Spam is a major problem that the internet suffers from, to fight spam websites uses captcha when submitting a form or registering for an account.

Up until now Capthca has been using random English letters that a users needs to submit in order to go to the next step in registration or in posting a comment. But few days ago, UK based Hsoub launched Arabic Captcha. meaning it uses Arabic letters, and since Arabic words combine Arabic letters together it is hard for automated software to figure them out.

This is much needed initiative to fight spam and hackers in the Arabic web, but the Captcha does not work with people who do not know Arabic, since they do not know how the letter looks like after being combined with other letters.

Hsoub Arabic Captcha comes with API so any website can use. well done for such initiative.

UK based newspaper the guardian has launched an Arabic version of its website. The new site offers translation into Arabic from its English edition.

The Arabic site displayed news in chronicle order and sure the Guardian can do better to enhance it.

Saudi based National net ventures (n2v) has announced that it invested in Mj in the region (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and UAE) , they have not invested until now in pure play e-commerce ventures, I would advice them to seek to diversify their investments and explore new disruptive e-commerce ideas.

If you use iPad it is most likely that you use Flipboad, a popular social magazine that aggregates web content from Twitter and Facebook and displays them in a magazine style.

2 days ago Flipboard announced that Aljazeera is available in Flipboard giving it access to millions of its users. I can say that Al Jazeera is one of the best Arab Media companies to use social media and mobile tech.

Yahoo! Maktoob and the Association for International Broadcasting (AIB) have announced that the 2011 People’s Choice Award will be hosted on Yahoo! Maktoob, reaching the sites’ 55 million users in the Middle East and North Africa.  The People’s Choice is the category in the AIB’s international media excellence awards which is open to online viewers everywhere who vote for their favorite entry, and each year attracts entries from broadcasters across the globe.

This year’s topic for the People’s Choice award is “Best Coverage of Democracy Uprisings” reflecting the momentous changes happening in the Middle East and North Africa during the Arab Spring and highlighting the impact that traditional and social broadcasting has had in enabling the movements for change.

The deadline for final entries is Friday September 16th, but already programmes have been submitted from Europe, Middle East, and Africa and include entries from Al Jazeera, Al Hurra, France24, NDTV, Press TV and The Doha Debates.  A short list of the six best will be selected from which online users from across the world can view and vote on Yahoo! Maktoob from the second half of October. The winner will be announced at the AIB’s ceremony on the 9th November.

Yahoo! Maktoob will be hosting the programmes on special pages in both English and Arabic versions, allowing a worldwide audience to participate in viewing and then choosing the one they like best.  Viewers can also use the power of Yahoo! Maktoob’s platform to comment on their choice and share their views and their votes with friends on Yahoo! Maktoob and other social media platforms.

US government keeps talking about its values of democracy, freedom in general and freedom of press. But when it comes to exposing their own crimes or publishing views of the “other side”, freedom of press is not anymore free and one sided view should be the only one “beamed.”

A confidential US cables from US embassy in Doha, Qatar where Aljazeera head quarter is located and was published recently on Wikileaks, reveals that Al Jazeera Managing Director Wadah Khanfar has agreed to US government request to delete and altar website content that “disturb” the US government.

The cable talks about the meeting between US government officials with Wadah Khanfar to discuss the latest US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report on Al Jazeera and what the US government considers “disturbing” Al Jazeera website content.

In the meeting US government officials raised the question of an Al Jazeera website piece published listed under the heading “”Special
Coverage”, and containing “Live Testimony Concerning Tal Afar”. “The site opens to an image of bloody sheets of paper
riddled with bullet holes. Viewers click on the bullet holes to access testimony from ten alleged “eye witnesses” who
described recent military operations in Tal Afar. “”

Khanfar said said that in accordance with an earlier promise to US government officials, he had taken a look at the piece and had two images removed (two injured children in hospital beds, and a woman with serious facial injury.)

US government officials also pointed out “that the testimony of a “doctor” in the piece also implied that poison gas had been used on residents of Tal Afar and that the appearance of the piece, in particular the bloody bullet hole icons, came across as “inflammatory and journalistically questionable.” Khanfer said he would have the piece removed. he said “Not immediately, because that would be talked about, but over two or three days,”

(Writer Note): that the US government has launched the war on Iraq under the pretext of dismantling weapons of mass-destruction, reports of US army using such weapons would undermine any legitimacy the US government has at home or aborad.

