Goodbye. “Thanks for all the support over the past few years. We dreamed about enhancing the online Arabic content. We dared to implement our dream. […] Thank you for sharing the journey with us.”
This message is all that’s left of Egyptian website Onkush.com, one of the many Arabic search engines that have popped up over the last few years in the Middle East and North Africa only to disappear or languish in the shadow of giants such as Google. Many other attempts to strengthen the limited presence of Arabic content online have likewise failed to significantly raise its profile or competitiveness, including regional government initiatives the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Arab Knowledge Report described as slow and not prioritized appropriately.
As a result, less than 1% of online content is in Arabic even though Arabs make up 5% of the world’s population. Searches for authoritative Arabic sources often land you in forums where only-God-knows-who is giving their two cents on everything from quantum physics to how to bake konafa.
But with two overthrown Arab dictators, increasing political openness in several Arab countries and ongoing uprisings in others, Egyptian information firms are looking forward to a brighter future for the Arabic language online thanks to greater information freedoms and the popularity of social networks. In addition to political developments, the number of people going on line is growing. While internet penetration remains relatively low in most Arab countries, the number of internet users in the Arab world expanded 2,300% between 2000 and 2009, according to Internet World Stats, and high growth rates are expected to continue.
Egypt’s own revolution was catalyzed by an explosion in social media use, and Taya IT, an online products and smart phone applications provider with offices in Cairo and Dubai, is looking to tap into the energy of social media devotees with their latest product Yahki.com. The website is a “storytelling platform” that allows users to combine their own commentary and materials from various social media sites, including Twitter, YouTube, Flikr and Facebook, in a single stream.
“I’m a big believer that the people in this region […] really have been undermined and really these people deserve more,” said Ashraf Tawakkol, CEO of Taya IT, during a July 26 roundtable presentation at the Four Seasons Nile Plaza hotel. “And over time, you find people getting more education, understanding more.”
“I see a very bright future [for Arabic content] for many reasons,” adds Mohamed Eliwa, founder and CEO of Arabia Inform, a pioneer provider of electronic content in the Middle East with offices in Cairo, Dubai, Riyadh and Washington, DC. “The first reason is the Arab world became more important to everybody all over the world […] Second, the stability means more transparency, information, exchanges. Third […] Egypt especially, and Syria insha’Allah [God willing] in the future, will free the academic sector. The same for media, the quality of the content is different now: analysis different, opinion different, news coverage different.”
Giving back to the web
Taya IT is aiming to take Arabic content global through the use of social media. According to the Dubai School of Government’s 2011 Arab Social Media Report, the Arab world accounted for 21 million Facebook users as of December 2010, up from 12 million users in January of the same year. Tawakkol sees an important role for social media in improving Arabic content and exposing it to the rest of the world by increasing the interconnectivity of the web and Yahki.com’s beta version taps into this potential.
“We have a huge problem with the Arabic online content,” explains Tawakkol. “So, our idea was, why don’t we do something that enables the users to easily search for content? […] They can grab it, and then have that in some sort of a locker, an account, and instead of just connecting to it, give them the ease of using it in a better way. And that way, the resulting pages are a well-structured page that enables search engines to discover it; it enables him to easily share it.”
For example, let’s say you were in Tahrir Square for the July 8 protest and you want to do more than just upload a video to Facebook. To do this, you can go to Yahki.com and create a “story” that links various social networks and media under a particular topic. You might start by writing a description of your impressions and then drop a video file into the stream via a tool bar. You can add a YouTube video of Ramy Essam singing “Taty Taty,” followed by an aerial shot of the crowd from Flikr to show the huge turnout and then a Tweet from an activist. As a finishing touch, you can embed the link to a blog post or article that had an interesting take on the demonstration by searching for it using the Google search selection from the tool bar.
When users click on your unique story, they’ll have access to all the links, pictures, blogs, etc, you’ve streamed and then add their own links and comments. Viewers can take links from your stream and share them on their own social networks. This is what Tawakkol refers to as “contributing back to the web.” But the best part is being able to do everything without leaving the Yahki.com website. You can also add material to an existing story or start a new one as you browse without signing into your account.
