I’m pleased to welcome Hayk Hakobyan as our brand-new Ambassador in Cairo, Egypt! He explains how 2 Egyptian startups are building on twitter as a P2P traffic information system; long before twitter became an enabler in the country’s political revolution.

Cairo is the largest metropolitan center on the African continent, boasting a population of 20 million and counting. One of the salient “features” of Cairo is that it is a crowded city. A sprawling city intertwined with long bridges, tunnels and wide avenues; its streets are busy at all times of the day, and not only in the central part but in the outskirts as well. However, until a while ago there was no systematic way of getting updates about the traffic situation.

Since two years, usage of social media has been growing in the region and in Egypt in particular. Egypt became the biggest adopter in usage of Facebook and YouTube. On Twitter, Egyptians, in their regular Twitter updates, thought to fill the gap of absence of information about traffic. They created a Twitter hashtag #cairotraffic and started tweeting daily about accidents, traffic jams and bottlenecks in different parts of Cairo using their mobile phones or the Internet. The popularity of this hashtag took off shortly. Since then, anyone interested was able to follow the hashtag in order check which routes/streets to avoid or to report a traffic jam/bottleneck/accident.

With exponential growth of the number of Egyptian Twitter members using this hashtag, it became difficult to follow updates and status changes by just following the hashtag. Shortly afterwards, two startups grew around meeting the need of structuring tweets with this hashtag and offering a more user-friendly and pleasant experience.

Startups, Bey2ollak and Wasalny, offer a community-based service where one can share and learn about traffic situation in Cairo and Alexandria. Both companies allow reporting and checking via the Internet in addition to offering mobile applications for BlackBerry, Android, and iPhone. Both startups widely leverage social media, in particular Twitter and Facebook, to further enhance their offerings and engage those interested in their services. Bey2ollak offers a simpler interface, with reports of a traffic jam and ongoing comments of status changes. Wasalny, in addition to essential information about traffic jams and accidents, offers further information about estimated arrival times between two points and granular route traffic details, enabling possibility of checking exactly which parts of a specific route/street are jammed and which are empty. The latter is possible via Traffic Maps on certain streets. Lastly, Wasalny allows a possibility of choosing a desired direction for commuting and seeing the best option for arriving to a specific destination based on user comments and time estimates.

Both Bey2ollak and Wasalny operate in a so-called free business model mode, building a reliable platform for those interested in traffic status in Cairo and Alexandria, and perhaps ultimately offering either a set of premium services (for paid subscribers) or attracting advertisers (Bey2ollak is officially powered by Vodafone).