Category: Startups

AMWAJ (“waves” in English) is an international sustainability and entrepreneurship forum organized by PepsiCo and Revolve Media focused on offering socially innovative ideas, sharing best practices and finding practical solutions to build inclusive societies for a sustainable future in the MENA region.

PepsiCo Social Impact Competition is a contest for MENA-based social startups organized by PepsiCo MENA Region, in partnership with Wamda, to strengthen the community of social entrepreneurs across the region and to spread awareness around social entrepreneurship in the Arab world.

During the Gala Dinner, Napata announced as the winner of PepsiCo Social Impact Competition and $10K.

Napata is social startup based in Aswan in upper Egypt, helping to recycle palm waste by turning it into eco-friendly products.

Let’s look at all the 10 finalists:

Junkbot:

Junkbot is a DIY robotic kit that enables everyone to build robots using unwanted junk like plastic cups, old CDs, used water bottles etc.

STP:

SEP hand-embroidered accessories blend premium craftsmanship with style. The 800 artists who embroider the unique SEP pieces are refugees.

Nafham:

Nafham is a free K-12 online education platform provides 5-20 min. video lessons covering Egyptian, Saudi, Algerian, Syrian and Kuwaiti curricula for all students starting from primary 1st to Secondary 3rd.

BuildPalestine:

Build Palestine is a donation-based crowdfunding platform that aims to empower grassroots problem solving.

Not Guilty:

Not Guilty is an NGO that is holding a nationwide campaign aimed at abolishing sexual harassment and sexual abuse through many venues: media, education, Training of Trainers (TOT), and counseling. We believe that prevention is better than treatment.

Bilforon:

Bilforon is a mobile application for ordering home-cooked food from local and refugee women who make it and sell it from their houses.

Pathfinder:

Pathfinder operates in the Health “Special Needs” Sector, where we aim to help as many visually challenged people as possible, using tech.

Shamsina:

Shamsina innovates in sustainable energy solutions to serve those most in need, creating local know-how, jobs, and demand along the way.

Green ALAFCO:

Green ALAFCO mission statement is the recycling of the aluminum UBC (Used Beverage Cans), with the help of the waste pickers network.

On the personal level, I would love to thank PepciCo and Revolve for supporting the social entrepreneurs around the region.

Congratulations Nabata and keep it up!

Egypt-based digital agency Digitree has kicked-off its very own social media analytics tool “Hype Insights”. The tool enables brands, agencies, and freelancers to measure their managed social media assets’ performances in a super user-friendly way, at a very competitive and affordable price.

Social media analytics are becoming more and more crucial for businesses. The importance to measure all social media metrics increases and major social media platforms continues to make changes on the way you profiling audiences, and so it increases the importance to measure all social media activities which is critical to your success.

On other note – open-ended questions:

• What is the impact of social media?
• Can I use social media data in developing a new product?
• Is social media beneficial to the marketing function only? What about other functions such as HR/Finance/Operations/R&D.
• Can I turn social media data into strategies?
• How data skills can affect other operations such as innovation activities?
• What kind of innovation does the data skills in genders?

Hype Insights will answer your questions 

Differentiation, Competitive Edges, Benefits why you need it? why you really want it?   

• Unlimited Social media channels statistics.
• Unlimited number of fans statistics.
• Very powerful dashboard assist the subscriber to get his audience demographics through charts coming up from insights across the social media channels and online existence.
• Serving all kind of users (Freelancers, brands and Agencies).
• Set a comparison between the current month and the previous month to give you insights about media spending and the page content.

Hype helps you gain deeper insights by tracking every like, share, comment and individuals across all major brand profiles.

Stay tuned to our full guide and review on the tool soon. Meanwhile, you can gain access to Hype Insights social media analytics tool for two months free of charge. Try it now!

It is a cool surprise for anyone after discovering that the team behind recently smart electronic payment methods in Egypt, their eldest member is 25.

“Looking around, we find that cash holders, or cash collectors, are facing the risk of fraud, their money being stolen, or waiting long-time for collecting cash,” Alain El-Hajj, PayMob COO, 24, and Co-founder, said.

