Facebook Celebrates Innovative Arab Developers at the F8 Conference

27 April 2017 - Dubai, UAE: Facebook celebrated the achievements and products of its growing Arab developer and partner ecosystem at its annual F8 developer conference, held in San Jose, California, on 18 and 19 April. Arab developers shared the stage with Facebook and developers from around the world, showcasing innovative products and services they created for their local communities and the global market. 

F8 hosted more than 4000 people in person and millions of people watched via Facebook Live for two days of new products, tools, interactive demos and speakers to help developers build, grow and monetise their apps. 

This year Facebook brought F8 to developers around the world through F8 Meetups hosted with tech hubs around the world. In the Middle East and North Africa, it hosted F8 Meetups in 5 cities, including Dubai, Amman, Casablanca, Beirut, Cairo, where participants watched live streams of the sessions in San Francisco.

“We’re partnering with many Arab developers to launch products that not only meet the needs of their local markets, but which are also ready for the world stage,” says Emeka Afigbo, Facebook’s Head of Platform Partnerships for the Middle East and Africa. “Events like F8 are a perfect opportunity for us to talk about how we will work with partners to do more with our platforms. As importantly, they are a forum for us to get feedback from our ecosystem and to showcase our partners’ work to the world.”

Two startups from the MENA region were amongst developers chosen to meet with Mark Zuckerberg as part of a global developer roundtable.

Tunisia headquartered InstaDeep is one of the first Artificial Intelligence startups in Africa. Based in Tunis with an office in London, founder Karim Beguir showcased how his team of developers, 3-D engineers, sound artists, and data scientists are helping small to midsize businesses (SMBs) create customized apps incorporating computer vision, predictive analytics, 3-D imaging, AR/VR and deep learning.

MindRockets, a startup based in Amman, Jordan demonstrated how his company uses assistive technologies to aid the hearing impaired in voice recording, book reading and viewing online videos. Officially launching at the Seedstars Summit in April, the new free technology will be the first of its kind from the Middle East to assist the hearing-impaired.

Additinally other partners featured at F8 this year include

•    Anghami is the first legal music streaming platform and digital distribution company in the Arab World, launched in November 2012, providing unlimited Arabic and International music to stream and download for offline mode.
•    Fetchr.us is a simple and reliable way to send and receive packages. You can simply ship, and receive, anything, anywhere.
•    Elves provides a concierge service on Messenger. Users can book taxis, restaurants, or their next trip from the Elves Bot on Messenger.
•    OpenSooq is one of the largest online marketplaces in MENA, with over 50 Million downloads, and running in 19 countries. 
•    Azkarbot provides daily prayers and reminders to hundreds of thousands of muslims every day, and was featured during the opening keynote.

Launch of Developer Circles 

At F8, Facebook also announced a new program for developers all over the world to connect, learn, and collaborate with other local developers. Developer Circles is a community-driven program that's free to join and open to any developer. It was piloted in Tunis, Casablanca, and Cairo.

Each Developer Circle is led by members of the local community who act as leads for the circle, organising events offline and managing a local online Facebook community. Developer Circles are forums to share knowledge, collaborate, build new ideas and learn about the latest technologies from Facebook and other industry leaders.