Egypt Yellow Pages Ecosystem

August 28, 2011 1 Comment

There is no question that local search is now one of the core services of many web and mobile applications offered today. Think about the big market players such as Google and Facebook, both of them offer “places”. Social media check-in apps such as Foursquare, verticals like hotel review sites (Tripadvisor),  restaurant reviews sites, food delivery sites, map providers such as Navteq, or even directory assistance services offered by mobile operators, all their services are based on a venue database. If they don’t get it right there is very little point in offering their services.

Think about the effort and cost needed to maintain your own database. Thousands of businesses open, close, or relocate every month. This is the opportunity where what is offered by Yellow Pages is exactly the need of all these applications and services.

Egypt Yellow Pages is no exception, the integration between Egypt Yellow Pages database and their partners is becoming a key strength for many of these applications making use of the most complete business database in Egypt covering over 220,000 listings and 170,000 map locations.

Here is the ECO-SYSTEM of Egypt Yellow Pages

Egypt Yellow Pages ECHO-SYSTEM

I’ll go through the details of each of these systems and partnerships in future posts.

Filed under Advertising, Egypt Yellow Pages, eMarketing, Maps, Mobile Yellow Pages Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Cairo Daily Deal Sites Comparison

August 6, 2011 9 Comments

Daily deal websites have been around in Cairo for about 6 months since February 2011, during this period the daily deal industry have evolved a lot from offering low quality deals that has lots of conditions and restrictions to much better quality daily deals that offer value to consumer…

As more and more people turn to social media sites, the idea is becoming more appealing to both the local businesses and the consumers, there are now 6 major deal sites in Egypt basically covering Cairo and trying to cover Alexandria as well but not so much success so far covering other Egyptian cities.

I’m writing reviews about all these 6 sites in order to help you know what to expect from each site, that said don’t go crazy with the deals thing and spend your money wisely!

Here is a list of daily deal websites in Cairo and my reviews about them:

Cobone - Best Deals, Great Savings in Cairo

Offerna.com DARE'n'DEAL - Together we win 

GoNabit - A Living Social Company  Dealwaty - Live it up for lesseDealo.me  

Cobone. Cobone is one of my favorite deal sites in Cairo, they are a good money saver as they bring places where i usually go,  so it’s not only about going and exploring new places but rather saving money on everyday places, i bought 2 deals so far one for Trianon Cafe and another one for Grey Lounge in New Cairo. Visit Cobone.com Here >>

Pros

  • Few limits and restrictions, usually deals are valid in all restaurant branches and on all menu items
  • Reputable website with good experience in several middle east countries
  • The offer 5% additional discount when you buy online with Master Card

Cons

  • Invite your friend and win 46 LE is a kind of hoax, i invited a friend before and he purchased but i never for the money, talking to the customer service, they mentioned that the deal value should be more than 46 LE in order to redeem that money but the deal was only for 30 LE. Didn’t like that…
  • The site could use little bit more work on bug fixing, displaying the right map location, importing contacts from email, …

Offerna. is the Egyptian daily deal site with a full local flavor, as the name suggests it means “our offers”.  Due to this reason Offerna is one of the easiest names to remember, as the same matter with other popular sites which has a local name such as Masrawy, YallaBina or FilGoal….

Offerna stared off the wrong foot, when they offered deal with good brand names but with so many restrictions that made the offer lose its value, for example they offered a meal in Abou El Sid with half price, however it was restricted to a certain branch, at certain weekdays and a certain dish! That said, it seems they got over this problem recently when (i got confused, it was darenadeal who made this bad abou el sid offer http://www.darendeal.com/deals/index/4-EGP-89-Instead-of-EGP-183-for-a-Delicious-Meal-of-Authentic-Oriental-Cuisine-for-Two-at-Abou-El-Sid-(Set-Menu-of-2-Salads,-an-Appetizer-and–Abou-El-Sid.mhtml) Offerna made recently a very successful Ramadan Iftar without any restrictions to days or branches, this offer sold 1,382 times! Visit Offerna.com here >>

Pros

  • Most deals are available at prices less than 50 LE
  • Deals are getting better over time

Cons

  • Some venues that offer the deals are not well known
  • Many deals discounts are 50% not more

