Twofour54 ibtikar, Abu Dhabi media zone’s creative business arm, announced today that they are launching a seed fund, called ‘AppsArabia,’ in order to create Arabic Apps for the iPhone, iPod and iPad.
Apps have been an outstanding success, with an excess of 4 billion downloaded since their launch. It is not yet known how many exist in Arabic, but the majority are not made within the region.
The fund, which has an initial focus on Apple products, will eventually create comparable software for Android, Nokia and Blackberry.
Tony Orsten, Twofour54’s Chief Executive, said that AppsArabia was intended to ‘stimulate’ the creation of Arabic content in Apps and encouraged individuals to come forward with ideas saying that if they were ’good enough’ then there was potential to reach a world market. And even if that fails, then creators can still ‘make money quickly,’ according to Orsten - and sometimes in only ‘a few weeks’.
And with the current global market for the development of Apps now estimated at $6.2 billion, he’s probably not wrong either.
Sarah O'Connell, Staff Writer, Gulf Jobs MarketMusanada (Abu Dhabi General Services) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Telecoms giant, Etisalat as part of the Abu Dhabi initiative (ADNET) to get its government comprehensively and securely networked by 2011.
The understanding, which agrees core services to be provided by Etisalat, aims to establish a network infrastructure of highly secure connections enabling Abu [...]
The UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority known as TRA has announced that it will launch .emarat, the only just approved Arabic web domain name, by the end of this month.
Executive Director of Technology Development Affairs, Mohammed Gheyath said that businesses will be able to sign up to the domain name by June and that registration will [...]
The world’s biggest mobile telecoms company by revenue, Vodafone, has taken ‘legal action’ against Qatar’s telecommunications regulators because of a licence granted to Virgin Mobile Qatar.
Vodafone own 23% of the shares of its Qatar company, with another 23% of shares owned by the Qatar Foundation. The remaining 54% are publicly traded shares.
The company are arguing that [...]
A public relations firm has reported that there are upwards of 15 million Facebook subscribers in the Middle East and North Africa and that they outnumber the newspapers currently in circulation in the region.
Spot On Public Relations also identified Saudi Arabia and Dubai as being key markets for the site which can be regarded [...]