Preston & Walker Pte Ltd. singapore based investment firm is offering 1 Million USD for the most promising business plan with a global scope.

“Our aim really is to look for the next big thing – whether it is an idea to generate more jobs, to change the way the game is played in a specific industry, to create a more socially responsible world – or even just to inspire us to learn more about ourselves,” said Gareth Walker, who is the company’s founder in a press release.

Participants in the contest cab submit their business plan here, and it will be judged by a team of anonymous millionaire judges. A small registration fee will be charged. For those who are selected, the judges will consider investing a maximum of US $1,000,000 of seed funding, as well as offer help in development of the ideas, serving as mentors to jumpstart the business. Deadline for submissions is December 31, 2011, and winners will be announced on January 31, 2012.

Participants may belong to a start-up or early stage venture.

For more information, including rules and regulations and registration fees, see the competition Web site.

Twitter trending topics are the most discussed topics on Twitter, last year Twitter added local trending topics to some US cities and some countries around the world, where it buzzed the most discussed topic coming from a given location. However now we can see United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Turkey were added to the list , where users can see trending topics from UAE and Turkey. We do not know when these 2 locations were added, a user told us it has been there for a while

Looking at UAE trending topics we found some of them similar to those trending worldwide, with the exception of hashtag #Syria and #Egypt. As we can see all trending topics are in English due to the high presence of expats in UAE. According to latest estimation there are around 2 million Twitter users in UAE:
#Top100Lies
#ThingsWeDoDuringExams

Microsoft Corp. announced the promotion of Ali Faramawy to Corporate Vice President Microsoft Corporation and President – Microsoft Middle East & Africa. The promotion recognizes Faramawy’s strong leadership and his contributions to helping “to fuel growth across the region. ” It also underlines the growing role of MEA (Arab world) as an area contributing to the overall success of Microsoft.

As corporate vice president, Ali Faramawy will continue to be responsible for Microsoft’s operations in the Middle East & Africa (MEA) area. MEA is one of thirteen areas that comprise Microsoft’s worldwide operations. Microsoft said that “the area represents one of Microsoft’s fastest growing and most dynamic markets – and certainly its most diverse.” Microsoft MEA is comprised of 32 offices representing 79 countries across three continents. Faramawy has led the region for seven years .Ali Faramawy’s previous title was Vice President Microsoft International and President – Microsoft Middle East & Africa.
Throughout his twenty years career in the IT industry, Ali held different Technical, Sales and Managerial roles in different parts of the Middle East and in Europe with companies like Dun & Bradstreet Software, NCR Corporation, Yokogawa Marex and finally Microsoft Corporation.

Ali joined Microsoft in October 1997 as the General Manager of Microsoft Egypt. After a successful four year spell in that role, he moved on to assume additional responsibilities for the area of Eastern Mediterranean, which encompassed Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Cyprus & Malta.

In May 2002, Ali moved to take on the newly established position of Regional Director – in charge of Sales, Marketing & Services for the Middle East and Africa Region.

Ali graduated from the Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University, majoring in Computer Science & Automatic Control and has an MBA in Strategic Marketing from the University of Hull in the UK. He is married and has two sons.

It seems folks at Oasis500 are boycotting ArabCrunch, they do not send us their news nor invite us to their press events, even after repeated calls from our side!

In a press release handed to the media Oasis500 the second accelerator program after Meydan in Jordan announced that it has secured a USD 1 million investment from TIMAR Ventures, a Turkey-based early-to-expansion stage venture capital (VC) fund.

This investment is targeted at the first funding round of Oasis500 Ventures 1, the investment arm of Oasis500, and will be invested directly into startup companies, either during the initial USD $15,000 funding stage or beyond.

TIMAR Ventures is a USD $150 million early-to-expansion-stage venture capital fund that invests globally in companies that apply disruptive innovation in technology and business models to create category dominant players. It also invests in the “replicate-and-innovate” model which aims to replicate successful business innovation models within Turkey, the Arab region, the Central Asian Republics and Central Eastern Europe.

(Via Business.Jo)

Tomorrow is Eid Al Fitr in most Muslims countries. In this occasion I send my greetings (see my Video below) to All Muslims worldwide and specially AC’s Muslim reader: Happy Eid, Eid Mubarak and May Allah accept from me and you. If you are not Muslim then I also wish you a happy Tuesday  :).

What Is Eid Ul Fitr?

Muslims celebrate ‘Eid ul Fitr on the first day of Shawwal — the tenth month of the Islamic calendar, following the month of Ramadhan (in which the revelation started and ended 20+ years later, and which is also the month of fasting). Following a Lunar calendar, Muslims mark the beginning of the month with the sighting of the new crescent.

The month long fasting of Ramadan culminates into the festival of ‘Eid-ul-Fitr (the Festival of Fast-Breaking). It is a festival of joy, family reunion and thanksgiving to Almighty God. The giving of a special charity for this occasion is obligatory. This is known as Zakat. Muslims dress in holiday attire, attend a special community prayer in the morning, and visit friends and relatives. Greetings of “‘Eid mubarak,” or “a blessed ‘Eid” are exchanged.
Eid Ul Fitr Prayer

:

Allaho-Akber, Allaho-Akber. La ila-ha ill-lal-lah. Allaho-Akber, Allaho-Akber. Wa-lilahill hamd. 

(Allah is great, Allah is great. There is no god but Allah. Allah is great, Allah is great. And all praises are for Allah).

Here are some links to websites that helps you know more about Islam:

Islam Guide.