According to the cable Khanfar said he had told the website staff that in future, when they want to add an item to the “Special Coverage”
section of the website, they should send a draft of the idea
over to his office.

The cable notes that The AJ website is located in a separate building across town. Khanfar added “I don’t say that such things are not going to be repeated on the website, but it is a learning process,”

The cables reveals that Khanfar was preparing a written response to to DIA points about coverage from July,August and September of 2005. The cable says the meeting with Khanfar happened in 10/19/2005. He asked for fixing “the method of how we receive these reports” as he has had found one of them in the fax machine ( Writer note: maybe he feared that other coworkers would read them.)

In the cable US officials told Khanfar that despite an overall decrease in “negative coverage” since February, the month of September
showed a worrying increase in such programming over the
previous month. (Writer: Negative coverage most probably means content that criticize the US government.) These Problems according to the cables “still remain with double-sourcing in Iraq; identifying sources; use of inflammatory language; a failure to balance of extremist views; and the use of “terrorist” tapes. “

Khanfar objected to the to the use of the word “agreement” as used in the August report on the first page, under the heading “Violence in Iraq”, where a sentence reads: “In violation of the station’s agreement several months ago with US officials etc”. “The agreement was that it was a non-paper,” said Khanfar. “As a news organization, we cannot sign agreements of this nature, and to have it here like this in writing is of concern to us.”

Khanfar said there are some mistakes “which we accept and address” but he said that the points are taken out of context noting that during the “AJ broadcasting day, a comment made or position taken by one person may be balanced with a different comment or position later in the same show or later on during the same day.”

As for using “terrorists tapes” Khanfar said “We have always said that we are going to use these tapes and we will continue to use them. The
question is how. None of the tapes are used just like that,” the cable wrote: “meaning that they are reviewed for newsworthiness
and are edited.”

On Concerning the use of inflammatory language, Khanfar said the station’s concern is with the language used by its own reporters and anchors and that would addressed. However the reports’ focus on inflammatory language is on that used by non-Al Jazeera interviewees, he pointed out. saying that AJ can not control what these people say.

Commenting on the reports overall, Khanfar said they lacked balance in that they only focus on the negative. “A report like this should have both sides,” he said. “It does not report the voice we have given to American spokespeople over the recent past,” he said. “We do not always find a military spokesman, for example, but we are trying our best, and we have some success. This is not mentioned.”

Conclusion:

We do not know what made Khanfar resort to US pressure to delete website content that the US government considers as “disturbing”, as ethically, they should not resort to such pressure. What the public knows is that Aljazeera station in Afghanistan and Iraq has been bombed by US forces, and that its former reporter in Afghanistan who interviewed Osama Bin Ladin has been sentenced to prison time in Spain. While its Jordan’s office chief Yasser Abu Hilaala was recently beaten by a Jordanian policeman and civilian uniformed man during AJ coverage of a strike in Amman, and most recently AJ corresponded in Afghanistan has been detained by Israeli forces for suspicion of being a Hamas member, which has no bases as his lawyers say.

In recent years observers notes that AJ coverage of the war in Iraq has been one sided, meaning it is broadcasting US and Iraqi government officials points of views and failing to broadcast the other side, whether it is al Qaeda in Iraq or other Suni insurgent organizations. This confidential cable might have revealed the reason behind the AJ one sided coverage of Iraq in the recent years. What it also reveals is the US government intolerance to other views that would expose their wrong doing and the pressure that the US mounts on independent media.

(Full Cable: http://wikileaks.org/cable/2005/10/05DOHA1765.html )

This is a guest post, views mentioned by guest writers do not necessarily represent those of ArabCrunch. The guest writer here choose his identity to remain anonymous. If you want to write a guest post to ArabCrunch please email us your bio and the topic you want to write about.

#Image by AJC1.

Two Jordanian startup who were incubated in Jordan based startup accelerator Oasis 500 have secured investment rounds.

Masmoo3 turns Arabic books into Arabic Audio formate available through several channels such as Apple’s App store, Google Android, Windows Mobile 7, web and others, while Dakwak reviewd by AC in July 2010 offers websites crowd sourced translation.

Masmoo3 received funding from angle investor investor Ihab Al Ramlawi, while Dakwak received investment from IV Holdings, according to government run Jordan Times the amount of the deals were not announced.

