Today Samsung launched its Application Seller website, which is basically the developer end of the Samsung Application Store. The store is still in trial mode for UK customers, but Samsung plan on a broader launch in the coming months.

Samsung phones run on tailored versions of Windows Mobile or Symbian, so developers making apps can use the Application Seller site to distribute their programs to Samsung customers. The model is similar to other handset maker app stores - Samgsung provides the platform and customers, an takes a cut of your sales in return.

While not boasting a superstar product like the iPhone or BlackBerry, Samsung have been on a tear in recent years, and are talking about a 20 per cent global market share by the end of the year. Every man and his dog have an application store these days, and it seems like a space destined to consolidate, but you can't blame Samsung for trying.

Anyway, if you're interested, here's the press release from Samsung:

(UPDATED: See end of post)

This one is a classic - a collegue just forwarded me a mail received from Etisalat's customer care centre. The collegue uses Etisalat's broadband internet service, which is the monopoly internet provider here in Abu Dhabi.

This customer needed to change a detail on their account, and went to Etisalat's customer service website to do it. But to process the change, the website required a mobile number. And not just any mobile number. When she entered her number, beginning with 055 (the prefix for du, Etisalat's mobile competitor), the site rejected it. The only way she could process the change was to enter in a fake 050 (ie. Etisalat) number.

She later sent a mail to the customer care team, letting them know that she could not be contacted on the ficticious 050 number, and giving them her real number. Here is their response:

As we mentioned before, there has been some interesting commentary in the last few days about Twitter in the region, as well as the role being played by Watwet, a Twitter-style service started by Jordanian entrepreneurs, that aims to be a Twitter for the Arab world.

This post on ArabCrunch pointed out some interesting figures. Watwet has around twice as many users in the region as Twitter is estimated to have, but its userbase is overwhelmingly skewed towards Jordan, and its percentage of active users is even lower than Twitter's.

Quite a few people shared their thoughts on Watwet afterward, and the skeptics among them were best represented by Salem, who wrote in the comments to our post:

Watwet recently transformed themselves into just another Twitter application by connecting their accounts with Twitter...what is the value of having your tweets in two locations? what is the value of using watwet as an inferior twitter app when you have all hose other really useful apps to use (on your mobile)? why would anyone want to maintain two accounts for the same function? Why would anyone follow you on watwet when they can do that on Twitter? Why would anyone be looking for you on watwet when you "and they" are also on Twitter? Why do all the hard core watwet users (very few btw) still maintain a more active stream on Twitter? and before the twitter busines plan was leaked, did the watwet guys know where twitter -or they- were heading? or were they just twaiting for twitter's next move? Ask them that, but don't wait for an answer.

I asked them, I waited (about half an hour) and they answered. Here is what Karim Arafat, Watwet's founder and CEO, had to say:

Congrats to Gaith over at Arabcrunch for this scoop of insight on the relative popularity of Twitter and its Arabic clone, Watwet, in the Middle East. I'm kicking myself for not thinking of this when I wrote up my piece of Twitter skepticism last week.

The nut of the post, which is well worth reading, is that Watwet has about twice as many users as Twitter is estimated to have here in the region, although the demographics are quite different. In short, Twitter has about 12-15,000 mainly English speaking users, predominantly in the UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, while WatWet has about 25,000 users, mainly Arabic speaking, and mainly in Jordan.

My take? Like its sister site Ikbis, an Arabic-focussed YouTube that we wrote about previously, I think Watwet's biggest advantage is in playing the ground game in the region.

Over the last week, Ozone, an Indian internet business with a substantial presence in Dubai, has advertised the Horse.ae domain name as being up for grabs, in a series of ads in the Arabic and English media.

Asking price? Somewhere in the Dh6 million (US$1.6mn) range. The good news? It is sold:

You'll see this in the newspaper tomorrow, and up on the website sometime soon, but you saw it here first! Today was a good one for du, which is looking more and more like a serious competitor to Etisalat as time goes on. An early story on du's quarterly results - including an absolute whipping of its competitor in the race for subscribers, below:

On the heels of my blog colleagues post on Etisalat's PR disaster with its recent bungling of the BlackBerry "spyware" saga, I begun to wonder how this will affect the telecom operator's relationship with the smartphone's Canadian manufacturer, Research In Motion (RIM).

