Egypt Yellow Pages Partners Day

January 19, 2011 Leave a comment

I’m a little late to talk about this one, but last Sunday, January 16th 2011, was Egypt Yellow Pages first event for 2011, the best thing we thought we would do this year with, is to honor our partners and give them a big thank you for being so awesome through 2010… Our event title is Enhancing Local Search And Location-Based Services With Key Strategic Partnerships…

Hosted in the Four Seasons Nile Plaza in garden city, more than 40 communications media specialists, editors and journalists covered the event that was attended by Egypt Yellow Pages strategic partners: Ministry of state of administrative development – e-Government, Nokia/Navteq, Al Masry Al Youm and Akhbarak.net

The event started with the keynote from Marc Lambert, managing director of Egypt Yellow Pages. The speech was so insightful, Marc explained how our strategic partners will help us enhance the local search services on more platforms by making it available through our partners sites and in the same time focusing on offering location based services which is the future of the local search…

 

Marc Lambert giving his keynote in the event

Marc Lambert giving his keynote in the event

I had the opportunity then to present some figures and insights about our achievements in 2010, which ended up with us having more than 175,000 business listing in our database out of which 115,000 are geocoded. At the time i am writing this blog post, we have about 180,000 listings and approaching 120,000 geocoded listings… 2010 was also a year that witnesses tripling our website traffic from 400,000 visits per month to over 1.2 million visits, a truly new milestone for local search in Egypt.

 

 

Mohamed Salah, Director Digital Media, Egypt Yellow Pages presentation about insights and search trends in Egypt for 2010

Mohamed Salah, Director Digital Media, Egypt Yellow Pages presentation about insights and search trends in Egypt for 2010

Our partners were the ones who presented our strategic partnership details to the media, the following were representatives of  our partners:

Mathia Nalappan, General Manager – North Africa, Nokia
Phil McKinnon, Head Of Marketing – North Africa, Nokia
Mohamed Abd El-Jalil, Head Of Solutions Sales – North Africa, Nokia
Sahar Afia, Project Manager – Government Services Development Program, Ministry Of State For Administrative Development
Kismet EL-Sayed, Shareholder / Business Development Director, Al-Masry Al-Youm
Osman Ahmed Osman, Founder, Akhbarak.Net

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Filed under Advertising, Egypt Yellow Pages, eMarketing, Mobile Yellow Pages, New Technologies, Yellow Pages Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Egypt Yellow Pages 2010 Zeitgeist

January 9, 2011 3 Comments

2010 was a year characterized as being the most successful year in the history of Egypt Yellow Pages. I am pleased to announce to you today the local search trends from Egypt’s number one local search site www.yellow.com.eg (if you want to see 2009 search trends click here)

One very interesting trend to start with is that the number of Arabic search queries super passed the English search queries for the first time on Egypt Yellow Pages. Arabic is now taking the lead with 55% of the search queries while English queries presents 45% of the total search.

Here are the top 10 searches for 2010:

  1. Restaurant
  2. Hotel
  3. Company
  4. Pharmacy
  5. Bank
  6. Real Estate
  7. Advertising
  8. Furniture
  9. School
  10. Factory

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Filed under Analytics & Statistics, Egypt Yellow Pages, Yellow Pages Tagged with , , , , ,

life-long donations to Palestinian refugees

December 16, 2010 Leave a comment

Got the below email from Unrwa, you can make a donation with your credit card for the Palestinian refugees, and then they will send you a survey, when you fill it, they will honor you by planting an olive tree in Palestine, they will name it too with your name

Dear MOHAMED,

We are excited to share with you the good news about the olive tree planting you supported thanks to you and many more of our fantastic donors, the village of Burin has received 351 olive trees.

This new forest will change not only Burin’s landscape, but also the lives of this Palestinian community. Please accept our heartfelt thanks for this life-long donation.

We have 351 olive trees ready. What’s next?

