Who are the Top 20 Google Ebda2 Finalists?
Google Ebda2 recently announced its top 20 finalists that are going to take on the homerun for winning $200,000. After being chosen by a panel of judges, one these 20 projects will be the lucky winner in May 2012.
Find out which projects made it and what their vision is:
1. Madad - Team Leader: Sameh Awad
Madad is a social technology venture (first of its kind in the region) with a vision to enable a shift from simple charity to strategic and sustainable development by filling the existing gap between the donors and the NGOs working in the respective field. Madad aims to tap into the EGP 5+ billion of donations channeled to charity work today and reallocate them, in an accessible, organized and transparent fashion using technology and social media, to sustainable development projects that bring us closer to a brighter and developed future in Egypt.
2. Pulse for integrated solutions - Team Leader: Mohamed Fathy Abdelshafy
Pulse is a main player in the mHealth/eHealth domain. Our staff members have experiences in academic research and multinational companies. We are experts in biosignal acquisition, digital signal processing, embedded systems development, pcb design, mobile application development, server-side development, electronic medical records and medicine. Our project named “Health intact” had been honored the Duke’s Award 2010 from Oracle as one of the best applications worldwide and was the only awarded project in the health care section.
3. MediaWave Egypt for Technology Solutions - Team Leader: Adham Maghraby
MediaWave owns and operates its proprietary, one of a kind, real-time mobile tagging technology targeting all radio and TV stations worldwide. The technology allows listeners and viewers to all forms of radio and TV stations worldwide to tag live content using any mobile phone by sending a blank SMS to the station, the content is instantaneously delivered to the users email and mobile phone for digital consumptions. This real-time content monetization technology improves the role of the media station in the digital value chain from passive broadcaster to instantaneous digital point of sale. The technology offers a solution to digital piracy for content labels and innovative consumer access to digital content. MediaWave enjoys IP protection under the international protocol of WIPO, and has been awarded a US Patent number US 8,112,494 B2 issued on Feb 7th, 2012. It is also patent pending in the European Patent Office.
4. Recyclobekia - Team Leader: Mostafa Ahmed Hemdan
E-waste (electronic waste) problem is a really big serious problem that threatens Egypt’s environment, as millions of damaged electronic and computer devices, which contain very dangerous materials and at the same time contain very precious metals are thrown every day in the landfills. Our company idea is based on collecting e-waste from all over the country – through our website and mobile applications – then make green recycling on them in factories abroad and in the very near future inside Egypt, which will help in reviving the country’s economy.
5. SuperMama - Team Leader: Yasmine ElMehairy
SuperMama is the first online parenting community in the Arab World. It covers pregnancy, parenting, home management, food and nutrition, career as well as a mother’s wellbeing. SuperMama offers information offered by researchers and experts as well as a space for discussions between mothers. SuperMama also offers easy-to-use tools to help mothers manage their time, health, and money. SuperMama follows a multi-sided platform business model, where mothers will be able to use SuperMama free of charge and revenue is generated through two streams: Different forms of Advertising Products including banner ads, White-Labeling, content sponsoring, product placements and reviews as well as Premium Listing in the SuperMama directory and Affiliate Revenue with partner eCommerce and Group Deal sites providing SuperMama deals.
6. KarmSolar - Team Leader: Ahmed Zahran
KarmSolar is developing the Solar Management Interface (SMI); which is an online software designed to support a commercially competitive high-capacity solar water pumping technology that replaces unreliable and polluting diesel generators used to pump underground water in agriculture farms. The SMI makes possible the expansion of solar energy technologies in the agriculture sector and provides farmers with energy management support and services that maximize agriculture production.
7. Cloud Center - Team Leader: Karim Sameh
Cloud Center is an online exchange marketplace platform operating to facilitate and execute call center service transactions by home-employed individuals. Cloud Center relies on innovative and patent-pending propriety technology. This will change today’s call center business by service commoditization that will reduce both entry and running costs through utilizing different voice communication channels. It will change thousands of lives by providing profitable and convenient work environment.
