Translate, Rebrand, and that’s another Web Startup

Online Startups, which are rare, putting the fact that they’re mostly not official nor real business entities in the Arabia, most are just an idea that went online with some HTML and JS, no real businesses around them. Rare is the word, but the handful projects are nothing but a projection of other projects that went very popular in English and elsewhere.

Yes there’s hunger for Arabic content, there are a number of initiatives that are encouraging the growth of original Arabic content. But does that mean hijacking other websites content into an Arabized portal?

Video Sharing, Social Networks, Micro-Blogging, and even sites like Techcrunch have been copied. We’re not saying that’s bad, an opportunity call. Why not? Right? So if you write in English anyways, why don’t you write and post to TechCrunch instead? An Example.

What I find disturbing with Arab worlds startups is the fact that they are a projection of the Silicon Valley. Sure some are really valuable, but the fact that 90% are 100% copies, it disturbs and makes up for a market that doesn’t really exist. Reminds me of how back in the late 90s Internet companies made the investors lose faith in Internet ventures in Dubai, it came to a point that companies stopped even believing that websites are good for businesses at all.

You might be in pressure, need to go and get real famous in a record time, follow other people’s success, but for real man, copying the same steps and publicizing upon it? I wish I could name people and companies and still don’t make a chaos. But for real, no one’s hurt but the industry!

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