Arab-based startups at Tech-world popular blogs
I was wondering why I keep reading posts about startups from everywhere in the world at the most popular tech/web blogs, but none come to mention Arab ones. So I did a search on the following keywords in TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb and Mashable:
Arab, Arab startups, Middle East, arabia, Maktoob, d1g, yamli, ikbis, watwet, and of course my own startup questler.
and here are the results:
| TechCrunch | ReadWriteWeb | Mashable | |
| Arab | 10 Results, 8 with “arab” in “comparable”, 1 with “arab” in “sharable” and one about censorship!!! | 57 Results: 1 about Queen Rania YouTube Channel 1 About innvovation in UAE 1 About EgyptianYouTube Channel 7 with “comparable” so I only browsed the titles of rest! |
3 Results, one with Ikbis mentioned! One mentiones flickr being bloced in UAE and the third one has no mention of the word arab anyway. |
| Arab Startups | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Middle East | 6 Results, talking about different web companies targeting the middle east, one about Middle East Oil and one about the Internet cables! | 2 posts about World wide Internet Penetration rates | Just too many to go through! Sorry! |
| Arabia | 5 Results, all mentioning Saudi Arabia | 0 | 1 Result mentioning Saudi Arabia |
| Maktoob | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| d1g | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| ikbis | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| watwet | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| yamli | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| questler | 0 | 0 | 0 |
In comparison, there was a long post on ReadWriteWeb the other day about German twitter clones as a phenomenon. Korean startups, Canadian ones, China of course, Philippines, Spain, Portuguese.
So I tell you, cloning or lack of real innovation is definitely NOT the problem here, So is it because of:
- That the words “Arab” and “Middle East” are synonymous with Internet censorship?
- No interest?
- Not many startups to make the news?
- Bad marketing?
- Worse of all, low self worth, that many Arabs suffer, thinking that they won’t make it big anyway so they don’t contact these people?