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.

When learning one of the common programming languages like C++, English language in most cases is a barrier for young Arab kids to learn software programing at a young age.

Kalimat comes to bridge the gap by offering an Arabic educational programing language for kids in which developers write the code using Arabic letters.

According to Mohammed Sayed, the language is easy to learn but provides enough features to allow for complex programs and it has attributes that are familiar to developers such as Object-oriented programming, Dynamic typing , Garbage collection and creating .exe files.

The language is open source freely available on Windows , Ubuntu 32-bit and Ubuntu 64-bit here is a book in Arabic to teach kids how to use Kalimat.

Update: Samy the author of Kalimat says ” Just wanted to tell people who downloaded the September 2011 edition: There’s a bug that prevents the creation of .exe files! I fixed it in the October edition, available now from the official site (http://www.kalimat-lang.com) or from http://code.google.com/p/kalimat/downloads”

This project is important and I would like to ask fellow developers to joins the community and further develop it and enhance it. It would also be very useful for Arab schools to add it to their curricula and teach it for kids at a young age.

The project is founded by Mohamed Samy from Egypt, many thanks for this great offer.

The interest in learning Arabic in the world has increased in the last decade, specially in in USA. There many reasons behind “why” many are learning or interested in learning the language. Some are Muslim reverts who do not know Arabic and want to learn it in order to better understand Quran and Hadith. Some are CIA/FBI agents who want to learn it for their spying, interrogation job, or when coordinating with other tyrant Arab secret police agents. Some work with the US army and want to learn it to deal with Arabs in occupied areas such as Iraq. Others are Middle East university stream students and want to learn it as it is part of their studies. and there are others who are not Muslims and who just want to learn it because they are fascinated with Arabic and the Arab world.

Whatever was the reason, Arabic Coach provides the platform to connect anyone who wants to learn Arabic from around the world with native Arab teachers from the Arab world.

The site offers those who want to study Arabic the option to browse teachers see their profile, video intro and ratting, then they can schedule virtual teaching sessions with the desired teachers, conducted via Skype or Yahoo messenger.

Each teacher can determine his own hourly rate. in which the student has to pay, Arabic Coach takes 20% fee from each teacher. Teachers are provided with a suggested curriculum, lesson plans, and assessment tools, but they have the freedom to use their own methods. All teachers go through a screening session before their profile goes live.

We reviewed around 2 years ago Microsoft Mareen from Cairo Microsoft Innovation Lab (CMIC), the tool competes with US startup Yamli and google’s Ta3reeb as the tool converts Romanized Arabic text into Arabic.

Since then the CMIC has been busy innovating new tools and technologies that help Arabic language online under the name of Afkar, and these tools matches google’s Arabic products and includes new ones that google does not have.

Here are Afkar’s products to date:

• Maren

Convert Romanized Arabic text into Arabic. It competes with Yamli and Google Ta3reeb.

• Maren Autocomplete

A smart tool that automatically completes the words you type in Arabic. Maren Autocomplete also helps you create correct sentences by giving you word options based on the context of the full phrase.

• Maren Multilingual

Maren Multilingual allows you to type classic Arabic or Romanized Arabic words within an English sentence. The application then gives you an instant and accurate English translation using Bing Translator. Competes with Google Translate, RealTime English-Arabic Translation Via Google Talk, Google tool bar.

• Bing Translator

Bing Translator is a free translation service for online automatic translation of text and web pages. It currently translates 32 languages including Arabic, English, Spanish, French, Japanese, German, Chinese, Italian, Korean, Thai and Russian. Competes with Google translate.

• Bing Answers

An “instant answer” is a snippet of information related to the keywords in your search query. Bing Answers quickly extracts pertinent information and displays it up at the top of your search results. This helps you to access the information you want immediately, without having to visit a webpage.

For Example
• Muslim Prayer Times:

Type “Muslim prayer times” plus the capital name and you are done. Google launched similar service in its search back in april 2011.
Google offers similar service to Bing Answers in its search in Arabic called Snippet.

