Q8Ba7th Official Blog

Q8Phones is the site for people looking to buy/sell used phones in Kuwait as the name suggests. The site is not limited to used phones, however you will see that this the majority of available phones there. The site design is fairly simple, nice and clean. You will need to register to post your phone ad. You can browse through the available phones without registration. Shall you be interested in a phone? You will fill a simple form to contact the seller and he shall reply back via email then. This is to maintain the privacy of the seller not anything else. I like this concept rather than posting my email or phone number. Registration and posting is all FREE. The site makes it revenue through ads on the side.

Community? There are currently 23 mobile phones only. But I am sure if anyone sold a phone there he will be getting another customer to use the site. Last time I checked there were only a handful of phones. Now there is a bit more. Hopefully, the community will grow. We are one of the fastest mobile changing communities in the world aren’t we?

WARNING:

From buyers side, after listing few items, I immediately received a purchase request from the US that was welling to add 40 KD to the item price to cover shipping. Something didn’t make a lot of sense. The buyer insisted on paying by wire-transfer, saying she was scammed by PayPal. Lots of people would think it’s safe to give away your bank account number to anyone, but BE CAREFUL. This is their way to money laundry affairs and will get you into trouble. If you wanna use the site, stick to local sellers, and cash payments.

Popularity: 61% [?]

I will have to second Kuwait Mac Community on that one and add a little to it. Urood is a new site for classifieds in Kuwait. It’s design is pretty simple, but it’s also straight to the point kind of sites. Just what I like. You can post your ad by a quick and simple registration process, or you can even post directly without sigining in. You will just receive an email to confirm your post and for future update.

The site has sections for real estate, items for sale, and jobs. The site is only in English, and a look at it’s Privacy Policy you can see the site is owned by a US limited liability company. This kind of explained why the site is built using Perl, as I don’t know many in Kuwait who would know and use it right now. As a matter of fact, I know one geek only who was studying in the US. I thought for a second, this could be him! Alas, the site as many others in Kuwait seems to have no popularity at all, although other than that, they have everything to kick a top classified site in Kuwait.

if you like it and think this could help you and others, try to spread the word about it. It’s what the site needs right now if you like to get the most of it.


UPDATE: Site has gone down for a while now and is no longer in operation.

Popularity: 45% [?]

As the college opening approaches, you are probably asking about the professors you have picked. Are they good/bad/easy? Can I get an A! Lots of people ask that question as if it’s all on the professor . Anyways, KUNIV.net is a nice unique site in Kuwait for Kuwait University Professor’s reviews. The idea is very simple. You login, and review your professor. You have to fill in the information about which class you took with him, which grade you got. So an F student review would not matter a lot perhaps to the reader. The site reads 8850 reviews at time of writing over 1247 professors. I’m not sure is 1247 is the number of reviewed professors or total of all professors. All in all, you will find your professor review most of the time.

I should add a note here however I could not agree to half the reviews on my department, so you should not only take the rating. Please take the time to go through the review it self. For example, you will see that professors that give easy A’s and high grades get the credit back with 5 stars. Some students however take the definition of university literally as a place to learn and do not care only about the grade (I happen to be one of them!). In that case, you will be disappointed with the result.

What I dislike about the site is being forced to register to read the review. It’s a bit awkward to have that restriction on just reading. It seems like a way to push for more registered users. But what good is a registered user if he doesn’t intend to contribute in content? Just let him read the review I’d say.

This site, you should know, is only for Kuwait University. There is another version of it for GUST University, and another for the Public Authority for Applied Education and Training. Both are still kind of new and don’t have strong community as it seems.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Kuwait Chamber of Commerce & Industry is not just another institution site, otherwise I wouldn’t be talking about it. This site has the killer feature which no other site has. Using the search box shown below, you can search for all registered companies in Kuwait.

So for example, you can search for Al-Aola (الأولى) or Al-Soor (السور) company which many people seem to be asking about but don’t know their contact. The site will give you information about their contact address, numbers, emails and site if they exist. It will also show you the registration number and license expiry date (not sure if this is supposed to be public). So you will know if you are dealing with an expired license company or fake one. Note however that you need to be searching as per the official registered name otherwise you will not find it. You can search in both English & Arabic, so that’s even better.

On the main page also, down below, you can see the daily activities, be it exhibitions, tenders, news and other stuff. They also have the new Business Opportunities new section where you can see up-to-date required imports and exports, so you can bet for them.

All in all, this is a very rich informative and up-to-date site that you refer to all the time.

Popularity: 6% [?]

With so many other options, Q8CV have impressed me with the way they are moving forward. Q8CV does not seem to be just another job seeking site in Kuwait. It seems to be one that has come to stay and dominate. Why I say this can be explained by the Alexa stats.

Few months back, no one knew about the site, and now it’s ranked 67,071 on Alexa. Not bad at all. I started seeing it’s ads on Google not long back. Then soon after, I can see they are doing a brilliant job distributing their ads on YouTube, DailyMotion, and other sites with both text and image ads, utilizing both Google AdSense and Dart Media (which I still have to try). Quite the type of ads that works well. Some companies spend thousands on newspaper ads which most people just simply ignore and the next day, the ad belongs in the trash. Online ads are cheaper, much more targeted, and it’s success is measurable.

