Similar to Wamda's recent Best MENA Startups of 2011 competition, entrepreneurship and tech news site Zajil.me launched a competition for the best Arab startups. The results were just announced, revealing the best 10 Arab startups launched in 2011.

The winners were chosen by both a committee of judges and public votes. For their evaluation, judges considered the following elements: the idea, the quality of implementation, the scalability and the profitability models.

As for the public votes, it relied on personnal evaluation from the users of the different startups. The first and second places were chosen according to the judges choices, and the third place is the startup that gained the most votes from the public.

The committee of judges was formed from:

Ahmed Taktaka, the head of the investment department at N2V.
Dania Ismail: Director of strategic planning and business development at th MBC Group.
Tarek Al Osairi, founder and general director at Arkam Business Info.
Omar Tahboub,  product vice president at Bayt.com
NAjeeb Jarrar, MENA product marketing manager at Google.

Winners of the project content category:

First place: Zaytouneh, a website for Arabic cooking videos.
Second place: Afkar Al Riyadiyyat, an interactive website to teach mathematics for young children.
Third place: Eve Arabia, a platform specialized in the elegance and beauty of the Arabic modern woman.

Winner of the entertainment category:

There are 4 winners in this category instead of 3 because the first place results were equal between BirdyNamNam and GameTako.
First place: BirdyNamNam and iPhone and Nokia game application.
First place: GameTako a platform to share local game production.
Second place: Istikana, a service to provide ordered videos online.
Third place: Zobad, a website that picks daily photos and videos most shared on the internet.

Winners of the services startups:

First place: Bey2ollak, an online community to help drivers avoid traffic (only available in Cairo for now)
Second place: Khamsat, a website to link young Arabs ready to offer simple services for a fix fee of 5 dollars and buyers of such services.
Third place: lkta, an online service that provides websites frontpages screenshots.