• Instant Translation on Bing:

You can get translation for 32 languages including Arabic, English, Spanish, French, Japanese, German, Chinese, Italian, Korean, Thai and Russian. 
Here are some examples:
• If you need to get the Arabic translation of “sophisticated”, just type:
Translate sophisticated to Arabic
• To get the translation in more languages: Translate sophisticated from English

• WikiBhasha Beta

WikiBhasha Beta is a powerful multilingual content creation tool for Wikipedia. Developed by Microsoft Research, WikiBhasha Beta enables Wikipedia users and contributors to explore and source content from English Wikipedia articles, to translate the content into a set of target languages, and to use the content with user additions and corrections for contribution to the target language version of Wikipedia. The content creation workflow is flexible enough to accommodate new content creation, while preserving reusable information such as references and templates.
WikiBhasha Beta has an easy to use, intuitive user interface and enables quick and easy translation of English articles to more than 30 other languages, supported by Microsoft’s Machine Translation system and Microsoft’s Collaborative Translation Framework.

• Maren Morph

Arabic morphological analyzer.

Maren Morph automatically analyzes a given Arabic word and displays possible analyses with corresponding diacritics for each analysis. Each analysis shows the linguistic structure of the word by deconstructing it into its basic morphemes, including the prefixes, stem and suffixes, and the stem is further broken-down into its root and morphological pattern.

The presented word analyses are ranked in a way that reflects their actual usage in written Arabic text, based on word usage statistics.
Maren Morph also features much more morphological information like all valid derivatives and inflections for the word subject to investigation.
Maren Morph was built to help a wide variety of users spanning Arabic language specialists, college and school students, researchers and academic staff as well as common internet users.

Souq.com was launched in 2005 from Maktoob group (Now Jabbar Group) as an auction site, it initially covered Jordan, then expanded into UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The site is not anymore just an auction site, but rather a marketplace for anyone to sell or buy, Souq.com supports many formats (auction, fixed price and Classifieds for the Real Estate and motor vertical.)

Selling in souq sounds a straight forward 123 process: register, add product name, choose the payment method, done. Once a user buys your item, Aramex will contact the you to collect the item, once the the items is delivered to the buyer the funds will be released to your wallet, now it can be transferred to your bank account.

Souq also has what is calls SouqSafePay, where it will release funds to the seller only once the buyer receives and approves the item.

On the Kuwaiti store, Souq also has a storefront for Kuwaiti bricks and mortar stores where users can buy directly from them directly.

Kuwait Souq is available in English and Arabic.

eHow is an online guide with more than 1 million articles and videos about how to do things. The site is owned by Demand Media a US company that is set to hit NASDAQ, as it filled for an IPO early this month.

Critics of eHow label the site as a content farm which pushes together an inventory of low quality articles and videos produced by low paid freelancers in order to boost search engine traffic.

Low quality English content might be a true case for eHow, but for the Arabic Internet, there is no content to start with. Thats is why a startup like eKayf which is a copy of eHow but in Arabic is very useful, at least there is now some Arabic content that has some editor behind it rather than content coming from Forums as 90% of that content has no  real value, the prof is that most of the time google returns wrong results for many Arabic keywords.

As of today,  eKayf seems to boost good amount of content dividing them into different categories: Internet, Computer, Work, Relations, Life, Health, and Cooking. Here is an Arabic post in how to use Twitter.

eKayf (means eHow in Arabic) launched in 2009 and is based in Egypt.

There are a number of  pure Arabic distributions for the free and open source operating system Linux, Ojuba is one of the most recognized one.

Few days ago the 4th edition of Ojuba has been launched under the name “Riyadh”, the most notable features are support for 64 bit CPUs, a personal lock folder for encrypted files, activating 3G connection automatically and more.

Ojuba is available for free under Waqf General Public License ,To download Ojuba you can go here ( arabic) english unofficial site here.

Germany based language portal bab.la launched its Arabic version today. bab.la has free dictionaries for 28 languages, where users can use via the web and mobile but what is more interesting you can get any word translated by sending a tweet to @babladict.

To do that just enter the language abbreviation ( ex: En) space the abbreviation of the other langauge you want to have the world translated to ( ex: Ar, Fr, Gr ) then the word that you want it to be translated and hit send, in a few babladict will @ you with the translated word.

bab.la Twitter account says its supports 14 languages, I tested English to Arabic, French and German.

bab.la website seems also to offer more accurate English to Arabic translation than google translate
example the world startup goolge translated it into “بدء التشغيل” which means start running, while bab.la translation offered 2 Arabic words : البدء في التشغيل، ابتدائيّ the second one is the same as google but the first “new” or “initial” which is some how related to what the word startup means (I could not test german or french since I do not speak them). bab.la also offers Similar terms for the translated word in both Arabic and English. ( Bab.la failed to translate innovate to Arabic via its Twitter Interface)

Additionally on bab.la users can submit their own suggested translations. ”This is just the beginning as our portal is wiki-based. Users can suggest their own translations or complete existing translations” explains Egyptian Susan Karmal, project manager of the Arabic version.