In my most recent reporting job for a Canadian national business paper, I covered RIM for about two years, writing everything from quarterly earnings reports to getting the scoop on some of its upcoming product releases. I also had the opportunity to meet and interview the company's co-chief executive Jim Balsillie quite a few times. So, I'm quite familiar with the company's operations.

Mr Balsillie is a busy man. Aside from running one of the hottest technology companies in the world, he is also attempting to purchase and relocate a National Hockey League team as well as trying to snap up a business unit of Nortel, a beleaguered Canadian telecom equipment firm,  away from Nokia Siemens and Ericsson [update: Ericsson won in the end]. In his spare time - if he has any - the executive likes to play ice hockey in a highly competitive league, giving bodychecks as much as he takes them. In the course of a decade, his aggresive grit and competitive streak has made him one of Canada's most respected businessmen, and it's safe to say that he will be the subject of many MBA courses for years to come.

On top of all that, he just had to deal with the global public relations fallout of one of its carrier partners sending an unauthorized software patch that appears to circumvent security protocols. Security, by the way, is paramount to the BlackBerry, a feature which like to heavily leverage to their customers, constantly bragging about their uncrackable 256-bit encryption technology that not even the US government has been able to hack.

Needless to say, this is the last thing Mr. Balsillie and RIM would like to deal with. While it remains to be seen how Etisalat's moves will influence the company's relations with RIM, the BlackBerry maker has been nothing short of a golden goose for the mobile firm. Each month, Etisalat's 145,000 BlackBerry users pay a hefty monthly fee to access their mobile services, while each new BlackBerry product flies off shelves as soon as people realise they can upgrade their year-old devices.

It will certainly be interesting to see how RIM negotiates future product releases with Etisalat and whether we will begin to see du offer more robust BlackBerry packages in the near future. Will RIM forgive Etisalat's software patch so easily? Knowing Mr. Balsillie's business acumen, it certainly will not be forgotten anytime soon.

The story of Etisalat's problematic BlackBerry software upgrade, which we have covered in depth, has now become a truly global one, with coverage by the New York Times, BBC, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Sydney Morning Herald, among about 480 other publications.

For a nice take on the story, listen to this interview on Dubai Eye radio this morning, where Alexander McNabb, the PR man behind the excellent Fake Plastic Souks blog, explains pretty clearly why Etisalat has fallen victim to the classic law of media relations: news expands to fill a vacuum.

As we quoted one BlackBerry user as saying in an earlier story, "the less they talk, the more people will talk about it."

Going into media and customer blackout on this story directly led to a week of digging by the local press, lots of angry customers voicing their thoughts online, subsequent comments from RIM/BlackBerry, and the international media storm that followed. I hope Etisalat and their PR company, Asda'a Burson-Marsteller, has learnt something from the whole experience. 

That doesn't seem to have happened though, judging by the things said in this interview by Arabian Business with an Etisalat vice president.

Yesterday, SpotOn Public Relations released a widely-cited report that detailed the amount of Twitter users in the Middle East and North Africa. We published two articles based on the figures; one by media reporter Keach Hagey, "Middle East Twitter users sees rapid growth", and by technology reporter Tom Gara, "Facts show Twitter yet to lure Middle East users".

In short, the numbers gave a brief introspective view at how the micro-blogging service has grown in the area, while ensuring that if there's any local companies out there looking to do some "internet marketing", it looks like SpotOn knows their audience.

But I was skeptical. I spent over five years of my undergraduate education analysing some pretty intense statistics and I just didn't buy SpotOn's methodology, only cited in their press release as: " based on the agency's survey, tracking and analysis of registered Twitter accounts across the Middle East and Africa region."

To confirm these numbers, I turned to Sysomos, a Canadian-based start-up, who hold a patent-pending technology born from a university research study on analysing the social web in real-time. The company made its mark among the Twitterati after publishing a fairly comprehensive global study on the usage of Twitter, full of fancy graphics and all that.

It apparently took the brains over at Sysomos quite a bit of time to process the data. I received the figures from Sysomos late last night, past our paper's deadline, from company spokesman and Twitter expert in his own right, Mark Evans.

The results comparing both firms' figures are after the jump:

OK, so it's a pretty small game, but Spot On PR's new report on Twitter usage in the Middle East shows the microblogging service getting some micro-traction, growing by 300% in recent months.