Info2cell.com, one of the Arab region oldest mobile service application provider in the Middle East, has announced the recent launch of 3ala TV ( means on TV), a specially-designed interactive TV guide website – for users to find selected TV channel schedules and information about their favorite shows and actors. Users can also sign in the website for the latest news, read blogs and also participate in live forums.

Moreover, users can also create their own pages and select their favourite actors or TV programs, while also being able to add friends, who are already registered on this website, to their page.
The site competes with Jordan based IV Holdings funded startup ShooFeeTV. Having a quick look at 3alaTV, you find that ShooFeeTV is richer with information about programs and TV channels.

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.

As with every year at the time of Ramadan Yahoo! Maktoob has created the a Ramadan site, designed as a one stop destination that provides access to a host of rich spiritual, lifestyle, and entertainment content. The dedicated site (maktoob.ramadan.yahoo.com) brings together content relevant and not relevant to Ramadan, pulled from multiple leading Yahoo! Maktoob properties including News, Helwa, OMG!, Video on Demand, Forums and Search. The site also provides prayer and imsakieh times based on country and city.

“As the premier digital media company, we have created a premium online destination that brings together the best Ramadan content. We are selecting content that is relevant to this period from all of our popular properties, and packaging it in a way that gives users an experience that is both enjoyable and useful,” said Ahmed Nassef, Vice President and Managing Director, Yahoo! Middle East.

Yahoo Maktoob’s Ramadan site bring content from OMG! Arabic that brings all the news of celebrities during Ramadan which muslim clerks deem it as unislamic during Ramadan.

Yahoo Maktoob Video on Demand is also re-launching with a new video content, with over 500 hours of video, including popular TV shows, Islamic shows, cooking, and news. Helwa, the region’s leading women’s property, brings Ramadan related content with over 16,000 recipies under its Kitchen/Recipes content section.

Ramadan Games, a dedicated sub section from Yahoo! Maktoob Games, includes puzzles, a Qatayef making game and other cooking games. The site is also host to a full Ramadan TV guide, where people can log on to find out what the latest shows on all regional TV channels.

In the spirit of the sharing aspect of Ramadan, the Yahoo! Maktoob Ramadan site offers a free SMS service to all users enabling them to send Ramadan greetings to family and friends direct to their mobiles. Users can send up to 3 SMS per day and can choose from a pre-defined SMS template or customize their SMS message.

For users on the go this Ramadan, the new mobile application provides feeds from the Yahoo! Maktoob Ramadan site including, prayer times, TV guide, OMG!, and more.

The new site is also running a competition encouraging users to share their personal experiences and how they celebrate Ramadan by submitting uploads in the form of write-ups, photos or videos. Winners will be based on community votes, with a chance to win iPads.

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.

The “Israeli” army is banning its soldiers from using social media and networking sites such as Twitter and facebook for what it calls fears on national security leaks.

In justifying the move the Israeli army noted that soldiers post secret photos of bases and compounds and would post future battle plans on social media sites which can be used by liberation movements in the region to counter them.

We are not sure if securing military bases and battle plans is the only reason behind this ban, or if it is also to keep Israeli human right violations against Palestinian civilians behind closed doors as a number of facebook leaks ( one here) another one here ) by “Israeli” soldiers reveal miss treatment and human rights violations of palestinian prisoners.

“Israeli’ army has also established a social media task force which hired social media experts to spread propaganda and halt anything that does not portray “Israel” in a good way or reveal its wrong doings from spreading across social media sites. According to Aljazeera who picked up the story from an Israeli research center Another force was established to mine the internet and trace logs of soldiers activities in social media sites and chat rooms to make sure they did not connect the media .

If you work with the “Israeli” army shoot us an email with what and you friends share inside detention compounds and bases, we will post them.

HawaaWorld, one of N2V’s companies, announced that it has acquired “entertainment world” http://www.tt5.com, one of the largest entertainment websites in the Arab world, to serve its goal of enriching its content. Amount of the deal and its terms were not announced.

tt5.com offers entertainment content on a daily basis covering fields such as images, videos, games, stories, funny situations, stories from our culture, and news from all over the world.

HawaaWorld, the largest female website, provides its members with useful content and the latest services. Recently, female members have been able to post their classified advertisements free of charge. HawaaWorld website is one of the ten most visited websites in Saudi Arabia; it receives 12 million visitors a month, and has more than one million members from 170 countries.