Islam Web

Islamic Tube

Just Quran

Best Islamic Sites

Sisters Magazine

#image by creativesam,

As in most countries in the world Ramadan is one day to start. a new startup has emerged to provide Islamic mobile apps for all devices. which would be handy to help Muslims during the holly month.

Islamic Appstore provide Muslims direct access to thousands of Islam-oriented contents in different sections such as The Holy Quran, Ahadith, Prayers, Supplications, Ringtones, Wallpapers, nasheed… All what users need is to connect to www.islamicapp.com using their mobile, tablet or Smartphone browsers and start downloading various contents.

Islamic appstore is also available for Developers as they can start publishing their contents and apps using the developer portal.

Robert Murdoch’s Newscorp owns many influential media outlets in UK, USA, Australia and other countries in the world. Many believe that no prime minister in England can be elected without his newspapers and media outlets’s blessings, that might also be true for any U.S president. His Fox news station in is one of the most followed news stations in America and its is known to support Zionist agendas and in growing islamophobia sentiment across the U.S.

But that empire is collapsing after the phone hacking scandal of his U.K news of the world has made against thousands of people, now the tide is turing on News corp.

Public outrage against News corp illegal practice is growing, and the world is realizing the extend of media power that is controlled by one family. Many now call to boycott news corp and its publications.

MurdochAlert is a Firefox add-on warns you whenever you visit one of the 100+ Murdoch Family-controlled websites. The add on says If you’re not ready to block them all, MurdochAlert can warn you instead. “Also it’s handy for identifying news sources controlled by the Murdoch Family. MurdochAlert warns you whenever you visit one of the 100+ Murdoch Family-controlled websites. If you’re not ready to block them all, MurdochAlert can warn you instead. Also it’s handy for identifying news sources controlled by the Murdoch Family. “

The browser add-ons developer explains why it was developed by saying:

“NewsCorp agents in multiple countries have been arrested for hacking into the phones and computers of at least thousands of innocent people. Since the Murdoch family controls 100+ high-traffic domains, it is difficult for average users to know which sites could potentially place them at risk. 

MurdochAlert identifies the domains that may place users at risk for Murdoch-related hacking. MurdochAlert shows a bottom warning box whenever you visit a Murdoch-controlled sited. “

As for Chrome there “Murdoch Block”, a chrome browser add-one that Blocks websites owned and operated by Newscorp.

If you need a list of websites controlled by newscorp of the world you can see the list here.

Via ArabCrunch Arabic Edition.

Wonder why the U.S Government attacked Wikileaks? they claimed it is national security, but the truth is that they did not want the world to know about their crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries, whether it is the number of civilians including children and women the US army and the CIA killed, or to know about illegal torture and rape happing inside CIA and US, Pro US Afghani and PRo US Iraqi detention center, Or how the CIA and US state department conspire with other Muslim and Non-Muslim dictators against people and other countries.

To hide their crimes and mislead the public about the truth the U.S Defense Department extreme technology arm “Darpa” is developing its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. “It’s an attempt to get better at both detecting and conducting propaganda campaigns on social media. SMISC has two goals. First, the program needs to help the military better understand what’s going on in social media in real time — particularly in areas where troops are deployed. Second, Darpa wants SMISC to help the military play the social media propaganda game itself.” According to wired, SMISC algorithms will be aimed at discovering and tracking the “formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes)” on social media.

The requested SMISC project also needs to be able to seek out “persuasion campaign structures and influence operations” developing across the social sphere.
SMISC will not be about flagging negative content about US and it s army but also to help it in counter-messaging.

SMISC would be used in the environment in which [the military] operates” and where it “conducts operations. Which means according to wired the system will be directed to non U.S social media communities.

Now according to The U.S Smith-Mundt Act pointing propaganda campaigns at US audiences is illegal.

However, this program will definitely cross that line, as with the power of Retweets, reshare on facebook and Google plus. U.S army propaganda will eventually reach US domestic audience and thus mislead them about the conduct of U.S foreign policy.

This is not the first time that a U.S government body has used social media for propaganda purposes. There many incidents that are reported in the media like this one and others that no body outside the spy circle would know about.
Another example, is In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, has invested cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is. Finally, Visible gives users a chance to tag posts, forward them to colleagues and allow them to response through a web interface.

Also the CIA and Google (shame on Google!) has invested in Recorded Future that scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come.
While it is morally incorrect to lie to anyone and mislead them whether they are Americans or non Americans, we humbly ask congressmen, law makers, activists, net freedom organizations, executive, entrepreneurs and geeks to take action and use Smith-Mundt Act to end US army and the CIA online and social media propaganda efforts because based on that act it is illegal, the public has right to know the truth and free flow of information should be granted. Not lies and deception. to coverup crimes.

It seems every hacker in the world is pointing his keyboard at sony, as hack number 13 has been targeted at Sony Europe by a lebanese hacker.

The hacker known as Idahc got anther users database at Sony Europe that contains around 120 users name, passwords, mobile phone numbers, work emails and websites addresses.

According to Naked Security the attacker claims that he used SQL injection to get the database.

This is clearly another embarrassment to Sony after millions of accounts in PSN got exposed by a hackers around last month.

F.B.I. director Robert Mueller III travled to Silicon Valley, Tuesday, to meet with top executives of several tech companies including Facebook and Google about a proposal that would make it easier to  spy on Internet users.

According to NY Times report, under Mueller’s proposal, ” firms would have to design systems to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages. Services based overseas would have to route communications through a server on United States soil where they could be wiretapped.”