“We see that every merchant is having a problem in the payment methods, whether the know-how of collecting money, or problems facing delivery men themselves; cases are a lot,” he added.

Such innovative services are being used for performing payment transactions via a card or a mobile phone, paying on delivery, in store or for online shopping.

To dig deep in the journey behind our young geeks, how they are working hard to make a real change in the technology of payment in Egypt, El-Hajj, PayMob added that the team’s goal is to convert Egyptian cash payment to electronic one in order to facilitate payment among money senders and receivers in such long supply chain.

“Our main goal is to converting Egyptian society to a cash-less society, ” said El-Hajj enthusiastically.

According to El-Hajj, PayMob started operating in 2013, trying to grow and grow till it managed to provide a number of different and innovative services in payment technology.

The 15-member young team have grown after the three co-founders: Alain with his two university friends Mostafa Menessy, and Islam Shawky who were colleagues in the American University in Cairo (AUC), started to work on their own business.

Safe payment or collecting money is something critical for several segments in the society: ordinary citizens, merchants, cash on-delivery services, or online shopping.

Went through how Alain and his Co-founders enable users through technology, Mostafa Menessy, 23, PayMob CTO, say: “we provide both services for two main pillars of electronic payment operations: Acceptance and Issuance.”

For acceptance, a term refers to enabling a merchant to receive money electronically, PayMob provide online payment gateways which used by services to provide online credit card payment,  credit card payment-on delivery service, which is sending a delivery man with an electronic machine for collecting money via credit cards to empower clients to depend on credit cards in payment in case they are facing any trust issues or infrastructure limitations that wouldn’t allow them to use their credit card for online purchase.

In addition, Menessy noted that credit card payment-on delivery service is one of the first of its kind idea that will have a patent license for it, as our team considered the first one to bring such a kind of payment worldwide.

“Coming to issuance, we have a lot to provide such as building mobile wallets, which means having a virtual wallet, but this is time through mobile operators, as well as through your bank. The service helps customers in doing cash-in, cash-out, and money transfers.

” Users can send and receive money through their mobiles by entering certain codes; it is a service currently used by all mobile operators in Egypt. One of our new technologies after we found that the users can only send and receive only if they are in the same network, is changing this by partnering with global and local payment networks to let it be open to receive and send among all users,” he added.

Have a general look on the Egyptian Fintech ecosystem, local experts find that regulators are still overly concerned. Regulators have to look at international standards applied in security, mobiles and operations and set a guideline and a framework for investors to choose from. Of course a clear framework will help innovate faster.

The Central Bank of Egypt (CBE), the body that is monitoring all financial transaction in Egypt, said that the country is in a dire need to be a cash-less society, welcoming more innovative providers for more electronic payment services.

According to local experts in finance, cash issuance in Egypt is too costy as it absorbs from 0.5 to 1.5 per cent of the GDP.

According to Egypt Business Directory online portal, most of online transactions carried out by Egyptians falls in the categories of electronics, airline tickets and fashion.  About 75 per cent of users, in terms of  demographics of these transactions,  are in their 30s or less and half of them are located in Cairo.

In Egypt, only 7 per cent of the population is banked and only 7.6 million people have credit or debit cards. For e-commerce, 80 per cent relies on cash on delivery. Meanwhile, 7 per cent of the population is banked; only 7.6 million have credit and debit cards, despite the fact that the government-related institutions provided payrolls via banking accounts instead of cash.

However, the rate of credit card issuance is growing annually by more than 40 per cent, which indicates that cash dependency may decrease.

“PayMob’s team is currently processing millions of transactions and hundreds of millions of dollars per year, the company achieved a 75x growth rate in first two quarters of 2016 and plans to reach 200x before the end of the year,” according to the PayMobCEO, Islam Shawky. 25.

Shawky said that our challenge was to prove that technology innovation is not just coming from abroad, but as Egyptian innovators are able to solve many payment issues in Egypt and the region. “We envision a world where sending a payment is as easy as sending an SMS.”