Update: Zaid Tillawi from Jeeran Marketing told AC that Jeeran is not planning to shut down its blogging platform and that you can create a new blog when you sign up on Jeeran Places.

Amman, Jordan based Jeeran is in route to shut down its blogging platform, it has ended new registration ( registration did not work at our end, Update, you can create a new blog when you sign up on Jeeran Places.) and expected to shut down its blogging platform all together soon later. It has moved its Music site to bandoora. The site has redefined it self as a site for local reviews and discussions.

Now when going to Jeeran you can go to local communities in Amman the capital of Jordan, Riyadh , jeddah , Damam and Khubar in Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Dubai in UAE and Kuwait city in Kuwait .

Each city site includes a directory of places in services, restaurants, electronics and so on. Users can review each place and join discussions about their local communities. All current Jeeran cities are in Arabic except Dubai and Abu Dhabi as foreign expats are the majority in these 2 cities.

Jeeran places competes with Saudi Startup Qaym in terms that it provides a section for restaurants reviews, Kuwaiti restaurant review site Yallawain and fast restaurants numbers finder Tasree3.

Jeeran is backed by investments from Intel Capital and Jordan based VC IV Holdings. To read about Jeeran’s history you can go here.

Is it a smart move for jeeran to end its blogging, video and photo sharing platform?

During her visit to the region Yahoo’s CEO Carl Bartz shared How Yahoo sees huge opportunity in the Arab region. in a press releases sent to us, Yahoos says that Maktoob homepage is the fifth most popular home page on Yahoo with around 50 million unique users compared 30 million unique users when Yahoo acquired Maktoob for around 200 million USD. In terms of revenues in the press release Yahoo said that Yahoo captures 40% of online display advertising around 40 million USD.

Here is the remaining of the press release:

“When we look around the world, the Middle East and North Africa is one of the most exciting markets for us at Yahoo!, with a combination of rapid user growth and a very attractive advertising market with incredible potential,” said Bartz.

“Arabic is also one of the fastest growing languages on the Internet, yet only 1% of online content is in Arabic today,” Bartz added.  “Part of Yahoo!’s investment in MENA is to facilitate the growth of the Arabic language online.”

During her remarks to media assembled at Yahoo!’s offices in Dubai, Bartz discussed four topic areas: Yahoo!’s local teams and commitment to the region; the company’s commitment to growing Arabic content online; new products the company has planned for the region; and the growing online advertising opportunity.

During her remarks to media assembled at Yahoo!’s offices in Dubai, Bartz discussed four topic areas: Yahoo!’s local teams and commitment to the region; the company’s commitment to growing Arabic content online; new products the company has planned for the region; and the growing online advertising opportunity.

Local Teams and Investment

Yahoo! acquired Maktoob in November 2009, and since this point the company has invested in fully staffed offices across Dubai, Amman, Cairo, Riyadh and Casablanca.  The offices are home to nearly 300 employees who work in editorial, engineering, sales, marketing and customer care.

“Because our teams are local, we understand what people need and in turn develop our products accordingly to serve up the right content. This is a big differentiator for us. We are not just a technology company, we create deeply personal digital experiences,” said Bartz.

“You can’t deliver ‘deeply personal’ unless you are deeply local. We combine that expertise with a global scale, global content, and the best from around the world.”

Growing Arabic Content Online

Bartz cited that the thirst for high quality and relevant content in Arabic can be seen in the company’s engagement on its properties.

In the past year and a half since Yahoo! acquired Maktoob, the combined reach of the company has grown from 30 million unique users to 50 million. The Arabic Yahoo! Maktoob homepage launched last November and it is already the fifth most popular Yahoo! homepage in the world today.  Only the U.S., Taiwan, India and Indonesia have more readers.

Six months after the launch of the homepage, Yahoo! Maktoob has become the second biggest news destination in the region after Al Jazeera, and has established leadership in a number of content areas. For example, the company is number one in the region’s online Entertainment with omg Arabic.

The women’s property, Helwa, is the region’s favourite lifestyle destination for women’s news, health and family tips, as well as fashion reviews.

Yahoo! Maktoob has also established content deals with the likes of Al Jazeera, BBC, Reuters and the Saudi Publishing & Research Company, and continues to look for more Arabic language content partners. The company continues to recruit writers, bloggers and editors to make its original content in Arabic broader and richer.