Since Yahki.com is something in between a micro-blog and a regular blog, Taya IT is also looking to develop a Yahki.com smart phone app, “as people move with the information in their hands; this is the trend,” says Tawakkol.
Enriching content
But what about the content that is actually being shared on sites like Yahki.com? While social media may increase exposure to material on the web, the quality of that information is essential in determining whether the internet will fulfill its potential role in economic and cultural development. The UNDP Arab Knowledge Report points out that the domination of some topics and meager treatment of others hinders Arab countries’ ability to keep up in a highly competitive world. The report warns: “In such a world, marginalization is the fate of cultures that fail to reproduce themselves adequately through the creation of knowledge and devise new forms for its utilization.”
Producing larger amounts of high-quality content is the true challenge in a region where academic life and the media have long been limited by police states and cultural conservatism.
Enter Arabia Inform, which consists of Moheet.com, the first Arabic language news website; Almotahida Multimedia, which produces educational software; AskZad, the world’s largest Arabic digital reference database; Acumen Media Intelligence that provides media and business analysis; and Middle East Monitor, which monitors, archives and indexes Arabic newspapers, magazines, websites, scientific journals and television and radio stations.
Eliwa realized the potential of information while working at a newspaper in Saudi Arabia. When his editor asked him to find background information on Ali Kafi, the new president of Algeria after President Mohamed Boudiaf was assassinated in 1992, the only source he could find was a five line press clip that cost SAR 500 (LE 795). Soon after, he resigned and started his own digital information service which went bankrupt two years later in 1996. The following year, with the power of the web available, he gave it another try.
Arabia Inform’s Cairo office is now a sprawling operation with approximately 1,000 employees who scan, record and index newspapers, websites and TV and radio channels and other media 24 hours a day — a process that draws in about a terabyte of information a day — along with original journalism produced by the 70 reporters of Moheet.com.
As part of its expanding operations, Arabia Inform announced a deal in June with ProQuest, a major US-based electronic publisher, to serve as AskZad’s global distributor to academic libraries.
“Now the Arab world became an issue worldwide, so all companies started to look for us,” said Eliwa. “We found that ProQuest was the best strategic alliance. They want to have our content available for thousands of Arabic and Middle East departments worldwide.”
One of the biggest challenges to expanding Arabic online content is investors’ fear of financing a non-tangible product; however this has recently become less of a concern. Although there are no exact data available at present, there is little doubt that growth rate forecasts for the Arabic content market — estimated at 5–10% including print media by a 2003 UN Economic and Social Committee for Western Asia (ESCWA) study — are far exceeded by current growth.
“They say build a factory for cars and you are welcome. But working in the internet, I can’t touch it. It’s not tangible,” says Eliwa, describing the common attitude among investors 10 years ago. “Ten years later, they came running after content and they found that if you want to compete on the internet you have to digitize what you have.”
But there are still many hurdles facing the industry. With Egypt’s rich academic past, Arabia Inform has plenty of resources to draw on for its archives, but tracking down those resources has sometimes proven difficult. When Arabia Inform sought to digitize the archives of an academic institution based in Cairo, they found century-old copies of its journals had been eaten by rats, rendering most of them useless. “Many of them were destroyed and we had to buy one from here and one from here until we completed [the collection],” says Eliwa. “We’re talking about 100 years. It wasn’t an easy job.”
Many traditional publishers, used to having tight control over tangible publications, are also nervous about converting their products into digitized media that could be shared around the world with the click of a mouse. This fear is exacerbated by weak, laxly enforced or poorly designed copyright and intellectual property laws in many Arab countries.
Another challenge is the Arabic language itself. The distribution of Arabic online content requires the adaptation of technologies to make them compliant with the language, and the development of this software has not yet met the industry’s needs. Adding to the difficulties is the fact that there remains a lack of standardization of the Arabic language among Arab countries and academic centers.
These are the pitfalls plaguing local attempts at developing Arabic search engines, leaving Google, which still produces inferior Arabic search results in comparison to its English services, to dominate the scene in Arab countries.
