The medical industry in the Middle East is not always easy to navigate for patients.

In the GCC, expats often have difficulty finding doctors they can trust. In the Levant, especially Lebanon, there’s a large number of world class medical practitioners, however picking the best one for a specific need can be a challenge; and that’s without mentioning how difficult it is to go to a clinic while dealing with busy work schedules and traffic congestion.

The above issues are some of the factors that encouraged the founders of eTobb.com to launch their startup.

Premium Online Health Portal

eTobb.com is the first dedicated, premium, online medical platform in the MENA region. It aims to connect doctors and patients directly. Users can ask health-related questions for free and get answers from top medical experts. The process is simple, free and, most importantly, safeguards the users’ identity.

eTobb launched to the public on January 14, 2013. Since then, over 50 registered doctors from 21 different specialties have started engaging users and answering their queries. These doctors are affiliated with some of the most prestigious medical centers in Lebanon, and thus by extension in the region.

The process is simple. All you have to do is register on etobb.com and ask any health-related question. You can also browse through existing Q&As to see if your query has already been addressed and can even request second opinions on any answer should it not prove satisfactory.

In addition, eTobb is building the largest medical expert network in the region, by making its doctors’ profiles accessible and searchable for users.

Regional Reach

“We are overwhelmed with questions from users” said Sara Helou, one of the founders of eTobb, “and not just from Lebanon, but from the entire Arab world. People are genuinely excited to use the platform.”.

eTobb also benefits doctors, allowing them to have a virtual practice online and to showcase their expertise and credentials to the world.

To quote one of their users, “eTobb is awesome! Got a detailed reply to my medical question! Making my life so much easier.”(from Lama Baydoun (@Mumibee))

The startup has not just been receiving critical acclaim from doctors and patients. Indeed, it recently acquired its first sponsorship partner: Bankers Assurance, a leading Lebanese insurance company. Bankers Assurance is promoting its new “Bankers Best Assistance” mobile app (available on a variety of devices), and clearly saw eTobb.com to be a great platform to be associated with: youthful, modern and offering a true benefit to patients in the region.

Thus, with a growing body of top medical experts, an enthusiastic user base and promising early monetization achievements, the Seeqnce-advised startup is poised to take the lead in driving the regional digital revolution in medicine.

Got an itch? What are you waiting for? Head to eTobb.com and share your concerns with any one of the Arab world’s top medical experts.

This column is part two of the Seeqnce start of year series on Entrepreneurship in Lebanon. In this column, we look back at some startup stories of 2012.

2012 was a difficult year for Lebanon’s entrepreneurs. On the one hand there was a steady buildup and growth in the sector in the preceding years and the sector seemed poised to leap forward. Yet socio-politically, it was a difficult year. Strikes, demonstrations and road closures were the backdrop to increasing political tensions, and the Syrian crisis weighed heavily on the country.

In spite of this, Lebanon’s entrepreneurs still found a way to shine through.

One great example is the Seeqnce Accelerator Program’s 8 Startups, founded in October 2012, all of which have released multiple iterations of their products, and some of which started generating revenues within two months of founding. 8 startups created in one day, employing scores of talented people creating impressive businesses: so 2012 wasn’t all bad news, then?

In fact, many other startups and entrepreneurs kept working hard through the turmoil, and achieving great things by any measure, let alone through what should have been a crisis year.

Below are just 5 of the more interesting success stories to come out of the country in 2012, presented in alphabetical order. If you feel we missed any, feel free to comment below.

Anghami

Sector: Mobile Applications – Music
Anghami is a music app that offers you unlimited Arabic & International music to stream and download. It is available right now on iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Nokia, with an ever-growing repertoire of music available.

The startup raised USD 1M from Middle East Venture Partners in 2012, and launched its apps in October of that year.

Following US-based Pandora’s model, Anghami allows you to download the app and listen to music via streaming and/or download. While the service is free for now, it will eventually switch over to a paid model in due course – so catch it while it’s still free. You can find Anghami in the various app stores.

At7addak

Sector: Social Network – Gaming
At7addak is an online gaming network, that helps gamers across various platforms connect.

Although founded in 2011, 2012 was a great year for at7addak. Despite its service being free, the company generated over 700,000 USD of revenues through partnerships, sponsorships and advertising, and was selected by NGO Endeavor for entry into its entrepreneurship program. If at7addak can maintain this momentum, 2013 should prove to be an interesting year for the startup.