While the olive trees are being pampered at a nursery, we are getting the terrain ready. The planting is scheduled for mid-January 2011. The very same day we plant the trees you will receive photos from us, along with a certificate.

On behalf of the Palestinian refugees living in difficult conditions in the village of Burin and the local workers hired to plant the olive tree you donated, thank you!

Chris Gunness
UNRWA spokesperson

Filed under Egypt Yellow Pages

Driving Directions on Bawaba

November 12, 2010 Leave a comment

Now the driving directions are available on government maps service of Bawaba, it’s very easy and straight forward, once you find the government service provider that you want, you can specify your location and see the nearest route to this service provider.

You can try this out at http://egypt.gov.eg available also bilingual

This service is developed and managed by Egypt Yellow Pages. Using the geocoded content for Government service providers from the Yellow Pages database.

See the video below for a step-by-step walk through

 

Filed under Egypt Yellow Pages, Fun Stuff Tagged with , , ,

Dr. Ahmed Darwish Signs an Agreement with Egypt Yellow Pages

August 5, 2010 Leave a comment

Egypt Yellow Pages has finally signed the agreement with Dr. Ahmed Darwish – Minister of Administrative Development in a big event in the ministry head quarters. The Cermony was followed by a press conference which was attended by more than 50 journalist and TV reports covering the event.

This agreement empowers Bawaba (Egypt EGov Portal) with Maps that covers different governmental service providers in Egypt, which makes it easier to reach the service provider you want in Egypt without any hassles.

The service can be accessed from http://www.egypt.gov.eg or directly from http://www.egypt.gov.eg/services/LoadxtrServices.aspx?section=citizens&PgURL=73753

Below is the coverage by Mona El Shazly in the popular talk show “Al Ashera Masa’a” on Dream TV.

Event photos

Minister Dr. Ahmed Darwish giving a speech about the partnership agreement
Minister Dr. Ahmed Darwish giving a speech about the partnership agreement

Marc Lambert - Managing Director of Yellow Pages sign the agreement with Dr. Ahmed Samir
Marc Lambert – Managing Director of Yellow Pages sign the agreement with Dr. Ahmed Samir – Deputy of the Minister. At the back Dr. Ahmed Darwish and Eng. Hossam Ragheb witness signing the agreement

After signing the agreement

From left to right: Dr. Darwish, Marc Lambert, Hossam Ragheb and Dr. Ahmed Samir

From left to right: Dr. Darwish, Marc Lambert, Hossam Ragheb and Dr. Ahmed Samir

Marc Lambert, Loula Zaklama, Nemine Seif, Mohamed Salah, Taher Ali, Aliaa Fathy

Filed under Egypt Yellow Pages, Yellow Pages

The Best Optimizer Is Between Your Ears

May 20, 2010 Leave a comment

I still remember The Art of Assembly book by Randall Hyde that I read during college and his qoute

The Best Optimizer is Between Your Ears

The idea simply was revolving about the fact that if you focus too much on details and try to keep optimizing something that works really slow by just trying to get the assembly code more efficient or by using higher processing power, then you are just wasting your time… 20% or 30% performance improvement in an application that runs in 40 or 50 seconds isn’t really that much… What you should be looking at is a totally novel solution.

Well he was right, but this time the optimizer was not between my ears, it was between the ears of the people who developed the Sphinx Full Text Search Engine… Using Sphinx our team was able to make our ypanalytics tool much faster, we use this tool to analyse the user search trends and usage of Yellow Pages sites…

The tool now became 60 times faster! a mysql query that took 2 minutes to execute using an optimized mysql query now takes 2 seconds to execute using sphinx! Perhaps it is worth mentioning that the query originally took perhaps 4 or 5 minutes to execute before query optimization but still normal optimization is not enough by any means.. you just need a new solution to solve a new problem, solutions which you already know and have dealt with might not be sufficient any more…

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

Egypt Yellow Pages becomes the official data provider for e-government

April 23, 2010 2 Comments


In a huge step that will shape the Egyptian information community, the e-Government has chosen Egypt Yellow Pages to be the official partner who will provide many service to the government portal including providing information of different government  entities contact information and map locations.This is a result of the  cooperation agreement Yellow Pages signed with the Ministry of State for Administrative Development under the patronage of Prof. Dr. Ahmed Darwish, Minister of Administrative Development.

