Back in July, Arab News reported on the tech startup Ajnad.com. At that time, Ajnad.com’s management predicted that they would be moving rapidly to add features to the Arabic Internet search site. The first version of Ajnad.com focused on transliteration and search and Ayman Elsaedi, chief architect, Ajnad LLC anticipated that enhanced versions of the project would roll out at the rate of one per month. The goal, according to Elsaedi, would be for Ajnad.com to quickly become “a combination of Google, Yahoo and MSN for the Arabic world.”
But, as often happens, even well crafted plans can go awry. After a struggle to cope with both technical and economic realities, the Ajnad team is moving forward once again toward the completion of the Ajnad platform. Elsaedi advised that there had been unexpected issues in developing the Arabic phonetic transliteration used with the site’s search functionality. “We had to solve several complex problems related to natural language representation and we had to put forth algorithmic proofs to several generic premises for how Arabs speak,” Elsaedi said. “We also had to re-architect our transliteration engine. This took a lot more time than initially thought. Version 1.0 of Ajnad.com was a one to one mapping between Latin and Arabic alphabets. Version 2.0 is based on how people speak, not just write. That required an overhaul of the architecture.”
Version 2.0 of Ajnad.com launched last week. Elsaedi remarked that the new version is “much, much smarter and easier to use than any similar online tool.”
While work was wrapping up on Version 2.0, good progress was logged on Ajnad Version 3.0. Features in this next release will include improved accuracy and speed, an application programming interface (API) to enable third party integration and a one of a kind editor for the Arabic Web. It is now anticipated that Version 3 will be released by the end of this year.
Technology difficulties aside, Elsaedi admitted that this is a very tough time to be a business startup.
“Due to the weak economy, we had to push back on some research projects that aimed to solve problems and add more features. We also had to reassign resources internally,” said Elsaedi. “Additionally, some advertisers have had issues that caused delays in closing ad deals. This is about to change though this quarter.”
All these issues have forced the Ajnad team to demonstrate agility early on in order to keep their business viable. Frankly, that’s not a bad skill to hone in a digital world where “riches to rags” is determined by mouse clicks.