Mawdoo3, (in ar, موضوع ; literally "Subject") is an online

Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic languages, Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C ...

content publisher, based in

Jordan Jordan ( ar, الأردن; tr. ' ), officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan,; tr. ' is a country in Western Asia. It is situated at the crossroads of Asia, Africa, and Europe, within the Levant region, on the East Bank of the Jordan Rive ...

. Mawdoo3 was initially established in 2010 by Mohammad Jaber and Rami Al Qawasmi, and officially launched in 2012. The company claims to be the world's largest Arabic website. The company expanded its online Arabic content with over 140k articles to date. In 2011, it won the first prize for the Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Award for the category of universities and academics in 2011. In March 2018, Mawdoo3 also launched an Arabic speaking digital assistant called “Salma”.

History

Establishment

The Idea of Mawdoo3 began with Mohammed Jaber, who, when he was studying at the

Hashemite University The Hashemite University (الجامعة الهاشمية), often abbreviated HU, is a public university in Jordan. It was established in 1995. The university is located in the vicinity of the city of Zarqa. As regards to the study systems, it ...

, said: "The idea of the project came in late 2009 from reading a book about

e-marketing Digital marketing is the component of marketing that uses the Internet and online based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services. Its development during ...

during my summer vacation, which prompted me to read further. I bought three specialized books and read them, which revealed to me the opportunity to build a project to develop a keyword analysis service in

". In 2010, Jaber and Rami al-Qawasmi founded Mawdoo3 with their private money and that of family and friends. The startup won the first prize for the Queen Rania Business Plan Competition Award in 2011, while the founders were still students. It was launched in 2010.

Investments and partnerships

In August 2015, Mawdoo3 announced that it had received $1.5 million in

Series A A series A round (also known as series A financing or series A investment) is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchan ...

funding from

Dubai Dubai (, ; ar, دبي, translit=Dubayy, , ) is the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the capital of the Emirate of Dubai, the most populated of the 7 emirates of the United Arab Emirates.The Government and Politics of ...

based investor “EquiTrust” (Choueiri Group former corporate investment arm), as a result of a remarkable increase in the traffic with more than 20 million visits per month, of which 12 million are unique with a majority of the traffic coming from

Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in Western Asia. It covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and has a land area of about , making it the fifth-largest country in Asia, the second-largest in the A ...

, followed by

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...

and

.This funding was to be invested in supporting Arabic content and increasing the number of Arabic pages on the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

as per the announcement. In addition, Mawdoo3 entered into partnerships with a number of publishers and institutions to provide them with high quality content, such as

Mutah University Mu’tah University ( ar, جامعة مؤتة, ''Jāmi‘atu Mu'tah'') is a public university in the Jordanian town of Mu'tah which was founded on 22 March 1981 by the Royal Decree to be a national institution for military and civilian higher ed ...

Queen Rania Rania Al-Abdullah ( ar, رانيا العبد الله, ; born Rania Al-Yassin, 31 August 1970) is Queen of Jordan as the wife of King Abdullah II. Rania was born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents. She received her bachelor's degree in busines ...

Center for Entrepreneurship, the

Islamic World Academy of Sciences The Islamic World Academy of Sciences (IAS) is a non-profit organisation of scientists and technologists that works for the promotion of science and technology in the Islamic world. It was founded in 1986. Foundation The establishment of the ...

, Medical Reference Altibbi, and the technical Arabic

Dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies ...

. In July 2018, Mawdoo3 announced that it had received $13.5 million in their series B round of funding, led by U.K.-based Kingsway along with U.S.-based Endure Capital. In 2018, Mawdoo3 generate
289,000 USD
in revenue.

Growth

In early 2016, with approximately 17 Million users, Mawdoo3 became the most popular website in Arabic. In early 2017, Mawdoo3 AI was founded, A fine-tech division of Mawdoo3 with a mission of creating an Arabic speaking conversational agent that answers factoid questions. In 2018, Mawdoo3 announced reaching 45M unique users, achieving a growth rate of approximately 43% of what they have in 2016.

AI

In March 2018, Mawdoo3 launched its beta web services of the most comprehensive Arabic NLP toolkit for developers (ai.mawdoo3.com). The API-based developer library exceeds state of the art accuracy in most of the NLP tasks including but not limited to: Automatic diacritization,

named entity recognition Named-entity recognition (NER) (also known as (named) entity identification, entity chunking, and entity extraction) is a subtask of information extraction that seeks to locate and classify named entities mentioned in unstructured text into pre ...

, coreference resolution,

sentiment analysis Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining or emotion AI) is the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subjec ...

and Arabic

text to speech Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or Computer hardware, hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system conve ...

. Mawdoo3 NLP toolkit was designed to serve as building components of Mawdoo3 Arabic speaking digital assistant, Salma, that answers factoid questions from Mawdoo3 platform. Salma is planned also to be provided as an Arabic voice interface service for enterprises in sectors like travel, automobile, telecom and electronics.

The way it works

Mawdoo3 uses the

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...

system, Mawdoo3.com adopts a more centralized operation model to create and upload content. The team is composed of 20 full-time employees, as well as hundreds of writers divided into paid experts and contributors, who write on specific topics according to special content strategy. It publishes original informational articles and rejects opinion, news, and promotional pieces. Prior to publishing, an in-house auditing team verifies the content of every article for

plagiarism Plagiarism is the fraudulent representation of another person's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one's own original work.From the 1995 '' Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary'': use or close imitation of the language and thought ...

, and checks for correct language use. Translated articles are also welcome.

Statistics

Visitors

According to the Alexa website (July, 2018), the distribution of the Arab visitors is as follow:Alexa: Mawdoo3
.

References

{{Authority control Internet properties established in 2012 Jordanian online encyclopedias MediaWiki websites Arabic-language encyclopedias 21st-century encyclopedias Jordanian companies established in 2012