Sohaib Thiab – The Story of an Internet Entrepreneur

Finally after allot of waiting and anticipation, the Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Competition results were announced in a nice ceremony at PSUT last Wednesday, I wrote the draft of this post one day after the ceremony but didn’t have the time to finish it and upload some pictures, 92 business ideas were submitted to the contest from 20 universities, 10 business plans were selected for the final round, including my business plan for Faye3.com along with my partner Hussam Hammo.

We presented the idea around a month ago in front of an international jury including jurors from Cambridge university as well as other universities from Spain and the US and a bunch of Arabic countries and yesterday the 10 finalist teams attended the announcement ceremony were the results were announced (nerve breaking moments)

I am glad to inform you all that our business plan for Faye3.com received the 1st prize in the competition, the 2nd prize went to a mobile applications company specializing in security and the 3rd prize went to a web2.0 e-learning website, there are generous financial prizes sponsored by Jordan Telecom as well as the publicity (news and TV) for the winners and especially for the 1st place winners (us), we heard that 1st place winners get a marketing campaign for free as well, not sure how accurate is that, but I sure hope it is true.

This is a great push for our project, and the networking in the ceremony was great as well.

Below are images of the ceremony. We also got interviewed by the Jordanian TV which was aired last Thursday in the 6pm news.

Me on the left, Hussam Hammo (my partner in the middle) and Mr. Basil Head of QRNEC on the right

Mr. Mohd. Khawaja on the right, project manager of QRNEC.

I’ll try to upload more pictures later on, you can check our more images on my facebook profile.

Finally after much delay and lots of hard work, www.faye3.com is now online in its Beta release, faye3 is an Arabic word (a bit Jordanian) which is called to someone who is “cool”

Registration will be open for some time on the website before we turn the website to be invitation based, so register an account now!

Faye3 has lots of cool features, to name a few:

1. User profiles, full;y customizable, you can also use the myspace layouts out there and our system will apply it!
2. Personal Blogs
3. Personal image gallery with public/private options for your images.
4. MSN/Yahoo/AOL/Outlook address book grabber (easy invites)
5. Nudges
6. Horoscopes
7. Fully WAP enabled!
8. Find the rest out yourself!

This is the BETA release, so please don’t mind any minor issues (if any) here and there, we will be opening a blog under Faye3 soon to post all the Faye3 related updates on.

Thats about it for now, I will be posting frequent updates on how this youg social network does, the concept of social networking is still new to some people in this region and so is anything web2.0 related, so its going to be an exciting ride and I look fwd. to it!

This is one of the few posts I usually cover on my blog that are non internet/business related, I try to cover business and internet related news in my posts since thats why most people come to read my blog, but I got my new Sony digital camera (DSC W100) and I love it, its has lots of features, small and easy to hold, you can reach all the buttons easily with no trouble, I’ve been considering buying one for a while, I am not a big fan of taking pictures where ever I go, but I thought that having one is needed sometimes when your on a trip, hanging around with friends or attending a conference.

I checked out reviews for a number of other Sony Cybershot cameras and found lots of good reviews for this model, I’ll leave you with these screen shots now.