- Dubai is the most innovative city in the Gulf, according to a YouGov poll published by Maktoob Business. But that's a little bit like being the best ice hockey team in Australia, the survey said, because just 2% of respondents consider the Gulf to be a particularly innovative place.

- Spice, the Indian telco that competes with global players like Vodafone, NTT and Etisalat, has cancelled plans for an IPO on the Dubai Financial Market after chaos and mass-selling on the exchange in the last year. The company will IPO somewhere else, in 2011, its billionaire founder Bhupendra Kumar Modi told Bloomberg.

- Netbooks make up 20 per cent of the total sales at Dubai-based electronics retailer Jackies, the company said today. Demand for the gloriously cheap little portable computers is up by 40% in the first half of this year, and Jackies thinks new offerings based on the Google Android operating system will be big hits.

- Intel is about to announce that it has signed a big deal to supply CPU chips to Nokia. That will be a major turning point in the advanced semiconductor industry which, as we all know, Abu Dhabi is heavily invested in. Watch this space.

- A little treat for those who made it all the way to the bottom: Expect a news announcement regarding a serious jump in UAE broadband internet speeds in the coming week. In an interview for a story published today, Etisalat's COO said there would be a big news event in the coming weeks, with broadband being the centre of the story. With the national fibre network nearing completion, people connected to the light-speed system should expect speeds much faster than the paltry 16 megabit connections currently on offer.