Sunday, August 30, 2009

The Maktoob story: A source of pride

The big news this week is the sale of Maktoob.com to Yahoo! Rumours had been circulating for years regarding this deal, but it’s now official and the Internet media scene in the Middle East will never be the same.

To begin with, we should all feel extremely proud of the Maktoob team, especially the founders Samih Toukan and Husam Khoury who launched Maktoob eleven years ago, following a few years of experimenting with web development and Internet projects under their previous company Business Optimization Consultants (BOC), which even launched one of the first recruitment sites in the Arab World, Job Finder.

In 1998 they spotted a niche for Arabic email services and announced Maktoob at a computer show in Amman (METS 98) where the founders wore Maktoob T-Shirts and asked people to sign-up for an account. I remember signing up and grabbing my email address zeid@maktoob.com which I’ve proudly used ever since, having beaten hundreds of ‘Zeids’ that would follow as Maktoob gained millions of email users in record time and its fame went beyond Jordan.

Maktoob (meaning ‘letter’ in Arabic) grew beyond its name to offer so much more Arabic and English content. Your email username and password became a gateway to so many other services.

I’ve been watching Maktoob closely since it started, and have worked with the Maktoob team on many occasions. The patience and determination of the founders and their early investors must be commended. From humble beginnings in a Jebel Amman office, Maktoob now has over 300 people in Amman, Dubai, Riyadh, Cairo and Kuwait.

There are many Jordan-based Internet media ventures that have been inspired by Maktoob, or have simply benefited from the awareness that Maktoob created in the region. When Maktoob opened its Dubai office, it was probably the only Arab website selling online advertising professionally in the Middle East, educating clients and advertising agencies about the future of marketing as we know it today.

It took years for proper revenues to materialize, but perseverance and leadership have been awarded now with this recognition from Yahoo!, whose acquisition of Maktoob will send a message worldwide regarding the emergence of the Middle East as an Internet media market.

It will also tell the story of Jordanian entrepreneurship against all odds. A story that involved hundreds of team members over the years, all of whom feel this success is theirs too.

The outpouring of support and congratulations to the Maktoob team following the announcement of this deal has been heartwarming. No matter what direction the new Yahoo! Maktoob takes, its place in the region’s Internet history is secured as the trailblazing industry-maker, born in Jordan. Congratulations to us all.

zeid@maktoob.com

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Yahoo! to acquire Maktoob.com

Yahoo! has agreed to acquire Maktoob.com, the Arab world’s largest online community, marking the first major investment by a U.S. technology company in a region where internet penetration is still in its infancy.

The global internet giant said on Tuesday it has entered into a definitive agreement with Jordan-based Maktoob Group to acquire Maktoob.com for an undisclosed fee. Maktoob Business is a part of Maktoob.com.

Yahoo! said it expects the acquisition to be completed in the fourth quarter.

Read more

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Internet filtering by MENA Governments increasing

OpenNet Initiative recently released a report delivering an an updated view of Internet content controls in the Middle East and North Africa region, comparing findings to an earlier global survey carried out in 2006-2007.

The new study shows that Internet censorship has “continued apace in the region.”

Fourteen countries in the Middle East and North Africa, out of eighteen countries surveyed, filter Internet content using technical means.

"Our latest research results confirm the growing use of next generation cyberspace controls beyond mere denial of information," says Ron Deibert, ONI Principal Investigator and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto. "The media environment of the Middle East and North Africa region is a battle-space where commercially-enhanced blocking, targeted surveillance, self-censorship, and intimidation compete with enhanced tools of censorship circumvention and mobile activism."

Apparently, Internet censorship in the region is increasing in both scope and depth, and filtering of political content continues to be the common denominator among filtering regimes there.

Governments also continue to disguise their political filtering, while acknowledging blocking of social content, and censors are catching up with increasing amounts of online content, in part by using filtering software developed by companies in the U.S."

Examples of issues that the ONI research reveals include Qatar's blocking of online educational health content such as the Web site of the Health Promotion Program at Columbia University; Syria's blocking of political Web sites such as Facebook; the UAE's blocking of a number of sites that present information on Nazism, Holocaust deniers, and historical revisionists, and sites that are hosted on Israel's .il domain; and two Yemeni ISPs' use of Websense.

