How to Become an Architect and Win in the RankBrain Era?

Google announced in 2015 its latest algorithm named RankBrain

WHAT IS RANKBRAIN?

RankBrain is a machine-learning artificial intelligence system that helps Google process some of its search results, in particular, rare or one-of-a-kind queries. It was launched in 2015 and is used globally by Google.

RankBrain is primarily focused on helping refine queries that Google processes, but the company says that the system is also used to help rank web pages. In fact, Google says RankBrain is its third most important ranking factor.

How to master SEO in the age of machine learning

WHAT IS MACHINE LEARNING?

As a form of artificial intelligence, machine learning makes it possible for computers to learn without being programmed. This means that software programs will have the ability to change and grow when exposed to new data, making computers more adaptable.

Machine learning isn’t an entirely new premise. In fact, basic machine learning algorithms existed and flourished in the 1990’s, albeit with limited applicable use. Until recently, all of Google’s updates were manual pushes, which is why we saw massively volatile results whenever major updates hit.

RankBrain Changed It All

When PageRank came out, it all made sense. It was a time in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) was not powerful enough. Yet things changed swiftly when in 2013 Google launched a new algorithm, Hummingbird. That algorithm used AI to analyze and understand human language.

In this scenario, back in 2015, RankBrain became one of the most powerful ranking factors. De facto RankBrain is shaping the web like PageRank did back in the late 90s.

The Intent with machine learning is to serve better content to users

Google’s ultimate aim is to apply machine learning so that its search algorithms will be able to learn and update themselves automatically, and it’s here where the real impact will be felt.

Content is the fuel for effective search marketing

When you publish your content as structured data, there are many different ways to leverage on it and to improve its findability and the monetization of it. It is always a fairly wild ride when working with technology: we keep on bouncing between conceptual thinking, technical specifications , and very practical examples — we’re starting to test here and now the power of linked data and how it can help publishers interact more effectively with their audience.

The simplest and most immediate benefit of semantic SEO is for sure to let your website unambiguously communicate with search engines, gain good rankings and increase CTR. With some work and a bit of luck, your content can also get featured on voice search and personal digital assistants (or as someone would call it PASO the new SEO).

At the same time, by reusing the same structured data that helps you boost your ranking on your favorite SERP, you can do a lot more.

What’s next?

In conclusion, ever since search engines took over the web they created a net that put machines in charge of it. Either you spoke their language or your content got deemed unworthy. Yet a revolution happened when Google launched RankBrain, within Hummingbird. Finally, machines were able to read human language. Thus, you should focus on becoming a better writer and inspire people through great stories.

So Are you ready to become an SEO Architect?

Try WordLift now!

 Free 14-day trial

 

Unlocking the Value of Open Data at RiseUp16

Open data boosting entrepreneurship at RiseUp16:

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We were glad to be present at RiseUp Summit again this year for the 4th time in a row

We always focus on introducing the latest technologies, sharing experiences, knowledge, resources and best practices with the dynamic entrepreneurs and startups for empowering this ecosystem in Egypt and the region.

We had 2 interesting events this Year at RiseUp16

Jointly with Access to Knowledge for development center (AUC School of Business) we conducted a workshop on December 11th introducing to the community “How Open data can boost social entrepreneurship”

How businesses can harness the power of data

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Access to knowledge team started the workshop by introductory remarks on Open data explaining the potential of open data and what it can be used for, giving examples of businesses sharing data, such as Telsa and they presented some case studies such as en2ly showcasing how can Open data improve the transportation sector in Cairo

And they highlighted how businesses can harness the power of data and that open data creates new business models that didn’t exist before

The semantic web is changing the way we use the internet

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Our own Fady Ramzy InsideOut CEO presented to the attendees the following:

  • The web has evolved “from web of pages to web of data”, Computers understand the meaning of what we publish on the web.
  • The types of data on the internet and how to structure the content over the web in terms of open data
  • How content classification enables content discovery and creates alternatives entry points and routes for contents

