I’m not going to say anything about the incident…. but if you were at ArabNet or following tweets, you’ll probably get the joke ;)

Foo Me from Lebanon: Revenue streams are targeted ads, service subscriptions, and content submission (classified ads a la Facebook)

Iltaqi: Tabbing the social stream, capturing status updates to help organize events. My biggest problem is the name. What’s with old-school name for Arabic websites? Why hasn’t the worldwide trend of funky names caught up? Iltaqi? YallaNetla3 sounds better to me :P

TasmeenMe: The woman, Noura Al-Fadel, is one of the first females to speak. I’ve already reviewed TasmeemMe earlier. The idea is great, creatives definitely need such an idea, but the website needs tons of functionality work and a larger client base. I like the potential though. I liked the chic though, she’s confident in a very understated way, and I love her glasses.

Jawaker: Online cards game with a social component. Brilliant localization.

Wasafati.com: An online community that revolves around recipes, nutrition, and health. It is built on .Net. Booo.

Rifflex: From what I understand, it’s kinda like Friendfeed. First time I hear Web 3.0 today. People liked him. Weird disco lights shining in the background.

BaytBayt.com: Real estate site.

Qaym: Charismatic guy. Second Gulf-person in both start-up demos and ideathon. Okay, at least I think he’s Khaleeji from the outfit. Not enough Gulf-people at ArabNet… I love the two guys wearing dressy tobes like you see on TV in the front row. Totally trippy.
It’s basically social reviews. Not a ground breaking idea, but we don’t have a good one for the Arab world, so there’s potential.
Qaym.com/api is out, that’s cool. I like.

Shawweet.com: Soccer social network for the Arab world. Brilliant idea. I think the market will love it. The name is funky but man spelling it is a disaster. I can think of 12 different variations.

Snap2Shop: Fellow Tweep @iHijazi presenting his photo printing website. Great idea, I have no idea why I haven’t used it yet! :)

After an ironically bad start that had old-media traditional individuals “blah blah” about how the “Internet will change the world” (unavoidable in the Arab world, I suppose), the actual conference kicked off with the first panel, revolving around “The Ecosystem of Entrepreneurship.”

The panelists are:
1. Rashid Al-Ballala, CEO of National Net Ventures
2. Rabea Ataya, CEO of Bayt.com
3. Maher Kaddoura, representative of Start Alliance
4. Samih Toukan, founder of Maktoob.com and CEO of Jabbar Group

I’m missing in the list Habib Haddad of Yamli, who was supposed to be on this panel, but I didn’t spot him today.

Three out of our four panelists are business people. Obviously, Samih Toukan is too, but his background is engineering, which makes him a little more “techie” than the rest. This is interesting as a lot of the international web-startups started out in garages by students and geeks, rather than business people.

The panel started with this question:
“If I’m an investor, what should I set up?”
Here are snippets of the answers, which took off a turn around the best way to deal with starting a company.

Samih Touqan: “Right time to start a venture because of the increasing interest of international and regional entities.”
Rabea Ataya: “Set up offices and deal with your communities, you will sustain a more long-term advantage than something purely virtual. A purely virtual business can be attacked from anywhere in the world.”
Maher Kaddoura: “Arabic content is the deal. The vast majority of Arabs do not speak English. Maktoob, the vast majority of their customers are from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, we need to create content for the masses, not the sophisticated English-speaking Arab nationals.”

“What about partnerships?”
Rabea Ataya: “Marriage is easier to get out of than parternships.”
Maher Kaddoura: “Is there a magic number? Fundementally about what resources and skills you need to make the project operate.”

“Mentoring rather than geeking it out” :)
Maher Kaddoura: “Young People focus on product itself, perfecting it, and spending really way too much time on the product. You need a mentor, and to not reinvent the wheel, packaged knowledge around that you can access. Try to assemble as much as you can, don’t get your ego in the middle.”

“Investors and Being Business-Minded”
Samih Touqan: “Local investors are still in investing in real-estate, and we have to get investors to invest at least 1% of their billions of dollars on technology to create more content, more jobs, and more innovation.”
Rabea Ataya: “Respect for trade rather than institionalizing. A hundred people who can build long-term instuitions. If you are actually trying to be good and building something useful. I’d like to see a lot more instituitions being built.”
Rabea Ataya: “Something that our ancestors had was the entrepreneurial, they used be farmers, have small businesses, and we are missing that.”

Here’s where you follow up live on what’s happening at ArabNet :)

ArabNet early in the morning :)

My favorite thing about Twitter is that you can capture excitement in a way that you could never do before Twitter.

An added plus for an event like ArabNet is that Twitter is the most comfortable place for us geeks to get excited. You can get live-time updates on the the excitement on Twitter by following the following hashtag: #ArabNetME

I have been researching different ways for live-blogging on Wordpress these past few days and I thought I’d share them here, in case anyone is wondering.

Most of my research revolved around localized Wordpress plugins and attempting to blog via Google Wave. Most of the Wordpress live-blogging plugins I tried were completely crap. They didn’t give me enough control, and were very buggy. Embedding a Wave for live-blogging seems to have a little more potential, but it’s still not usable. The most ambitious solution for that, in my opinion, is Wavr, but it’s also really buggy and took me forever to get to work. My main problem with live-blogging using Google Wave though is that only users with a Wave account can view the Wave. Nope, that won’t work.

There also various ways of displaying a Twitter live-stream in a blog as a “live-blog”, but that doesn’t make sense.

In the end, I decided that the best method for live-blogging on Wordpress is by using “Scribble Live“. There are many similar live-blogging platforms, but this one is my favorite because it’s very easy to customize and has a lot of options that make live-blogging an event actually fun.

I love the Twitter integration of Scribble Live; you can pull tweets from certain Twitter profiles or by following a keyword. It supports audio, video, and images, multi-bloggers, and commenting. Pretty nifty if you ask me…

Here’s the one I will be using for ArabNet, you can check try it out now. Add your avatar on their website. If you are attending the event and interested in live-blogging here or adding your Twitter account, let me know as well.