“Now, we are proud to prove there are innovative applicable services we do bring to Egypt, hoping to penetrate more emerging markets around the middle east and Africa Those regions do have an appetite to new technologies that facilitate their everyday payments,” Shawky added.

Months ago, the young geeks have managed to secure a seed fund from A15, one of leading Venture Capital companies, as the later is strongly believing to achieve the collective vision of an advanced cashless society.

Nearly 2.6 million people dying annually in the United States, Entrepreneurs see an opportunity to innovate. A new U.S. tech-startup, MyTrustedWill, is hoping to capture and lead that sector.

MyTrustedWill, a platform allows you to keep your family and loved ones in touch with you, even after you pass away! By allowing users to pre-record phone calls, SMS, emails, videos, upload documents, make donations, and even send gifts!

The website allows users to decide, when, where and with whom their phone calls, gifts, and other digital assets will be delivered.

The founders of MyTrustedWill, Ebrahiem Shetewy and Ismail Habib, wanted to create a private and secure platform that allow users to stay in touch with their families and loved ones, even after passing away, with no third party human interaction at all and with direct delivering to the recipients’ mobile phones, landlines, emails or home addresses.

An early version of MyTrustedWill was introduced in October 2016, Users were invited to try the service, and in less than 13 days, more than 1.7k of accounts was created with more than 2.3k of confidential data and uploaded files.

MyTrustedWill includes two Artificial Intelligent (AI) systems that are designed to imitate the human capabilities of thinking and verifying, – they can auto-verify the users’ life status, and auto-confirm if they’re no longer alive by using several methods and techniques – ends with a manual human verifications!

Local Life Verifiers Network (LLVN), another significant feature that takes the verification process to another new level! The company seems to have invested in taking all the possible security measurements to ensure data privacy and encryption; the users’ data are encrypted by a military-level encryption, the same used by the United States Government.

The start-up has been self-financed until now but is now closing a seed round, said Ebrahiem Shetewy, a founder, and chief executive.

MyTrustedWill will be at RiseUp Summit in Cairo during December 9-11, 2016, Get more information about this interesting platform by visiting the company’s Website, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

I started my own business six years ago. Like most new entrepreneurs I had a great amount of enthusiasm but lack of practical experience. So what did I do? I started reading any book and article I could find on entrepreneurship.

I wanted to know what made Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg such amazing creative geniuses and leaders. I wanted to understand how Amazon and Google became the world’s most admired brands. I felt I could learn so much from these amazing personalities and brands.

As time went by and my business started to expand and grow I started wondering whether my management and leadership styles were truly effective. What would Steve Jobs have done if he ran my company? How could I make my company more Google like? What would Jeff Bezos do if he was our CEO? After all, these people are the creative geniuses of our time, right? They are the best in their league.

What does this have to do with the US elections, you might be asking yourself! A lot! A lot!

Let’s look at Donald and Hillary.

Hillary represents all the books that most of us read to get inspired! The nicely designed, sugar coated, just believe in yourself type of books. They are great books, don’t get me wrong but they do not really represent the truth. Yes, Steve Jobs was a creative genius but everyone that has ever worked with him would agree that he was not the nicest person in the world. It was his way or the highway. Quite different from the collaborative thinking that we are being told to implement in our companies. Also quite the opposite from the leadership styles that most books on entrepreneurship are promoting.

So, my question is, in today’s, obviously, very crazy world, does being nice, open minded, collaborative and emotionally intelligent really pay off?

If you look at Donald’s victory, the answer would be NO!

Yes, he is racist, yes he is ageist, anti-feminist, gay, Muslim and immigrant hating, self-loaded person but he has two things that, I think, all the great business leaders we admire had and still have- arrogance and ego! The two things that all of the fancy books we buy on daily basis say that we should not have if we want to become great leaders.

So what does this mean? Does it mean that your ego will bring you more success than being understanding and considerate of others? Does it mean that being arrogant is actually the way to make it in life?

Maybe yes, maybe not!

But the one thing that this election has definitely taught me is that there are no rules when it comes to making it big! No rules whatsoever!