And Fady highlighted 

  • The key to break the internet is to tell stories and distribute it in an efficient way
  • “Data is the current oil.” If we get data we can create new business models and change the world
  • He presented the Linked open data project for Enel Electrified Vehicle charging Network and here is fady’s presentation  during the workshop
  • He advised attendees to build their own dataset using WordPress as WordPress CMS is still number 1
  • And he explained to attendees how to  structure content on WordPress using open data technology such as Wordlift

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Fady also presented a demo about Wordlift to inspire social entrepreneurs in this untapped area of massive opportunities

What is Wordlift?

wordlift-logoWordLift, by Insideout group, is a content analysis and recommendation tool for WordPress. It is a tool for publishers, newspapers and magazines to organize their content in a meaningful way, expose it better to search engines, boost their user base, website traffic, advertising and above all user experience and accordingly revenues.

Wordlift adds semantics annotations and combines information publicly available as linked open data to support editorial workflow learn more about it here

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The workshop was really interesting and attendees were highly engaged and The hashtag #Opendata went trending during the workshop

Live Streaming Karm Solar annual forum

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Karm Solar launched its Annual Forum as RiseUp’s first satellite event. KarmSolar is a solar technology and integration company that delivers innovative solar solutions to the agricultural, industrial, tourism and business sectors. Since its founding in 2011, KarmSolar has been Egypt’s largest private off-grid solar energy integrator, with exceptional experience in developing its award winning high-capacity solar pumping stations

The Forum featured a series of major announcements, keynote speakers and showcases

We had great pleasure to provide Karm Solar with Live streaming over their Facebook page, which had great impact by putting their online audience at the heart of the event.

 

 

 

The science & art behind Travel Blogging!

Its all about the experience!

Travel is all about new experiences, thats a major fact about. Travel blogging is crucial tool to share those experiences and build online communities about them exchanging different thoughts and lessons learnt. Here is some food for thought by our CEO Fady Ramzy.

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Aswan Nile view is a remarkable experience, achieving high engagement over Facebook

I admit that I always admired the job of the travel blogger since I was first invited to speak at the IOETI conference in Cairo in December 2011 and I was glad to meet top botch travel bloggers like the Dave & Deb from The PlanetD, Dan & Audrey from Uncornered market, Erica Hargreave from Romancing and then also the next year invited to speak in Alexandria and got in contact with Laura Hubber who talked about E-branding Egypt!

While traveling a lot around the globe for business, From Nairobi in Kenya to Tampa Florida in the US, I was always keen to share the experience over social networks, get in contact with locals, attend meetups and understand more about every place I visit.

Starting first trails

In December 2013 I was mentoring Startup weekend in the amazing city of Aswan & it was my first time to go there. Being amazed by this city I decided to go back few weeks ago with my family for a vacation, but on the other hand since the city was really fascinating I decided to start practicing sharing the experience in a professional way and here is what I did:

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Spices Colors in Nubia went viral over instagram

  • Location marketing (Foursquare) I made sure to check-in every location I visited and leave at least one tip, its like paving the way to others and with every check-in & tip I added a photo and shared that to Facebook/twitter. Finally I compiled everything in an interesting Foursquare list
  • Content creation (photos & videos) I had my camera always around at every moment, you never know when the best shot is coming and tried to shot as many photos as I could, then filter & edit them.
  • Story telling (Instagram, Pinterest & Facebook) Instagram is really a magical tool for visual story telling and sharing the experience, all you need is a smart phone. When also combined with Facebook sharing, you get the best of the two worlds. A pinterest board is also a massive tool, its your panorama to the world. Here’s mine about Aswan!
  • Joining conversations (Twitter) By doing quick searches & picking the right hashtags I could align the content I am sharing with interesting relevant topics to achieve more reach. Popular travel hashtags include #ttot #IP & #hotels, just to name very few.
  • Reviews, reviews, reviews (Tripadvisor) Whenever I visit any city, Tripadvisor is a must do step checking out the hotels & places I would visit. The point is share as much as possible honest & true experience with positives & also negatives!
  • The blog Finally comes a blog post that summarized the story.