“We are making our content mobile, since mobile penetration for this region is growing at an incredible rate,” said Bartz.  “This month we will introduce our Yahoo! Maktoob homepage for mobile in both Arabic and English. Also look for mobile versions of our media properties, like news and sports.”

Video is also an important area for Yahoo! as broadband penetration continues to rise in the Middle East. Bartz said that Yahoo! has plans to invest more in Video On Demand service to deliver content from popular Arabic TV series, movies and music videos.

New Products

Bartz also shared details of Yahoo!’s new Ramadan product. Under the theme “Ramadan Around the World, Ramadan Where You Are”, Yahoo!’s Middle East editorial team will personally select lifestyle and religious content from its News, Women, Video and omg properties, and popular forums.

“No one else has the ability to draw from such a rich selection of content, and make it so personally relevant to users,” Bartz said about the upcoming Ramadan site.

Growth in Online Advertising

Bartz emphasized the opportunity these new Yahoo! experiences – along with the growth of the Internet in the region – create to extend the company’s lead in online advertising.

Already, Yahoo! Maktoob is the number one in the Middle East and North Africa for display advertising, with 40% market share.

Online ad spend for the region is currently only 2% of total advertising spend for the entire region.  By way of comparison, online spend in France is around 15% and in the UK it’s 25%.

However, Bartz noted that the region is host to the fastest growing advertising market in the world, with average year-on-year growth in digital spending around 25-30%.

“We envision the online ad market in MENA to reach at least 5-7% of the total ad market by 2015,” said Bartz.  “And with our strong agency and client relationships – along with our leadership in Science, Art, and Scale – I am confident we’ll be there to deliver the benefits.”

“Advertisers in the region – just like anywhere else – want to tell their stories in beautiful, immersive and personal ways,” Bartz added.  “And it’s a big reason why Yahoo! has great partnerships with some of the leading local and global brands, from P&G, Unilever, Etihad and Emirates airlines, and GM, through to Chanel, Dior and more.”

Arab Spring had an impact on BCC Arabic website visitors as with all other news sites. At Arab Advisors Media Telecom Convergence conference today in Amman, Jordan, Falko Mortiboys and Rufus Weston from Digital Insights at BBC World Service shared their insight in how Arab Spring affected growth in audiance at BCC Arabic, and we would like to share 10 interesting insights with you:
1- First Spike of Traffic After Bin Ali got ousted. traffic for tunisia uprisings was relatively low until ben ali went.

2- Record Audience During the Egyptian Revolution and Mubarak’s Resignation.

3- Traffic spike picked up during the Libyan revolution and when Momar Gaddafi appeared on TV and when the first Air Strike came against Libya

4- During Arab Spring Spikes BBCArabic showed an increase in Live TV streaming

5- Arab spring has resulted in 15 fold increase in traffic to web site from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. I think that would increase if they add the native Like Facebook button instead of share and the native Twitter Retweet Button.

6- 65% of BBC Arabic news web site visitors are now from Arab world compared to 45% before the Arab Spring.

7- BBC Arabic’s Mobile picked up traffic after the Egyptian revolution and unlike Web it remind high, 6 month ago mobile videos were low.

8- Post Arab Spring BBC Arabic mobile video page is the most popular after its homepage. BBC Arabic Android App is coming soon.

9- Most popular pages during the spikes were the live-text page which gave users info real-time

10- Rufus Weston told ArabCrunch “that we estimate that for major news spikes, we retain approximately 3% new audiences.” and it is a key driver of BBC Arabic’s growth strategy.

BBC Arabic site has 1.6 million unique users per week and 1.5 million pageviews per day. During the Egypt revolution traffic was much higher than the average 1.6 Unique users.

Shutting down the internet cost egypt millions of dollars according to studies in the mater, however that crime did not go unpunished.

An Egyptian court has ordered former egyptian president Husni Mubarak and other former officials to pay 90 Million USD for shutting down the internet and cell phone networks during the Egyptian revolution.

According to Aljazeera Mubarak is sentenced to pay 200 million Egyptian pounds (1 Egyptian pound = 0.16787 U.S. dollars), former prime minister Ahmed Nathef 40 million EP, and former interior minister Habib Al Adli 300  million EGP for damages that “the national economy has suffered.”

It is worth mentioning that the former regime blocked Twitter other websites before shutting down the internet.

