As 2011 is about to end, history was rewritten in 3 Arabs countries and counting. Bu Azizi started something that can not be stopped.

But what where the top search terms coming for Egypt and Saudi Arabia? Google released today it is annual Zeitgiest a look into the year’s top google searches. We would like to note that Facebook and Twitter and news where the among raising trends. meaning more new users for both Facebook and Twitter and more interest from the general public in political news.

Fastest Rising Searches in Egypt ( we translated them to Arabic)

Jan 25th revolution

Mydan Al Tahrir

Facebook

Jocks 2011

7th day ( a newspaper)

Mubarak Trail

Twitter

Finance Ministry

Google Gravity

Love forbidden serias.

Egypt’s Fastest Rising People:
Mubarak

Wael Ghonim

Hisham Al juokk

Isam Sharaf
Tamer Ashour

Omar Katamesh

Hussien Salem

Ahmed Al Shahat

Ahemd Iz

Jamal Mubarak

Egypt top Google news:
Al Youm Al sabaa
Al Maser Al youm
Youtube
Masrway
Adustour
Facebook
news
google
al jumhuria
al shourok

http://www.googlezeitgeist.com/en/top-lists/eg/google-news

As for KSA: fastest raising searches:
Youtube
Facebook
hafez
games
twitter
spongup
aljazeera
heart heart song
al arabiya
bank Al tasleef

KSA fastest rising people:
Ghadafi
Myriam Fares
Ali Abdallah Saleh
Maher Almaakulai
justin Bieber
Mohamd Abdo
Manal Aalem
Khaled Abdul Rahman

KSA Googel news:
Mohamed Abdo
manal Al alem
Khaled And Al rahman
Itihad sports club
Egyptian league
Al Yaman
Reyal Madrid
Al Nasr sports club
Egypt
Barcelona

Google has launched recently a website dedicated to Egyptian parliamentary election that starts today.

The site http://google.com.eg provide a number of services, news about the election aggregated from the web and that can be filtered according to any egyptian political party or issue.

It also has a section which provides a google map mashup that asks users for their national number to get info about where to cast their vote and other voting information, this is done using Egypt’s supreme juridical comity for elections sites.

Also google has a YouTube Channel dedicated for the election called “sayyedqararak” that features videos from elections candidates. The channel is in partnership with BBC, Egyptian Satellite Channel On TV and Egyptian news Maser Al Youm.

As today is the election and if you were an Egyptian who did not vote yet, this is a useful service for you.



Google has launched recently gmail SMS chat  in many Arab and some African and Asian countries with a number of mobile operators.



SMS with Gmail enables users to send free text messages (SMS) to  their friends directly from their Gmail accounts.
if the user’s contact replies, the text message response will appear as a reply in Chat.  just like gmail chat gtalk.

Sending and receiving a message from Gmail to any phone is free.

When replying with an SMS from phone to Gmail, you will be charged a regular SMS rate by your mobile provider.



Google has partnered with a number of operators in the region to bring the service here is the list of Arab, African and Asian mobile operators that are supported:

 ( Syria and Sudan are not on the list due to US government sanctions.)