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Quick lessons learned

Well, though its fun all the time but travel blogging is not easy as anyone (including) myself would think! Here are few things to be taken into consideration

  • Talk to People Talk to local people as much as you can, hear their stories and understand more about the place. For example in Aswan, Nubian people are extremely decent, humble and friendly.
  • Watch for Power Always have your camera, mobile and all devices well charged and also consider getting a couple of battery banks. Worst experience was running out of camera charing in the middle of the Nile with amazing shots to be taken, missed!
  • Watch for Connectivity Make sure you have a good 3G package from your operator. You don’t want to be always striving for connectivity & bandwidth as I did on the last day as my package ended.
  • Ensure Wifi Hotel wifi is crucial as well. Though Movenpick is on an amazing location on the Elephantine island and it is one of the best hotels in Aswan, wifi was only in the public areas.
  • Create Content A photo is always worth a thousand words, try to generate interesting visuals. Moreover with instagram video & vine you got also to share mini-videos.
  • Promote content While writing a blog, tools like our own Wordlift that would enrich your blog post giving it better exposure and ranking over search engines can play magic, its a must have for every blogger. Our Italian team headed by Andrea & David had an interesting hackathon developing the product roadmap few weeks ago.
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Colored homes in Nubia achieving several retweets on twitter with proper hashtags

The results

As mentioned I was just entering the world of travel blogging (or at least lets call it professional experience sharing) and I challenged myself how far could I promote Aswan. I was really glad to answer several times calls asking me questions about best places there and average prices, sometimes over Facebook chat!

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English: Hi Fady, I want to goto Aswan with family

 

An open call for travel blogging

The goal behind these lines you are reading is to share experience so we look forward your feedback as well. We are very keen to support the travel industry, especially in Egypt, promoting its values online through our innovative solutions & services. We look forward to your comments here to keep an ongoing conversation 🙂

 

Starting today … Always Startup!

This is the story of our new brand, InsideOut Today!

It has been a very interesting journey since our company was born in 2009, launched by Andrea Volpini who initiated the setup for the company beginning of the year then myself, Fady Ramzy, joined as the country manager in June to start the journey of Interact Egypt bringing online innovations from the European market to Egypt and the Middle East. Interact Egypt, started as the regional office for Interact SpA to strengthen the footprint in Middle East and North Africa, especially in the Telecommunications market. We started building the team and we were (and we still are) very focused to get the best calibers in town in terms of technical skills as well as personal entrepreneurship & enthusiastic spirit! The very first team members were Remon Magdy, the brilliant Service Delivery Manager, Ahmed Atef as support engineer & Jasmine Alladin our energetic online marketer.

Andrea's birthday in Cairo 2009

Celebrating Andrea’s birthday in Cairo 2009, with an exciting gift from the team: A Shisha 🙂

And we moved forward …..

Now we were closer and more local to our Egyptian as well as regional customers in Egypt, Tunis, Algeria and others, even including Pakistan. We started our journey by having all the R&D operations done in Cairo as well as the regional support operations. Lastly was the business development to grow our own regional footprint and it was interesting to expand our customer base to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Ghana and others in the MENA region. We were also proud to have a network of worldclass technology partners, like RealNetworks where we launched their Helix 13 platform in 2009 in Cairo in an interesting event inviting partners, customers and telco/media key players. Since then, we have been their regional partner for next generation streaming technologies. We were always committed share our experience to the local community through lots of public events we did as online marketing consultants, also with giant partners like Al-Ahram (in media & publishing sector, check the photo set) and Ministry of Communications & Information Technology (in Government sector, check the photo set), Google (in ICT sector, check the photo sets & session video) and IOETI (In travel & tourism sector, check the photo set) and also Markedu and Afritech (in the sector of online marketing, check the BBC interview and photo-sets: Markedu & Afritech). Based also on our commitment to local startup eco-system, we believe that we did the very first web-seminar about E-marketing for Entrepreneurs in Arabic! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMG9hR_hG20