8. Wasalny - Team Leader: Samer ElBaghdady
Wasalny.com is an online service that was launched on 10/10/2010 and aims at being the ultimate digital assistant for commuters. Wasalny is available as mobile applications, a mobile website and a desktop website. One of the biggest challenges in mega cities like Cairo, is its traffic. What makes this problem even worse is the lack of information. This is where wasalny.com kicks in. We harness the power of social media and crowd sourcing to create a network of commuters that share traffic information around them.
9. Bey2ollak - Team Leader: Aly Rafea
Driven by the current traffic conditions in Egypt, we decided to provide “Bey2ollak”, a service to help us all navigate through the traffic in Cairo and Alexandria (hoping to expand soon across the nation). “Bey2ollak” is a community based traffic information service aiming to keep track of the status of all major roads. Our success is based on the active cooperation of all our members in providing information regarding the traffic conditions they are facing.
10. Citjo - Team Leader: Mahamad ElTanahy
CitJo presents citizen journalism in a platform that gives professional value to media that news organizations can use quickly and with ease of mind. Users upload their material using their existing Twitter image hosting service, or directly to our site. The CitJo team makes sure it’s categorized correctly, and vets the best material. Media buyers are able to search for material based on technical and editorial content through our filter page and can buy a license. We make it easy for citjos to connect with major national, regional and international news organizations, and a wider audience.
11. Ketaaby - Team Leader: Somaya Soliman
Ketaaby is a striving new startup with members who are passionate about providing better edutainment mobile applications for kids of age group 3-8. We want our kids to learn Arabic in an interesting modern way, through the technological channels they love to use nowadays. We provide Arabic interactive stories and fun-learning applications in Arabic. Our applications are not educational but also interactive and interesting for young minds.
12. Ubering - Team Leader: Momtaz Moussa
Ubering is a gamified social interaction platform where users receive badges from peers for sharing conclusions and insights on recent news to eventually become experts in areas of interest. With its new visual experience, Ubering makes social interaction easier as users share views by assigning expressive badges to their favorite topics and public figures.
13. Wireless Stars Inc. - Team Leader: Adel Youssef
IntaFeen is a location-based mobile application that allows you to discover various places around you in your own city. You can find nearby cafes, restaurants, banks, gas stations or anything your heart desires. Compete to become the Umda (Mayor) of a place and you could win rewards and discounts. Using IntaFeen, you can write feedback about the places you visit and share it with others. Whether it is your favorite sandwich, dish, drink, IntaFeen can help you share your experience, thoughts, and pictures with your friends on Twitter and Facebook. You can also view popularity of places by reading tip reviews written by users just like you. IntaFeen is available on almost all mobile phones.
14. Agzakhana - Team Leader: Sherif Shabana
Agzakhana was launched in 2008 with the mission to become a leader in the healthcare industry by providing technology-based services to the industry stakeholders. Our first product, the website, is an e-commerce portal for offering pharmaceutical and cosmetics to the Egyptian market. The company operated to serve only residents of Greater Cairo and has expanded to cater the whole Egyptian market and supports international orders. Our second product, the PHMS service is a software package designed for pharmacies to handle their business transactions, monitor their inventory and equip their pharmacies with business tools that would help improve the pharmaceutical business. Our design aims at compensating for the lack of sales training for pharmacists expecting to increase a pharmacy revenue by 20%.
15. GroupStream - Team Leader: Yasmin Elayat
GroupStream is visual group storytelling tool that empowers groups to easily bring together their social media fragments, such as tweets, Facebook updates, photos and YouTube videos, to easily tell stories together. Users continue to post to the services they love and we create their unified stream. GroupStream presents these stories a lean-back, interactive, visual experience.
16. Empty Studios – Cartoon Hero - Team Leader: Mohamed Tarek
Cartoon Hero is a new generation of “kids and family” entertainment. We are simply able to turn kids into superheroes. Using the latest 3D technologies, each member in Carton Hero will have his/her own personalized 3D model online where he/she can interact, play, and socialize as a superhero. Kids will finally be able to live one of their most desired yet impossible dreams. Moreover, it won’t stop fighting when they go offline. It will just begin!
17. ClickThru – The Home Page - Team Leader: AbdelRahim AbdelRahim
Paving the way to Egyptian furniture industry to expand by connecting producers, buyers and designers under one hub to increase exposure and sales through advanced search and market scanning features. This will be supported by a creative discount/sales mechanism. The Home Page portal enables the exhibitors to showcase unlimited number of products with a detailed description/info and enables the users to scan all available products in the market from the comfort of their homes.