Hillary was the picture perfect candidate but she lost! Donald was the arrogant prick that won! Very similar to the entrepreneurship world around us! The hipster guy working from an exotic beach is the perfect picture of entrepreneurship. But! But he is not the guy that will make it really big. It is the arrogant guy that eventually will start playing the corporate game and shove his arrogance in people’s faces that will truly win the entrepreneurship race.

So what do we do, do we change? Do we stop sugar coating reality and start presenting it the way it is? It seems that things are moving that way! More and more entrepreneurs are starting to get fed up of the “pink” interpretation of today’s business world and the whole just “believe in you” mentality. I just hope that arrogance and ego will not completely replace the two.

Finally, in a world obsessed with winning and “Wolf of Wall Street mentality” the US election showed that no matter the hard work, no matter the sacrifice, no matter the winning spirit, sometimes the answer will be NO and there will be times when your effort, no matter how big, will result in failure.

And maybe this is the greatest lesson of all. It is OK to fail. It is completely fine to admit that – ‘There have been a few times this past week when all I wanted to do is just to curl up with a good book or our dogs and never leave the house again.’

An Egyptian website, while I wasn’t even in Egypt, convinced me to buy online for the first time. The Giftery is what my credit card desires.

So before we go into the details, let’s just set one fact straight: This is not a sponsored post 🙂 I have received nothing from this website; although if I do receive something after this, I absolutely will not turn it down. Just saying.

I actually had a fallout with them because they mishandled an order and they didn’t deal quite well with it. Ups and downs to everything.

Let me start by giving you a brief background about me. I’m not very keen on online shopping. I’d say annually, I have an average of 2 transactions. I don’t like shopping online unless it is absolutely necessary. Plus, the 2 transactions I made last year for example, were very basic you-can’t-get-this-wrong type of purchases: a USB Flash Drive and a mobile cover.

I got to know about a great website, called the The Giftery in 2012. It was my friend’s birthday in Egypt and I was all the way across the globe in the US. I really wanted to buy her something, and to avoid asking for favours from anybody, I stayed up late on Google, searching frantically for ideas on what I can do. Behold, when I found the giftery.com because I needed it, would it convince me that from now on, I would complete 2 online transactions for myself, and another 599 gifting other people! Shopping for other people is a need, whether it is a special someone’s birthday, an anniversary, a baby shower etc. Online shopping for yourself on the other hand, has a wider spectrum: ranging from I really need this to this might look cool to find in my wardrobe (a want).  My theory is that online gift shopping has a more inelastic demand than shopping for yourself.

There are plenty of reasons why I still use The Giftery to this day. Sometimes, when I feel like I deserve a bit of pampering, I buy a gift and deliver it to myself. It comes all nice and wrapped and not in ugly brown cardboard boxes. Let me tell you the five reasons why I still use The Giftery as my main source of online shopping, despite being a little bit more expensive than others.

1)    The Giftery is full of extremely exceptional products

You will find the necessities, such as kitchen products, but you will also find handmade crafts, customized towels, cards and so many others that make each product very special.  Furthermore, they have so much brands with a cause: environmental and helping out on social causes.  Want to add something to the gift package? Flowers? Check. Gift cards? Check.

For a friend’s wedding gift, I bought them two customized bathrobes with their initials and “Mr and Mrs” for each one. When one of my friend’s was really sick, I got her some home decor and a scented candle delivered right to her doorstep. Each gift can be exceptionally unique to your gift recipient.

The Giftery also have a bot on the homepage that filters the gifts according to the price, event, gender and age group of who you’re buying a gift for! The menu’s categories can even give you ideas on what to buy: because the products are so unique, you’re bound to find something that stands out.

2)    Efficient delivery system

A crucial point in being an effective ecommerce website is delivering up to your promises; what you say online must happen offline. The Giftery specifies for each and every product the estimated time it will take to deliver, which also depends on the time you place your order.  When checking out your cart, you specify the address of the person to whom your sending the gift to, The Giftery will then contact the gift recipient to schedule an appropriate delivery time and location.  You can also get it delivered to your home address, and pay cash on delivery as well. Why rage through City Stars for a gift, when you can get a great gift, possibly even customised, delivered to their doorstep without the traffic and the hassle!