The Egyptian Revolution

A major milestone for Interact Egypt, as well as the whole Egypt, was the Jan 25th revolution in 2011 where young Egyptian generation wanted to create a new Egypt that’s more dynamic and enthusitic going away from 30 years old stagnant political regiem & scene. This revolution was ignited over social media, and we had to summarize the whole story for those days before, during and after the revolution in a summary slide-deck that went viral and a public photo set. Egypt, written using logos

Andrea makes another entrepreneurial move!

Few months later, as a serial entrepreneur, Andrea decided to make a major entrepreneurial move by moving out of Interact SpA and creating his own startup with David Riccitelli Insideout10 SRL to bring a step forward their own restless dedication towards online innovations, and with special focus on another major passion the semantic web – where the web is about things not strings! It is the next generation web where computers understand the needs of human beings and makes the online journey looking for content and services easier and richer discovering more facts and exposing more values. At this moment, the very first version of our first semantic web product, Wordlift, took place. Wordlift started basically as WordPress Plugin that provides an easy-to-use method to enrich user-created text (a blog post, article or web page) with HTML Microdata, and evolved across different versions to be the tool to help bloggers, publishers & content creators to organize their posts and pages using “concepts” like we do in the real world. Accordingly, Interact Egypt was reborn again, instead of being the regional office for Interact SpA, it was the sister company for the new startup, Insideout10 S.R.L having an amazing team back in Rome including Maurizio Sarlo, Francesco Scavelli and Kim Renberg as first believers of this new path. This move was a major change to our team, where for the first time we had to become a startup ourselves since we were not relying anymore about the Italian mother company. We grew our own footprint unleashing the potential in Africa where we started building online music and online advertising platforms. Moving the the Gulf (GCC) region, where internet speeds were even booming, our streaming platform was the exact solution for Telco operators who wanted to provide streaming services to their customers, starting by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Meeting @RealNetworks office in London

Tough times, that generated more success

Moving forward to the next years after the revolution, namely 2012 & 2013, it was challenging & tough time for us due to the overall situation in Egypt. The elections for a new president, was a unique experience that many Egyptians had not witnessed for the previous 30 years, or (if age is less than 30) then it was a first-time experience. We had our contribution here too: Our social media monitoring report about presidential candidates went viral & trending over slideshare and also received the attention of international media like BBC, CNN and Wamda https://twitter.com/slideshare/status/214366046247845890 https://twitter.com/samuelcnn/status/214326101504311296 Back to our core business, Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMS) and media delivery, the year 2012 was major year for technology advancements on both fronts. In digital media, the new MPEG-DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) technology started to evolve, we witness that clearly during our visit to IBC in Amsterdam, where we celebrated the launch of our second major product (after wordlift) which is then code named HelixCloud. HelixCloud is basically a middleware that provides a management framework and an intuitive Web UI on top of Helix Universal Server to help ISPs, Telco Operators or large enterprises to take control of their streaming platform. This product has changed the way our customers do streaming business. For example in A1, Austria’s leading telco operator providing them with a scalable and robust future TV platform that boosted their revenues through ingesting advertising in video playlists as well as lowering operational costs. It was a busy year though in 2012, between launching new versions of the mobile portal for Tunisiana (our telco customer in Tunisia), Augmented Reality for Enel (energy customer in Italy), upgrading the streaming platform of FastTelco (Telco customer in Kuwait), boosting back travel industry in Egypt through events & trainings and also launching social media contest for Savoy Group (travel customer in Egypt, a leading hotel complex in Sharm el Sheikh). Good news also was that, again our products like wordlift were getting media attention. This is also beside lots of work also on the Italian side, summarized in the next leaderboard video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOyW8LrK_Dc