18. Air2fone for communication services – Sacha Books - Team Leader: Samer Youssef
Sacha Books develops interactive Arabic books for Arabic speaking kids worldwide. Sacha Books also offers a comprehensive platform for books production, publishing, distribution and monetizing as it opens its doors for freelance illustrator, writers to have their own content published on Sacha Books Library. Sacha Books is the first to launch an interactive children story “The little Red Riding Hood” in Arabic language. The goal is to provide a complete edutainment application for children to learn moral values while playing engaging games and puzzles at the same time. For now, the content is distributed on iTunes store with future plans to make it available on Android as well. It is also worth mentioning that Sacha Books is a brand fully owned by Air2fone for communication services.
19. Cloud Niners Information Systems LLC - TeeksForGeeks - Team Leader: Ahmed Kamal
TeeksForGeeks is a cloud-based, social network online platform that facilitates ICT information sharing, interactive training and collaboration. It is a marketplace connecting minds across various boundaries, helping share and sell expertise online. Based on cutting-edge web-2.0 and virtualization technologies, TeeksForGeeks promises to alter the landscape of lifelong learning by pioneering fundamental rich-media learning services, patented cloud virtual-lab environments, personalized, self-paced training paradigms, self-evaluation, and a plethora of communication, collaboration and community content-authoring tools.
20. Innosol - Iqraaly - Team Leader: AbdelRahman Wahba
Iqraaly (www.iqraaly.com) is a web and mobile platform for converting Arabic articles in newspapers and/or news portals into audio files via human narration, and then publishing them online (streaming, MP3s, mobile app, podcast) and offline as mobile value added service using IVR. In phase II, we will launch our open platform for crowd-sourcing audio content, online/offline publishing and monetization, our sources of revenue will be extended to the subscription fees to the platform based on a freemium model, Revenue Sharing from audio content Ad sales and in-App purchases.
Google Ebda2 started in September 2011 as a competition organized by Google in cooperation with Innoventures and Science Age Society to identify, mentor and reward the best technology start-up in Egypt.
Find out which projects made it and what their vision is:
1. Madad - Team Leader: Sameh Awad
Madad is a social technology venture (first of its kind in the region) with a vision to enable a shift from simple charity to strategic and sustainable development by filling the existing gap between the donors and the NGOs working in the respective field. Madad aims to tap into the EGP 5+ billion of donations channeled to charity work today and reallocate them, in an accessible, organized and transparent fashion using technology and social media, to sustainable development projects that bring us closer to a brighter and developed future in Egypt.
2. Pulse for integrated solutions - Team Leader: Mohamed Fathy Abdelshafy
Pulse is a main player in the mHealth/eHealth domain. Our staff members have experiences in academic research and multinational companies. We are experts in biosignal acquisition, digital signal processing, embedded systems development, pcb design, mobile application development, server-side development, electronic medical records and medicine. Our project named “Health intact” had been honored the Duke’s Award 2010 from Oracle as one of the best applications worldwide and was the only awarded project in the health care section.
3. MediaWave Egypt for Technology Solutions - Team Leader: Adham Maghraby
MediaWave owns and operates its proprietary, one of a kind, real-time mobile tagging technology targeting all radio and TV stations worldwide. The technology allows listeners and viewers to all forms of radio and TV stations worldwide to tag live content using any mobile phone by sending a blank SMS to the station, the content is instantaneously delivered to the users email and mobile phone for digital consumptions. This real-time content monetization technology improves the role of the media station in the digital value chain from passive broadcaster to instantaneous digital point of sale. The technology offers a solution to digital piracy for content labels and innovative consumer access to digital content. MediaWave enjoys IP protection under the international protocol of WIPO, and has been awarded a US Patent number US 8,112,494 B2 issued on Feb 7th, 2012. It is also patent pending in the European Patent Office.
