Apple is set to open its first representative office for the Middle East in Abu Dhabi, according to channel sources working closely with the vendor.

Apple has never had any employees based in the region up to now, preferring instead to channel all its business through Arab Business Machine (ABM). However, talk of the Mac vendor launching its own operations has grown louder in the market during the past year, and now resellers claim they expect concrete developments in the next few months.

One Apple dealer said it had been told by Apple officials who visited the region that the company had selected office space in Abu Dhabi, and had originally intended to move in last December.
The source suggested Apple's motivation for seeking a local presence could be to gain greater control over the development of its business in the region.

"They now have a lot of products that are going outside of distribution, like the iPad and iPhone, and I think they want to supervise such things themselves in the region," said the partner. "Our feeling is that Apple would be more aggressive in terms of visiting large accounts and developing other businesses. Their involvement in certain deals at the moment suggests this is the direction they are moving."

Any move to open a representative office in the Middle East is likely to create speculation over Apple's future channel strategy as well. At the moment its products are distributed solely through ABM, which is based in the UAE. ABM used to be Apple's International Marketing Company (IMC) for the region, but now carries the title of ‘Authorised Distributor' following a corporate rebranding exercise 18 months ago.

ABM sells to a broad network of Apple Authorised Resellers, Authorised Premium Resellers and Authorised Restailers throughout the Middle East, including GraphiTech, Direct Access, KMS and iPoint.

One Apple dealer welcomed the prospect of Apple having its own staff on the ground. "It would definitely be a good thing because Apple will get a better feel for the market. If Apple is in the picture I think it will look more closely at how it needs to strategically support partners to focus on certain products or markets. It won't just be about short-term profit."

When approached for comment on the Abu Dhabi office situation, a spokesperson for Apple UK, which oversees the Middle East business, said the company had "nothing to announce at this point in time."

Source: ITP.net

Microsoft Gulf has announced the launch of Microsoft Office 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 in the Gulf region. Microsoft Office 2010 is available in 10 languages, including Arabic and will expand to 94 languages. It can be purchased with the most popular desktops and laptops from leading PC makers including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba, the firm said.

The Telecom Regulation Authority (TRA) is on a sector liberalisation drive that may see the introduction of voice over internet protocol (VoIP) services by etisalat and du this year.

Al Emarat Al Youm reported on Sunday that the companies plan to launch their services by July, but officials at both companies declined to confirm or deny the report. TRA said in early January it plans to unveil a new VoIP policy "soon."

"It's not an issue of allowing VoIP," TRA Director General Mohammad Al Ganem told Gulf News. "It's an issue of regulation and consumer protection."

Al Ghanim said VoIP operators have been blocked inside UAE because the mechanisms do not exist to regulate them. Consumers have no outlet to direct complaints in case of poor service or other issues, he added.

VoIP companies allow users to make phone calls and send text messages to mobiles and land-lines using the internet for free or at costs well below those charged by traditional network operators.

"It's a case of having the right infrastructure to do so and du already has an all IP network and etisalat is nearly there," said Irfan Ellam, telecom analyst at Al Mal Capital. "It's a strategic choice for the business in order to maintain revenues and profitability."

Source: Gulfnews

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Our Graphic Designer Fahad Khalid's website www.fahadkhalid.com won second prize in the personal websites category in UAE Web awards 2009 presented by Pan Arab Web Awards Academy.
The ceremony was held at Jumeirah Beach Hotel, Dubai on 5th December 2009.

Following in the footsteps of its Yahoo! rival, Microsoft has just released a preview of its new MSN.com website that it claims "is designed to be the best home page on the Web".
Microsoft sites have been ranked third, behind Google and Yahoo!, in the latest comScore analysis of the top 50 web properties in the United States. But MSN is still well in the playing field, attracting more than 600 million global visitors every month.

The new MSN design has been influenced by customer suggestions, and the preview site sports easier access to Bing search and more relevant news and information in a cleaner interface, with 50% fewer links than the current version of the site.

Perhaps the most interesting new feature on MSN is the addition of updates and information from Windows Live, Facebook and Twitter, quite similar to Yahoo!'s offering.
"More than half of people online start their sessions on sites like MSN and they told us they want simplicity - yet still want the latest information and their favorite services delivered together," said Lisa Gurry, senior director, MSN.

"The time was right for us to make a big bet, and our approach needed to be bold," said Gurry. "Today is an important transformation for MSN, and it's only the beginning."