The site also offers other services such as teaching materials games and professional translations service.

Arabic English dictionary, translation and learning is nothing new, Google has Gtalk bot Sakhr has  web dictionary, iPhone app real time Arabic to english translator, Yahoo Maktoob iPhone app,  and Arabic Pod has interesting Arabic learning podcatst, with videos and other things that are added since our last review about them.

At the Begging this month Sarmady the digital arm of Vodfone Egypt released thier first Arabic iPhone, iPod and iPad app FilGoal South Africa offering interesting features for FIFA Worldcup 2010 fans:

• Latest news from the FIFA 2010 World Cup in South Africa
• Annalyses of games and exciting features and interviews
• information about the participating teams
• Fixtures, results and tables of all the groups
• A list of all the players participating in the tournament
• Live coverage of all the games, including goals, yellow cards and red cards
• FilGoal.com users’ comments on all the editorial material

The app has achived 11,000 downloads, while Shawweet BlackBerry App achieved 13000 downloads in 4 days since its launch.

I did not test the FilGoal app because until today I am iPhoneless , however today I tested quickly Eurosports worldcup English app for iPod using my friend’s iPad, the app looks interesting and has nice features such as live match coverage.

In social media and online marketing monitoring your brand, your competition and your industry is one of the important pillars to carry out a successful social media and online marketing strategy.

Google alert has been here for some times now enabling you to enter a keyword and get alerts to your email inbox whenever that keyword is mentioned online, for example you get an alert whenever your brand is mentioned thus it also works as a media monitoring tool.

Yesterday Google has launched Google Alerts in Arabic so now you can use Google Alerts to find content in Arabic as well monitor your brand mention in Arabic and do intelligent monitoring of your industry in the Arab world.

However Google Alert is not totally optimized for social media namely Twitter, but since google alerts covers blogs too and they are a social media type google alerts is useful in some social media fronts. Back in February we covered the launch of SocialEyez which called it self “the first dedicated social media monitoring service designed to capture and analyze Arabic content online” but until now we did not test socialeyez.

I advice you to read the help section of google alert in order to set the right types of Alerts here (Arabic link). As for international social media engagement measurement  and monitoring tools check out PostRank and uberVU.

Google announced 2 days ago the launch of it’s Arabic and other 35 language search tool, which allows users to type queries in Arabic on any keyboard by providing a virtual Arabic keyboard. Google decided to introduce this feature:

“Many users are more comfortable formulating questions for search in their own language. Though English transliteration (typing other languages in English script) works well for some, success varies greatly on users’ fluency in English. Input Method Editors (or IMEs for short) are also very useful but require users to know the standard conventions about how to switch languages using mouse or keyboard shortcuts. “(Google Arabia Blog)

The keyboard utilized is the standard windows configuration, which may hinder users who are used to Apple’s Arabic keyboard.

Google has also Google Ta3treeb, an online transliteration tool that converts latin letters into Arabic and comeptes with Yamli and other solutions.

Launched at GITEX 2007, Onkosh.com was one of the few Arabic search engines that poped out from the region. The project is part of Orascom Telecom subsidiary. A telecom, mobile, ISP, web hosting and online media and emarketing giant in the Arab world. Where they have a number of online properties including LinkOnLine which operates MSN Arabia in partnership with Microsoft.

Onkush provided search capabilities in Arabic for websites, photos, forums, files and blogs as well as news. The Arabic search engine was one of the first to invent transliteration of Arabic Language, that allows users to search in Arabic by writing Arabic words using Latin Alphabet without having to install Arabic support on your PC. In this front Onkush competes with Yamli, Google Ta3reeb and Micosoft Marin along others.
In Arabic search it competes with Google, Yahoo Arabic Search, Araby and Ayna.
Today we were tipped that Onkush announced on its website that it is closed now

“Goodbye, Thanks for all the support over the past few years…..”

We do not know when Onkush.com was shutdonw, but in Nov. 2008 we wondered why Onkush is not part of MSN Arabia search? The site however was using Microsoft bing, which might be part of LinkOnLine deal with Microsoft.

This might be the reason behind shutting down Onkush as there is a conflict of Interest between Onkush and bing.
I will contact LinkOnLine and update you with their reasons behind this closure.

GoodBye Onkush.
#Thanks Ammar Mardawi for the tip.