Cinemoz

Sector: Entertainment – Video on Demand
Cinemoz, which styles itself as the Hulu of the Arab world, has formally launched its service in July 2012. In its first month of operations, the site hosted 500,000 unique visitors; its has since hit the magical 1M users per month mark – quite an achievement.

With its access to huge libraries of Arabic video content thanks to strategic partnerships with the leading content owners and creators of the region, Cinemoz has a promising year ahead.

But perhaps the key to its success is the Cinemoz team’s obsession with maintaining a quality, premium experience. As its Founder and CEO, Karim Safieddine, puts it: “[t]he Arab users have been underestimated for too long. What we proudly proved with Cinemoz is that, when provided with a premium experience and services that are relevant to the region’s aspirations and specificity, you create lifelong customers.”

Game Cooks

Sector: Mobile Applications – Gaming
Game Cooks was founded in 2012 by Lebnan and Arz Nader, both part of the team behind blockbuster game Birdy Nam Nam.

The company released two games in 2012, Run for Peace, a platform game where a character named Salim runs through various levels set in the Middle East to spread the message of peace; and Deja Vu, a classic memory-matching game.

Both games carry the Game Cooks signature elements: fun graphics and sounds, and engaging gameplay. Both games are available on iOS through the App Store.

Instabeat

Sector: Consumer Electronics – Sports Equipment/Quantified Self
Instabeat, founded by Hind Hobeika, is a heart-rate monitor for swimmers, that mounts on your swimming goggles’ strap and gives you instant feedback on your heart-rate through a heads-up display system. Swimmers can now know they are operating at the optimal heart-rate without stopping or slowing down to look at their watch. Think of it as a sort of basic, underwater Google Glass…

Instabeat comes at the perfect time for the “quantified self” movement’s rise. What is perhaps most interesting, though, is the fact that Hobeika’s is a hardware startup; it is great to see entrepreneurs innovating in production and manufacturing startups based in Lebanon. You can pre-order your own Instabeats now from their website.

The Expats

While this article’s focus is on Lebanese startups primarily based in Lebanon, there are many startups founded by Lebanese people achieving great things outside of Lebanon as well. Some of these include: Freshgrad, Justmap.it, Nabbesh and Pave, to name but a few.

And Much, Much More

There are many more great startups that were founded or achieved great things in 2012 in or from Lebanon.

While 2013 is not looking to be any better in terms of socio-political stability, we are confident that Lebanon’s startup ecosystem will rise to the challenge, and push out some great success stories. Watch this space!

Join the discussion: did you try any of the products from these startups? Do you know of another Lebanese startup that was not mentioned?

PHOTO CREDITS:

Photo credit: jeff_golden / Foter.com / CC BY-SA

At the time of writing, snowflakes are falling outside of Seeqnce’s Hamra offices – something that has not happened for a very long time in Beirut. This could be the first of many firsts in the coming year: the 2013 Middle East entrepreneurship calendar is shaping up to be unprecedented in breadth, depth, and success stories.

This is also a good time to look back at the last year in entrepreneurship. Seeqnce’s next column will be about the key startup stories of 2012; but first, let us focus on the 2012 highlights of the entrepreneurship support sector in Lebanon.

Converging on Entrepreneurship, but the Master Plan is still Lacking

“Entrepreneurship” has been the buzzword of 2012 in the Arab World. International Organisations (World Bank, UN, EIB and many more), NGOs and governments (both local and foreign) have all shown a keen interest in encouraging entrepreneurship in the Middle East.

Everyone seems to agree that entrepreneurship is what Arab economies and societies need; it is encouraging to see that a consensus is growing around its benefits, and around supporting it.

What is still lacking, however, is a clear plan on how to get all this support and funding to the front lines. It is important that the many millions of dollars that are about to be unleashed to support entrepreneurship in the Middle East be used wisely, transparently and in the most impactful way possible.

Lebanon’s First Accelerator Story

It can be done: with the support of a handful of individual investors, and a budget of 600,000 USD, Seeqnce’s 2012 Seeqnce Accelerator Program has managed to attract 436 entrepreneurs from across the globe, which has led to 8 startups being founded and seed-funded by Seeqnce in Beirut on September 24th 2012 (find out more about them at http://seeqnce.com/startups.php).