Afghanistan
: Afghan Wireless Communication Company



Algeria
: Nedjma


Angola
: Unite


Bahrain
: Viva, 
Zain


Cameroon
: MTN
, Orange


Congo, Democratic Republic
: Vodacom


Côte d’Ivoire: 
Orange


Ghana
 Airtel, 
Tigo

Guinea
: Orange


Indonesia
:Indosat
, Telkomsel
, Tri


Iraq: 
Zain


”Israel
:” orange
, Pelephone


Jordan
: Zain


Kazakhstan: 
Kcell


Kenya
: Airtel
, orange
, Safaricom,
Yu

Kuwait:
Wataniya, 
Zain

Liberia
: Cellcom


Malawi: 
L Airtel, 
TNM


Malaysia
: DiGi


Maldives
: Dhiraagu
, Wataniya


Mozambique
: Vodacom


Nigeria
: Glo
, Starcomms


Palestinian Territories
: Jawwal
, Wataniya Mobile


Philippines
: Globe
, SMART
, Sun Cellular


Saudi Arabia: 
Mobily, 
STC
, Zain


Senegal
: orange
, Tigo


Sierra Leone
: Comium


Sri Lanka
: Dialog,
 Etisalat, 
Mobitel


Tanzania
:Vodacom
,Tigo


Thailand
: dtac, 
True Move


Tunisia
: Tunisiana


Uganda
: Orange, 
MTN
, Uganda Telecom


United States: 
All operators


Uzbekistan: 
Ucell


Zambia
: Airtel
, MTN
, Zamtel





Nearly 2.5 million Muslims begin the annual Islamic ritual of the Hajj today, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The Hajj represents one of the five pillars of Islam; it requires all Muslims around the world who are able-bodied and can afford it to perform the pilgrimage once in their lifetime.

YouTube has partnered with Saudi Ministry of Culture and Information’ to live stream Hajj 2011. So now millions of people from around the world will be able to experience the event live on video. Here is the channel link: https://www.youtube.com/hajjlive

Last Ramadan Youtube live streamed prayers from Mecca for the first time.
and here is the live stream it self:



Last year Google started something useful for the Arab tech and startups ecosystem by hosting events in several Arabian cities branded gdays.

As with last year Google developers conference is coming to the region once again. Google has announced that gJordan is coming to Amman (the capital of Jordan) on October 23 & 24! and to Dubai g|uae on October 19 & 20!.

The 2 events have the same format, first day is geared towards developers focusing on Google developers tools in mobile (android) cloud computing, and so on.

The second day is geared at technology Entrepreneurs, Webmasters, University Students, IT and Business Professionals.

Registration is free, and space is limited, so register now for the day of your choice below on gJordan and gUAE

Google has launched Insights MENA an interactive website that provides research data about the online behavior of urban consumers in five key Arab markets: Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and UAE. This tool comes handy for online professionals, entrepreneurs, mobile apps developers and is alarming for tyrant Arab governments who can see how the shift of media usage and information control is going away from their hands to the internet,

as the research reveals that media usage via the internet is close to TV and newspapers.

The research was conducted by The Nielsen Company Dubai.

For Internet usage rates, UAE comes in top with 84% then KSA with 70% then Morocco with 51%.

Most internet users in UAE are not new to the internet as 52% has been online since more than 5 years, followed by KSA with 34% and only 17% of Egypt for being online 5 years and more. As for being only 1-2 years online Egypt comes first with 29%, jordan second with 23%.

In All countries, 83% of internet users access the internet from home, 26% from office, 20% from cyber caffe, 15% family and friends and 14% in the go. 70% access the internet daily for 11.4 hours from home and 8.7 from office.

The most frequent online activities are: visiting an online portal, using a search engine, send/ receive emails, use instant messaging, visit and access a social network. Reading writing a blog post came also as an important activity with happening an average 4 times a week.

90% of users own mobile, KSA and UAE has the highest percentage of internet enabled mobiles 69% then 58%, morocco at 28%, Egypt 41% Jordan 51%.

Again UAE and KSA has the highest internet usage via mobile 57% UAE 54% for KSA, then morocco 24%, jordan 18%, Egypt 22%. Which means targeting both KSA and Egypt with mobile apps is more important than other markets, even though UAE has a higher penetration rate than Egypt, but 22% percentage from a population of 10s of millions is greater than 57% of few millions in UAE.

As for E-commerce 12% form UAE purchased online, while 19% did online research, then comes KSA with 5% buying online, morocco and jordan stand at 2% and Egypt at 1%. What are the reasons for these numbers? GDP per capita is higher in KSA and UAE than other countries.