Dare’n'deal. Darendeal is world class daily deal website, everyday literally you will see a new offer, sometimes two offers are released in the same day. So you will never get stuck with that Thai massage ad for one week on the site waiting for a new offer to be released. Although i have never personally bought a deal from there, you will find a few past deals with over 1,000 or 2,000 purchases like spend a day by the pool for 35 pounds. Visit Darendeal.com here >>

Pros

  • Highest number of deals in terms of quantity
  • The Arabic site is fun to use, it seems that they have specialized editors in Arabic section who write in the same language we speak, not the formal Arabic thing

Cons 

  • You can easily miss a deal if you don’t check the site on daily basis
  • Mostly restaurant deals, not much of  other lifestyle deals

GoNabit. Acquired by Living Social, you would expect the $ 1 billion daily deal giant to dominate the market in Egypt and kill the competition, well No. Unlike expected the website is poor in terms of deals and content, since the beginning of Ramadan i have seen tens of Iftar and Sohour deals on many websites… Guess what GoNabit have for us? Ice cream offer!! Visit gonabit.com here >>

Pros

  • Supported by the giant Living Social

Cons

  • Website and daily deals are below the quality you would expect from Living Social
  • You can’t browse the older deals

eDealo. With deals targeting class A, eDealo is trying to expand the daily deal business to other verticals such as travel, eDealo have launched the vacations sections with Trips inside Egypt including Sahel and Red Sea and outside trips as well. Visit www.edealo.me here >>

Pros

  • Penetrating new verticals such as travel and vacations

Cons

  • Past deals are not listed
  • New deals are not as frequent as other deal sites

Dealwaty. The newest member of daily deal websites, just launched about 2 weeks ago, so it is early to judge the site now. The site now probably started the same way as other deal sites but with the advantage that people know learned the concept in Egypt. Visit dealwaty.com here >>

Pros

  • Upcoming deals is a good idea to present some teasers for the new deal

Cons

  • The past deals don’t seem to do very well, yet it’s early to judge
Updated:
One more site was suggested by members
el7a2.net. Another local daily deal website with the name “Catch it”, so they tell you go and catch it before it expires, the slogan says “Life isn’t cheap…but it comes with discounts” and that’s very true. The website in general looks pretty neat, seems that they had in the past a good deal with Apple tradline that gives you a 1,000 LE voucher at half price to buy apple products, awesome! Probably they need to focus more on Marketing the website and increasing their “Likes” on Facebook to reach few tens of thousands to be more popular.Visit www.el7a2.net here >>

Pros

  • Live online support

Cons

  • Comes in English only – no Arabic

I’m sure more to come soon!

Updated (17/8/2011):

Haladeals. The new Cairo based daily deals site has not started yet its marketing campaign, with less than 2k likes on facebook as compared to 160k likes in other giant sites, you can assume that the message is not reaching the audience. That said the site looks neat and have a few but very nice deals in cool restaurants and cafes specially in Maadi area. This website could make it to the top with the right marketing efforts, now offering iPad 2 as gifts in a competition. Visit haladeal.com here >>

Pros

  • Good quality deals in very nice places
  • Bilingual support

Cons

  • Needs more marketing efforts to spread the word. Also makes you think, are these too many players in the market now, or there is still space for more?

Updated (11/04/2011):

Offeratak. Egypt Yellow Pages have just joined the daily deals and group buying sites business by launching its daily deals aggregator Offeratak.com. Offeratak is a patent pending daily deals aggregator that collects deals from Cobone, Offerna and Dare’n'Deal. Visit Offeratak.com here >>

Also read this nice comparison to the popularity of daily deal sites in Cairo

Learn more about Offeratak by visiting Offeratak blog

Filed under Daily Deals, Fun Stuff Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Top 10 Myths That Egyptians Believe

May 21, 2011 2 Comments

There is a set of beliefs that we were raised on, the idea was usually thrown on our way by our parents and it was heavily supported and enforced by our friends, colleagues, relatives and the society in general…

Although time passes one year after another, we gain new experiences in life, it seems that we will never get rid of these ideas but my only hope is that we stop passing them to the newer generations at least not to spread the infection :)

Myth #10: Turn off your car headlights

Myth #10: Turn off your car headlights

Here is my list:

Tip #10: Turn off your car head lights

When there is lighting in the street, there is no need to turn on your head lights, you should switch them off and save your car battery, turning on the lights is bad for your car battery.

