By Tara Lifland, NoCamels With 380 million native speakers, Arabic is the sixth most common language in the world. Yet relatively, it is the language with the least content on the Internet today.
MobiStine, a Palestinian company that develops medical applications, based out of Ramallah and partnered with Israeli company Exshake, has come out with one of the first interactive applications in the Arabic language; an application for new parents who lack important information when pregnancy and having a baby.
So far, the app has over one million downloads from Arabic-speaking countries worldwide.
“The biggest problem,” Husni Abu Samarah, MobiStine’s founder tells to NoCamels, “is how difficult it is for Arabic speakers to find information on the web.” Ten percent of the world’s Muslim population are new parents, he explains. “Because of the lack of information available to the Arabic-speaking public, we have a lot of inexperienced new parents.”
MobiStine’s new application, available on all mobile platforms partnered with gynecologists and obstetrics to ensure the legitimacy of the health information. “We offer parents all the information needed to guide them through a healthy pregnancy, from the first nine months, until the baby is about three years old.”
Keeping expecting parents informed
The Mobistine app
“New parents are attached to their smart phones and keep it close to them,” Abu Samara tells NoCamels. “This is why we’ve come up with our innovative new Human Sense Depiction feature. Due to inexperience and lack of common knowledge on the subject of pregnancy, many Arabic women aren’t aware of some of the risks involved in becoming new parents. For example, they may not know that sleeping on your stomach when you’re well into your pregnancy can cause danger to the baby.”
“This feature senses the movement of the body, analyzes this movement as risky for the baby, and alerts the mother to change her position,” Abu Samarah adds.
The app also incorporates a social forum for Arabic-speaking parents to connect with one another and GPS capabilities to guide users to the nearest hospitals, pediatricians, or baby stores.
A niche marker
According to the Abu Samarah, 50 percent of his one million users are returning users. In such a large
“niche” market, Abu Samarah is expecting sales to increase drastically. “It’s not in competition with the other hundreds of pregnancy applications in English,” Abu Samarah tells NoCamels. “Even if the English applications could be translated, culturally there are many differences when it comes to raising a child.”