Google has its ways to greet Muslims during Ramadan, it has announced that it is launching Makkah Live a channel that is  video live streaming from Al-Masjid al-Haram in Mecca during Ramadan. The live streaming is done in collaboration with Saudi culture and media ministry.

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 was a dream to me, it was a dream to see Arab corrupt tyrants to fall one after the other. However this comes with a price. First our friend Slim Amumu was arrested in Tunisia (now he is a minister) second Wael Ghonim was arrested in Egypt to be released later. Now the turn is for Syria. Anas Marawai founder of popular Arabic android blog Ardroid has been arrested in Syria since 1/7/2011.

we’ve known Anas over 2 years online but we never met face to face, he helped in ArabCrunch fight to end the US sanctions against Syria, and force linkedin to end its blockhead against Syrian users, in which we succeed.

We ask the Syrian authorities to release Anas immediately and I ask ArabCrunch advisor Abdel Salam Haykal to interferer with the Syrian authorities for his immediate release. We hope he is not tortured and goes back to his family safely.

Friends of Anas launched a campaign online to support his release and we urge ArabCrunch readers to support the effort. And if you are a blogger please go ahead and blog demanding his freedom.

Campaign website

Facebook page

On Twitter use the following hashtag:
#freeAnas

Hold on Anas there are thousands of people with you.

PS: expect me to be the next one arrested.

Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, Chairman of Kingdom Holding Company (KHC) met with Eric Schmidt Executive Chairman of Google at the George V hotel, Paris.

According to a press release from KHC, AlWaleed and Schmidt discussed business and economic issues. The two also discussed Prince Alwaleed’s investments in the US in light of being the largest foreign investor there. Also, on the agenda of discussions was future potential business cooperation between KHC and Google in the technology field.

The meeting was attended by Jamal Khashoggi, General Manager of Prince Alwaleed’s new news channel, Heba Fatani, Senior Executive Manager, Corporate Communications Department and Dr. Khaled Almansour Advisor to prince.

Prince AlWaleed is the second largest shareholder in News Corp and also the beneficial owner of approximately 7 percent of News Corporation’s Class B Common Stock.

Via ArabianBusiness, Thanks to @lynnzov

Google shows snippet of movies show times in many countries in its search resluts, today google announced that it launched Islamic Prayer Times in search results highlighted from pages across the web.

Google says this feature will be available on all domains for searches in English and Arabic. This feature uses Google’s Rich Snippets technology, which also powers improved search results for other kinds of information like events, profiles, recipes, reviews.

Testing the service in Amman, Jordan it did not work, maybe it needs a day or 2 to work.

Wael Ghonim Google’s head of marketing tweeted that he is taking a sabbatical from Google to start a tech Non government organization to “fight poverty and foster eduction.”

Wael has been one of the admins of Facebook page We Are All “Khaled Saed” page, Khaled Saed is an activist from Alexandria who was beaten to death by Egyptian secret police for posting a Youtube video that shows evidence of police corruption. The page attracted 10 of thousands of followers and so far has 1,173,996 members. The page call for protests in the events that lead to the ousting of former Egyptian president Husni Mubarak was crucial.

In February Wael went missing in Egypt to later we get the info that he was arrested and was released on 7th of February to emerge as one of the Egyptian revolution leaders.

We will update you here with more info about the NGO once we get them.

Google has launched today Google Maps domains enabling local search within a country in Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Oman, and Saudi Arabia.

The Interface of these local maps is available English and Arabic as well French in some countries. Google navigation comes enabled with new Google Maps domains. Google Navigation offer directions from one distention to another.

Also users can now in these countries create “My Maps” a customized version of the user’s maps. Say your favorite hangouts.

Google also launched Google Map Maker in Saudi Arabia and UAE, Google Map Makers allows users to use their local knowledge to practically edit the entire map – from roads, businesses, parks, schools and more

There is no doubt that Arabic fonts are one of the most beautiful fonts in the world, however digital fonts optimized for the digital screens (PCs, Tablets, Mobile) we use are behind the rich arrays of Arabic fonts that we have offline.