Tip #9:  A/C are made to turn them on 16 degrees / full fan

Summer is hot, to overcome the hotness, when you turn on the A/C make sure it is 16 degrees, to have a quick effect, you can leave it like this or you can witch it to 18 degree after a while… Make sure you have a blanket and a jacket to use… of course if you are a tough guy you won’t need the jacket.

Tip #8:  When a car comes in the opposite direction turn off your head lights

Driving is “Art, Morals, and Consideration”, when you see a car coming in the opposite direction switch off your lights, if the other driver doesn’t respond by doing the same abiding to this protocol , give him a warning sign by flashing your strong lights 3 to 4 times, if no response is seen, you are allowed to punish the driver by turning on your head lights again

Tip #7:  Take off your socks before sleeping, to save your eyes

If you sleep with a socks, your eyes will hurt you next day.

Tip #6:  When you’re sick drink lots of liquids

Although this is a true medical fact, why does we get it from everyone we see when we have a cold? is it to show compassion? Not sure about you but I would accept something like “get well soon”…

Tip #5: Gym advice, you are doing this exercise in the wrong way

Probably you’ve been going to gym for many years, but just try changing your gym, do the same excise in front of the new trainer or the guy that loves to give advices to everyone because he a has a 150 KG muscles body…. They will tell you that you’re doing it in a wrong way.

Tip #4: Turning on you’re lights before it’s completely dark (15 minutes to dawn for example) is a disgrace 

Again this is my favorite thing, people will warn you, in order to save your battery, they will signal with their hands, talk / shout to you, and/or try to chase you in order to warn you that the most valuable thing you have in your life – the car battery – is in risk.

Tip #3: El fouta el zefra (a piece of cloth wet with gas ) will just clean your car in seconds.

if you don’t know it melts you car paint slowly so it becomes blurry and loses its shine after a while.

Tip #2: Breakfast (Optional) 12-1 PM, Lunch 4-6 PM, Dinner (Mandatory) 10-2 AM

This is a pretty good advice to gain weight as fast as you can.

Tip #1: It is okay to smoke hash but it is haram to drink alcohol

Seriously, some people genuinely believe about this…

Filed under Fun Stuff, Weird Stuff

Egypt Yellow Pages App Released on BlackBerry App World

May 19, 2011 Leave a comment

One month after the launch of BlackBerry App World in Egypt, Egypt Yellow Pages have released the BB App on the App World. This is one of the first BlackBerry applications (perhaps the first one) that are submitted from Egypt. This application launch was a developed by a brilliant new Egyptian startup called Apptitude.

What makes our BlackBerry application unique is not only being one of the first Egyptian publishers to join the App World, it has also been developed based on the community demand on different social networking sites especially Twitter… Our twitter friends joined out application beta testing program and provided us with very useful feedback and many additional features to add. Also their ongoing support helps us to add more features and make the application better….

A big thank you to our list of honor beta testers:

Mostafa khaled Beige

Mahmoud Ahmed

Mahmoud Abdel Aziz

Ramy Temraz

Bassem Osoris

Gamal Omar

Abdou Omar

Islam Badr

Mohammad Mokhtar Eltrissi

You can download Egypt Yellow Pages BB App from App World here.

Filed under BlackBerry, Egypt Yellow Pages, Mobile Yellow Pages, New Technologies, Yellow Pages Tagged with , ,

BlackBerry App World now in Egypt

April 12, 2011 2 Comments

BlackBerry App World

BlackBerry App World

After waiting for it for a really long time, it has been confirmed today that BlackBerry App World is now available in Egypt. Although no official published news by RIM confirms this. Many users from Egypt have reported that they were able to access AppWorld and download application from it.

Many people wonder why did it take all this time to launch the store in Egypt. RIM has responded to this question saying that they do not launch the App World in a country unless they have signed an agreement with all the mobile operators to avail it for the users. Perhaps that could be the reason of the delay.