ArabCrunch urges Silicon Valley companies to refuse cooperation with the F.B.I. in this matter, 100s of millions of Non-Americans rely on Google and Facebook for their daily internet life and these 100s of millions of people did not elect the government that wants to spy on their communications  and on what they say online.

The F.B.I. will not use wiretapping of criminals from U.S soil  only. But also opposition to its occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq,  and other countries in the world. Not to mention with the US government treatment of Wikileaks  and other free media would raise huge suspicion that  the FBI would wiretap journalists and bloggers like us in order to identify and suppress source of leaks of government criminal activities in USA and around the world.

NYTimes says that the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires phone and broadband network access providers  like Verizon and Comcast to make sure they can immediately comply when presented with a court wiretapping order.

As for the 100s of millions of non-americans would there be a court order to wirtetape anyone? we doubt.

It is really ironic that Hillary Clinton few months ago expressed concerns of wiretapping requests  to BlackBerry devices by governments in the Arab region, while its government is pursuing this on its soil. Preashing sometime overseas and do something else home!

#Robert S. Mueller III and Gorge Bush image from the White house archive.

Updated.

There is no doubt that here at ArabCrunch we were big fans of Twitter since the day it was launched. We favored it over its Arab clone WaWet, for many reasons on top of them international adoption rate and a large applications ecosystem.

We were happy that Twitter opened a new platform for the world to communicate on 1 to 1 and 1 to many bases, as it played an instrumental role in breaking barriers including boarders.

However the nasty hand of politics comes to spoil things up.

Our compeitiors the US state department interference is not new with Twitter, as they asked Twitter to postpone its scheduled maintenance to give a chance for “the pro democracy revolutionary attempts in Iran”

And since we are under cruel assault by the US administration and its CIA along with the Zionist movement and certain their Arab “allies.” We raised a very legitimate question whether the CIA, Mossad and any other intelligence agency have access to our accounts on Twitter or any of our staff, or not. We are looking for simple answer Yes or No. But until now there is no answer! the tweet was sent on the 27th of sep.

We feel suspicious because we’ve been seeing retweets and replies from mostly social media Arab mercenaries and not normal tweets! Those tweets were designed to install confusion in our staff mind as a physiological warfare against us and as a failed attempts to mislead the public with a new coverup for the CIA crimes against free media.

Giving access to the CIA, Mossad or any other intelligence such as NSA and specially those in certain Arab country has catastrophic results:

1- We can not rollout that we use Twitter to communicate with some of our news sources, as such access to the CIA, NSA and Mossad would put them in grave danger.

2- If the motive before for the CIA/Mossad and Zionism in destroying ArabCrunch is based on colonial dictator and imperial lust to control free media outlets in politics or tech. Now they have a new motive, which is retaliation because we exposed some of their plots against ArabCrunch and other independent Startups founded by independent Muslims, as such they can send a tweet on our behalf that would put us in legal trouble and impressment under certain anti-free media laws in certain Middle Eastern oppressive and dictator banana republics regimes.

We have a message to the CIA and their Aarab tails, we understand what social graph means since before Facebook was public, you will never be able to find our sources. We will do anything (legal) to protect the brave American men and woman who risked their lives to warn us of your criminal plots.

We will never share our password on Twitter, google or else where with anyone, even under torture or a new type of blackmail.

We hope Sean Garrett @SG from Twitter communictations or anyone from Twitter will come and answer our legitimate question.

Update 1:

Sean replied to our question if twitter gave admin access to the CIA/FBI/Mossad/NSA and Other Agencies to Our Twitter Accounts? “um no. just as much chance of this as Twitter being the gunman that killed JFK.”

which is a great news, but we still waiting for him to answer if these agencies asked/have/had any type of access to our accounts.

US official has been repeatedly attacking Wikileaks and its founders, Julain Assang, reports before the release of the 90,000 secret logs of the Afghan war suggested that US officials were looking to assassinate Julain.

According to UK newspaper Guardian, Wikileaks said that the whislteblowing website’s funding has been blocked, moneybookers a UK registered Internet payment company that collect wikileaks donations, emailed wikilekas telling them they had to close the account because it has been on an official US watchlist and on an Australian government blacklist.

The Guardian posted moneybookers reply to wikileaks supplied by Wikileaks founder Julian Assange:

Hi Daniel, you can inform him that initially his account was suspended due to being accessed from a blacklisted IP address. However, following recent publicity and the subsequently addition of the WikiLeaks entity to blacklists in Australia and watchlists in the USA, we have terminated the business relationship.’”

US officials have repeatedly asked WIkileaks to “do the right thing” return the logs and destroy all copies. Which is something TOO late. as all files are now at the finger tips of thousands of people around the world.

Julain Assange defiant response to the “do the right thing,” is releasing thousands more of the secret logs it has obtained, this time about the War in Iraq which would expose the amount of murder the US army and its allies has committed against Iraqi civilians.

Is this an outrages and hypocritical move by the US administration, as the public in USA and around the world have the right to know the hidden secrets of how power is being abused by totalitarian and dictator governments around the world? Is this 100% against the principles of free speech and free flow of information?

However the site seems to be down for a while. Is this the case at your end?

ArabCrunch over Twitter around a week ago said that AC’s founder was aware he was under surveillance, he confirmed that he was aware since several months ( might mean 5-7 or 20 or 40:) (surveillance: that does not necessarily mean on the ground or just online by NSA, we do not comment at this point for security reasons.)
The leak from the US State Department and US department of Defense about Obama’s administration criminal plans (CIA) to destroy ArabCrunch are a security alert to those agencies and their dogs, as such the agency and its dogs would look for sources of the leaks and any evidence.