The Group

Moving forward in 2013, the new spin-off called Redlink became finally a reality, providing semantic technologies to news & media, and changing the way computers work for people! This was the year of linked open data for us, where we started heavily focusing on these technologies and providing it to our customers like the linked open data for Enel project, and other projects across Europe as well. The InsideOut Group now started to taking shape between the three companies, with a startup spirit! Having said so, back to Cairo, the major trend was the uprising tech startup eco-system that was really booming, with lots momentum going on, and we were actively there on several fronts like providing guidance to Entrepreneurs, speaking at and supporting events like Riseup Summit , launching Egypt’s first Augmented Reality meetup, and lots more. Although political scene was quite tough in Egypt those days, we managed to deliver our best quality of services and also expanded our services and footprint to South Africa, crafting a solution for democratizing the radio programing there! Rise Up Egypt Summit Another major milestone for 2013, towards end of year, was the start of MICO (Media in Context) project, a European Union part-funded research project to provide cross-media analysis solutions for online multimedia producers. The 3 companies of the group are working harmonically on that project while our role, here in Cairo, is providing interesting use cases for this research project.

InsideOut Today!

Finally today, in July 2014, we are proud to make this long awaited announcement of our rebranding where our new brand is InsideOut Today. It is a new concept more than a brand, it is dynamic, open and community driven! Even our new logo is an open source algorithm that you can play with it yourself! Our team is growing, not only more geeks, but in several fronts also boosting every day our energy and focus. We work hard and play also hard 🙂 !

Iftar party 2014

InsideOut Today team at the Iftar party, Ramadan (July) 2014.

 

The new uprising Silicon Valley!

Slideshare2Once again, politics and technology happening come across on our Interact Egypt timeline. The date is Jan 28th 2014, which is a very important  and stressful date  in Egypt for two reason: The trail of former president Mohamed Morsi facing jailbreak charges and the second reason was the 3rd anniversary of revolution, namely that date on 2011 was called the “Friday of rage”.

Lets talk technology!

But, the same date was stressful on another more interesting track than politics, technology! It was the announcement date for Google Cloud Developer Challenge 2013, an annual software applications contest based on Google app engine. The contest, that started on September 4th had many applications submitted from different parts around the world including India, Latin America, Middle East and North Africa, South East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and finally. United States, Europe and the Rest of the World. The contest had 5 milestone dates starting from competition start till winners announcement and was really a very useful experience for everyone who joined regardless where he/she reached. Behind the scenes, everybody also witnessed and was amazed by the energy of the enthusiastic young lady orchestrating the whole contest, Elizabeth Clark.

The tech startup scene?!

Middle East participation was, as usual, quit interesting to me. In the last 4 or 5 years, the tech startup ecosystem started to flourish and get unleashed in the Middle East in general, and Egypt in specific. For this reason also in the recent years Egypt saw lots of events, contests, hackathons for tech startups, from international entities including Google’s own “start with Google” (where our country manager Fady Ramzy presented an interesting session about E-Marketing Strategies for entrepreneurs) and the more interesting events like Startupweekend, that was courageous enough to move away from Cairo to other places all over Egypt including upper Egypt cities witnessing such events for their first time like Assuit and Aswan! This also ignited local scene here in Cairo to start running our own “local” entrepreneurship events like RiseUp summit last November.

Our geek is here!

Back to our  #gcdc story, which is even more interesting, since Interact Egypt’s own geek Mohamed Abdel elRahman was one of the finalists with his cool midoapplication Courseit, which enables you to learn anything you want, you can find numerous of useful written courses and streaming videos that can optimize your knowledge and skills in many different life categories.  Mohamed is a real example of Egypt’s new generation technology geeks, his personal hobbies is to play around with new Content Management Systems and programming languages, reading techies blogs, trying out new frameworks. On that day he was really nervous and curious to see his app as the winner for the Middle East region, and we all supported him and had the same passion 🙂 But then, the announcement was on that night, due to difference in timezones, which added more stress here!