All 8 startups are going strong, employing over 30 people and boosting the Lebanese economy through their activities. Some of them even started generating tens of thousands of dollars of revenues a mere 2.5 months after incorporation.

Taking this as a basis, and thinking slightly more conservatively, perhaps the yardstick of success for aid providers should be at least 10 startups per 1 Million dollars?

Most encouragingly, a huge amount of interest is being shown in the 2013 Seeqnce Accelerator Program, with over 100 early applications already received (you can apply at this link).

All Key Actors Making Headlines

While Seeqnce has continued to focus on Internet startups, other actors in the industry continue to make an impact across all sectors.

Hamra-based AltCity formally launched its new space in 2012, and has since increased its activities in support of social entrepreneurship. AlCity has some exciting things in the pipeline for 2013 including a tight partnership with Touch and Apstrata.

2012′s ArabNet conference, held in Beirut, was a great success, attracting over 1000 attendees from the region and beyond (plus a larger number of viewers on the live stream of the event). The number of globally competitive startups presenting is incrementally on the rise, with some very bright stars shining through, such as Qordoba and Cinemoz.

The 2012 MIT Enterprise Forum Arab Business Plan Competition has allowed some impressive entrepreneurs to shine through. 2012′s winner, Hind Hobeika, invented Instabeat, a HUD for swimmers, now available for pre-order in the Instabeat website.

In its second year of operation from Beirut, Endeavor continues to support late stage growth companies, and has more than doubled its roster to 8 companies in 2012.

An Increasing Choice of Working Spaces

On the real estate side, Berytech continues to be the prime location for subsidized startup-hosting. It is joined by new actors in different parts of Beirut.

The Ministry of Telecommunications unveiled the Beirut Digital District, where established technology/communications companies can set themselves up in a central location providing improved infrastructure. And perhaps most surprisingly, Solidere – not exactly a name synonymous with startups – launched a startup space (Cloud 5) in downtown Beirut in late 2012.

The Startup of Something Great?

All of these worthy initiatives are a great sign of the consensus building up around the value of entrepreneurship. But what is perhaps most encouraging is that this consensus exists both in public policy spheres (government, NGOs, etc.) and among private actors (investors, multinational companies, etc.) equally.

For a year when, as the Mayan story goes, the world was supposed to end, Lebanon’s entrepreneurship ecosystem looks more like it is in the midst of a rebirth.

ikimuk.com is a Seeqnce Startup that launched to the public on December 10.

Similar to successful US-based Threadless, ikimuk lets users buy t-shirts featuring designs from leading artists.

How it works:

1. Favorite Designs Are Chosen

Users preorder the designs as part of bimonthly themed competitions.

2. Designs With the most Preorders Win

Winning designs get printed on high-quality t-shirts.

3. T-shirts Get Shipped Within a Week

ikimuk delivers the requested t-shirt sizes to their buyers.

“The response from the artist community so far has been phenomenal, with over 70 already on board from across the Arab World. It’s really cool, everyone wants to be part of it!” said Carl Halal, one of the 5 ikimuk cofounders.

The first competition was themed “Fruits vs. Vegetables”, and 8 designs were featured, ranging from quirky to geeky to downright funny.

According to Sevag Malkedjian, results have “exceeded our expectations”, with hundreds of T-shirts preordered, all within a week.

“I’ll wear @IkimukTweets for life!”
– from @patrikabs, designer

Artists whose designs win an ikimuk competition receive a large cash reward upfront as well as a percentage of each T-shirt sold, in addition to being featured on the website’s catalogue and on the hundreds, if not thousands, of shirts people wear every day.

ikimuk is one of 8 Startups that were selected for the 2012 Seeqnce Accelerator Program, a year-long program that invests in web & mobile startups in Lebanon. Each Startup received an investment of 76,500 USD. Demo Day is in March 2013.

The Dubai School of Government and SAP have released a report on Social Media and Arab Youth which asks the question “Can this huge usage of social media play a powerful role in the economic empowerment of the most active group in society, the Arab youth” finding that in the wake of the Arab Spring, in fact the answer is yes.  Youth are using social media increasingly to look for jobs, upskilling and to create SME’s.

On the other hand, an infographic about how Facebook Addiction is affecting our minds makes the striking observation that internet addicts experience a 10 – 20% decrease in speech, memory, motor control, sensory and other information, however people with significantly more Facebook friends tend to have larger orbital prefrontal cortexes, the area responsible for social behaviour and emotion.  More Facebook friends means more time spent online, which has potent effects on the secretion of hormones, which accounts for its addictive nature.