#image credits.

mediaME.com, the news community for advertising and media professionals in the Middle East has launched a free Classifieds service .

mediaME Classifieds listings categories cover all aspects of the jobs and freelance markets, featuring Job Postings, Job Seekers, Freelancers and Professional Service Providers with sub-categories for every advertising and media specialization. Also, the listings aim to serve the needs of sellers with categories for Media Opportunities, Sponsorship Opportunities, Events & Activities and Business Equipment & Software.

In a press release Zeid Nasser, Founder & CEO of mediaME.com said that launching the classified section in mediaME signals a shift towards mediaME.com becoming a marketplace for buyers and sellers.

mediaME owner is Jordan based MediaScope has received in Feb, 2009 investment from IV Holdings

Istikana the free to use ad-based online classical premium Arabic video content platform ( reviewed by AC here) and The Arab Telemedia Group today announced a new content partnership that will bring many popular TV shows from Arab Telemedia’s library, including “Akher Ayam Al Toot”, “Sham Shareef”, and many more to Istikana.

Under the agreement, full episodes of Arab Telemdia’s extensive library of thousand’s of hours of drama series will be available on the Istikana service beginning April, 2011. The Arab Telemedia Group is the first Arab production house to have won an International Emmy Award (Al Ijtiyah – 2008).

With this agreement istikana solidify its position as the platform for premium classical Arabic video content.

If you grow up in the Arab world you remember growing on TV cartoon series such as Adnan wa Lina, Grendizer and Abtal Al-Mala3ib . Istikana offers you the online place to view on demand the complete episodes of such series for free.

The site has a wide variety of shows that span from, Drama, Cartoon, Theater, Comedy to Religious.

According to the site’s cofounder Samer Abdin all the site’s content is legal and licensed either direct from the content owner, or an authorized MENA re-seller.

Legal video content platforms is not new to the Arab world, there are Egypt based Forga, Shahid from Dubai based MBC group and Shofha from Egypt based LinkDotNet. While Shahid main focus is offering MBC’s run Series and movies free on demand, and Shofha on movies and Series licensed from variety of sources such as Rottan where users have to pay to buy or rent movies and shows and view them on the site or download them. Istikana focus on Arabic classical shows and offer them for free and on demand. As for Forga it offers movies, series, trailers, video clips and actors’ profiles, though most of the content Forga has are modern movies and much less content for series, we found only 2 of them!

Istikana business model according to Abdin is based on advertising as the site currently run display ads and in-video pre roll ads.

The classical Arabic video on demand service is founded by Samer Abdin and Tareq Abu-Lughod and is self funded but it also has received early angel investment from a Googoglar Sami Shalabi.

The site enables users to embed videos on any web page here is the first episode of Grendizer:



One of the oldest online news sites in Jordan Ammoon has accused Jordan Intelligence in hacking the site.

The sites’ editor in chief Bassel Elkour told Jordanian newspaper Assabel the hacking happened when the site posted a statement from some of Jordan’s tribal leaders criticizing certain parties inside the government and corruption in Jordan.

Okur added that the site received direct threats from certain Jordanian security parties one day before the hack and on the next day a message popped up on the site saying that “ because you did wrong to the images of the country your site has been hacked by Jordanian expats in Australia! ” Okus dismissed the message as a decoy.

Like Tunisia, Egypt and the rest of the Arab countries Jordan is a police state who’s intelligence interferes in all aspect of life: sports, tech community media etc and has strong ties with the CIA.

On the story that Assabeel posted about the incident one commenter wrote: “ anyone who accuse Jordan intelligence will die!”

The country has recently been witnessing demonstrations across many cities against economic conditions, inflation and in demand for policy change. The country’s main opposition party showcased last month evidence of fabrication to the last parliamentary elections’ results.

Jordanian opposition main demands are a new election law and a change to the constitution which allows the prime minister to be elected or emerge from a parliament majority block, rather than how it is done now: appointed by the king.

The U.S government suffers from “Dissociative identity disorder,” or multi-persona disorder. Publicly they talk about democracy, human rights, liberty and the right of nations to rule themselves and decide their future . Yet in practice the consecutive US administrations “Democrats or Republican” have been the historical backers of brutal dictatorship and police states in the Muslim world and non-Muslim world, alike.