We mentioned for the first time in the last post who is behind the terrorist DDoS attacks and criminal hack of ArabCrunch blog. Now we will reveal more plots, as all these plots were designed to force ArabCrunch founder to become a CIA agent or remove him from the leadership position or get red of him in one way or another or destroy ArabCrunch with anyway, whether by blocking advertisers from advertising on AC so there are no revenues and we go bankrupt, or to the level of cutting the line of communications for ArabCrunch have with the outside the world, by manipulating our email on google ( we did not talk about Voice yet).

The CIA/Mossad and the global Zionist movement are ready to go at any level to destroy AC. The Zionist infiltration of United States of America is a secret to too many Americans, the way they operate is no different than they way Banana republics operates: control key power elements: Media, Economy then you control politics.

In 1997 the world hottest news was about Bill Clinton Monika Laynski Scandal, The US president was blackmailed by this young Jewish girl, she had her shirt with the “evidence” for 2 years! why? because she was a trap (card) to be used when needed.

Some say in USA that the blackmail was orchestrated by the Israeli Prime Minister Natneyaho, Monika is a member of an Israeli Party and when she went back to “Israel” she was greeted with flowers and roses as a hero who saved “Israel.” We mentioned in the last post, that the father of Gaith Saqer the founder of ArabCrunch is Dr. Mohammad Saqer a senior Muslim BrotherHood leader, and was an ex-president of Islamic university of Gaza.

• Dr. Mohmmaed Saqer is believed to be a former Hamas leader during his stay in Gaza in the 1980s. in the 1980s and during Dr. Mohammad presidential period of Islamic University in Gaza he was a target for several assassination attempts. He lives in Jordan and teaches at the University of Jordan.

Again we stress, AC’s founder Gaith is NOT a member of Muslim brotherhood or Hamas or any political parties. AC’s founder is not involved in any politics. But his job requires him to meet people from different walks of life. That does not mean he agree with anyone point of view or believes.

The Mossad is always actively fresh for new recruits as a recent announcement reveled that they have succeed in recruiting a son of a Hamas leader. Mossad tries to recruits not just Hammas leaders but their direct family members. Not just that anyone they can add as an asset. and Not just Mossad tries to recruit other Arab Intelgance agncies and the ICA too.

• One of ArabCrunch American fans who owns shares in one of the most poplar sites in USA has been facing several lawsuits.

We asked him if those are because of his support to AC, he said “Yes extreme Israelis are behind this!” The guy is not Muslim or Arab by the way!

• CIA acquired ArabCrunch hosting company

ArabCrunch was in negotiations with a major hosting company in Texas: Softlayer, the hosting deal would bring salable server bandwidth to serve AC’s growing visits. We were waiting for this deal to happen because we had a deal with another company that would bring us 10s of millions of visits per month and potentially make us the number 1 blog or 2 in all categories ahead of Huffington Post. Negotiations with the hosting company took sometime and was about to close when we were close to close the deal, boom a private equity firm comes and acquires softlayer!!! And who is this private equity firm?

It is GI Partners a firm that has secured $4.0 billion of capital commitments on behalf of recognized institutional private equity and real estate investors in the U.S., Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

GI Partners is CIA front for its business, spy and military operations, GI Partners runs an imam program to brain wash Iraqi prisoners and destroy their well, a common tactic used before by clonal powers such as UK the program name is Russian and East European Partnerships (REEP) Inc., REEP/OSS Web site, also offers “intelligence support operations.”

A REEP Inc. Web site announced in August 2008, for example: “Counter Intelligence Agents – Urgently needed. – There is a unique opportunity to serve the United States as an interrogator and Counter Intelligence Agent as part of a rebuilding effort in Iraq.” (This REEP Web site has been taken down since truth-out.org asked a REEP official about the ad in August, and the REEP web address now transfers visitors to a combined REEP/OSS Web site.) So Basically did GI Partners blocked our partnership with Softayer? well since the deal went south after GI become the owner. We believe so. Now we are hosted with a CIA owned company.

• CIA/Mossad Accessed and tampered ArabCrunch EMAIL

That means not only the CIA and Mossad have access to our google email but the CIA have direct access to our server! Very nice! We mentioned before that the CIA and the Mossad had access to our email, now also confirmed: our server, We know that certain data that belong to us else where has been played with, and since there are thousands of files we do not know what else was added or deleted. Probably not just to fabricate crimes against AC’s founder and AC but also to wipe of any evidence of their passing by!

• Former Israeli Army Solider is one of the people behind Obama’s Entrepreneurship Plan

Former Israeli Army solider (six years in the Artillery Forces) Mickey Bergman is a major architect of Obama’s and the US State department “Muslim entrepreneurship engagement plans” Founder and President of the Solel Strategic Group (SSG) Current clients include: the Clinton Global Initiative, the Aspen Institute (jointly with the U.S. Department of State), New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, the Robert Redford Center at Sundance, and J Street.

Completed contracts also included the Reut Institute, former Member of Knesset Ami Ayalon, the American Jewish World Service, the Elders, and the University of Utah. He also works Aspen Institute as Director of the US-Palestinian Partnership (UPP).

With the Governor he helped negotiate a “ceasefire” between the government of Sudan and local Darfur militias He continues to work in collaboration with Governor Richardson as his Foreign Policy Advisor to the Middle East and Africa.

