Etisalat has cut the prices of its iPhone monthly plans, as well as the prepaid price for the handset. Price cuts seem to be in the range of 20-25 per cent, a pretty nice little saving, but still at the top end of pricing around the world for an iPhone plan.

The big question - can customers who signed up for the old packages last month take advantage of the new prices? My guess is no, but we're getting Etisalat to confirm, so watch this space.

(UPDATE: My guess was wrong! Etisalat says people who signed up before the price cut can expect to see the new prices reflected on their next bill. Hats off for this, a fairly gentlemanly move, all considered.)

Old vs new prices, plus Etisalat press release, after the jump:

Some early disclosure here: Salman Suhail and Mustafa Elgharbawy are two old friends from Cairo. Mustafa was one of the first people I ever met when I moved to Egypt almost five years ago, and Salman is a member of an exclusive club - about 25 members - who can say with all honesty that they have been my housemate and survived to tell the tale.

Both of them now work at TayaIT, an Egyptian technology company that has developed a pretty slick Arabic search engine, and is working on a bunch of other cool projects.

Salman contacted me today to let me know that his new project, Ba2olak Eih (Egyptian slang Arabic meaning, roughly, "I'll tell you something...") is now online and in the wild. It works like an Arabic version of Digg, with one pretty interesting kink - users can vote a story up or down, but the front page stories - which would be the most popular ones, in the Digg universe - are based on the intensity (Salman calls it the "velocity") of the votes, not the popularity.

So a story with a thousand negative votes will make it to the front page, not for its popularity among users, but for the intensity of their feelings about it. Seems like an worthwhile experiment, especially in the Middle East, where everybody loves a good argument.

And last week Mustafa had his first iPhone application go live on the iTunes App Store. MojoTasks is a nice clean little task manager / checklist program for the iPhone.

I'm not sure exactly how many Middle Eastern iPhone developers are out there with their apps on the store - just getting registered takes actual paperwork and can apparently be quite a hassle for people in this part of the world. So congrats to Mustafa, and he says we can expect more apps from him in the coming months. 

Dream of working for a media company in a trendy city with great food, nice beaches, and beautiful people? We in Abu Dhabi may think we have it all, but Kuv Capital, a Lebanese venture cap firm, is hoping to raise up to US$20 million to build a media production zone in Beirut, a la Dubai Media City. Given that the Lebanese contribution to Middle Eastern entertainment and media is pretty significant (oh Nancy Ajram, you are eternally hand-washing your laundry in our spotless minds), and the general appeal of Beirut as a place to live, this sounds like a good idea,  long overdue.

In the latest installment of Regulatory Smackdown, Volume XXIV, Etisalat said late on Thursday that it has submitted a detailed breakdown of its internal cost structure to the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA). Thursday was the deadline for the report, which the TRA has been requesting from Etisalat for years. The cost structure will be used in setting prices, and this is all generally good news for competition and, please pretty please, lower prices.

Virtual is the new physical: The Dubai-based mobile operator,Friendi, launched its first network, and the first "virtual" mobile network in the Middle East, in Oman last week. It hopes to run up to 20 more in the next few years. We got the lowdown from its chief executive.

As long as nobody starts another text message spam company, I'm happy: Tunisiana, the Tunisian mobile operator, has launched a seed fund for entrepreneurs building services businesses in the mobile space. They will invest up to 30,000 Tunisian Dinars (Dh80,000) in startups they think have some potential. Startup Arabia has more.  

Looking for a job in space? Or at least the space industry? Khaleej Times reports a local company is organising job fairs for those with a passion for the Final Frontier.

Vodafone Qatar's billion-dollar IPO was fully subscribed, thanks in part to a fatwa from the local religious establishment letting everyone know the company and its business is Shariah-compliant. And speaking of public offerings, the FT tech blog reports that April was the best month for tech IPOs in more than a year.