Total number of e-commerce users in these four countries exceeded 5.1 million people in 2007.

Full report available at zawya - Middle East Business Information

From Reuters:

Most of our surfers like the idea that they can decide what the team will do: who will be in the first 11, what formation they will play and who will be the substitutes
The Internet fans can drag players they think should play into their preferred positions on a pitch diagram by a deadline. The information is then collated and the players who get the most votes will line up for the next match. We thank our sponsors - Play65 Backgammon site.

A group photo of the team - getting instructions directly from the Mac…

All the games are transmitted live and the fans decide on positions changes, substitutes (and replacing timing) etc. This makes Hapoel Play65 Kiryat Shalom the first Interactive team that is managed as a social media democracy.

sources:

Reuters - Israeli soccer club puts online fans in charge
Yahoo News - The First Web 2.0 Football Club in the World

The latter has announced support for the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) and a series of further enhancements are expected. IDNA enables webmasters to use domain names which exist outside the original 26 characters used for the English-language - but not for too many other languages since many have odd accented characters. Additionally, this brings greater support for asiatic and arabic character sets.

The other new development which is currently being looked at, according to a senior Google source, is the addition of a tool within webmaster tools whereby you can specify the country your site relates to. The countries will be listed in a drop down list - and you’ll almost certainly only be able to choose once country per site.

For a long time it has been a problem if you site was a .com site with no history of activity in a country for Google to pick out the right ‘bucket’ in which to list your site. For some this was an embarrasment - for others a major business hurdle. Matters were worse for those .coms hosted in a country other than the one they were targeting - perhaps for business political or content management system reasons. The result was you might be targeting France with a site hosted in Norway - but not end up appearing in the ‘Pages Francophones’ of Google.fr - even if the language of the site was French.

The simplest way of solving this problem has always been to have local country domains in which case - contrary to what one SES panelist advised in San Jose, the hosting location becomes irrelevant. For many, this isn’t practical - hence the reason why some have chosen to host locally to get around the problem.

These two developments combined will help international SEO specialists manage their projects with less frustration!

Al Arabiya’s largest web audience is in Saudi Arabia (21%) with Egypt (10%) following behind - but the site has large populations of Arabic speakers in the US (8%) with the UK, France, Germany and Canada each representing around 4% of the audience. According to Al Arabiya, the audience is growing.

“We are very excited about the imminent consumer launch of onkosh.mobi, the mobile version of Orascom’s new Arabic-language search portal, onkosh.com,” said Khaled Bichara, Orascom Telecom Holding Board Member & Chief Fixed and Portal Officer, Wind Telecomunicazioni SpA.

“We will be greatly enhancing this in the coming months on an ongoing basis with data from the dotMobi mobile content database, to give our Arabic users the full mobile web experience.

Onkosh is built from the ground up with the Arabic user in mind, utilizing advanced NLP (Natural Language Processing) to improve search results.”

Orascom Telecom interested to gain share in Internet search market in Middle East because of search advertising opportunity, which there are Google, Araby.com, and Ayna competing to offer Arabic search services with different verticals. Also the mobile search market is increasing in MENA region due to high mobile penetration.

The sheer number of content and service providers tapping the mobile channel is immense; it would be near impossible for users to remember each and every premium short code or service URL, this is where Raheeb plays a vital role as a single point of access for users searching for mobile content and for content providers searching for the right vehicle to reach users; for the latter group Raheeb will prove to be much more effective than running expensive newspaper campaigns with very temporary and limited effect at best.

They are going to serve different topics for Saudi mobile users like: News, Stock market, web directory, weather, WAP sites directory, sports, Islam, and misc.




Naseej plans in next phase to widen their service coverage with new mobile operators in other countries. The number of mobile subscribers in Saudi market is 19 million subscribers which is considered the largest market in the region.

Sherif Eskander, Google regional manager of Middle East & North Africa said:

Google has a long-term commitment to this dynamic region, which has potential for growth and development. Last year we launched a number of custom designed products for the Arab world, and our participation in Cairo ICT only confirms our commitment

Google works seriously to develop customized services for Arab world, including Gmail, News, and Adwords. Google targeting Arabic Internet market since the Internet penetration of the region is high and its promising Internet search market.

Cairo ICT 2007 is considered as one of top IT events in MENA region which the major players in the business are participating and showing their latest technologies.

The article can be found here

The leading Arab country for access remains the United Arab Emirates and broadband use is increasing too - though in different rates in different parts of the arab world.

Madar Research forms part of the Safawi project with German search engine company Seekport. Safawi is to be launched later this year and will have full Arabic-language search capabilities.

Arabic internet users - as we have reported previously - often have good English fluency but are not comfortable searching in English. The availability of more search engines in Arabic will be a significant plus.

Source: Itp.NET

Via Haaretz (Hebrew)

That will leave quite a few corners of the UK and Europe where speeds are lower!

Source: AME Info

“There is no (full) Arabic Internet search engine on the market. You find so-called search engines, but they involve a directory search, not a local search. There’s nothing available for overall Internet search,” Hermann Havermann, managing director of German Internet tech firm Seekport, told Reuters.

“There is not enough Arabic content available on the Internet. But there’s no motivation to put more Arabic content on the Internet as long as you don’t have a system to find the content,” Havermann said.

The Yahoo! news article reports that the Arabic online advertising market could grow to $150 million in 2008 from $10 million at present.

Source: TW | Yahoo! News

The Pew Global Attitudes Project has released a report illustrating the rapid growth of internet use globally. Much of this growth can be put down to more women and over 50’s coming online across Western Europe.

The report also contains some interesting figures on internet growth across a range of countries, including Russia, China and India, comparing data from 2004 and 2005.

Usage has risen across the board with 35% (rise of 16%) for Russia and for India 21%(rise of 15%).

The Netherlands has the most mature market, with 84% of its inhabitants going online. They are followed by Canada (79%), UK (76%), US (76%)and Germany (67%).

In terms of access Netherlands again came out on top (72%) with established western markets close behind. Access has risen though for Poland (20%, up 18%), China (33%, up 14%), Russia (15%, up 8%) and India (14%, up 11%).

Russian users are still overwhelmingly young people. Only 3% of Russians aged from 50 to 65 have access to the Internet. To compare, in the USA and Canada 68% from this age group use the Internet, in the UK this index is equal to 67%, in Germany – 53%, in France – 52% and in Poland – 22%.

Source: RataNews | Pew Global Attitudes Project

Sources:
albawaba.com middle east news information::Algeria: 1 million internet users

New english-speaking Arabic search engine launched in beta

Deepy has a look of Microsoft (that search button…?) and the now standard Google format. However, it has a very neat spelling feature which corrects you as you type.

This may seem innocuous enough - but if English is not your mother tongue and the world’s information is largely recorded in English and only findable by searching in that language - you’d appreciate some help with your spelling wouldn’t you?

A report carried out in 2004 by Web Certain suggested that Arabic speakers, amongst other non-English mother-tongue speakers, found searching in English less than easy. Deepy may just have come up with a solution which may well be copied by others. Now that would be a good idea if search engines added accent correction to their none-English sites!

Reported by Abondance

The news was revealed by the Kuwaiti Director General of the country’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry at the world information forum in Cairo.