When we released ArabCrunch.NET in private beta as the social platform that empowers the Arab tech ecosystem only in English, an Arabic Interface was part of our plans and today it is opening live to anyone to signup.

Now millions of Arabic native entrepreneurs technology professional, geeks, academia students will have access to all the great offerings ArabCrunch offers them:

-Networking within the tech industry, with top notch executives, and with serial entrepreneurs like the cofounder and CEO of the world’s most popular mobile browser Opera, VPs and directors from Jabbar,Yahoo, Google, Microsoft.

- Mentorship opportunities with senior executives and other industry gurus from companies such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and from successful Arab, US and international serial entrepreneurs who have been successful in Silicon Valley, Europe and Arabia.

- Asking questions related to Enterpunership on starting a business and getting answers from well advised community that share what they know by answering others questions.

- Networking with other Tech Startup and companies in the region and worldwide, finding and networking with Service Providers, Venture Funds to help with funding, Incubators to help them get office space and other services, Organizations to help them find support services, whether starting and growing a company or increasing the technical skills of an engineer or the tech company’s staff. Lastly, help contribute to and use the open source projects developed by devoted and passionate Arab geeks.

Today ArabCrunch.NET boasts 1833??? members and grows everyday organically. The new social network will be integrated with ArabCrunch global events under ArabCrunchStart initiative which are organized by ArabCrunch and our ambassadors in the USA ( Seattle, NY and Silicon Valley), London, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and other countries around the world soon to join.

ArabCrunch.NET is not only about startups and business; we look at the problems facing the tech industry as an ecosystem. We will be enhancing and offering more features that empower every participant of the ecosystem in new ways never seen before (any feedback is welcomed). Stay tuned.

If you are familiar with web advertising, google has an advertising platform for website publishers called “adsense”, which enables them to serve ads on their websites coming from Google’s advertisers via Google self service advertising platform “adwords.”

Google shares part of the revenues it acclimates from google adsense customers but does not disclose the actual percentage. Adsense is available on per click and on impressions bases in many ad formats: text , images and flash and can be added to any website , it is  also available  to RSS feeds only to Google Feedburner websites/blogs users.

Google sends check payment to adsense users after reaching around 50 USD every month and has been running a program to allow users to get payed via  the popular money transfer medium “Western Union” in a number of countries.

4 days ago Google announced expanding  the number of countries where individual web publishers can get their adsense payments via Western Union. The new countries google added are: Saudi Arabia, Croatia, Iceland, United Arab Emirates, Latvia, Lebanon, Slovenia, Tunisia, Moldova and Malta.

Google’s Western Union payments will be dispatched in according to the account payment schedule and will be available in US dollars at any western union local store in the above countries. (more info here.)

In another google Arabia news, google Rich Snippets is now available internationally with Arabic search is being supported. Rich Snippets which allows users see additional facts and data from web site in search results.

Arab NBA fans can now get all the content about NBA from the official NBA site  in Arabic. The new Arabic NBA site was launched few hours ago by Sarmady a major Internet player in Egypt which was acquired around a year ago by Vodafone.

NBA Arabic website is rich of content as it includes recent matches news, photos, videos, players and teams info and rankings, schedules and stats about almost everything NBA.

With this launch NBA Arabic webiste becomes the best Arabic website with the richest content about NBA beating both Yahoo Maktoob Sports in Arabic and the #1  sports website in Arabia Kooora.  However, Koora’s advantage remains in its live satellite matches schedule from across the world and near real time matches coverage.

Google is pushing further  to support  Arabic and  other 41 International languages in its quest to further increase its Internationalization revenues. In the Arabic front we reported recently about Google’s Tashkeel,  yesterday Google announced a new step to support Arabic online with an announcement to added Google automatic translation “word” to any website using google toolbar, beating Yamli’s web-based real-time translator tool that uses Google translation API which needs to be accessed  by opening a new site and moving a step ahead of Microsoft’s Translator widget.

The service works if you hover over a word with your mouse to get the automatic instant translation. The  feature is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox. On Google Chrome, automatic page translation is already built in.

The new Translate feature is available in all international versions of Toolbar, including English, and the translation service supports 41 different languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

You can Install the latest Toolbar version from here.

Tasree3 the Jordanian startup which enables users to find restaurants in a fast and easy way, has launched today its Arabic user interface.

The Arabic version has the same functionality we mentioned before for its english version:

“It has only one search bar where you enter the restaurant’s name that you want to eat at, and in case you do not remember the restaurant’s name, it helps you with an auto complete feature. Then simply hit ‘look up number’, and the site will look up the number for you. Moreover, you can browse the menu of that restaurant and add your own review.”"