Aspen Institute is the main think tank behind Obama’s engagement and tech plan for the Muslim world: this person who is involved “very much” with these “efforts” is a former Israeli army soldier.

• Coupe attempt in certain Arab Country in September linked to the CIA

One of our friends is an Arab foreign minster, we asked him to help us get signatures from other Arab and non Arab foreign ministers in the illegal and the obviously now unfair competition from the Obama’s admin.

He promised to raise the issue with secretary general of Arab league and make it a discussion issue in the next meeting of Arab foreign Minster which ended last week! Boom, coupe attempt in that country! email does not arrive to his inbox and no much wording from him!

• Other Plots:

The other plots that the some CIA criminals did from leaking wrong news that we know that they are wrong, but they leaked them in-order to make us write about them which would bring our coverage trust down.

The other plots were designed to confuse AC’s founder and make him think “even by force that he is hallucinating” one more! the CIA and Mossad pigs have started a counter campaign on new blogs, or via tweets making fun of AC and trying their best to confuse the public that “who is AC” it is nothing! no cares about you! Well we are something, and Obama is determent with his entrepreneurship plan to engage Muslims in “a very nice way” as the case with AC and the case or Iraqi Journalists.

• Former FBI Director Running Obama’s “Engagement” with Muslims

Oh this effort is run by Former senior FBI executive at the US nationally security advisor. FBI are “nice people!” It is not just ArabCrunch, every Muslim tech Startup should submit to Zionist and CIA well or out of business. It happened to others but they did not publicly talk about it. We did! and we are almost done!

Inside Facebook released few days ago its Inside Facebook Gold report, with data about membership and usage across the number 1 social networking site in the world Facebook.

The report reveals the shift of Facebook population of more than 500 million users, from being dominated by US citizens and English speaking people to more of an international play ground.

According to the report Arabic had the highest growth rate in August with around 18%  followed Portuguese by around 11%, this is due to the increasing number of Brazilian coverts from Google’s social network Orkut to Facebook, as Facebook is showing strong growth in Brazil.

As for Arabic, despite that its high growth rate it is still the smallest of the top 10 languages, holding around 1%. Our source inside Facebook informed us few months ago that Facebook users from the Arab world stands at around 16-18 million users ( we will update you soon with the latest numbers.)

English has dipped from holding 50% of languages on Facebook to 47.95%. The second language was spanish with 14.43%, then French with 5.26%, Turkish makes the 4th largest language on Facebook with 4.66%, while the largest Muslim country in terms of population Indonesia holds the 5th rank with 4.44%.

That also means that  3 languages moslty spoken by Muslims ( Turkish, Indonesian and Arabic) make around 11% of facebook users holding the 3rd place ahead of French, which implies that facebook has to be more concerned about Muslims feelings with provocative stuff such as (draw Mohammad -peace be upon him- day on facebook) as someone like Millatfacebook might eat the lunch.

This shift in Facebook population, also means that facebook is eating users from Google and Yahoo at the international level, which is a good news for Facebook and International social marketers alike, as ads on Facebook now can be targets to specific languages not just English.

#via insidefacebook.

Paragon Software Group, has launched the voice enabled Al-Mawrid Al-Qareeb Arabic-English and English-Arabic Dictionary Mobile app from the oldest and largest publishing house of Arabic books and educational materials – Dar El Ilm Lilmalayin.

Al-Mawrid Al-Qareeb is now available on the latest series of Windows Mobile devices, iPhone and iPod touch (Apple versions include iPad support for early adopters), in addition to the version released in early 2010 for Symbian S60 3rd Edition and S60 5th Edition devices.

Key Features of the app:

• 33,535 words, phrases and definitions
• Portrait and landscape views (for Apple and Windows Mobile devices)
• English audio pronunciations prerecorded by native speakers
• No Internet connection required – easy access anywhere, anytime and without any charges
• English words are translated in any grammatical form
• Read e-mails, documents, and web pages from the device and get word translations without leaving active applications (for Windows Mobile)
• Touch screen support (for iPhone, Symbian and Windows Mobile devices)
• “Fuzzy search” and wildcards (“*”, “?”, etc.) features help to find and translate words even if users do not remember the exact spelling.
• Hyperlinks between articles and directions to easily switch between related entries
• “Flash Card Quiz” to add new words to flash cards and test knowledge at leisure
•  “History” feature displays the last looked-up entries
• Possibility to clear “History” (for iPhone)
• List of similar words in case of misspelling (for Apple and Symbian devices)

OS: iPad, iPhone and iPod touch OS 2.0-3.X; Windows Mobile 6-6.5 Standard, Classic and Professional; Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC and Smartphone devices, Symbian S60 3.x – 5.0 phones.
Price:
Apple devices is available for 14,99 USD (11,99 EUR)
Windows Mobile and Symbian is available for 39,95 USD (27,95 EUR)

<!–a19f861c30064643965154a801cc0730–>

Internet security company AVG just released a study that looks at the safest and most dangerous places to be hit hit by a malicious computer attack or virus.

According to the study the most dangerous countries for web surfers is Turkey with an average of 1 in every 10 users face a threat to be hit online, followed by Russia 1 in every 15 users, Armenia (1 in 24) and Azerbaijan (1 in 39). While some of the world’s safest surfers can be found in Japan and Taiwan and seven of the 10 safest countries in which to surf the Internet are in Africa.