Going global
Developing Arabic online content is not only the concern of Arabic speaking countries. With global political and economic tensions constantly revolving around the MENA region, the importance of Arabic online content extends far beyond the Middle East, as highlighted by Arabia Inform’s distribution deal with ProQuest.
Jan Diggs, global business development manager for Arabia Inform, serves as a coordinator between Arabia Inform offices in Cairo and Washington, DC. “I am representing Arabia Inform, but I also feel like […] I sort of have to build bridges between the two [regions] because there are so many misunderstandings. When we start to talk to new clients, the first question we always get is: ‘Are you in any way affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood or terrorist organizations?’”
Diggs believes that the US government and corporations working in the MENA region need to have a broader understating of the region’s people and the issues they face and cannot solely rely on US media or English language media in the MENA region.
After Diggs found out that an American ambassador serving in a Middle Eastern country was relying on English language media in his briefings, Arabia Inform conducted a study comparing the content of English and Arabic language media in that country. “We found that only about 5–7% of what was in the Arabic-language media actually made it into English-language media,” says Diggs. “So what the Arabs are reading was completely different than what the expats were reading.”
While visiting the US State Department several years ago, Diggs found another disturbing language gap — not a single person in the Iraq section of the State Department spoke Iraqi Arabic, relying instead on a smattering of Modern Standard and Gulf Arabic. Many also had limited reading skills.
However, the West is starting to broaden its understanding by talking to experts like Arabia Inform, says Diggs.
In line with Taya IT’s mission to “bring Middle Eastern and the Western cultures closer together,” Yahki.com has both English and Arabic language interfaces, with stories in English and Arabic displayed together on the opening and explore pages. Tawakkol believes the website, particularly in light of the Arab revolutions, will have a wide appeal among the professional class in Western countries.
Most of the written content is brief, also making it ideal for a quick translation using online tools such as Google Translate until the website eventually gets its own translation tool.
Tawakkol sees linguistic diversity as the internet’s future. Despite the homogenizing effect globalization often produces, a healthy global economy requires cross-cultural communication and robust competition that extends to languages and cultures as well.
“Really people here have some brilliant ideas, brilliant insights,” he says, “and when they get properly communicating with others, with other cultures, they benefit and they benefit the others.” bt
This message is all that’s left of Egyptian website Onkush.com, one of the many Arabic search engines that have popped up over the last few years in the Middle East and North Africa only to disappear or languish in the shadow of giants such as Google. Many other attempts to strengthen the limited presence of Arabic content online have likewise failed to significantly raise its profile or competitiveness, including regional government initiatives the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Arab Knowledge Report described as slow and not prioritized appropriately.
As a result, less than 1% of online content is in Arabic even though Arabs make up 5% of the world’s population. Searches for authoritative Arabic sources often land you in forums where only-God-knows-who is giving their two cents on everything from quantum physics to how to bake konafa.
But with two overthrown Arab dictators, increasing political openness in several Arab countries and ongoing uprisings in others, Egyptian information firms are looking forward to a brighter future for the Arabic language online thanks to greater information freedoms and the popularity of social networks. In addition to political developments, the number of people going on line is growing. While internet penetration remains relatively low in most Arab countries, the number of internet users in the Arab world expanded 2,300% between 2000 and 2009, according to Internet World Stats, and high growth rates are expected to continue.
Egypt’s own revolution was catalyzed by an explosion in social media use, and Taya IT, an online products and smart phone applications provider with offices in Cairo and Dubai, is looking to tap into the energy of social media devotees with their latest product Yahki.com. The website is a “storytelling platform” that allows users to combine their own commentary and materials from various social media sites, including Twitter, YouTube, Flikr and Facebook, in a single stream.
“I’m a big believer that the people in this region […] really have been undermined and really these people deserve more,” said Ashraf Tawakkol, CEO of Taya IT, during a July 26 roundtable presentation at the Four Seasons Nile Plaza hotel. “And over time, you find people getting more education, understanding more.”