It’s no secret Facebook and other social networks, even overall internet addictions are rewiring our brains.  The ability of the brain to change whilst learning is called neuroplasticity.  Areas which are infrequently used atrophy and new neural pathways and synapses are formed and deepened with other more frequent activity.

The question we need to ask is simply; when it comes to thinking about the next generation of the workforce:  Is work exciting enough to focus the attention of employees?

Internet usage and social media result in constant mini bursts as multiple tasks are completed simultaneously as well as processing much information in multiple formats.

For example, a typical twenty year old is on facebook,  youtube, gmail and news and other content sites all at the same time.  Rapidly engaging in little communication volleys.  If you need further convincing about this dopaminergic power simply observe the symptoms of over dependance.  One social network is not enough, many have Facebook, Whats app, BB messenger, Viber, Skype and Twitter.  This would seem a highly inefficient use of resources, there should be saturation at some point, but in fact every new network brings an increased chance of interaction (a message, a beep, a poke, an image) resulting in an increased hit of dopamine.

Full article

Frequently we see few or no mobile campaigns that deliver content or marketing messages using smartphones, even though adoption rates are some of the highest globally.  Advertisers may be concerned that lack of familiarity with engaging in branded content will reduce the impact of a campaign – this can be solved by experimenting with retail first, rewarding those who use their smartphone to receive discounts.

Looking at some numbers:

• The Middle East’s mobile-subscription rate is 96 per cent, according to a report by Ericsson. (global average is 87%)
• The number of Middle East mobile lines hit 266.3 million in Q1 2012
• (Some consumers have more than one line, meaning the number of individual customers is lower.)
• Globally about 10 – 15% of mobile subscribers are using smartphones
• That figure is lower in the Middle East where it stands at around 6 – 7%

To summarize: MENA has one of the HIGHEST global mobile penetration rates at 96% and has a BELOW global penetration rate of SMARTPHONES at 6 – 7%

The more advertisers can incentivize usage of smartphones by providing better content and financial rewards, the more people will get used to using them and will be able to respond to marketing messages when done correctly.  Often the decision is between making some sort of app or not, which is surprising given the amount of emphasis advertisers usually place on the sales or marketing “funnel”.

No thought is given to how the app will sit in the different stages of the sales funnel, will the app be used to drive awareness?  If so – how will you market that app?  will it be used to drive sales? If so is there the opportunity to buy?

Full article

“It is not the critic who counts.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly.”

With these words, quoted from Theodore Roosevelt, Seeqnce announced the Grand Finale of the 2012 Seeqnce Accelerator Program (SqP2012), an evening where 8 new technology startups will take the stand for the first time, having been chosen to receive cash investment, as well as 6 months acceleration services from Seeqnce, in order to turn their idea into a successful business.

Taking place on Saturday, August 25 in the evening at Seeqnce Space in Hamra, the Grand Finale concludes the Selection Phase of SqP2012, a 3 months process where over 430 applicants – from Lebanon, the Arab region as well as places as far away as Japan and the USA – went through various elimination rounds in the hopes of being selected.

“Lunging into a startup is all about self-discipline, self-motivation, and self-validation.”
Ali Koubeissi – SqP2012 Finalist

The SqP2012 is a one-of-a-kind entrepreneurship program, which focuses on helping create new web or mobile startups through extensive entrepreneur outreach, as well as with processes that help applicants find business partners and build complete teams before getting started on their business idea.

The chosen startups that emerge from the extensive Selection Phase then spend 6 months residing at Seeqnce Space, benefiting from intensive training and mentorship, as they focus fully on building solid products and attracting a user base.

During the Grand Finale, the startups will each get on stage and pitch their projects to an audience of investors, technologists and the general entrepreneurship ecosystem. Attendees will also be able to interact with the teams by meeting them at their dedicated booths.

“The teams are spending the entire week prior to the Grand Finale running two shifts: A day shift where they fine-tune their pitches with Seeqnce directors, and a night shift where they work alongside the Seeqnce Team in setting up the Seeqnce rooftop space. There’s an incredible spirit, a feeling that everyone is working together towards something truly unique”
Lara Zok
Program Coordinator

Attendance is free, however registration at the above link is mandatory.