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Finally the announcement came out late night from the Middle East were Geo Sketch from Saudi Arabia and Travellog from UAE, but our Mohamed was even filled with further energy to proceed on the geeks track and jump into future contests again!

Interact would like to congratulate all the #GDCD winners worldwide and especially the uprising Middle East! 

 

Rise Up Summit a Vibrant Entrepreneurial Community

Rise Up summit is Egypt’s largest entrepreneurship summit, it took place on November 24 and 25 at the heart of Cairo “American University Greek Campus in Tahrir Square” gathering entrepreneurs, business owners and young ideas along with whole Egypt startup ecosystem in one place, to provide opportunities for startups and linking entrepreneurs with investors.

Opening ceremony on November 24 started by introducing the key organizers behind #riseup13

Abdel hameed sharara

Abdel hameed sharara

Abdel Hameed Sharara, the founder of Rise Up Egypt said that the most important thing sought by the summit is to look for the best ways to reach a better society, and to improve the standard of living in Egypt, through the adoption of major companies for young entrepreneurs and help them start to apply their ideas. After the summit, he is planning to tour Egypt’s governorates and expand the event to become RiseUp MiddleEast or even RiseUp Africa.

Ahmed El Alfi

Ahmed El Alfi

 Ahmed El Alfi Flat6 Labs Founder and Sawari Ventures Chairman he is funding the new GrEEK Campus where the event took place he said: he is planning to change the Campus in the coming years, by turning the facility into Egypt’s very own Silicon Valley. “In 2 – 3 years, this will be the Arab World’s and Africa’s entrepreneurship headquarter; and since RiseUp Summit is aiming at the same goals as we are, we are proud to host it here,” El Alfi also explained that the location of the venue is very convenient, since half of Egypt’s population (40 million people) are able to reach it in about an hour and a half.    

Event highlights: 

This event is highlighting that Egypt has the capacity to go through the necessary alteration to develop the entrepreneurial community, regardless of the present political, economic and social barriers.

Engineer Atef Helmy - MIT-Enterprise-Forum-Discussion-Panel

Engineer Atef Helmy – MIT-Enterprise-Forum-Discussion-Panel

Engineer Atef Helmy, Minister of Communications and Information Technology participated in an opening discussion panel where he talked about the National Strategy for Communications and Information culture of entrepreneurship in Egypt, and the four programs  applied in universities for the development of this concept for the rehabilitation of its graduates for working life and creativity in their field.  

The MIT Enterprise Forum was a great input at the summit, through the one-hour panel discussions about challenges facing entrepreneurs in Egypt. Hala Fadel, the Chair of MIT Enterprise Forum in the Pan-Arab Region, believes that Egypt has courage, energy and great ideas – a combination that the RiseUp Summit has embodied and used efficiently to connect entrepreneurs on a wide scale.

Pointing the importance of education, the American University in Cairo’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program was also a key organizer of the summit. “Egypt’s future lies in its education and private sector,” Dr. Sherif Kamel, the dean of AUC’s School of Business stated at the press conference of the preopening of Rise Up Summit

The Greek campus is packed with some great entrepreneurs - Injaz Trade Fair

The Greek campus is packed with some great entrepreneurs – Injaz Trade Fair

More than 2,000 entrepreneurs attended the summit and showcased their projects, aiming to catch the attention of investors and professionals to attain the funding needed to bring their ideas to life. They had the opportunity to network, discuss and listen to Keynote speakers sharing their success stories also participants had the opportunity to join professional workshops. 