Egypt Yellow Pages BlackBerry App

Egypt Yellow Pages BlackBerry Application

The launch of BB App World in Egypt must be good news for users, developers and application vendors. Distribution of BlackBerry apps is not a simple task specially with all the device and OS specific features available, which makes it harder for the application vendors to do the correct device and OS detection and avail the correct version of the application to the correct device and the appropriate OS version.

As a Yellow Pages publisher, we are very delighted about availing the Black Berry App World in Egypt which will enable us to distribute and deliver efficiently our free local search application for Egypt. Currently, you can download Egypt Yellow Pages BlackBerry application from here. It is available for Curve, Bold and Torch models. There are 2 versions of the application, one supports OS 4.6 and another one supports version 5.0 or higher which has more features and functionalities embedded.

Filed under BlackBerry, Egypt Yellow Pages, Fun Stuff, Mobile Yellow Pages, New Technologies, Yellow Pages Tagged with , ,

Turkey Yellow Pages is now 3 years old

April 6, 2011 2 Comments

www.yellow.com.tr is now 3 years old. It was great to see the small baby growing until it became the largest business database in Turkey with more than 650,000 listings and about 3 million monthly visits….

It was fun to be here in Istanbul and have the chance to celebrate with TYP team. Way to go Turkey Yellow Pages!

Yellow.com.tr 3 yaşında!

 

Turkey Yellow Pages

Turkey Yellow Pages 3rd anniversary

Filed under Fun Stuff, Yellow Pages Tagged with

6.5 Million Egyptians on Facebook

March 17, 2011 2 Comments

I keep hearing lots of numbers of Facebook users statistics in Egypt, the total number as of today (17 March, 2011) is

6,393,080 people

How did i know these stats? There is a very simple trick to know this number yourself… Go to the advertising link at the bottom of the FB page, click on create ad button, then you will get a page at which you can specify your targeting options…

Make sure to select the date Any-to-Any and the country Egypt, which should be selected by default if you live there. Wait for a few seconds and then you will see on the right side of the page the up to date total number of Facebook users in Egypt. The total number of users is now:

Facebook users in Egypt in March 2011

Filed under Advertising, Analytics & Statistics, eMarketing, Fun Stuff, Social Media Tagged with , , ,

Sayed Darwish on Google Homepage

March 16, 2011 Leave a comment

I love this one from Google, they have Sayed Darwish image on www.google.com.eg in the memory of his birth … for those who don’t know a lot about him, Sayed Darwish is the one who composed Egyptian national anthem, using modified words of Mostafa Kamel

Below is Google Logo featuring Sayed Darwish

Filed under Fun Stuff, Google Tagged with ,

Android on fire, Windows Phone 7 under fire!

March 8, 2011 Leave a comment

Stephen Elop Nokia’s CEO is probably one of the most unlucky guys today, he probably choose the worst time ever to kill the symbianOS and replace it with Microsoft Windows Phone 7, a choice that many people criticized and said it would rather be much better for Nokia to partner with Google and use Android.

comScore has announced that Android, the 2 years old platform, is now the most popular operating system on smart phones in the US, having just surpassed BlackBerry, iPhone and Windows Phone 7 (WP7),  having now a market share of 31.2%.

The irony here for Nokia  is not just the lost opportunity to catch up the leading mobile operating system but also the loss  of market shares of the new partner Microsoft which has down to only 8%. This must be very frustrating for Microsoft, they launched their new WP7 last October aiming at competing Android and iPhone, what you typically expect is that their market share would grow due to this new product or at least stabilize but not fall down.

Smart Phone Market Share, Jan 2011

Smart Phone Market Share, Jan 2011

 

A good question to ask here, was Stephen Elop’s choice of Microsoft as a partner influenced by being an ex Microsoft executive or by believing so much in Microsoft products? Somebody has to answer this.

Smart Phone market share numbers in January 2011
Smart Phone market share numbers in January 2011

 

Nokia must now share Microsoft’s frustration, apple must be happy that they didn’t loose any ground against Google’s Android but rather Android took from the market shares of the other market players especially BlackBerry…

I wonder if the same market dominance will be possessed by Android on other markets worldwide.

Filed under Analytics & Statistics, BlackBerry, Google, iPhone, Microsoft, New Technologies Tagged with , , , , , ,

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