Shasha Font project (shash means screen in Arabic) comes to offer a hand in creating Arabic fonts that is tailored for the optimum usage of screens, the project is designed by 2 egyptian artists Gaber and Ganzeer and being funded by Google.

Shasha Font’s blog offers documentation of the entire process. The font will be open source and its licensing will be under creative commons (CC).

Thank you Google for funding such needed Arabic project and for supporting the Arabic web.

After Launching an Arabic version, YouTube has started offering local version for Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Yemen.

According to Google announcement local version of YoutTube means people who visit the site will see on the homepage the most popular videos in their home country along with those that are rising in popularity.

This sound like a logical step as YouTube is growing in popularity in the region and many more active users from professional media and immature users are uploading videos everyday to the number one video sharing platform in the world.

YouTube is offering also recommended channels based on watch history, shared videos, and other channel subscriptions.

With this move YouTube is adding more pressure to regional video sharing sites such as iKbis and D1G as another avenue of their value is diminishing: local feel and touch.

Android Market place is currently blocked across the Middle East, however news surfaced on Stuff Middle East that Android market is coming soon to UAE, Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

A source informed Stuff that Google has reached agreement with telecom operators in these countries, though no final date is given but the market is expected to be available in few months. We will contact google and update you here.

Syrian authorities have unblocked Facebook and YouTube, a good news for syrian online population who have been using the 2 sites via different ways such as proxy servers or VPS.

This news has been confirmed by several users in Syria and by one of the popular sites in Syria (Syria news) who said that the unblocking comes after a call on Facebook from certain opposition parties for a day of anger against Syrian president Bashar Al Asad and counter calls to support him. Syria news says the later had more support among Syrian youth.

Updated: confirmed he was released.

After being missing for around 2 weeks, news surfaced that Wael has been in custody by the Egyptian regime and that he was released few hours ago.

R.N.N one of facebook pages that specialize in updating the public about the revolution in Egypt said that he was released and posted in what appears a pic of him.

Google confirmed his release via a tweet along with CNN, Alarabiya and other TV stations.

Many unconfirmed report said that Wael is the founder or one of the admin of  ”We Are All Khaled Saed” page on Facebook which was pivotal in calling for the current revolution in Egypt. Khaled Saed was beaten to death by Egyptian police in Alexandria for posting a YouTube video about police corruption..

At ArabCrunch we are happy for this news and ask God to protect Wael and all our Egyptian brothers.

Wael was reported by R.N.N. that he joined the demonstrator in Tahrer  square in Cairo after his release. Wael is Google MENA Head of Marketing, we will wait for his tweets on his Twitter account for extra confirmation.

Update:

Wael just tweeted “Gave my 2 cents to Dr. Hosam Badrawy. who was reason why I am out today. Asked him resign cause that’s the only way I’ll respect him #Jan25” and here more picture of him after his release:

#image via ONTevg.

After launching Speak to Tweet service that enables Egyptian to record a voice mail which will be tweeted automatically, Google went ahead and launched a Google Crises Response page for Egypt.

The page contains Google tools such as Google Transparency Report which displays web  traffic to Google services from Egypt, YouTube Channels and Speak to Tweet service.

The page also contains emergency, airlines and embassies phone numbers and Google Maps mashup that displays Protests locations on Google maps . Other info on the page are Google news about Egypt and latest tweets with hashtag #egypt.
Google has a missing executive in Cairo our friend Wael Ghomin, which we pray for his safety and release.

Update: google issued the following statement:

“A Googler, Wael Ghonim, is missing in Egypt. He has not been seen since late Thursday evening in central Cairo. The safety of our employees is very important to Google, so if anyone has any information please call the following U.K. number: +44 20 7031 3008.”

Update2: some people say that it is not Wael in the video, however as I personally know him the person looks like him, but we are not 100% sure, what we are sure about is that he is missing.