3)     Not a JACC (Just Another Copy Cat)

Sometimes I feel like all ecommerce websites look exactly the same. When I hear about another ecommerce website, all I hear inside my head is ah, is it a JACC? Is there anything different? I like that The Giftery looks completely different. The categories are not ordered like a systemized supermarket aisle. I like how they give prominent exposure to the different suppliers.

The other reason why The Giftery is not a JACC is because it’s very localized to our needs and culture.  The only reason I knew about Black Friday was because I spent some time in the US. Now that I’m back in Egypt, there is no way I’ll remember when it is on my own. However, Black Friday is now becoming popular in Egypt’s ecommerce websites. I’m not against that, but I like how The Giftery also is about celebrating local festivals, and puts their sale prominence during these times.

The Giftery also has features to curate gift lists: baby showers, house warming, weddings, etc. You can even buy Ramadan decoration, plan Santa visits for Christmas or a special Mother’s Day surprise! I understand that *gift websites* are available in so many other countries and this is not the pioneer; but I do give it points for standing out from current ecommerce websites available in Egypt and for its on-par localization of such an idea.

4)    Call Center is a Human Who can suggest Gift ideas

We’ve all called an ecommerce website before after using it asking about a product, wanting to return it or for any other reason. Then answers the bot machine who is sometimes difficult to deal with, and sometimes it takes ages to get to the person who can really help you. What I really like about The Giftery is the phone number is person who answers, who knows almost everything about the ins and outs of the website and your order. Furthermore, YOU CAN EVEN ASK THEM FOR GIFT IDEAS! It’s human enough to make recommendations!  You can also make your gift even a little bit more special by asking them for special packaging or arrangements.  You will not need to practice samurai skills with kitchen knives to extract a gift from the bubble-wrap carton monster. It is delivered looking like a gift.

Truth be told, I have experienced a scenario where they didn’t deliver a gift packaged the way it looked like in the picture. I called and complained. It wasn’t dealt with smoothly.  It’s not all perfect, but most of my orders were perfect.

5)    The website is subtle

Usual ecommerce websites have an aggressive homepage with SALE, LAST OFFERS, DEALS, THINGS EVERYBODY HAS BUT YOU DON’T, STOCKS RUNNING OUT. SCREAMS! I like The Giftery because it gives me this fake sense of I’m buying this on my own and I wasn’t led to it. When buying from other websites, it makes me feel like I didn’t need to buy it, but it seems like it’s a good sale so I’ll get it. However, The Giftery has a subtle way of providing balance: in the colours, the highlights of the homepage, the menu and even the checkout process. It does not throw products at me everywhere all the time. So stealth is The Giftery; I don’t feel the missing heart beat when I get the security text from the bank for using my credit card. I usually do feel the missing heart beat though with regular ecommerce websites.

Now that I’m back in Egypt, I don’t do online shopping as much as I did in the US, because delivery is a hassle. You won’t find the items at your door or in your mailbox. You have to plan to be somewhere at an exact time, and then wait for a call. If you’re at work, it’s annoying sometimes because you’re in a meeting and you won’t remember that this unknown number is the delivery man waiting for you at reception.  There’s always going to be the stare as well of, “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting here for?” The Giftery lifts this hassle off me, because I don’t worry about the delivery, the recipient does.  When I order for myself though, there is this similar hassle across ecommerce websites with the delivery.

Many Egyptians have great ideas, that will stand out globally. The Giftery is one of my favourite websites, and I’ve been using it for about four years now. It was the reason for my first online transaction in 2012, despite being in the US. Without it, I wouldn’t have then checked out Amazon!

Online shopping is hardest and ugly the first time (just like so many things in life – I’m thinking coffee here). Once you lose your ecommerce abstinence, there’s no going back; like an addiction. The choices available will always have you coming back for more, and thinking about the second hidden value in online shopping: you’re also buying time (and lots of it if you’re in Cairo).