From Tunisia to Egypt, the U.S governments has backed both regimes, in a recent Wikileaks leaked U.S diplomatic cables that provide a glimpses of the relationship of both oppressive: the FBI has been providing training to Egypt’s state security ‘torturers’ the state security and investigative service (SSIS).

Historically U.S governments have been supporting the state of “Israel” for decades in monetary funding that are being used to build new settlements on land that has been confiscated from the indigenous inhabitants of the land, and in advanced weapons used to kill Palestinians.
Yet in another evidence that the U.S government “under Bush or Obama “call for democracy is baseless the U.S government did not acknowledge the outcome of the last free parliamentary elections in west bank and Gaza!

In Iraq the government of the United States of America killed 2 million Muslims and Christian Iraqis in the name of freeing them ( according to International human right organizations) . And yet after the Iraqi resistance taught them the real lesson of freedom, they started withdrawing ( not finished withdrawing there are still thousands of US troops in Iraq) their troops and yet another deception, they handed the occupation to 100,000 or so of international mercenary forces and to a poppet Iraqi government and army.

So to conceal all their crimes against Muslims and Arabs and to help them win the propaganda war or what they call the “battle of hearts and minds.” Officials of the U.S states dep. are joining Twitter to “engage” “ it is to deceive” the world specially Muslims.

The latest U.S state dep., engagement (deception) effort with Muslims and Arabs is via launching an official Arabic account @USAbilAraby which its first tweet says:

“U.S state dep. acknowledge the role social media plays in the Arab world and we would like to be part of your discussion”

and that discussion to them are now in the forms of Tweets to deceive the Arab public opinion about what the U.S government is doing, as the account was tweeting about the need of change in Egypt praising the Egyptian revolution and so forth….

Oh Ya we believe you!

Political propaganda has entered a new chapter today, it is now Propaganda 2.0. courtesy of Hillary Clinton – Secretary of hypocrisy and miss-leading the public .

Sweden based mobile and Computer live streaming service bambuser has confirmed our report that it was blocked in Egypet at 1 CET today. Along with Twitter and other news websites reporting on the demonstrations.

Bambusa said in a blog post “Prior to services like Bambuser entering the field, protestors would record videos, uploading them to YouTube when they got home; however, many never made it, as police confiscated phones. Now, as they can’t operate like that, and so instead have chosen to close the whole service in order to keep control.”

it went on in saying: “we” condemn the abuse of power that we are seeing today. We are working hard to ensure access resumes for the Egyptian community and stand by them in their quest for the right to protest.”

On the Other hand according to several sources and Facebook updates of users inside Egypt, Egyptian totalitarian regime has blocked 3G access in demonstration areas to prevent Live streaming via 3G network.

Here are some of the videos the young and tech savvy Egyptians shared on the platform before the blocking:

The recently announced Egyptian Mossad Agent Tariq Abdel Razaq Hassan reveled that the Mossad revealed that he used several websites to announce phony telecom jobs targeting Syrian and Lebanese in order to recruit them to join the Mossad.

According to Egyptian newspaper Alyoum Alsabe , Tariq Abdel Razaq Hassan said he joined the Mossad via his request online, as after he saw an ad online to make money he clicked on it and it redirected him into the Mossad website where he sent him and email asking for a “job.”

If this news shows anything, it is that the Internet has become instrumental not in Mossad operations around the world but also in recruitment and propaganda. Another aspect is that Tariq is not highly educated, intelligence experts note that Mossad and the CIA focus in recruitment is not only on high assets such as politicians, businessmen, and the Media, the Mossad would recruit anyone educated, or not educated, connected or not connected.

Despite that “israel” has a peace treaty with Egypt since over 20 years and officials from both government meet regularly,seems “Israel” never stopped plotting and spying against Egypt.

According to Islammemo and a number of Egyptian news sites the ongoing investigation with the Egyptian spy Tariq Abdel Razaq Hassan revealed that the Israeli Mossad is behind the Internet outage that affected Internet traffic quarter one of last year.

During the outage ArabCrunch was present in Cairo by our founder Gaith Saqer who was attending ArabTechies Gathering. At the time Egyptian authorities said that Internet cables in the Mediation sea is behind Internet slowdown and outage in Egypt. The Investigation revealed that the Mossad has cut Internet cables between Egypt and Europe .

The Mossad spy also said that Israeli spy agency the Mossad used the internet and several websites to spread wrong information about Islam and Islamic Sharia in order to change the believes of main stream Arab Muslims.