The regime in Egypt has apprehended thousands of protestors as the revolution in Egypt grows every day. One of these people who has been apprehended is Wael Ghonim an Egyptian native and who is Head of Marketing for Google Middle East.

Wael has been active in using Facebook and Twitter in supporting of change in the political scene of Egypt. While he was in Cairo to attend a conference ( his work location is Dubai) he joined the demonstrations to later to be apprehended by secret police as the video below shows, apparently as of last Thursday the time of his last tweet.

Wael is a great friend to AC and one of our fans we ask anyone who knows anything about his where about to call Google’s published UK phone number +44 20 7031 3008.
, which is designated by Google for whoever seen him.

We pray to God for Ghonim safety and peaceful release. And we also pray for the safety of all ArabCrunch team members in Egypt.

Egypt Protest Cairo - Sky News from duncan sharp on Vimeo.

Via ReadWriteWeb, Twitter and CNN.

As theIinternet access remains blocked in Egypt a group of engineers from Google, Twitter and SayNow worked together in launching speak-to-tweet service— giving the  ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.

Anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to @speak2tweet.

Google said in a blog post “We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.”

SayNow was acquired by Google  last week.

Google just announced its Q4 results with operating income in Q4 2010 was $2.98 billion and net income of $2.54 billion. The big news is that Larry Page will replace Eric Schmidt as CEO, Eric will serve as Executive Chairman.

more on Eric’s post.

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.

During his speech at google’s first organized event in Egypt coined G Days Ari Kesisoglu – Regional Manager, Middle East North Africa said that online ad spending in the MENA region is between 110 to 130 Million USD annually. Although there is no real projections of online ad spending, last year it was estimated below 100 million USD, thus annual growth rate is estimated between 20-40 %.

I wanted to ask Ari how he got this number, and where is this money being spent? is it on adwords and the rest of major knowns websites such as sarmady’s and maktoob, jeeran, Jabbar, ameinfo and so on?

We hope he will answer so we update you.

On his part Wael Ghonim – Marketing Manager, Middle East and North Africa said during his Internet trends session that 100 million Arabs will be online in 2015 which is about 30% of the Arab world population. Mr. Ghonaim added that most users are young as this is good because this segment consumes more, and that this is the time to be online and invest online.

Wael also talked about what people are searching for in the Arab world where he said that news is #1 search category for egyptians, then images, music & audio clips.

As for  YouTube and other stats Wael said that region has:

• The highest number of playbacks compared to quiries
• 24 hours of videos in every minute are being uploaded to YouTube
• 10% of search are coming from Mobile devices
• Symbion OS is leading Mobile handsets in the region
• 200$ growth in mobile search quires in mean in 2009.
• Saudi Arabia leads growth in the region followed by egypt.

Anther important stats, Wael revealed that Arabic users speak Arabic as less than 20% of MENA users communicate in English. He suggested that if you target the Arabic market develop the arabic UI first.

Adwords is google’s goldmine where it gets most of its revenues, to those who do not know it allows small and midsize business to advertise on google search engine or via its Adsense partners’s websites using text based ads.

Google ads can be paid based on clicks or impressions, and they have greater targeting options because they are context aware, meaning that you can target an ad based on a certain keyword, to simplify it: if people are looking for Milk and you sell link, your ad will show when users search for the keyword “Milk” on google.

For the Arab world, google has introduced a number of features such as location targeting in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Now google has gone another step by introducing its adwords blog for the Arab world where its says users will get new features, tips and tricks and case studies.

The blog is in English and Arabic and would be helpful for online markers in the Arab region. And is another example of how global tech companies are using social media to reach out to their audience. However we wonder why google call’s it: Adwords MENA Blog in English, while in Arabic it calls it “google Adwords in the Arab world.”

This is the Arab world NOT MENA, most Arabs do not like to be named and coined colonial names . We hope google will rename the english version and keep its English and Arabic names constant.