The Middle Eastern tech world has been around for some time, but recently there has been some solid activity that points to increased technological growth on the horizon. Here are some updates you may have missed (these are primarily focused on the Arabic tech community, a subset of Middle Eastern tech):
1. Yahoo’s acquisition of Maktoob. Yahoo! recently acquired Maktoob, an Arabic internet services company for $80 million, expanding its presence substantially in the Middle Eastern market. Maktoob (“letter” or “written” in Arabic) was founded in 1998 and offers email, search, gaming and related services with a reach of 16.5 million users. Yahoo!, which already had approximately 20 million users in the Middle East, plans to offer Arabic versions of its homepage, mail, search, news, sports and other features.
2. Innovation. New sites are launching that combine technology and the culture of the Middle East. Ardroid is an Android community for Arabic users, and the search engine I’m Halal allows users to filter out content that is objectionable to those practicing Islam. Kzalek, currently in beta, is an Arabic desktop client for Twitter. I’ve long observed that technology “puts down roots” and prepares itself for growth by interacting with and adapting to local cultures. These sites are good indicators that technology is poised for growth in the local environment. The presence of tech news blogs like ArabCrunch and Next Web Middle East is another key indicator.
3. Foursquare in the Middle East. Foursquare, the popular mobile social network, includes two Middle Eastern cities, for those who enjoy playing: Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Tel Aviv, Israel. More to come soon?
4. Downloads. Negotiations have begun to bring downloadable content (like iTunes) to the Middle East.
It’s fascinating to see how technology continues to grow and adapt to different cultures globally. Here at Technicultr, we discuss multicultural communities online. If you are interested to learn more about the Middle Eastern tech world, we recommend ArabCrunch and The Next Web’s Middle East edition. It looks like those blogs will be busy with technical news for a long time to come.
Jessica,
Tim of tekSymmetry here. Since I moved to the Middle East by way of Kansas City and Atlanta, I've seen a lot of growth online here. We're a company out of Kansas City and we specialize in Arabizing user interfaces and building multilingual (Arabic & English) web listing portals. Net penetration and consumption is increasing tremendously here and so we thought we'd ride the wave. We built, http://www.ourleague.com (bilingual fantasy soccer site for Saudi Arabia), http://www.travelobby.com (bilingual hotel search), http://www.almousa.net (bilingual real estate search), and are working on going deeper with these and adding a few more (doctor's and hospitals, schools – colleges – universities). At any rate, it's great someone is talking about this since it's pretty exciting to us.