AVG said in a press release that data was taken from 144 countries, involving over 100 million PCs ( i think mostly Windows based), enabled AVG to look at the incidence of security threats that its software had to deal with in the last week of July. From these figures, AVG came out with an average for attacks per user per country.

USA is at number nine when it comes to the riskiest places to go online where 1 in 48 people were hit by an attack , UK is ranked 31st (1 in 63), Australia 37th (attack ratio = 1 in 75) while German web surfers come in at number 41 (1 in 83).

Sierra Leone had the fewest attacks with on average one in 692 web surfers facing an attack, Niger is second and Japan third with one in 404 facing an attack, is arguably the safest place to surf the net.

As per continent the safest continent is Africa (1 in 108), and by a long way South America (1 in 164), North America scored 1 in 51. In Europe 1 in 72, while in Asia (including Asia Pacific) 1 in 102.

VG spokesperson, Roger Thomson attributed the risks to a number of reasons,” the tendency to access semi-legal or illegal download sites, while some of it probably is down to being less cautious when it comes to sharing links and files online. Another factor is the popularity of Internet cafes and people generally sharing computers. However, it is safe to say that even in these countries, a minority of users account for a large proportion of attacks.”

Thomson cities that the low attacks rates in Japan to the country’s broad-band high penetration rates and that Japanese web surfers are generally more aware of safe and risky surfing behaviors.

As  for Arab countries, the numbers are: Iraq 1 in 49.6, Oman 1 in 54.9, Iran 1 in 55.4, Qatar 1 in 56.3, Yemen  1 in 64.9, Kuwait 1 in 74.6, UAE 1 in 80.5, Jordan 1 in 98.0, Saudi Arabia 1 in 110.5, Syria 1 in 181.4. The Global average is 1 in 73.

The study can be found here.

2 allegations hit Whistleblower website Wikileaks‘ founder Julian Assange in Sweden, the first one involves rape  but was dropped only after 6 hours.

Wikileaks got famous after leaking 90,000 documents involves the war in Afghanistan around a month ago, and before that releasing video footage of a U.S army Apache Helicopter killing journalist in Iraq. Since then Obama’s administration has been publicly attacking the site and looking for ways to press criminal charges.

Wikileaks said over Twitter“ Reminder: US intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks as far back as 2008.” The site on March 15, 2010 published a classified 32 page U.S. counterintelligence investigation reveled a plan in plotting to destroy the center gravity of the site by attacking its “trust” and credibility.

In an interview with Aljazeera English Asang said  that Wikileaks was warned by Australian intelligence of such things. However, he said they do not have yet an evidence of CIA involvement in this allegations but called it “Smear.”

Mentioning rape, many Iraqi prisoners accused US forces in Iraq of rapping them, while some CIA reports shows that rape threats where used as interrogation techniques by CIA operatives.

Wikileaks prepares to release another 15,000 documents relating to the war in Afghanistan.

Here is Alajzeera video interview with Assang:




There have been some confusion among some our followers on Twitter and facebook about our tweets since we recently started to share our readers’ comments on ArabCrunch English and Arabic.

Yes, we started to tweet our readers’ comments on ArabCrunch via our Twitter account, but that does not mean we necessarily agree with them, it is just to inform our Twitter followers of these comments and to offer our readers more visible voice. If anyone do not like the comment, he/she is welcomed to comment back on ArabCrunch.

Normally when we share a reader’s comment, we start the tweet with “comment” or “commenter” or the user name depending in how best we can shrink the tweet into 140 characters, the limit that Twitter offers.

On the Retweeting: We do retweet tweets from our followers and other places around the web, again that does not mean that we necessarily agree with the content of the tweet or the post. It is just that we find the Tweet or the post worth sharing or think it is of interest to read, again that does not mean we necessarily agree with the tweet’s content in fact in many occasions we do not. Example, if we stumbled into a post about “how Communists work with technology,” that does not mean we are communist, in fact we are NOT and we DO NOT have any political ideology or bias at ArabCrunch. But it would be of interest to know how communists use or work with technology.

This also applies to our facebook page, as we also started to share with our followers some of our users’ comments and other posts from around the web.

At personal user level, people need to note that if a person “Likes” a page or an update on facebook, it does not necessarily mean he/she really “likes” everything in that page or update, he might disagree with the whole update. But since Facebook does not have the text option of “follow” status update or “follow” a page many people will think that this person truly likes this page because the word is “liked”, which in many cases is not true. As again it might be something he/she likes to share or follow, however in other occasions he might truly like that post or update.

We hope this post clarifies some of the confusion about the stuff we share on Twitter and facebook.

Thanks,

Whistleblower site wikileaks that got famous after releasing 90,000 documents about the war in afghanistan (Afghanistan War Log) last month, but before that,  the site has been under fire and threats from US federal government officials publicly and secretly, specially after releasing a video of US Army Helicopter killing journalists in Baghdad. The main threat however is the site’s hosting.

Today torrentfreak revealed that during Julian Assange Wikileaks founder visit to Sweden, Wikileaks signed a deal with the Swedish Pirate Party to host the site.

“I love opportunities to demonstrate that one of the biggest differences between us and the other parties is that we positively leap at any and all changes to take real responsibility for changing the world, rather than just commission reports and avoiding blame like the archetypal politician,” Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge told TorrentFreak.

Swedish Pirate party partnership might offer “much needed” help to wikileaks if it gets voted into Parliament next month as it could use Parliamentary immunity to run the site from inside the Swedish Government, making it impossible to take the site offline through legal procedures.
According to Aasang the party might also help pass a legislation that guarantees press freedom by copying what he called “Iceland’s Modern Media Initiative” and might work in joint projects with Wikileaks.

