I feel special, like one in 9.6 million, after receiving my very own SMS from the UAE Ministry of Interior warning me to "be aware of falling into SMS calls scams, and never respond to such type of calls."

Say what you want about life in the UAE, but there are plenty of places in the Middle East where you are extremely unlikely to ever hear the phrase "With compliments of Ministry of Interior."

- Twitter is in talks with Zain, the regional mobile operator, to launch a local SMS-based notifications system for the Middle East, according to Arabcrunch. For Twitter, this is a good deal if Zain will send all those texts for free, for Zain, this is a good deal in terms of adding a trendy new bell and whistle to its service. But does anyone really want to recieve all their tweets via text message anymore? And don't most people have a smartphone with a Twitter app?

- Speaking of Zain, its shareholders will vote this week on abolishing an ownership restriction clause that prevents anyone from acquiring a more than 2% stake in the company. Opening the door for a possible stake sale to another telco or institutional investor? Was Etisalat's seemingly crazy statement about buying Zain possibly less crazy than it sounded?

- Atheeb's rollout of a national WiMax internet network in Saudi Arabia continues, with Medina that latest city to be blanketed in sweet wireless broadband deliciousness, reports ITP.net. There has been a lot of smack talked about WiMax, and it does seem to be a technology destined for nichedom. But it certainly seems like a good way to quickly roll out a competitive new broadband internet network, something needed in markets all across the region.

- Last week's scrapping of the Dh150,000 ($40,000) minimum capital requirement for startup companies in the UAE was widely hailed as good news for entrepreneurs. But The National's Wayne Arnold argues that the picture is a little cloudier than it may seem. 

Yesterday Gamal Mubarak, the son of the Egyptian president, gave his first webcast "dialogue" with the public via Sharek ("Participate") his flashy new "social" website.

I'd love to get into a discussion about Egyptian presidential succession and what Gamal means for Egypt and the region, but will instead stick within my nerdish Beep Beep mandate and ask: does anyone know who worked on the technical side of Sharek.eg?

In an effort to counter spam text messages, the UAE government will send 9.6 million text messages warning people about scam text messages.

As announced by the WAM news agency:

"The campaign is organised by the General Secretariat of the Office of the Interior Minister. It is aimed at spreading awareness amongst the public against falling victim to unscrupulous scam artists who use fraudulent e-mail, telephone calls, and short messages."

The campaign begins on Sunday, and will also include a full-court press in the media, according to the announcement.

What do you do when a bunch of big, aggressive guys tell you that they are going to start giving you a whooping in about 15 minutes time? Either leave the room and make your way to a safe place, or call your biggest, toughest friends and tell them to come over, pronto.

Nokia, it seems, is choosing the second option. Few companies are in a more intensely competitive squeeze right now: at the top end of the market they have Apple, Google, Research in Motion and Palm breathing down their neck. And at the low end, their competitive advantage in churning out hundreds of millions of cheap phones for the developing world is being eroded.

While a coward pacifist like myself might choose to flee when even the scent of a fight enters the room, Nokia are made of sterner stuff, as we will see later today. 

With Twitter on the rise here in the UAE, it really wasn't much of a surprise to see some enterprising individuals take advantage of the popularity and create a central area to index all our local tweets.

So, the guys at Dubai-based CloudAppers decided to do just that, launching UAETweets. In the week or so that UAETweets has been online, it's already indexed more than 900 Twitter users and 44,000 Twitter messages. Not bad, given the UAE only has about 5.600 users.

I had the chance to interview the website's founder, Baher al Hakim, via e-mail about the site, the results of which are after the jump.

It's been a busy couple of days in the news for all things Beepy:

- The Arab League has its eyes on a digital prize, planning to snatch up the .arab top-level domain when the internet addressing system is liberalised later this year. And speaking of that, here is a longer look at what that liberalisation means for all of us. 

- A massively multiplayer onling role-playing game studio has partnered with the Abu Dhabi Media Company (ADMC), publishers of The National (and therefore, Beep Beep.) The first game to be produced by the partnership will be based on Majid, the cartoon character who is something like  an Emirati Peter Pan.

D1G, a web portal targeting Arabic speakers across the region, has just closed a new round of funding. Last time I spoke to Majied Qasem, its director, he was talking about triple digit traffic growth for 2009, driven by the acquisition of a few popular portals in the region. The site is also growing organically in areas like streaming video and user-generated content.

D1G has recently acquired two Saudi Arabian web portals, including Yasater, a fairly lively tabloid-style gossip site. Karim Kawar, a former Jordanian ambassador to the US who is now working as an angel investor in regional startups, took part in the funding round and is now a board member. More on the deal over at Startup Arabia, and there will be a story on this in tomorrow's newspaper / this evening's website.

Strategy Analytics have released their mobile market estimates for the last three months, and it has been a great quarter for Samsung and LG, the world's number two and three phone makers. Their share of the market keeps going up.
Samsung and LG are clearly on the up, and those in the know expect this trend to continue. Who is losing out to the new guys? If you look at how the market has changed over the last few years, you see a few pretty interesting trends...