Its been a LONG time since i did any speed linking, so here are some good stories I’ve gathered for you from the web!
Technorati Tags: Facebook platform, Open Social, social networks
I got back yesterday from the Pan Arab Web Awards in Dubai which took place at Burj Al-Arab on the 27th, the ceremony was great to say the least, I went there along with Hussam Hammo to collect the two prizes As7ab Maktoob achieved, which are the “Best Arabic Website in 2008” Award and the “Best Arabic Social Network” Award.
I had a chance to go around Dubai in the following day before coming back to Amman, Dubai changed allot from the last time I visited it in 1996, it changed so much that you can barely know its the same city, below are some pictures I took in those two days.
One of the presentations
Not a Very good image of me receiving one of the awards:
Myself (on the right) along with other Maktoob Employees:
View from the partment and the surrounding building (most are being built):
Technorati Tags: dubai, burj Al Arab, Pan Arab Web Awards, as7ab Maktoob, best Arabic website
As an avid user of Pageflakes, i was excited by the news of it being acquired by Live Universe which also owns the video site Glumbert.com, the details of the deal has not been announced yet, although it is being said that the acquisition isn’t a large one, Pageflakes received a its last round of funding in May 2006, the amount invested in Pageflakes reached a total of $4 Million.
Live Universe was established by the MySpace founder Brad Greenspa, they also acquired the video site revver in February 2008. Pageflakes will remain at their current offices in Germany and San Francisco.
From a user end perspective, I hope this acquisition reflects into even more improvements into pageflakes in the upcoming months, they have lots of competition from giants like Google and Yahoo that they need to look out for.
Technorati Tags: pageflakes, live universe
Here is something I wasn’t expecting, although AOL has been making some strong moves towards transforming their brand from a dial up provider to an internet giant, they acquired yedda a while ago but the move to acquire Bebo for $850 Million is definitely a large step towards rejuvenating the brand.
$850 Million isnt very far awy from the $1 billion estimation Bedo received some time ago, Bebo claims to have 40 million users and curently are the 2md largest social network in the UK after Facebook. The $850 million price values each member at $21.25.
Bebo has 22 million unique visitors and 11 billion page views per month according to recent Comscore data.
You can find the official AOL announcement of the acquisition here.
Well its all over the web, after all the rumors that have been going around for the past year, Microsoft went out and confirmed it today in this press release, this deal, if it does go through will be one of the largest acquisitions in the history of the internet, this estimates the Yahoo! share at $31, Microsoft offered a combination of cash and Microsoft stock to Yahoo!
Needless to say, this puts allot of pressure on Google, which may very well be the greatest threat to the search giant so far, Yahoo! and Microsoft combines will own 27% of the search market pie while Google owns 68.1%, still Google remains the biggest player in the search arena, but its definitely something Google needs to look out for.
The internet as we know it wont be the same if this deal goes through, of course it depends if they decide to keep their products separate or in some way join them, just imagine how would things change if Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Instant messenger combined, crazy yeah?
You can read more about this offer on Techcrunch in this post.
Its been a while since I posted an episode of funny video Monday, luckily I remembered today, so here is my pic for this week from Funny Video Hub.
Another episdoe of speedlinking for some of the most usful posts I came across in the past few days.
Yeah, my blog was down for almost the past two days, Khalid had notified me 2 days ago right when i woke up that my blog was down (thanks Khalid) which was strange because all the other sites on the server were up and running fine, I reuploaded the index file and the blog was working fine.
Yesterday the same problem happened, however uploading all of the wordpress files didn’t work this time, my wordpress installation is up to date and all the files are there, after lots of investigation it turned out to be a hard disk issue on the server, it was full! luckily I had ordered a 2nd hard drive a couple of days ago and it was installed today.
This was a scary reminder of the importance of backups, I haven’t made a database backup in a while which would have been a total disaster if I had lost the database or it was corrupted, always back up!
The forum’s second day was awesome, I wasnt able to make this post yesterday because we finished late at night and I was too tired, the 2nd day mainly compromised of different startups as well as established companies seeking funding presenting their business ideas, all of them were the ones that participated in the ASTF business plan competition for 2007, the forum ended at around 2pm.
The organizers of the forum arranged for a great dinner in the dead sea panorama which was recently constructed, you basically take a road that goes way up to the top of a mountain beside the dead sea, the view was great from up there and the food at the panorama dead sea restaurant was great, below are some pictures of the forum and later on the view from the top of the panorama.
Technorati Tags: dead sea, investing in technology, dead sea panorama
For the next couple of days I’ll be attending the 5th Investing in Technology Forum that will taking place in Amman, Jordan, this will be a great networking opportunity for us, we were invited (myself and my partner) to attend because of winning the Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Competition for 2007, Sabeq and ASTF were kind enough to cover almost 90% of the attendance fees.
The forum covers variuos topics related to investing in technology, including things like how to attract VC’s, listing tech companies in the stock exchange, innovation ecosystem and licensing options.
I will be blogging at the end of each day with updates on the details of the topics covered in the panel discussions, hopefully I’ll be including some pictures from the event as well.
Sadly though, we missed the chance of being part of one of the panel discussions which would have been available for us if we registered earlier and shown interest in that, too bad we only learned about the forum lately.
Technorati Tags: licensing options. SABEQ, ASTF, investing in technology forum, VC’s