According to Wikipedia the Pirate Party (Swedish: Piratpartiet) is a political party in Sweden founded in 2006, strives to reform laws regarding copyright and patents. The party’s agenda also includes support for a strengthening of the right to privacy, both on the Internet and in everyday life, and the transparency of state administration Last year the part was 3rd largest political party in Sweden. The party has a EU parliament seat. and plans to launch anonymous, log-free ISP.

There are dozens of Pirate Parties around the world.

Wikileaks plans to publish before the end of this month another 15,000 documents relates to the war in afghanistan but this time, names of Afghan spies might be removed.

# via torrentfreak.

ComScore released today a report on Twitter stats for the month of June, the report reveals that 93 million Internet users visited Twitter.com -exluding third party app such as TweetDeck- an increase of 109% from last year.

Indonesia the largest Muslim country in terms of population achieved the highest penetration rate, at 20.8 percent of the country’s Internet users. Brazil and Venezuela follows Indonesia in that category.

In terms of users growth, Twitter is growing at much higher rates Internationally than in its homeland in North America as the region’s growth rate is at 22% to nearly 25 million visitors in June. Latin America had the strongest audience growth, surging 305 percent to 15.4 million users. Asia Pacific ranked as the second-fastest growing region, climbing 243 percent to 25.1 million visitors. The Middle-East Africa jumped 142 percent to 5 million visitors, while Europe soared 106 percent to 22.5 million visitors. ( we do not know what the term Middle East and Africa means to ComScore, is it the Arab world plus Iran and Turkey plus all Africa? last time we wrote about Twitter visitors  in early this year via 2 parties it was  about 15 to 30,000 thousand users, so 5 Million is a very massive growth rate)

The report reveals that Twitter is gaining adoption among smartphone users. In the U.S., 8.3 percent of smartphone users (4.2 million people) accessed Twitter.com in a month via the browser on their mobile devices, outpacing each of the European markets. In Europe, 2.8 percent of smartphone users overall accessed Twitter.com (1.7 million users), with the U.K. experiencing the strongest penetration in the region at 5.8 percent, followed by Germany with 3.1 percent and France with 2.1 percent.

It would be great to add third party apps usage, not sure how would that number increase, but many users who use apps like TweetDeck access Twitter.com occasionally over the month period. Another Interesting finding would be knowing who are the active memebrs from those reported and those coming as visitors via referrals like Google.

What is your take, why Twitter growth in Middle East and Africa plus Latin America is exploding?

#image via Si.

Whistleblower website WikiLeaks that is now well known for releasing the Afghanistan War Log of around 90,000 secret US military documents and the Baghdad shooting Video seems to be preparing for a new massive batch of leaks.

A Tweet sent by the Twitter account of Wikileaks asked for 700,00 USD for its next harm-minimization review, and accused the Pentagon and the media of not helping in the efforts of harm minimization.

That money seems to be going to help edit 15,000 more documents about the war in Afghanistan which might mean removing the “informants” names or a 260,000 pages that involves the Middle East or a new  a batch of fresh leaks and that money might be used to support the organizations infrastructure such as servers and so on as it lives off donations as a not for profit organization. Wikileaks accepts donations via different means starting with big to small payments on sites such as micropayment site Flattr.com.

The Pentagon has asked wikileaks recently “to do the right thing” and remove the war logs but wikileaks spokesman said more leaks to come.

Wikileaks accused in another tweet that “the pentagon wants to bankrupt us by refusing to assist  the review.

“Pentagon wants to bankrupt us by refusing to assist review.Media won’t take responsibility.Amnesty won’t.What to do?”

The Obama administration has asked today Britain, Germany, Australia and its other allies to consider criminal charges against the founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange to limit his cores Europe movement.

While an American official was quoted by The Daily Beast saying ““It’s amazing how Assange has overplayed his hand,”…. “Now, he’s alienating the sort of people who you’d normally think would be his biggest supporters.”

He was referring to 4 human rights organizations such as the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission AIHRC.

Wikileaks replied via Twitter by saying “Research note: AIHRC is primary funded by the occupying forces of Afghanistan.” and “Remember well those organizations currently rushing to push the Pentagon’s agenda without fact checking.”

A Petition posted online with the title of “Defend WikiLeaks – End the Secret Wars” said that “We believe that WikiLeaks and those whistleblowers who declassify documents in a time of secret war should be welcomed as defenders of democracy, not demonized as criminals. We support their First Amendment rights and welcome their continued disobedience in response to a long train of official deception.” The Petition has gathered   a number of well known people with 3061 signatures saying.”

Wikileaks has released on March 15, 2010 a classified 32 page U.S. counterintelligence investigation reveled a plan in plotting to destroy the center gravity of the site by attacking its “trust.”

The Pentagon has asked Wikileaks the site that posted around 90,0000 US military logs of 6 years archive of the war in Afghanistan to do “the right thing” and remove the log.

The New Work Times reported that Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary saying the logs gave Taliban and other militant groups access into US military tactics and techniques and revealed the names of the Afghan informants.

The Pentagon is worried about 15,000 more secret documents the site plans to post in addition to potentially others.

The U.S government has set- off a criminal inquiry led by the army and the F.B.I as 80 analysts from the US military and the F.B.I working to analyze the log file and its “damage.”