The event featured a mixture of keynotes: 

  • Cairo Angels Pitch 8 to 10 startup teams at Rise Up Summit were given the chance to pitch behind closed-doors to gain invaluable feedback, and possibly investment.
  • MIT Enterprise Forum Pan Arab Region Panel Discussions Panel moderated by an individual with relevant experience with diverse experts to answer audience about the many challenges that face entrepreneurs and organizations working in entrepreneurship in Egypt
  • Wamda’s “Pitch N’ Mentor” Entrepreneurs joined breakout groups with experts to learn how to perfect their 1-minute elevator pitch for both investors and the media.
  • Pitch and Ride PitchNRide is one of the highlights of RiseUp. This unique event puts an entrepreneur in the back seat of a cab with an investor. The entrepreneur does not know who the investor is until they get in the cab. They have exactly the time it takes for the cab to circle Tahrir Square to make their pitch. No presentations, just their skills to convey the idea and engage the investor.
  • Rise a Thon Where the real action happens during the Rise Up Summit! In this unique hands-on workshop, teams to build new products in less than 2 days to solve a number of challenges
  • Trade Fair by Injaz Egypt Injaz- Egypt in collaboration with RiseUp Egypt provided 50 booths for already established start-ups to showcase their products and services
  • Mini Workshops by FLAT6LABS The mini-workshops is a series aiming at solving startups challenges through the case study method.
  • Enspire by Endeavour Egypt The Enspire series are a series aimed at igniting inspiration and motivation through revealing successful entrepreneurial endeavors.

Interact participation 

Fady Ramzy CM of Interact Egypt at Enspire Talk Stage

Fady Ramzy CM of Interact Egypt at Enspire Talk Stage

Our CM Fady Ramzy was one of the speakers at #enspiretalk he presented sharp advises to digital entrepreneurs through also the inspiring success story of Interact Egypt and how it all started over linkedin. And he highlighted the massive social media tools we have today and the best way to use it. In the closeting ceremony he also announced the digital media academy opening next January 2013.

Live Streaming Views

Live Streaming Views

Interact Egypt proudly provided the live streaming service for the Rise Up Summit broadcasting the event to the world over the web to different devices and smart phones. It attracted more than 2,000 viewers to the live stream embedded on different websites. Interact Egypt provided Riseup with a turn-key solution that included the capturing devices, encoders and cloud streaming servers.

Interact Egypt team provided all the required professional services to run smoothly the streaming where we also streamed different activities from the event to the whole world and therefore we streamed the MIT Enterprise Forum Pan Arab Region Panel Discussions, an Enspire talk by Endeavour and a debate about funding held by Ra2ed A3mal. You can check the video archive.

The closing ceremony in the evening of 25 November began with a Google Hangout connecting 20 Arab entrepreneurs located in different countries around the world to share their experience with the attendees of the summit in Egypt. The Hangout was managed from London by Hala Fadel, the Chair of MIT Enterprise Forum in the Pan-Arab Region.

Talaat Harb 5 D Reincarnation

Talaat Harb 5 D Reincarnation

And the biggest surprise at the closing ceremony was a 5 D Reincarnation of Talaat Harb Egypt’s pioneer economist and entrepreneur giving a beautiful speech urging youth to rise up.

The Hashtag #riseup13 generated a great engagement as people were posting pictures and feedback during and after the event and we collected some lovely pictures from #riseup13 on our flicker account

 

Why we’re all excited about Cross-Media Content Analysis?

Media in Context

We all know from our daily online experience that media contents are on the rise. Digital photography and DIY videos are part of our information diet: more than 71% of online adults use video-sharing sites on a regular basis and 46% of Internet users post original photos and videos.

While information grows we’re gearing up with our sister company Insideout10 to set-up a new framework for semantic analysis of media contents such as photos, videos and audio files. Read more on the Insideout10 Blog.

 

#RamadanGeeks #1 iftar for Digital Media Entrepreneurs

Iftar with the #RamadanGeeks of Cairo

 

meetup

Last Wednesday 24th of July Interact Egypt partnered with Mercy Corps Egypt to organize a Ramadan Geeks iftar to bring the entrepreneurship and technology community together.

