As most of you know, I am the co-founder of Woopra (iFusion Labs, LLC), a start-up that was developed in Lebanon and was released in the United States. iFusion Labs, LLC is now based in Dallas, TX.

I heard from so many people that Obama will affect businesses and investments by having them pay even more taxes! Now that he’s the next president of the United States, I decided to read Obama’s Blue Print Of Change because this is one of the factors that may affect my future.

Here’s what he said about startups and entrepreneurs:

Provide Tax Relief for Small Businesses and Start-Up Companies: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will eliminate all capital gains taxes on start-up and small businesses to encourage innovation and job creation. Obama and Biden will also support small business owners by providing a $500 “Making Work Pay” tax credit to almost every worker in America. Self-employed small business owners pay both the employee and the employer side of the payroll tax, and this measure will reduce the burdens of this double taxation.

Lower Health Care Costs with a New Small Business Health Tax Credit: Obama and Biden will create a new Small Business Health Tax Credit to help lower the costs for small businesses to offer health insurance to their employees. The Obama-Biden Small Business Health Tax Credit will provide a refundable credit of up to 50 percent on premiums paid by small businesses on behalf of their employees. To be eligible for the credit, small businesses will have to offer a quality health plan to all of their employees, and cover a meaningful share of the cost of employee health premiums. The credit would be fully available to small firms, and would be phased out for medium-sized firms. It would also be phased out for small firms with high-income employees.

Create a National Network of Public-Private Business Incubators: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will support entrepreneurship and spur job growth by creating a national network of public-private business incubators. Business incubators facilitate the critical work of entrepreneurs in creating start-up companies. Obama and Biden will invest $250 million per year to increase the number and size of incubators in disadvantaged communities throughout the country.

I was watching yesterday the elections in the US. I admired the final speeches and the democracy in this country. Having a Lebanese political background, I would say that I really envy the Americans for what they’ve got!

Obama reminds me of Dimyanos Kattar, a Lebanese wise man, who was a candidate for the Lebanese presidency. Will we ever make a similar change in Lebanon?

Yes we can!

This is something I couldn’t expect to be done anytime soon by either Google Maps or Live Maps. It’s exciting that I can finally see the Maps of Lebanon, even the small village where I live got a label!

The question is now, will I be able to use the GPS/Google Maps on my iPhone in Lebanon? That would be awesome, especially that I always get lost in beirut :D.

Speaking about Google Maps and iPhones, I have a big surprise for the Woopra community who got iPhones! I’ll talk about it in the right time.

Thank you Google.

Update: iPhone updated their maps to show Lebanese Maps! I can’t wait to test it in few days (Thanks ElieDH and Wadih)

PS: Wadih Ghsoubi pointed me out to this Google Maps update.

I just came back from the BlogWorldExpo 2008 which was held in Las Vegas. This is my first experience as an exhibitor, and I love it :D! Woopra was sharing a booth with WordPress and LayeredTech and it was one of the busiest places in the trade show.

I met plenty of Woopra fans, they shared their Woopra experience with us. Lorelle VanFossen (our crazy editor) was doing some Woopra demos for those who have never seen Woopra. Also John, Jad and I were there answering some Woopers questions and writing a big list of features requests. As I got home, I started the implementation of that list.

At night, we were hanging out with John P., Aaron Philips and Greg Kuiper. We spent our time taking pictures, gambling, walking, walking, walking and walking. My legs are still hurting now…

Last time I was in Las Vegas, I didn’t have the chance to see the old vegas! this time we did and John took a video on the Freemont Street show; I posted it here. We have also taken some photos, I posted some of the pics taken by Greg and I. I’m still waiting for John and Lorelle to send me what they got to post them here!

Bellagio Las Vegas Water Show taken by Greg:

Overcoming the odds, Lebanese software gurus enter internet eminence

The world’s most popular internet applications, including Yahoo, Google, Facebook and YouTube, share several interesting characteristics. Nearly all were developed by students enrolled in American universities and nearly all were aided by an American venture capital injection to successfully enter the market. Lebanese-born Elie Khoury and Jad Younan have followed more or less the same path, yet with one major difference: they developed their Woopra program in Lebanon. Against all odds, some may argue, as the Land of the Cedars can hardly be described as an IT incubator.

Both Khoury and Younan graduated from the Lebanese American University in Byblos in 2007 with a degree in Computer Science and Computer Engineering, respectively. They spent many hours in class, but they spent many more nights working late on Woopra, a live tracking and analytics service that aims to send market leader Google Analytics into oblivion.

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I woke up minutes ago, and logged in to the Woopra Forums to see what happened in my absence. I got freaked out when I saw someone advertising his eBay auction “Woopra Invitation Code”.

How should we react? There’s nothing we can do about it since we don’t know which invitation codes the seller has. Is it that bad? I think it’s cool :). This shows the enthusiasm of the Woopers! As I’m writing this post, the last bid is 15$.

Let’s see where it stops.

Hey buddies!

What an exciting news! Layered Technologies & 3Tera are providing Woopra 100 Grid-Servers. It has been spreading all over the news since yesterday (Yahoo, Forbes, BusinessWire, WallStreet, EuroInvestor, Morning Star, TMCnet, pr-inside, StreetInsider and much more…).

It’s definitely true that Woopra is one of the fastest growing startups this year.

Layered Technologies and 3Tera to Provide 100 Grid-Servers to Woopra
Rapid Growth of Real-Time Web Analytics Service Powered by Cloud Computing Platform

PLANO, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Layered Technologies, Inc., a leading worldwide provider of “on demand” IT infrastructure, and 3Tera, Inc., the leading innovator of grid computing technology and utility computing services for Web applications, today announce support for Woopra, the real-time Web analytics platform. The companies will provide 100 grid-based servers in order to assist Woopra as it experiences a huge market demand prior to official launch.

“We are extremely pleased that Layered Technologies has stepped up to pledge the infrastructure necessary for us to meet the growing demand for Woopra,” said Elie Khoury, CIO of Woopra. “We are also grateful for all of the public feedback and support we have been given in the past 48 hours. We vow to work as quickly as possible to make Woopra available to as many as 100,000 Web sites within the next few weeks.”

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Errr… I dunno how to start!

It has been a year since we started working on a Live tracking and analytics service. After uncountable days and nights of massive work and brainstorming, me and Jad Younan (co-founders) came up with this new service that remained a top secret until this month.

After getting to a point where we felt the application was nearing a point for launch, we made the strategic decision to seek out a partner who could help us with financing, marketing, and general business structure. John Pozadzides seemed like a natural fit, because of his experience as a Director and Vice President in two major multi-national corporations (SAVVIS and Cable & Wireless) as well as his experience as Chief Marketing Officer for Layered Technologies. The fact that he is also a well known celebrity blogger and has an impeccable reputation is bonus.

During the Dallas WordCamp 2008 event, John Pozadzides has revealed Woopra to the public. People admired the idea. Tens of thousands of bloggers and webmasters have signed up and added their websites that are being approved on daily basis. We are trying to make it available for everyone, so it’s gonna take time to have an EXTREMELY scalable and STABLE system in order to have millions of webmasters using Woopra.

Cali Lewis from GeekBrief.tv has interviewed John and they went through some of Woopra features:

It’s amazing to see woopra climbing so fast to the top in the world of web tracking and analytics.

For those who don’t know what is woopra, here’s how others have described it:

Lorelle at Wordpress

Woopra is a live statistics program. It tells you what is happening on your blog right now, this very second

TechCrunch.com

Want to talk to the people visiting your blog in real time via a chat request? That’s just one of the features of new stats/analytics startup Woopra. Think Google Analytics or Nuconomy, but in real time.

GeekBrief.tv

Unlike the stat service you might be using to analyze your Web site traffic data, Woopra provides exciting, LIVE data about your visitors as they explore your site. Web site stats might be interesting to those of us who have Web sites, but Woopra makes stats addictive and quite frankly, entertaining. It’s sticky, and if you own a Web site, you’re going to want to have it running on a screen, the same way a day trader keeps a stock ticker and CNBC running non-stop.

Mashable

An inherently free utility, Woopra allows site owners and adminstrators the option to view site activity in near real-time (surely there must be some delay in data transfer, if only it be for a few seconds or minutes). That’s right, virtually live analytics with a visually intuitive design that’s really built to impress.

Tech News Site

Woopra is a fairly new web-tracking and analytics site that will work on any site; however, it is mainly targeted for small to medium websites that get anywhere from a few hundred page views a day to over ten thousand. This is a great tool for people who have a blog and are looking for detailed information about their site and their visitors

TechAU.tv

The statistics of website are interesting for a number of reasons, unique visitors is interesting to advertisers, browser share is important to developers and tracking which pages are visited can be used to evaluating the success of a marketing promotion. As a general rule, the more information available the better, to enable the most informed decision possible.

Oh by the way, check out Woopra.