International Startup Sites – Middle East
October 24th, 2008 | By PatrickIn the last International Startup post, I visited some of the popular startup sites covering India and Eastern Asia. Now, we’re on to the Middle East. Check out what’s going on over there:
StartUpArabia is another one of the blogs that made me want to write this international startup series. Mohamed Marwen Meddah’s site covers new Arab technology startups as well as general market news and information. The site covers startups all over the arab world, with recent posts covering sites or news everywhere from Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, and Lebanon. You can also find events (largely in Dubai) and a job board on Startup Arabia.
StartupIsrael’s design has a bit of a web 1.0 feel to it, but it seems to be largely a web 2.0 powered site. The site has an active events list, informative book list, and the authors re-post links to Israel startup news (in English) from Hebrew news sites. They also aggregate a few popular U.S. sites in one of their sections.
ArabCrunch and StartupArabia seem to overlap a lot in their coverage, and I suspect the two sites will compete for quite some time as they both have very high quality sites and articles. ArabCrunch does seem to do a better job of posting general industry news. From the looks of their tag cloud, the site stresses heavily on Jordanian news and startups.
Israel Startup News covers a variety of startups — not just web-based startups. This site really demonstrates the diversity of startups coming out of Israel with energy, medical, and web startups featured on the site. Dani Dechter’s done a great job pulling all of these different early company stories together.
TechWadi is a networking association for Arab Technology professionals in Silicon Valley and around the world. They host a series of events, largely in Silicon Valley.
This Pakistan-focused site covers startups, business models, new media marketing, and usability — great! The site leans towards being more professional-focused with sections on IT, HR, Marketing, etc. They’ve also got a great, active side bar worth checking out.
VC Cafe covers Israeli startups from abroad — originally from Silicon Valley, now from London. The site tends to feature funding rounds for Israeli startups, but there’s also general startup news and industry news as well. It may be last on this list, but don’t let that fool you. Count me in as a new subscriber.
Also worth checking out, TheWebsessed.
