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Final Results of the DAC Competition: A High Level
of Innovation Revealed
The
Digital Arabic Content (DAC) Competitions launched
by UN-ESCWA during June-July of 2008 laid a
foundation for innovation and unlocked an
opportunity for university graduates and young
entrepreneurs to realize their ideas in the DAC
domain. The competitions drew in over 55
applications from participating countries; Jordan,
Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Yemen on a variety of
subjects including software for Arabic language
processing and websites offering services for such
domains as education, culture, employment, tourism
as well as e-commerce.
The partnerships established with technology
incubators in the respective countries were key in
realizing the competitions and tightly knitting
activities during the evaluation stages. The
selection process was conducted on a national basis
by evaluation committees including UN-ESCWA
representatives, the partner incubator and selected
renowned technical and business experts from the
respective countries. Two stages were in effect in
each country; the first included a grading of
submitted proposals to select only a limited number
with a passing grade for entering the second stage,
which was essentially a face-to-face interview with
applicant teams to select the final winners.
“Alf Mile” was selected as winner of the incubation
award in Lebanon aiming to develop a regional,
interactive educational game on the countries and
cultures of the Arab world. The project will be
incubated at Berytech. In Jordan, the Jordan
Innovation Centre at Philadelphia University will
incubate the “Arab Entrepreneur” website as a first
winner and “Itqan”; a tool for automatic generation
of cases in software testing, as a second winner of
the competition.
The “Arabic Optical Character Recognition System”
project was found to be the best applying to the
competition in Palestine and was selected for
incubation at the Palestine Information and
Communication Technology Incubator (PICTI). In
Syria, two projects were selected as winners for
incubation at the Syrian Computer Society -
Information and Communication Technology Incubator:
an “Automatic Text-to-Speech Engine”; which will
recognize Arabic text for conversion into speech and
“academia.sy” - an interactive portal providing
educational services and media information for
students and institutions of higher education.
Witnessing the largest number of applications, the
competition in Yemen concluded with three winners:
“Aden Tourism Portal” providing a range of tourism
services on Aden, the “Electronic Mediator” which
acts as an online mediator for services such as
employment, project funding and real estate, and the
“E-Learning” project which provides comprehensive
educational management services. All three projects
will be incubated at the Aden ICT Incubator.
During the awarded incubation period, the winning
teams will work to develop their projects into
viable prototypes on the basis of which they will
establish their own enterprises. Technical support,
business advice, marketing guidance, and training
will be offered by the incubators as part of the
award and utilizing the financial contribution
supplied by UN-ESCWA.
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