With the Arabic version, Tasree3 is bound to be attractive to the majority of Jordanians, as Arabic is the #1 language online.
Looking forward to see tasree3 launching its service in other Arab countries.

If you write in Arabic and need some translation help or if you stumbled in an English word that you wanted to translate into Arabic, there is a google talk bot that helps you translate english words to Arabic in realtime, right from your Gtalk.

Just add: en2ar@bot.talk.google.com a and enjoy getting your translation in realtime.

We reported yesterday Google Tashkeel, and if you are aware google has its own translation app and widget for websites.

This translation momentum by the giant is a strategy to tab into international markets and improve search, but now google is no longer alone, As few days ago at MIX10 Microsoft jumped to to the bandwagon with Translator widget a tool that allows website to embed code on their website and have it available in around 32 languages including arabic the other languages are:

“German Polish Bulgarian Greek Portuguese Chinese Simplified Haitian Creole Romanian Chinese Traditional Hebrew Russian Czech Hungarian Slovak Danish Italian Slovenian Dutch Japanese Spanish English Korean Swedish Finnish Lithuanian Thai French Norwegian Turkish.”

Microsoft released Maren a desktop Transliteration application last year, and already has 150,000 downloads according to sources, an app that is superior to Yamli and Ta3reeb as It works on all MS Windows applications where users can compose documents, blogs, e-mails, instant messages, or even leave comments on friends’ Facebook pages all in Arabic.

You can read more about Translator Widget on msdn blog post.

Arabic language is different than English, for example it is written from right to left and has Diacritics describe how arabic text is pronounced, they are called in Arabic Tashkeel for example in Arabic a (ـِ ) kasra (i) can make the whole meaning of a word different. In Arabic AL-Tashkeel is based on Arabic grammar.

As for Google to improve its Arabic search it needs to understand the special nature of Arabic and its contest, which seems the reason behind the beta launch of Google’s Tashkeel which adds the missing diacritics to Arabic text. Google said on the lab page of the app “that it is an important pre-step to several text processing applications.”
Tashkeel offers users to add text directly via the website to do process the operation or to add a website URL where ArabCrunch Arabic looks like this:

There are many home grown efforts to improve Arabic languages technologies online, including ArabCrunch DEMO 09  last year company alkhawarizmy. which has enterprise Arabic web search engine and the only Arabic desktop semantic search engine and a good number of free open source projects that you can found on open source profiles on ArabCrunch.NET

Yamli the Boston based startup launched about 2 years ago with a transliteration tool, has extended its offerings recently with its new Dynamic Translator Project, which allows users to translate from Arabic, English, french, German, Spanish and visa versa.

The app which works in realtime is run via Google translate API.

According to Habib Hadadd cofounder of Yamli, the app is smart enough to save users edited translation and learn overt time  to improve the quality of translation ( You can look at older AC coverage of Yamli here.)

Transliteration is typing for example Arabic or Greek using the English keyboard , the user types in English “as you hear it” and the transliteration tool will convert the words into its native script.

Since Google launched Ta3reeb its online Transliteration for Arabic, which changes Latin letter into Arabic, it has been working in improving it ,as it has become more accurate and better in editing transliterated words. Google also launched an API for Ta3reeb and started integrating it with its online properties starting from Gmail, Blogger, Knol and its ejabat.google.com.

Google  first  transliteration tool was for the Indic language but later then launched its Arabic tool, after other several attempts to solve this problem most known example is Yamli, which when debuted Arabic transliteration it was the most accurate. However, to use Yamli, you need an internet connection. the other players in the Arabic Transliteration solutions include:eiktub, Arabic keyboard (ArabCrunch. NET profile) and Onkush.

The IT giant Microsoft went ahead and launched Maren its Native Windows Arabic Transliteration in July 2009, which does not need any Internet connection to complete the Transliteration job, meaning faster than Yamli or any other web based transliteration solution.

Google on its side, launched few days ago quietly Google Input Method (Google IME) which is its desktop version of its international web transliteration products, but does not need internet connection to convert the words. Google IME. is available for download from here (Requires Windows 7/Vista/XP (32-bit) which caused me to waste several hours yesterday in testing) and supports the following languages: Arabic, Bengali, Farsi (Persian), Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

When installed and enabled, Google IME operates as a small bar that by default will be placed at the bottom right corner of your desktop which can also be moved around. It can be used for more configuration and controlling various features of our IME. It has four icons with leftmost being the application icon. Next to it are IME language indicator button, keyboard button and menu button in that order.