Visiting the site now, I can see many new postings coming. Ofcourse the site still much behind Bayt.com, but Bayt is not for Kuwait only. Q8CV is. Q8CV now as far as I can see is the leading job posting site in Kuwait. The site is nick to nick with GulfTalent, and what a time it is to come into the game. Fresh grads are eagerly looking for new job, and I just resigned and am looking for one my self . Another good thing is that there is no need to be signed-in to see the job postings as well, unlike some other job sites.

Some other job posting sites that you might be interested in are:

• bayt
• Gulf Talent
• aYwaa

Did I miss any? Do let me know.

Popularity: 13% [?]

While this is not a pure Kuwaiti site, we decide to make exceptions to Arab sites with such resourceful information to the Kuwait community. Lakii is a site most suitable for Kuwaiti (or Arab) wives. It is site from and for the community with sections about the beauty (elegant but Islamic), babies, mobiles, forums, and the one I see most useful perhaps is kitchen section. It is in that area probably the best Arabic site for food recipes. For women, it would be really helpful. They share their dish recipes, provide photo of the dish, and others get to vote on the dish it self. It is also categorized into Salads, appetizers, sandwiches, etc. So if you are bored or don’t know what to make for lunch, a browse through this site will give you some ideas.

What’s great about this site is it’s already popular, very very popular with current rank 692 on Alexa worldwide. So the site is there, as well as the community. It’s not just a starting site. The benefit ofcourse reaches us men at the end when our wives cook delicious new meals everyday. so… Good Luck

Popularity: 5% [?]

Kuwait Mac Community is a new blog for Mac Fans in Kuwait, just opened in May. The blog takes Mac products and accessories more into focus, but is not limited to this only. You will there some nice reviews about other sites in Kuwait. Sites of the kind that I would like to know about. There isn’t much more to talk about here. It’s simply a blog. But it’s a resourceful blog. If I were you I’d go there and add it to my Google Reader, or whatever RSS Reader you use.

Popularity: 6% [?]

With GCC-Legal site, you can browse, search and know about the constitution, laws and legislation in your country, Kuwait, and any other country in the gulf. Though I’m not a politician, I always wanted to take a look at the constitution, and thanks to this site you can read all about your country constitution. You can also get printable version or Word document version of it. There is a small disclaimer however you cannot use those information as guaranteed final information. Mostly it is up to date I’d say as those information don’t change so frequently, but this is just to protect them selves legally I guess.

Up till July, I could see news about Kuwait, so good thing to know is, the site is being updated. Hope you find it useful.

Popularity: 7% [?]

With not so many places to go in Kuwait, restaurants tend to be a very important part of the time out. Kuwait is full of restaurants, however to find good service and quality food, you sometimes still need to ask. Wa7aa is just the site for this. It is a site dedicated for Kuwait Restaurants reviews. The interface is pretty nice and clean, site load time is excellent, you have the option to recommend and add restaurants as well, so you are not limited to what they have to list. Restaurants are categorized by area, food type and price. So you can filter out and focus your search.

What I really liked about the site is how the restaurant quality score is measured. It’s on a scale from 1-10, but you don’t pick the number. Rather, you fill in a survey kind of form as shown below:

Then, you also have the option to write small review and rate your restaurant visit experience.

Other users have the option to mark your review as helpful or not to provide better quality feedback.

What this site is really missing right now is the community. It has the capacity and all to tell you people’s opinion, but without those people writing their opinion, the site merely do you any good. So if you like the idea, you may want to start writing your own experience as you come across it.

UPDATE: Due to lack of contribution it seems, waa7a.com has been pulled down permanently as I can’t reach their page. Shame really. I liked the site, but not enough contribution was made

Popularity: 6% [?]

Q8Books is a %90 driven used book store located at Al-Salam Tower nearby Salhiya Tower. The store is not %100 online driven, but through their site you can see a large portion of the used books they have. The store which have opened back in 2003 claim to have a collection of 12,000 books on the shelves available for selling.

So how does the store works? Simple. You have some used book you want to sell. Take it to them, or if you have over 100 book they could also come and ship it. They will value the quality of the book and offer you a price for it, given the book is in a good usable condition. Another option that is available is the “sell through”, where they post your book and you get a percentage of the sale price (if it sells!). Commission goes down if the book takes longer to sell in the latter case. You can call it a storage charge for books that doesn’t sell quick.

If you want to buy a book, you can fill up a form online to RESERVE the book for 5 days under your name. You will have to go within that time to purchase it.

I am not sure how good that idea is selling inside Kuwait. How many readers we have is a considerable question. We are not a reading society that much. We do buy a lot but we don’t read. So I’m not sure about second hand books. Another thing is, for people who have Aramex shipments all the time, most novel books are available for sale through Amazon resellers at 1 cent! I felt awkward however about Q8Books using the same submit buttons from Amazon. I thought for a second they are affiliating with them, but no it’s not the case.

Popularity: 26% [?]