Ikbis is the first photo and video sharing service in the Arab World. Ikbis is part of TootCorp, a media company based in Arabia and founded in September 2005. TootCorp has special interest in citizen media and self-publishing. Other services by TootCorp include Toot and Toot Advertising Network (TAN).
Ikbis is a photo and video sharing service geared for the Arab audiences around the world. With Ikbis, you can upload and organize your photos and videos that you´ve taken with your digital camera or mobile phone. Moreover, you can share your photos and videos with friends and family, interact with other Ikbis users and rate photos and videos.
You can also share your photos and videos (we call them "shots" for short) publicly, making it even more fun to have tens of thousands of Ikbis visitors everyday watch your videos and photos.
It was an autumn evening in September 2005, when the team of Toot were sitting in a café, discussing the next big thing to do on the web. Next day Ahmad came back with a designed homepage of what will be our next big idea. Actually it was so big that we had to split it into three different projects! We got busy implementing Toot and launched it in January 2006. Toot got us busy for several months after. In April, we had a historical phone call with Andreas in Berlin to convince him to join the team. A couple of days later, Andreas joined the team and we became all too excited.
Ahmad, George, Andreas and Mazen (All co-founders of tootCorp) started prototyping Ikbis. But we got interrupted for a while because World Cup 2006 was all too important to miss! Then in mid-August, we finally started to see some real screenshots. By mid-October, Wael (yet another co-founder) tossed some cool designs. George, Ahmad and Mazen started drawing the overall experience of Ikbis and the business model behind it. By the 24th of October, technical development was on its full gear. Andreas (Ikbis code chéf) was pulling nights and days to finish it by the 3rd of November, as a gift for Ahmad on his birthday! Jad and Karim were doing the cheerleading in the meanwhile, along with some help every now and then.
Well, you guessed it! We were too crazy to think we can get the code in 10 days! So we had to re-schedule the launch till mid-November. On the 20th of November, Andreas opened the gates of Ikbis for the public!
Oh! Almost forgot that. Ikbis is a Scorpio! We didn´t want it to be a Sagittarius. There is a third baby on its way! So stay tuned.