it much easier for merchants to start selling their products online, making more money and letting Mizalla handle all the technical details, payments, shipping and tracking. On the other hand, this arrangement enables Mizalla to provide a wide range of products to its customers.

Shoppers can make their payments online using their credit cards or choose to pay cash on delivery if the order amount is less than $500.

As mentioned previously, the main focus of the site is Lebanese shoppers for the time being, but Mizalla hopes to expand to shoppers from around the region, and be able to start shipping internationally.

With the launch of this solution Mizalla joins the likes of Souq and Logta who have been working on establishing themselves in this space for some time, working with businesses to setup online stores on their platforms, as well as some other newer startups from around the region who are eyeing this space too.

Mizalla was founded by Bahij Demachkie and Haytham Elkhoja, and is based in Beirut, Lebanon.

The online service enables users to rate and review restaurants and coffee shops, in addition to uploading pictures of them and their food items, discussing their positives and negatives and posting relevant information about them.

The newly released iPhone application provides users with the following features:

• A list of the best ten restaurants in the city they’re in, based on the ratings of its users.
• The possibility to drill down and find the best restaurants in the city by category or type of cuisine.
• Access to the restaurants’ Qaym profiles that show the ratings, reviews and photos that other users who visited it shared and uploaded.

This first version of the application supports the following cities: Riyadh, Jeddah, Manama, Dammam, Khobar, Medina, Buraidah, Unaizah and Mecca. But more cities are planned for future releases of the application.

An Android version of the application is underway, and should see the light of day soon too.

The application is available in Arabic only, and can be downloaded for free from the iTunes store here.

They’ve gone ahead and launched a new section under their portal called Logta Mall, with a wide range of online stores for a number of retailers covering various sectors and offering their products for sale online through Logta’s new platform.

So to build up towards a B2C model, Logta’s sales team get in touch and work with a variety of retailers in order to put together partnerships, through which Logta sets stores for them on the platform with all the products they want to put up for sale, and then handle all the order processing, online payments and shipping follow-up.

With this move, Logta is hoping to establish itself as a central online shopping destination where users can buy the products they want at competitive prices from well known and trusted retailers.

Logta Mall is currently available in only three countries in the region: United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt; but it is expected that it will be expanded to cover other countries in the future.

The Logta promotions side of the site has around 850 retailers on board, and the new Logta Mall section already has 30 retailer stores set up and selling.

According to numbers provided by Logta, their site which was launched in January 2009 currently reaches 1 Million Unique Visitors per month, and counts 10 Million Pages views.