Google Middle East Regional Manager Wael Fakharany Joins Meedan Board

We are very excited to be welcoming Wael Fakharany, Regional Manager at Google Middle East, onto the Meedan Board of Directors.  Based in Cairo, Wael has over 20 years’ experience managing technology businesses in the Middle East and brings a wealth of business development knowledge that can help Meedan become sustainable.   We asked Wael some questions about joining the Meedan board, what he thinks he can contribute and where Meedan can bring value to Middle East web users in the years ahead. How do you feel about joining the... Read The Rest →

Google Updates Site Translation Plugin Allowing Owners and Readers to Improve Machine Translations

Google announced on Wednesday that a beta update to the site translation plugin, launched in 2009, now allows site owners and readers to “polish up” machine translation of a web page by contributing their own translation. Up til this latest update, the translation plugin only allowed users to view machine translations of a given web page with no ability to publish alternative, read: better, translations. Once a website sets up the plugin, users can choose the language they want to read the site in from over 60 possible languages. Then... Read The Rest →

Translating Tweets from the Arab Spring: Towards a Translation Workbench for Twitter

Think about the Arab Spring and you probably think about citizen media.  Syrians, Egyptians, Libyans, Bahrainis, Tunisians have not just been taking to the streets over the past year, but documenting their experiences in text, image and video – even building whole new social movements with a digital dimension. Has there ever been a historic moment of this scale unfold before our eyes through new media publishing tools? Surely this is inspiring to the rest of us who are not in the Middle East.  More than ever before, an American... Read The Rest →

Are you an innovator in citizen media? Win funding and support!

هل أنت مبتكر في مجال إعلام المواطن؟ اربح التمويل والدعم! If you’re as interested in improving access to media and helping drive social change as we are here at Meedan, here’s an opportunity that will be right up your street: إن كنت مهتماً بتحسين الوصول إلى الإعلام وبالمساعدة على دفع التغيير الإجتماعي إلى الأفضل مثلنا نحن في ميدان، فلديك فرصة مواتية ومناسبة تماماً: Ashoka Changemakers, with support from Google, has launched a global competition to discover ground-breaking solutions that boost media access and participation around the world. The competition is looking for... Read The Rest →

Lessons from ArabNet conference boost Middle East web startups

Nina Curley– The ArabNet conference in Beirut, Lebanon just wrapped up after a whirlwind two days, and Meedan was there to witness it all. Bigwigs gave newbies advice on startups and developing the right entrepreneurial mindset. Young bloggers tweeted cheeky comments and shifted the direction of on-stage conversation with their questions. Women represented in the crowd, even if not as much on the panels, and stood up for their voice. Palestinians were honored for their great entrepreneurial ideas despite being absent due to visa issues. The amazing Maya Zankoul produced fantastic... Read The Rest →

5 Great Feature Improvements with the New Look Meedan

There’s been a lot of great discussion about Meedan this week since our Monday release which has helped get our message and our product out and about. But for users of Meedan who’ve known the project for some time, what’s different from the beta version? The great news is that we’ve taken account of user experiences to improve this product. What you see is the result of a sustained effort to understand what our users need and how we will encourage uptake of a pretty unusual idea. After all, it’s... Read The Rest →

Translating and the Computer 31: Notes for Meedan's Translation Community

I’m just back from the 31st Translating and the Computer conference in London and have lots of exciting tools and tricks to share with the Meedan translation community. Safe to say, the conference brings together a fantastic array of people including translators, language service providers (LSPs), translation software developers, researchers and government agencies. There was a big showing too from the EU Commission and NATO. Although I was speaking on a crowdsourcing panel that raised some fascinating points of debate (ironic, you say – a panel of experts on crowdsourcing!),... Read The Rest →

Why open data matters

We had a great team chat last night in which our VP of Engineering, Anas Tawileh, gave an impassioned defense of why it is so important to keep data open. It was such fun, I want to share some of it with you now, by way of reminder as to why Meedan – and the other nonprofits we admire most – takes open source so seriously. It feels like many debates really miss the point on this. The question at the front of my mind is not about whether licensing... Read The Rest →

What Google Translate Persian says about the future of the polyglot web

Image via CrunchBase Today was one of the most important days in Meedan‘s history, and for the least expected of reasons. Six days into a electoral crisis of revolutionary proportions in Iran, Google released an alpha version of their Persian MT service. wOOt. Big deal, you may say. An MT service – what has that to do with protests and high politics in the Iranian Islamic Republic. Actually, I think it is enormously significant. It shows that Google feels the time is right for translation on the web. So much... Read The Rest →

Meedan launch at Aoc Forum in Istanbul

النشرة الإخبارية لشهر أبريل 2009 يبث موقع ميدان بيتا أخبار منتدى تحالف الحضارات CEO Note We are delighted to report a successful public launch of our dialogue platform, meedan.net. You can now register on our public beta to share conversation and media about world events with speakers outside your language community across Arabic and English – in our view a significant addition to the social web. This is a major milestone in our history, representing the culmination of months of painstaking work in design, development and preparation. We marked it... Read The Rest →

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