According to MSN corporate vice president Erik Jorgensen, the new homepage will begin rolling out today and become widely available to over 100 million U.S. customers early next year.

Source –ITP.net

The move could potentially open up the Web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic.

The Internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of international domain names - or addresses - that can be written in languages other than English, an official said Monday.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN - the non-profit group that oversees domain names - is holding a meeting this week in Seoul. Domain names are the monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and Twitter post, such as ".com" and other suffixes.

One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN's board at this week's gathering is whether to allow for the first time entire Internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters. That could potentially open up the Web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic - in which Russian is written.

"This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago," Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters, calling it a "fantastically complicated technical feature." He said he expects the board to grant approval on Friday, the conference's final day.

The Internet's roots are traced to experiments at a U.S. university in 1969 but it wasn't until the early 1990s that its use began expanding beyond academia and research institutions to the general public.

Rod Beckstrom, ICANN's new president and CEO, said that if the change is approved, ICANN would begin accepting applications for non-English domain names and that the first entries into the system would likely come sometime in mid 2010.

Enabling the change, Thrush said, is the creation of a translation system that allows multiple scripts to be converted to the right address.

"We're confident that it works because we've been testing it now for a couple of years," he said. "And so we're really ready to start rolling it out."

Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, Beckstrom - a former chief of US cybersecurity - said that more than half use languages that have scripts based on alphabets other than Latin.

"So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world's Internet users today, but more than half of probably the future users as the use of the Internet continues to spread," he said.

Beckstrom, in earlier remarks to conference participants, recalled that many people had said just three to five years ago that using non-Latin scripts for domain names would be impossible to achieve.

"But you the community and the policy groups and staff and board have worked through them, which is absolutely incredible," he said.

ICANN is headquartered in the United States in Marina del Rey, California.

Source: Gulfnews

Non-profit corporation Creative Commons (CC) is making inroads in the Middle East by launching their first Arabic copyright licences in Jordan next month.

In the online content space, Creative Commons helps users retain copyright of their creative work, stating exceptions to allow for a ‘some rights reserved' copyright. Through its free licences, it instructs others on whether content marked can be either shared, remixed, used commercially, or combined as necessary.

In an interview with Creative Commons CEO Joichi Ito at the recent TEDxDubai event, he revealed that the first Arabic licences will be launched in Jordan on November 15th - a significant milestone for the internet and online content in the Middle East.

A public review for the Jordanian licences took about a year with "dozens of people" such as lawyers and active members of the CC community offering their input. There was also a lot of debate on what to call ‘Creative Commons' in Arabic and whether they should have it translated in the first place. Eventually, a decision was enforced on going forward with an Arabic equivalent.
Egypt is expected to be the next country with a CC licencing project and then possibly the United Arab Emirates if the corporation manages to get hold of the right partners.

"Each country has different laws and so we have to get a local lawyer who takes our licence and translates it into the local law. There's a very rigorous process where we then we make it open for public comment, we get lots of people to comment, we translate it back into English, and we have this global discussion about whether this UAE licence reflects, under UAE law, the spirit of the original agreement. It's very technical and takes a lot of work," Ito explained.

While most look upon Creative Commons as a movement, Ito is keen to get it recognised as part of the internet's infrastructure and is pushing copyrights in all fields, including science.

"The two new things are science and education, which I think in the Middle East are key. I think the content side is important but unlike the US, I don't think you have as big a problem here yet because you don't have Hollywood...it will happen, but with science and technology it's something you really do want to plug in to the rest of the world and having an open standard is important. I see universities (here) connecting networks together but I don't think they've really thought about the legal issues," added Ito.

The concept however is still new in the Middle East, except for some exposure through the Wikipedia community and the broadcaster Al Jazeera - a key supporter of the Creative Commons in the Arab world. Ito admits that there's a fundamental lack of understanding for CC here but believes that that will change given time.

"I think a lot of it is the service providers such as Maktoob and Google, and how much they expose it. Google has it but they don't expose it that much yet. It's a chicken and egg because they don't want to expose it till the users know what it is and the users won't know about it until they are exposed to it," Ito commented.

"In the US, bloggers played a big part in getting the message of Creative Commons out and Flickr was huge; but it's banned here. I think it'll be interesting to see what happens (here). One of the key things will be the relationship between different constituents because, at the end of the day, you want it to be completely apolitical," he concluded.

Source –ITP.net