4. Recyclobekia - Team Leader: Mostafa Ahmed Hemdan
E-waste (electronic waste) problem is a really big serious problem that threatens Egypt’s environment, as millions of damaged electronic and computer devices, which contain very dangerous materials and at the same time contain very precious metals are thrown every day in the landfills. Our company idea is based on collecting e-waste from all over the country – through our website and mobile applications – then make green recycling on them in factories abroad and in the very near future inside Egypt, which will help in reviving the country’s economy.
5. SuperMama - Team Leader: Yasmine ElMehairy
SuperMama is the first online parenting community in the Arab World. It covers pregnancy, parenting, home management, food and nutrition, career as well as a mother’s wellbeing. SuperMama offers information offered by researchers and experts as well as a space for discussions between mothers. SuperMama also offers easy-to-use tools to help mothers manage their time, health, and money. SuperMama follows a multi-sided platform business model, where mothers will be able to use SuperMama free of charge and revenue is generated through two streams: Different forms of Advertising Products including banner ads, White-Labeling, content sponsoring, product placements and reviews as well as Premium Listing in the SuperMama directory and Affiliate Revenue with partner eCommerce and Group Deal sites providing SuperMama deals.
6. KarmSolar - Team Leader: Ahmed Zahran
KarmSolar is developing the Solar Management Interface (SMI); which is an online software designed to support a commercially competitive high-capacity solar water pumping technology that replaces unreliable and polluting diesel generators used to pump underground water in agriculture farms. The SMI makes possible the expansion of solar energy technologies in the agriculture sector and provides farmers with energy management support and services that maximize agriculture production.
7. Cloud Center - Team Leader: Karim Sameh
Cloud Center is an online exchange marketplace platform operating to facilitate and execute call center service transactions by home-employed individuals. Cloud Center relies on innovative and patent-pending propriety technology. This will change today’s call center business by service commoditization that will reduce both entry and running costs through utilizing different voice communication channels. It will change thousands of lives by providing profitable and convenient work environment.
8. Wasalny - Team Leader: Samer ElBaghdady
Wasalny.com is an online service that was launched on 10/10/2010 and aims at being the ultimate digital assistant for commuters. Wasalny is available as mobile applications, a mobile website and a desktop website. One of the biggest challenges in mega cities like Cairo, is its traffic. What makes this problem even worse is the lack of information. This is where wasalny.com kicks in. We harness the power of social media and crowd sourcing to create a network of commuters that share traffic information around them.
9. Bey2ollak - Team Leader: Aly Rafea
Driven by the current traffic conditions in Egypt, we decided to provide “Bey2ollak”, a service to help us all navigate through the traffic in Cairo and Alexandria (hoping to expand soon across the nation). “Bey2ollak” is a community based traffic information service aiming to keep track of the status of all major roads. Our success is based on the active cooperation of all our members in providing information regarding the traffic conditions they are facing.
10. Citjo - Team Leader: Mahamad ElTanahy
CitJo presents citizen journalism in a platform that gives professional value to media that news organizations can use quickly and with ease of mind. Users upload their material using their existing Twitter image hosting service, or directly to our site. The CitJo team makes sure it’s categorized correctly, and vets the best material. Media buyers are able to search for material based on technical and editorial content through our filter page and can buy a license. We make it easy for citjos to connect with major national, regional and international news organizations, and a wider audience.
11. Ketaaby - Team Leader: Somaya Soliman
Ketaaby is a striving new startup with members who are passionate about providing better edutainment mobile applications for kids of age group 3-8. We want our kids to learn Arabic in an interesting modern way, through the technological channels they love to use nowadays. We provide Arabic interactive stories and fun-learning applications in Arabic. Our applications are not educational but also interactive and interesting for young minds.
12. Ubering - Team Leader: Momtaz Moussa
Ubering is a gamified social interaction platform where users receive badges from peers for sharing conclusions and insights on recent news to eventually become experts in areas of interest. With its new visual experience, Ubering makes social interaction easier as users share views by assigning expressive badges to their favorite topics and public figures.
13. Wireless Stars Inc. - Team Leader: Adel Youssef
IntaFeen is a location-based mobile application that allows you to discover various places around you in your own city. You can find nearby cafes, restaurants, banks, gas stations or anything your heart desires. Compete to become the Umda (Mayor) of a place and you could win rewards and discounts. Using IntaFeen, you can write feedback about the places you visit and share it with others. Whether it is your favorite sandwich, dish, drink, IntaFeen can help you share your experience, thoughts, and pictures with your friends on Twitter and Facebook. You can also view popularity of places by reading tip reviews written by users just like you. IntaFeen is available on almost all mobile phones.