“I see a very bright future [for Arabic content] for many reasons,” adds Mohamed Eliwa, founder and CEO of Arabia Inform, a pioneer provider of electronic content in the Middle East with offices in Cairo, Dubai, Riyadh and Washington, DC. “The first reason is the Arab world became more important to everybody all over the world […] Second, the stability means more transparency, information, exchanges. Third […] Egypt especially, and Syria insha’Allah [God willing] in the future, will free the academic sector. The same for media, the quality of the content is different now: analysis different, opinion different, news coverage different.”
Giving back to the web
Taya IT is aiming to take Arabic content global through the use of social media. According to the Dubai School of Government’s 2011 Arab Social Media Report, the Arab world accounted for 21 million Facebook users as of December 2010, up from 12 million users in January of the same year. Tawakkol sees an important role for social media in improving Arabic content and exposing it to the rest of the world by increasing the interconnectivity of the web and Yahki.com’s beta version taps into this potential.
“We have a huge problem with the Arabic online content,” explains Tawakkol. “So, our idea was, why don’t we do something that enables the users to easily search for content? […] They can grab it, and then have that in some sort of a locker, an account, and instead of just connecting to it, give them the ease of using it in a better way. And that way, the resulting pages are a well-structured page that enables search engines to discover it; it enables him to easily share it.”
For example, let’s say you were in Tahrir Square for the July 8 protest and you want to do more than just upload a video to Facebook. To do this, you can go to Yahki.com and create a “story” that links various social networks and media under a particular topic. You might start by writing a description of your impressions and then drop a video file into the stream via a tool bar. You can add a YouTube video of Ramy Essam singing “Taty Taty,” followed by an aerial shot of the crowd from Flikr to show the huge turnout and then a Tweet from an activist. As a finishing touch, you can embed the link to a blog post or article that had an interesting take on the demonstration by searching for it using the Google search selection from the tool bar.
When users click on your unique story, they’ll have access to all the links, pictures, blogs, etc, you’ve streamed and then add their own links and comments. Viewers can take links from your stream and share them on their own social networks. This is what Tawakkol refers to as “contributing back to the web.” But the best part is being able to do everything without leaving the Yahki.com website. You can also add material to an existing story or start a new one as you browse without signing into your account.
Since Yahki.com is something in between a micro-blog and a regular blog, Taya IT is also looking to develop a Yahki.com smart phone app, “as people move with the information in their hands; this is the trend,” says Tawakkol.
Enriching content
But what about the content that is actually being shared on sites like Yahki.com? While social media may increase exposure to material on the web, the quality of that information is essential in determining whether the internet will fulfill its potential role in economic and cultural development. The UNDP Arab Knowledge Report points out that the domination of some topics and meager treatment of others hinders Arab countries’ ability to keep up in a highly competitive world. The report warns: “In such a world, marginalization is the fate of cultures that fail to reproduce themselves adequately through the creation of knowledge and devise new forms for its utilization.”
Producing larger amounts of high-quality content is the true challenge in a region where academic life and the media have long been limited by police states and cultural conservatism.
Enter Arabia Inform, which consists of Moheet.com, the first Arabic language news website; Almotahida Multimedia, which produces educational software; AskZad, the world’s largest Arabic digital reference database; Acumen Media Intelligence that provides media and business analysis; and Middle East Monitor, which monitors, archives and indexes Arabic newspapers, magazines, websites, scientific journals and television and radio stations.
Eliwa realized the potential of information while working at a newspaper in Saudi Arabia. When his editor asked him to find background information on Ali Kafi, the new president of Algeria after President Mohamed Boudiaf was assassinated in 1992, the only source he could find was a five line press clip that cost SAR 500 (LE 795). Soon after, he resigned and started his own digital information service which went bankrupt two years later in 1996. The following year, with the power of the web available, he gave it another try.
Arabia Inform’s Cairo office is now a sprawling operation with approximately 1,000 employees who scan, record and index newspapers, websites and TV and radio channels and other media 24 hours a day — a process that draws in about a terabyte of information a day — along with original journalism produced by the 70 reporters of Moheet.com.
As part of its expanding operations, Arabia Inform announced a deal in June with ProQuest, a major US-based electronic publisher, to serve as AskZad’s global distributor to academic libraries.
“Now the Arab world became an issue worldwide, so all companies started to look for us,” said Eliwa. “We found that ProQuest was the best strategic alliance. They want to have our content available for thousands of Arabic and Middle East departments worldwide.”