With more than 33 ministries in Egypt, it was almost impossible to get a phone number of a governmental office or organization, even if you go to the website of that ministries most probably you would find the information you are looking for and if you did it will be likely outdated. Now, not only this contact information will be available and up to date, but also maps will be displayed showing their locations and you can filter by city and area to select the one that is nearest to you.

e-government new maps serivice
e-government new maps

service

Egypt Yellow Pages have been known very well from both consumers and businesses in Egypt as the local search provider that provides the information about any business in Egypt with a database that is growing each day to reach now more than 140,000 listings and increasing. Now having Yellow Pages create and update the full  content for the Egyptian government  is an important milestone in the history of the company, and from my opinion and without exaggeration it is an important milestone in the history of Egypt as it strengthen the link between the citizens and the government, something the government is trying to achieve but with little success so far.

The cooperation agreement also involved linking the new mapping service to applications and forms currently available in the portal. The service is currently available for over 72 services provided by the following authorities: Real Estate and Documentation Authority, the Egyptian Electricity Authority, Directorates of Education and Directorates of Health Affairs, with more government authorities to be added. You can access the government maps section by clicking here.


Filed under Egypt Yellow Pages, Maps, New Technologies, Yellow Pages Tagged with , ,

Egypt Yellow Pages Partnership with Otlob.com

March 16, 2010 1 Comment

Last week we hosted a press conference at our premises in Maadi to announce to the media the launch of the strategic partnership between Egypt Yellow Pages and Otlob.com the online food delivery website in Egypt owned by LINKdotNET. More than 40 reporters, journalists, PR,  IT Specialists attended the conference that introduced the new food delivery service on Yellow.com.eg

Click here to try out the new food delivery service in more than 380 restaurants

Here is the video report of the event:

Here are some event photos:

Yellow Pages & Otlob.com Partnership

From left to right Mohamed Salah, Marc Lambert, Ahmed Eraqi and Walid El Saadany

Yellow Pages & Otlob.com Press Conference

Yellow Pages & Otlob.com Press Conference

Reporters at the event

Reporters at the event

Many reporters, journalists and IT Specialists attended the press conference

Many reporters, journalists and IT Specialists attended the press conference

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

Yellow Pages Maps vs Google Maps

January 23, 2010 Leave a comment

One questions i get a lot about yellow.com.eg maps is what maps are you using? People see the Google map on our website so they think we are using Google maps data. This is not correct. 

What we are using is google maps API for the GUI. However, the data is compiled by us, what we do is geocoding our database. i.e. specifying the exact latitude and longitude for each listing we have. This sounds like a tough job, actually it is but we are performing very well in doing it. 

I guess it’s logical to ask why we are doing all this effort. The answer can be found if you visit Google Maps and try to find a restaurant in Egypt and if you visit Egypt Yellow Pages website 

On Google maps searching for La Bodega will produce 7 or 8 results, some of them might be correct and some are not. This is because the data source is the user generated content, which is not correct in many cases. 

La Bodega on Google Maps

La Bodega on Google Maps

on Yellow.com.eg when you search for La Bodega, you get one and only one map location, the map location is accurate and is geocoded by our local search team. If we are not sure about a map location, then we do not enter it, if you see a map location online this means the location is accurate. 

La Bodega on Yellow.com.eg

La Bodega on Yellow.com.eg

click here to see La Bodega restaurant profile page 

The nice thing about having our geocoded database is not only the accuracy, but also the flexibility of using any maps for the GUI, we have tried both Google maps and Microsoft virtual earth (now known as Bing maps), Google maps has proven so far superior in Egypt.

Filed under Egypt Yellow Pages, Google, Maps Tagged with , , , , , , ,

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