14. Agzakhana - Team Leader: Sherif Shabana
Agzakhana was launched in 2008 with the mission to become a leader in the healthcare industry by providing technology-based services to the industry stakeholders. Our first product, the website, is an e-commerce portal for offering pharmaceutical and cosmetics to the Egyptian market. The company operated to serve only residents of Greater Cairo and has expanded to cater the whole Egyptian market and supports international orders. Our second product, the PHMS service is a software package designed for pharmacies to handle their business transactions, monitor their inventory and equip their pharmacies with business tools that would help improve the pharmaceutical business. Our design aims at compensating for the lack of sales training for pharmacists expecting to increase a pharmacy revenue by 20%.
15. GroupStream - Team Leader: Yasmin Elayat
GroupStream is visual group storytelling tool that empowers groups to easily bring together their social media fragments, such as tweets, Facebook updates, photos and YouTube videos, to easily tell stories together. Users continue to post to the services they love and we create their unified stream. GroupStream presents these stories a lean-back, interactive, visual experience.
16. Empty Studios – Cartoon Hero - Team Leader: Mohamed Tarek
Cartoon Hero is a new generation of “kids and family” entertainment. We are simply able to turn kids into superheroes. Using the latest 3D technologies, each member in Carton Hero will have his/her own personalized 3D model online where he/she can interact, play, and socialize as a superhero. Kids will finally be able to live one of their most desired yet impossible dreams. Moreover, it won’t stop fighting when they go offline. It will just begin!
17. ClickThru – The Home Page - Team Leader: AbdelRahim AbdelRahim
Paving the way to Egyptian furniture industry to expand by connecting producers, buyers and designers under one hub to increase exposure and sales through advanced search and market scanning features. This will be supported by a creative discount/sales mechanism. The Home Page portal enables the exhibitors to showcase unlimited number of products with a detailed description/info and enables the users to scan all available products in the market from the comfort of their homes.
18. Air2fone for communication services – Sacha Books - Team Leader: Samer Youssef
Sacha Books develops interactive Arabic books for Arabic speaking kids worldwide. Sacha Books also offers a comprehensive platform for books production, publishing, distribution and monetizing as it opens its doors for freelance illustrator, writers to have their own content published on Sacha Books Library. Sacha Books is the first to launch an interactive children story “The little Red Riding Hood” in Arabic language. The goal is to provide a complete edutainment application for children to learn moral values while playing engaging games and puzzles at the same time. For now, the content is distributed on iTunes store with future plans to make it available on Android as well. It is also worth mentioning that Sacha Books is a brand fully owned by Air2fone for communication services.
19. Cloud Niners Information Systems LLC - TeeksForGeeks - Team Leader: Ahmed Kamal
TeeksForGeeks is a cloud-based, social network online platform that facilitates ICT information sharing, interactive training and collaboration. It is a marketplace connecting minds across various boundaries, helping share and sell expertise online. Based on cutting-edge web-2.0 and virtualization technologies, TeeksForGeeks promises to alter the landscape of lifelong learning by pioneering fundamental rich-media learning services, patented cloud virtual-lab environments, personalized, self-paced training paradigms, self-evaluation, and a plethora of communication, collaboration and community content-authoring tools.
20. Innosol - Iqraaly - Team Leader: AbdelRahman Wahba
Iqraaly (www.iqraaly.com) is a web and mobile platform for converting Arabic articles in newspapers and/or news portals into audio files via human narration, and then publishing them online (streaming, MP3s, mobile app, podcast) and offline as mobile value added service using IVR. In phase II, we will launch our open platform for crowd-sourcing audio content, online/offline publishing and monetization, our sources of revenue will be extended to the subscription fees to the platform based on a freemium model, Revenue Sharing from audio content Ad sales and in-App purchases.
Google Ebda2 started in September 2011 as a competition organized by Google in cooperation with Innoventures and Science Age Society to identify, mentor and reward the best technology start-up in Egypt.