Regarding Jordan, the OpenNet website reports that, “Access to Internet content in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan remains largely unfettered, with filtering applied to a single news Web site.”

OpenNet Initiative (http://opennet.net), is a partnership among groups at four leading universities: Toronto, Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The 2008-2009 Middle East and North Africa regional overview and country profiles can be accessed at http://opennet.net/research/regions/mena. n

zanasser@gmail.com

Saturday, August 08, 2009

“Scareware” is big business

According to a study by Panda Security, fraudsters are making approximately $34 million per month through what is being called “scareware attacks”.

These are scams designed to trick surfers into purchasing rogue security packages supposedly needed to deal with threats which don’t really exist.

Also termed as “rogueware”, distributors of such software are successfully infecting 35 million machines a month.

Utilizing the concept of social engineering, whereby information on such fake security software is marketed through social networking sites and tools, user are tricked into visiting sites hosting scareware software, downloading it and telling a friend. Other tactics to find users include manipulating the search engine rank of pages hosting scareware.

Panda Security believes that there are over 200 different families of rogueware, with more new variants coming on stream all the time.

The technical director at Panda Labs explains that "Rogueware is so popular among cyber-criminals primarily because they do not need to steal users' personal information like passwords or account numbers in order to profit from their victims. By taking advantage of the fear of malware attacks, they prey upon willing buyers of their fake anti-virus software, and are finding more and more ways to get to their victims, especially as popular social networking sites and tools like Facebook and Twitter have become mainstream."

And the figures support the concern that this trend is growing. In the second quarter of 2009, four times more new strains were created than in the whole of 2008, primarily to avoid signature-based detection by proper security packages.

Another technique, behavior-based detection, is an approach that works well with Trojans and worms, but is limited when applied against scareware packages.

The real issue now emerging is how sacreware is emerging as an organized crime. There are dedicated software creators and distributors of scraeware. They go through a set of procedures: writing the rogue applications, establishing distribution platforms, payment gateways, and any other back office services.

There are also affiliates (distributors) tasked with the job of distributing scareware to as many victims as possible in the fastest possible time.

Stay out of this cycle. Don’t be ‘scared’ into downloading anything. Only obtain well-known industry standard security software. Forget about small, unknown vendors. Just applying common sense is the best protection against scareware, rogueware or any kind of new ‘threatware’.

zanasser@gmail.com

Wireless broadband will dominate our region soon

It is clear that wirless Internet use will exceed ‘wired’ use worldwide. Internet access delivered across mobile phone networks and Wi-Max networks will be the dominant form of connections soon.

Already, we can see several service providers in Jordan providing such services, including UMax from Umniah, Zain e-Go, Wi-Tribe services and others.
But the main service channel will be mobile GPRS, whereby phone owners will add Internet services to their cellular phone plan or package.

A recent study of this trend in our region, by Dubai-based consultants Delta Partners, confirms that almost 70 percent of broadband subscribers in the Middle East and Africa will use wireless networks by 2011, up from about 38 percent today.

This is partially driven by the region being the world’s fastest growing in terms of mobile penetration in recent years. Fixed line penetration has stagnated at 20 percent in the Middle East and 4 percent in Africa, meaning that any growth in Internet penetration will have to be via mobile.

The lack of coverage seems to be the main obstacle at the moment, but that is set to change with the arrival new submarine cables and aggressive investments in 3G networks from mobile operators.

“This will translate into a significant growth potential for mobile broadband in MEA, with subscribers expected to grow from 2.5 million today to about 40 million in 2011. At a strong ARPU of $10-15 this will represent a market worth around $6 billion in 2011 versus $1 billion today,” says Joao Sousa, partner at Delta Partners.
The report goes on to explain that operators should gain access to international connectivity at competitive prices, create an efficient network operation and develop an effective marketing policy.

Simply, what this means is that pricing should be attractive, and there is a need for more awareness among consumers.

At the moment, generally, users understand the concept of wireless broadband, but are not yet widely adopting it, probably due to prohibitive pricing.

Just like mobile voice services were expensive then dropped in price, mobile data/Internet services will follow. That’s when we shall all be able to enjoy full Internet connectivity, at all times, through any device. Analysts believe we are two years away from such a reality. I hope they are right!

zanasser@gmail.com