Geoff Morrell call has no meaning now since  the war logs has been also available  for around 20 days for free download on in different formats such as: CSV (15 MB), MYSQL ( 16 MB) and HTML (75 MB)

The site founder Julian Assang rejected repeatedly the U.S goverment acquisitions  saying the logs showed “thousands” of war crimes that may have been committed in Afghanistan.”We are familiar with groups whose abuse we expose attempting to criticise the messenger to distract from the power of the message.”

WikiLeaks posted on Torrent recently  an encrypted 1.4-gigabyte  file as an “insurance” in case the site goes on the dark.

The Pentagon has acted in perplex manner, as reports after the site leaked the famous Baghdad Video of Iraqi civilians were alleged to have been killed by U.S. forces,  suggested that his life is under danger and then news broke that a US official was quoted saying “we like his cooperation.”

The Guardian reported that earlier this year, “Wikileaks published a US military document which disclosed a plan to “destroy the centre of gravity” of Wikileaks by attacking its trustworthiness.”

Wikileaks was founded in 2007 and run by volunteers, the site’s  servers are hosted in Sweden where laws in the country protect “leaks”.  The site which has been under financial shortages partnered recently with Flattr, a Sweden based startup that is  affiliated with the Pirate Bay and provides a micropayment platform that helps people share small amount of money to other websites called “Flattrs”, the Wikileaks Afghanistan war diary has collected hundreds of flattrs so far. As the site seems as an unstoppable force in the world’s media.

Should Wikileaks “do the right thing” or “the right thing is to continues leaking”?

#Julian Assang Photo credits.

“Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public.”

This is what US army intelligence analyst Private Bradley Manning allegedly wrote to the former hacker Adrian Lamo who turned his name to the FBI where some raise  questions about the Wired Magazine hand and ethics in the soldier’s detention.

Manning is alleged of giving the whistleblower website wikileaks a classified video of American troops killing civilians in Baghdad. He is being held in in Virginia, USA after being transferred from his detention in a US army base in Kuwait.

Here is the video:



No one knows for sure if truly Manning did send the 260,000 pages to Wikileaks as the site Twitter account said it “is incorrect.” But the whole world knows now that Wikileaks posted an archive of almost 90,000 secret US military files on the war in Afghanistan.
However, US Republican Congressman Mike Rogers who sits on the House Intellginace Committee said yesterday he supports execution for the soldier Manning. He told US Radio WHMI that Private Bradley Manning appears to be guilty of treason in time of war, which is a capital crime. “He also criticized what he called a “culture of disclosure” for encouraging someone like Manning into thinking that the release of such sensitive information was a good thing.”

Rogers backed his opinion by saying that the leak led to the death many Afghans who “assisted” the United States Army and Intelligence.

On the other hand a website that was setup in support of Bradley Manaing has  the slogan of  ”Exposing war crimes is not a crime!”

While Wikileaks facebook page says it  primary interests  of leaking censored data “are oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their own governments and corporations” the site which is founded by Julian Assange  says its  has “received over 1.2 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources.” Wikileaks has leaked recently a document about the US army planes to attack the site’s public trust, its credibility.

Do you think Manning deserves to be executed? or the public needs to know what is hidden?

#image via Bradley Manaing website.

Today we  are starting a new section in ArabCrunch CrunchShare. Sharing videos and photos related to social media, if you stumbled on anything related please tip us here: newsATarabcrunchDTOcom

Worldcup 2010 is about to end, yesterday Germany beat Argentina 4:0 & Paraguay lost to Spain 1:0, the semi finals will feature Uruguay vs. Netherlands and Germany vs. Spain.

However the matches yesterday of the Quarter-finals will all exciting here are some of the best videos of the matches and related funny ones.

Argentina vs Germany [0-4] All Goals & Highlights WORLD CUP 2010 (narration English)




Maradona Goal V England 1986:




Goals of Germany VS. Argentina Match:




Argentinean team being punished Maradona style:




Spain’s goal against Paraguay:




Arabs in what it seems Jordan cheering After Germany Vs. Argentina Match:

#Videos from Youtube, D1G and ikbis.

The oldest independent browser company in the world Opera has released the final version of Opera 10.6 . We wrote about the beta version of 10.6 here but it had problems rendering some Arabic websites on Mac OS X such as ArabCrunch Arabic and Aljazeera Arabic, as it used to display Arabic letters without combining them . We informed  Opera directly about that and the team responded by fixing the problem, so many thanks to Opera and its desktop team.

The new browser comes the first built-in video playback with the open WebM format that gives you optimized video right in the browser on all platforms. Other Opera features such as offline applications let you work using web-based applications, without Internet connectivity.

Opera said via a press released that version 10.6 has anti-fraud systems and phishing protection and live feeds that supply fresh information on the latest web threats to the users and keep them in the know about potential malware, harm or scams. In certain regions, Yandex supplies user malware protection.

Other improvements and new things:

•       Appcache: Use in-browser applications such as word processors and spreadsheets even without an Internet connection by storing the necessary files locally.
•       More search: Opera 10.60 includes several search engines for the user to choose for themselves. Opera has added the Bing search engine as one of the choices, in addition to the default Google search.
•       Search suggestions: With websites such as Wikipedia, get instant search suggestions to complement your search experience.
•       Improved design: New design features such as an improved Menu button and icon tabs make day-to-day use of Opera even faster and easier.

•    Bug fixing of many issues of the beta version.

As Opera 10.6 comes with geolocation which can be turned on and off, Opera has created an interactive map to show real-time downloads of the Opera browser here: