- Built in-house with the highest technical capabilities in partnership with the region’s content creators and publishers.
- A seamless content experience tailored to the digital needs of today’s MENA millennials and beyond.
- Users can customize content and share their readings with their friends and communities.
Beirut, December 17,2018: Limelines, the MENA region’s first content curation platform, was officially launched to the public on November 27, 2018. The Beirut-based digital startup is fully developed by local talents, and caters to every reader, writer, and publisher in the region. The high-tech platform exposes the MENA region’s publishers and content creators all in one place.
Limelines allows readers to customize the content they would like to read about and pick the topics that interests them to benefit from an elevated and enhanced reading journey. With its integrated advanced machine learning, it spares the reader the time and effort of skimming through stories they less relate to: Limelines curates and offers its readers topic-driven stories. This enables them to move to a new era of news consumption that satisfies their information needs. Limelines also allows its users to collect and share the stories they read with their community. This AI-driven content channel is not only expected to disrupt online reading but will also introduce ‘social’ interactivity to the classic news reading behavior.
Rime Diab, Chief Executive Officer at Limelines expressed her enthusiasm and said: “Limelines was built with publishers in mind: Big and small publishers, newspapers, magazines, professional bloggers, and other expert writers around the MENA region. They can simply submit their content to our platform and benefit through its machine learning capabilities that will automatically tag and place their features and articles under one of our categories. The reception from our first group of publishers has been amazing, and we are looking forward to our continued partnership and collaboration with them.”
Limelines research revealed that in addition to news, sports, business, economy, culture, finance, entertainment, as well as tech, art, and health, represent the MENA region’s top interests. Thus, the platform strives to highlight these topics among over 40 additional ones and present them in a new mold through its partnership with publishers.
Diab further explained that Limelines provides publishers with a wider readership base by giving them a new seamless tech channel to broadcast their message, reach new audiences in varied destinations as the platform targets 18 MENA countries.
“The MENA region has so much to offer in terms of knowledge, especially through its wide and diverse writers, storytellers, and ambitious readers. Stemming from this, Limelines curates the region’s unfolding stories to give its readers a full circle perspective and an unbiased perception to content,” Diab added.
Besides the web version, the platform is available to download on iOS and Google Play free of charge.
The digital platform has kicked off in English first and is expected to release Arabic and French versions in early 2019. These two releases will constitute major milestones the startup aspires to achieve, to service the growing online audience.
“Our market research shows that 59 percent of the MENA region’s publishers write in Arabic, 43 percent write in English, while almost 15 percent publish in French. This diverse and cosmopolitan audience requires a platform that reflects it, and that’s what Limelines aspires to offer,” Diab explained.
Besides the growing portfolio of publishers, Limelines will invest more effort into further optimizing its machine learning and technical capabilities and add new features that promise to boost its readers’ experiences.
When it comes to servicing brands, Limelines will be the adequate digital platform for them to reach out their targeted audience. “The rich features built in our platform will allow us to introduce several business models along the way. Our Ad Tech system is built in house and upon launch, we introduc premium brand solutions that includes promoted stories, video, and print style full page ads. Ad content will be very integrated into the reading experience, the same way when you are reading your favorite print magazine. We will be pairing brands who want to tell their stories with high quality content within specific topics. When it comes to brand solutions, its ‘quality over quantity’,” Diab explained. She then added: “Brands we have spoken to and showcased our solutions to are very excited about the new brand solutions being brought to them by Limelines.”
Limelines was born to revolutionize media in the MENA region and advocate for a brighter and more optimistic version of the region. To know more about the story of Limelines, please watch this video.
Readers can simply log in to www.limelines.com or the app on iOS or Android, create a customized profile and kick-off their new reading journey. Publishers and writers who would like to start submitting their content, can create their personalized profile page through Limelines’ web edition. For any additional information, please visit our publishers page. Brands seeking to know more about potential business opportunities can visit our brands page.
Limelines is a prime brand of Cetera Technology SAL, a Lebanese tech startup founded by Khalil Abou Chawareb, Peter Jaber, and Chady Semaan, and initially funded by Abou Chawareb. In 2018, Cedar Mundi joined, and funded the company under the Central Bank’s Circular 331, a national initiative aiming at the creation of a knowledge economy and the development of startups. The company’s team consists of 20 talents, including administrative, development, business, design, and content creation skills.
Aspiring to transform the way people consume news, Limelines curates content bringing the region’s freshest stories into one universal place, while partnering with leading publishers and content creators. Limelines strives to keep readers informed and inspired about the many stories they love.