Saeed Al Khotani Saudi Gazette RIYADH – Over half of local businesses will be online within five years, according to a panel speaker at the Arabnet Riyadh 2012 Conference that concluded Wednesday night at Four Seasons Hotel here. Alper Celen, the founder of the Saudi daily deal site Fursaty.com, said at the session on “shifting local companies to the digital world” that 95 percent of his site partner merchants today were offline and did not engage in online marketing. “I expect that in the next five years more than half of these merchants will be marketing themselves online to remain competitive against global brands, the majority of which intensively use online marketing,” he said. Another speaker, Saud Al-Hawawi, the founder and copartner of technologyworld.com, said in a session on the future of digital content on the web and smart mobile devices that digital publishing suffers from very low support from governments and even from the majority of businesses in the Arab world, either because of a failure to realize its growing importance or a preference for traditional print publishing. Al-Hawawi said that while there has been a global boom in content publishing digitally and a heavy proliferation of mobile and online communication devices, there has been only a 15 percent presence – according to Google – of companies on the web in the Arab world in general and Saudi Arabia in particular.
“This shows that there is a pressing need to encourage recognition of serious websites and portals and the development of digital content in Arabic by appropriate government agencies, companies and investors in the Arab world,” he said. Arabnet Riyadh 2012 closed by announcing the winners in its two competitions: Ideathone and Startups.
The competitions were sponsored by Qualcomm, the San Diego-based global giant mobile processors manufacturer and wireless communication technology provider. Ideathone focuses on companies less than two years old with new ideas that they have not yet been able to put into commercial use, while Startup Demo aims to support early-stage startups and help them take their business to a new level, according to Omar Christidis, CEO of Arabnet and organizer of the event. Only six winners – three for Ideathone, and three for Startups – were selected by a panel of experts most of them from the Baider incubator at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, a partner in organizing the Arabnet conference. The first winner in the Ideathone competition and the first choice of the present and online conference audience was Latifa Bakr for her idea of connecting hearing impaired people with people online through smart mobile devices. The second winner was study.com's Jawad Abdulsamad for his idea of locating and connecting online study-mates and groups. The third winner was Otba Mushaweh for his idea of providing Arabic fonts to website to enhance the Arabic content on the Web. In the Startups Competition, the first winner was Wabil Al-Zaeem for his project motakalim.com that converts text to video images using popular characters. The second winner and the choice of the present and online audience was Kasim Abu Hashim for his project Arabiancode.com that features an augmented reality reader. The third prize was shared by Donna Al-Sayyari and Hessah Al-Shamran for their shop.qurtsyah.com that provides a window for e-commerce in office supplies.