Besides offline support, Google IME offers a number of useful features:Remembering user’s correction, Single click on a word to go to google search, visual Keyboard, and the ability to Switch to English at anytime ( for full features list go here.)

All these transliteration solutions are nice when Arabic or other native language keyboards are not present, but represent a danger to the existence of Arabic language and the other 13 languages, imagine a nation that can not use its own script to write, can we call it a nation!

Few days ago Google announced its annual Zeitgeist, a look at 2009 through the collective data of the world on Google.

Google Zeitgeist tools also offer insight into which topics were of interest across the globe. Top search terms from over fifty countries appear on our Google Zeitgeist webpage – from political candidates in South Africa, to news searches in the United Arab Emirates, to electronic brand searches in Hong Kong.

T his year’s global fastest rising searches show interest across pop culture (with the King of Pop at the helm, followed by searches for movie New Moon and singer Lady Gaga), social networking sites and new technologies such as Windows 7 and Torpedo Gratis.

Global Fastest Rising Queries according to Google:
1.    Michael Jackson
2.    Facebook
3.    Tuenti
4.    Twitter
5.    Sanalika
6.    New moon
7.    Lady Gaga
8.    Windows 7
9.    Dantri.com.vn
10. Torpedo Gratis

I have used Google Insights for Search, a publicly available tool that displays relative search volume across geographies, time periods and queries, to get the 2009 list in many Arab countries.

By looking at the list, you will see the most common Interest are are Photos, Music, and Games in the following countries: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, West bank and Gaza, Syria, UAE and Algeria.

You’ll also notice that Arabic keywords are dominant in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, West Bank, reflecting that Internet users in these countries use Arabic as the main language online. While English is dominant in Lebanon and UAE, maybe because expats are the majority of the population in UAE and maybe because lebanon is more western educated. French queries are dominant in Morocco and Algeria because of the French colonial past.

Here the top 10 Queries for major Arab countries:

• Kingdom of Saudi Arabia top 10 search ( terms translated from arabic): forums,Games, photos, songs, youtube, tarrab (music) chat, newspaper, Riyadh, trivian
• Jordan (terms translated from arabic): games, Jordan, photos, songs. newspaper, Alrai, download, girls, adductor, facebook., msn, love,
• Lebanon (terms translated from arabic: lebanon, lyrics, google, games, facebook, photos (Arabic keyword”, صور”, video, Nokia.

• Morocco: maroc, telecharger, youtube, clavier, jeux, clavier arabe, facebook, msn, vidoe, google.

• Syria (terms translated from arabic: photos, Syriam download (english keyword), songs, Syria, Chat, Education ministry, Forums, Al Arabia, Syria.
• Palestine (terms translated from arabic):, Games, Photosm Palestine, togather, Al Quds, Chat, Girls, Forms, Gaza.
• ‎UAE ( English terms) : Dubai, Download, Youtube, Games ( arabic word) Yahoo, news, Google, Games, facebook, india.
• Algeria:Algerie, telechargerm youtube, jeux, gammes (arabic) vidoem yahoo, Alshrouq (arabic) google, facebook.
• And here are UAE Fastest Rising Queries:

1.     Tribal wars game
2.     Gitex 2009
3.     netLog
4.     FlyDubai
5.     blackberry
6.     Ramadan 2009
7.     Twitter
8.     Star academy 6
9.     Etihad airways booking
10.  Kingfisher airlines booking

We broke the news back on the 19th of October about the launch of Kzalek the first Arabic desktop client for Twitter, but we did not update the post in a timely manner that Kzalek was launched under private beta and the download link was available only for a short period of time, because there was miss understanding in the communication with Kzalek Developer.

However today Kzalek is out of Private Beta with a new version that is available for download via its official website here ( see Kzalek profile on ArabCrunch.NET if you have an invite.)

As we said before Kzalek main value is in solving the Arabic problem for twitter users on Mac and Linux that other AIR based Twitter apps failed to solve ( Kzalek runs on Windows too). and in solving Arabic right-to-left (RTL) specially when you add a latin word to the Arabic tweet.

The new version of Kzalek now 0.2 beta has the same great features we mentioned here before, such as the ability to view the shortened links original long link without leaving the app via the Untiny untiny api. Though the new version also adds some more: custom sound notifications for replies and direct messages or all received tweets, and latest received messages quick search.

The following video explain more about Kzalek :