One of the biggest challenges to expanding Arabic online content is investors’ fear of financing a non-tangible product; however this has recently become less of a concern. Although there are no exact data available at present, there is little doubt that growth rate forecasts for the Arabic content market — estimated at 5–10% including print media by a 2003 UN Economic and Social Committee for Western Asia (ESCWA) study — are far exceeded by current growth.
“They say build a factory for cars and you are welcome. But working in the internet, I can’t touch it. It’s not tangible,” says Eliwa, describing the common attitude among investors 10 years ago. “Ten years later, they came running after content and they found that if you want to compete on the internet you have to digitize what you have.”
But there are still many hurdles facing the industry. With Egypt’s rich academic past, Arabia Inform has plenty of resources to draw on for its archives, but tracking down those resources has sometimes proven difficult. When Arabia Inform sought to digitize the archives of an academic institution based in Cairo, they found century-old copies of its journals had been eaten by rats, rendering most of them useless. “Many of them were destroyed and we had to buy one from here and one from here until we completed [the collection],” says Eliwa. “We’re talking about 100 years. It wasn’t an easy job.”
Many traditional publishers, used to having tight control over tangible publications, are also nervous about converting their products into digitized media that could be shared around the world with the click of a mouse. This fear is exacerbated by weak, laxly enforced or poorly designed copyright and intellectual property laws in many Arab countries.
Another challenge is the Arabic language itself. The distribution of Arabic online content requires the adaptation of technologies to make them compliant with the language, and the development of this software has not yet met the industry’s needs. Adding to the difficulties is the fact that there remains a lack of standardization of the Arabic language among Arab countries and academic centers.
These are the pitfalls plaguing local attempts at developing Arabic search engines, leaving Google, which still produces inferior Arabic search results in comparison to its English services, to dominate the scene in Arab countries.
Going global
Developing Arabic online content is not only the concern of Arabic speaking countries. With global political and economic tensions constantly revolving around the MENA region, the importance of Arabic online content extends far beyond the Middle East, as highlighted by Arabia Inform’s distribution deal with ProQuest.
Jan Diggs, global business development manager for Arabia Inform, serves as a coordinator between Arabia Inform offices in Cairo and Washington, DC. “I am representing Arabia Inform, but I also feel like […] I sort of have to build bridges between the two [regions] because there are so many misunderstandings. When we start to talk to new clients, the first question we always get is: ‘Are you in any way affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood or terrorist organizations?’”
Diggs believes that the US government and corporations working in the MENA region need to have a broader understating of the region’s people and the issues they face and cannot solely rely on US media or English language media in the MENA region.
After Diggs found out that an American ambassador serving in a Middle Eastern country was relying on English language media in his briefings, Arabia Inform conducted a study comparing the content of English and Arabic language media in that country. “We found that only about 5–7% of what was in the Arabic-language media actually made it into English-language media,” says Diggs. “So what the Arabs are reading was completely different than what the expats were reading.”
While visiting the US State Department several years ago, Diggs found another disturbing language gap — not a single person in the Iraq section of the State Department spoke Iraqi Arabic, relying instead on a smattering of Modern Standard and Gulf Arabic. Many also had limited reading skills.
However, the West is starting to broaden its understanding by talking to experts like Arabia Inform, says Diggs.
In line with Taya IT’s mission to “bring Middle Eastern and the Western cultures closer together,” Yahki.com has both English and Arabic language interfaces, with stories in English and Arabic displayed together on the opening and explore pages. Tawakkol believes the website, particularly in light of the Arab revolutions, will have a wide appeal among the professional class in Western countries.
Most of the written content is brief, also making it ideal for a quick translation using online tools such as Google Translate until the website eventually gets its own translation tool.
Tawakkol sees linguistic diversity as the internet’s future. Despite the homogenizing effect globalization often produces, a healthy global economy requires cross-cultural communication and robust competition that extends to languages and cultures as well.
“Really people here have some brilliant ideas, brilliant insights,” he says, “and when they get properly communicating with others, with other cultures, they benefit and they benefit the others.” bt
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