PICTI has graduated a Start-up Company (YooyaLand), and linked it with a local investor who launched the project commercially in the Palestinian Market
The Palestine Information & Communications Technology Incubator (PICTI) has enabled one of its clients to be investor ready and has linked it with Hadara Company “a member of Paltel Group”, which launched it to the private sector. This is the first case of a merger and acquisition from the incubator in Palestine culminating in transfer of equity shares in exchange of US$450,000 and an additional US$1Million of investment in the company.
Ms. Alia Abu Shmeiss submitted an ICT business idea to PICTI by filling the PICTI Application Form back in 2005. The Application went through the different processes of evaluation at PICTI which resulted in signing an Incubation Agreement between the two parties. Immediately, PICTI started to provide the Client and the project with the needed and agreed upon services in order to transfer the idea into reality through developing a high quality portal that combined education and entertainment into one edutainment website that addresses Arab kids aged 3-9 years old where they would learn by being entertained using Internet Technology.
In addition to the project financing in securing the needed seed funds, space, technical service and support for computers and networking, domain registration and website hosting for testing purposes, administrative and legal services such as registering of the company, trade marks, legal consultancy and contracts development, PICTI also managed to recruit a number of 10 technical staff members for the project whose job was to transform the interactive stories into animated reality and to develop kids endearing original cast of cartoon personalities.
Throughout and during the development process, a testing process of the project took place in order to check the popularity of the cartoon personalities used. The development of these personalities depended on several issues of which is the artistic creation, educational intellectual content of the owner of the idea and then transformation of these ideas into interactive stories with the usage of multimedia technology dubbing originally recorded sound over the animation.
The continuous efforts by the quality team made sure that the editing, adding and deleting resulted in an enhanced quality investor-ready product. Throughout the life span of the project, PICTI’s role was clear in encouraging innovation of the project’s employees as well as motivating the entrepreneur’s role in an attempt to elevate the product to high quality standards.
One of the value added aspects that PICTI provided was the modification to YooyaLand business model in generating revenue in order to fit the Middle East online payment culture and preferences.
In an attempt to attract investors, PICTI prepared and circulated an Investor Brief to several potential investors as a means of networking the project with local and regional investors. Indeed, with the assistance of PICTI General Manager, Ms. Abu Shmeiss managed to present the project to investors in Jordan and Palestine.
Yooyaland team was also given the chance to present the project at several events such as GITEX exhibition in Dubai and EXPOTECH exhibition in Ramallah under PICTI’s booth of participation. The main objective of this participation was checking visitors’ interaction which proved that many people were interested in it especially parents and kids. This project comes as a good example of PICTI’s role in developing the Palestinian MSMEs sector as a mean to generate new jobs, attract foreign investment and improve the economic situation in the Palestinian territories.
In spite of the challenges that the project faced during its growth and incubation phases at PICTI, the results proved the success of the project, crowned by linking Yooyaland with Hadara Company and launching it in the Palestinian market subsequently.
For more information about PICTI, please see their profile on the Global Network Directory by clicking here.