The attendees, more than 70 geeks, e-marketers and entrepreneurs, all enjoyed the opportunity to network, discuss, listen and ask their questions to Fady Ramzy, Country Manager of Interact Egypt, who presented some interesting trends in the e-marketing field.

The dish party was made up of fantastic food and even more delicious desserts to which the majority of people would like to know where the Nutella Atayef came from and what shop it was purchased from, if you do have the answer please do email us!

Breaking News…Digital Media Academy coming soon!

DigitalMediaAcademy-1

There was also opportunity to update the community with some exciting news during the iftar, the main update was proudly announced by Fady and Interact Egypt revealed the upcoming Interact Egypt Digital Academy program to be launched by end of 2013.

To know more about the digital media academy please fill out this form here to have the chance to receive the latest news and course details.

Mohamed Ismail from Qualcomm announced the opening of the second round of the Cinemobile film festival competition and Hesham Wahby CEO of Innoventures gave a brief discussion on the upcoming programs to support the Egyptian entrepreneurship ecosystem.

As in every networking event, there was also some time for mentorship in which Fady enjoyed mentoring a young startup team through their challenges on complementing their live scripting service with an online video platform in order to enhance their visibility and extend their reach to the desired participants. Many attendees had questions on the buzzwords & latest trends of emarketing and there is an evident struggle in grasping all of this terminology together, therefore during the event Interact Egypt gave some simple definitions to the most recurring buzzwords floating around the community recently, if you do have a burning question on emarketing please send us an email or message and it would be our pleasure to answer you and refer you to the team representative with the most knowledge and expertise.

Fusing technology & agriculture

One of the highlights of the evening were the discussions on emarketing topics, and it was a pleasure to have talks & clarifications of the terms regarding the gathering of open data & open linked data to benefit and strengthen a particular industry or target group. One of the discussions that we really enjoyed and wanted to highlight was regarding the deep need of open data to the agriculture and farming industry here in Egypt which can be available to any person or even any application or computer program to use, queries posed between Fady Ramzy and one of our attendees. Currently most of the data about agriculture in Egypt like irrigation, fertilizers, seeds, crops, etc is scarce over the internet & unstructured and is not readily available or easily accessible.  At Interact Egypt we are very passionate about the use of emarketing to empower markets and open free data and we believe if we can have such data gathered in a proper way, the agribusiness in Egypt would be transformed to the next level, and we would be very interested in exploring this subject forward with interested participants!

Master Tweeters of the evening!mastergeeks

Last but not least in honor of the #RamadanGeeks themed iftar, Interact Egypt also gave away a surprise prize to its Top 3 Master Tweeters of the evening, in which they each one 1 free pass to a course of their choice in the upcoming Digital Media Academy, a big congratulations goes to Shaymaa Gaafar, Mohamed Mordi and Muhamad Mansour.

We would love to hear your feedback about the upcoming Digital Media academy, please fill out this form and we will strive to answer all your queries as soon as possible.

Finally we would like to extend our thanks to all attendees and hope you enjoyed the networking and delicious food from the iftar dish party. We hope to see you at our future events, to find out more about upcoming meet ups follow us on FB, Twitter and Meetup.com.

For some great pictures of the RamadanGeeks iftar check out our  flickr account.

For inquiries and feedback please email us at anytime.

 

Delivering Simulated Live Streaming support for A1 Telekom Austria!

A1 - Delivery of the SLTA module of Helix Cloud

It always feels great when the testing team of A1 (Austrian’s #1 Telecom operator) completes the weekly session and we can bring in production our latest software  release of the Helix Cloud platform.

This time we added support for Simulated Live Broadcasting that can now be configured using an easy-to-use Web UI or via Restful APIs.

We also started the testing of the latest release of Helix Server v. 15 that now adds support for MPEG-DASH.

Thanks to @ziodave for his amazing work on this one and to the A1 Web Streaming Team (Ludwig, Arnold and Michael in the photo)!