Habib Hadad, the Lebanese entrepreneur behind Yamli and general darling of the Arab startup community, has just told me about YallaStartup, a new project he is working on.

More details will come soon, but in short, Habib has put together a team of mentors and advisors who will support new tech ventures coming out of the Arab world. If you got to the site right now, you can register to find out more. Working together on the project are Elie Khoury, the founder of Woopra, and Sami Shalabi, who founded a mobile applications company called Zingku which was acquired by Google in 2007.

One thing that we all know is seriously lacking in the Arab startup scene is the support structures. The most obvious ones are venture capitalists and incubators, but equally important are the less institutional things, entrepreneur networks, democamps, programs like Y Combinator and Seedcamp, angel networks etc. Its cool to see things like YallaStartup emerging not from government policy or corporate PR, but from some of the success stories of the community.

- Mabrouk to Talasim, who were among the six winners of Seedcamp in London last week. I had a chat to co-founder Zeid Koudsi yesterday, the story is in The National today. Also in the paper today, the chief of Abu Dhabi-owned Globalfoundries lays the smack down on Intel.

- But while we're on the topic of Jordanian dotcoms, apparently Yahoo's acquisition of Maktoob last month has some sort of broader importance for the Middle Eastern internet sector. I never really would have imagined, but apparently it is a big deal. Thankfully, after five weeks of detailed analysis of the deal, AT Kearney have put out a report explaining it all. Did you know, for instance, that "the presence of the world's biggest display advertising company will certainly help to stimulate increased online spend by advertisers"? A scoop of insight, to be sure. Click here to download the report

- A few bits and pieces: Business 24-7 covers a scientific breakthrough of global importance in Al Ain, Startup Arabia has a good summary of a study on Algerian internet users, and LG is searching for the owners of five of its Chocolate handsets - if your serial number matches one of these five, you've won $10,000.

Fitch Ratings has just put out an update saying that Etisalat could have its AA- credit rating downgraded if the federal government does not make it clear exactly how much it is willing to cover the company's debts.

This is interesting because as far as I know, Etisalat is not in a lot of debt, and is sitting in many billions of dollars in cash reserves.

The report also raised bigger questions about the credit worthiness of the Dubai government, downgrading the ratings of two major Dubai government companies, including DEWA, the electricity and water utility. While there is a general belied that Dubai's major corporations have the implicit backing of the federal government (and therefore, Abu Dhabi's massive oil reserves), Fitch said that this backing needs to be made more explicit.

According to Fitch, questioning of federal support:

"Reflects the increasing demands on its relatively small fiscal resources during the current period of economic stress [...] the increased risk that contingent liabilities arise from the exercise of its responsibility to ensure financial stability across the UAE, combined with the federal government's limited fiscal and financial flexibility, has weakened the UAE sovereign credit profile. Although the sovereign credit remains strong, the lack of clarity on the process for non-budgetary financial transfers between the UAE federal government, central bank and individual emirates, is a source of weakness."

Read on for the full report from Fitch.

The things that make me go Beep this week:

- Sakhr Software have released Arabic Language Buddy, their real time English - Arabic translation app for the iPhone. You speak into the phone in English, it says it back in Arabic. If it works, it is a gift from the heavens, and we'll be testing it out later today. It's a ten dollar download on the iTunes store, currently not available to UAE iTunes users, and costs an extra $150 per month subscribtion, including a new feature where.....hang on, did I just say $150 per month? Yep, this software isn't for cheapskates - including basically every pseudo-bohemian foreigner in Cairo who could really really use an app like this. Click here for the full press release from Sakhr.

- Sure, a universe of geeks awaits the rumoured Apple tablet computer / giant iphone. But Microsoft appear to have something even cooler in the works - the new "Courier" concept for a booklet-style tablet computer is as gorgeous as anything Apple have ever made, and has a crazily cool looking user interface. Certainly one to keep your eyes on - check out the video on Gizmodo.

- Do you long for the sweet embrace of BlackBerry-style push email, but suffer from committment issues, bad credit or a criminal record, and therefore can't sign up for a contract? I feel you, brother. Now, our troubles are over (well, one of our lesser troubles). International Mobile Sevices (their name probably sounds better in the original German) have launched a prepaid push email service in the UAE, based on good old-fashioned scratch cards. It isn't totally clear how the whole system works - download the press release here - but it does seem to be based around buying a Windows Mobile-based Palm Treo, which is a bit of a downer.

In a speech coming up this week, Barack Obama will give props to Globalfoundries, the Abu Dhabi-owned microchip joint venture, EETimes says.

With billions of delicious petrodollars, courtesy of Abu Dhabi's Advanced Technology Investment Company (Atic), Globalfoundries is about to build one of the world's most advanced semiconductor fabrication plants in upstate New York.

That makes Obama happy (as it should) and he will reference it in a speech on the role technology and education play in America's economic future, the report says. He's giving the speech at a community college near the site of the $4.2 billion factory, but there is no word yet on whether he will make a quick visit to the site.

He should. Of all the things that Gulf countries could possibly do with their epic oil wealth, investing into American high technology and R&D must be, from a US viewpoint, one of the best. As we've mentioned before, a significant number of the limited partners (LPs) that bankroll American venture capital companies are already from the Gulf.

And given that the speech is next Monday, it could turn out, depending on lunar observations, to be a nice way to say Eid mabrouk to an important, low-key US ally. Which reminds me - Eid mabrouk, Beep Beep readers. See you next week.

There have been rumours for more than a year that i-mate, the Dubai-based smartphone maker, is approaching its demise. This month, the rumours stepped up a notch, and last week they were published in All About Phones, a Dutch mobile site.

There's still no official confirmation, but the situation is looking grim. Obviously, saying a company has closed its doors is a pretty serious statement, so we are going to hold out until we get something reliable. But the company's phones are being redirected to a single voicemail message, its tech support number is no longer answering, and their offices in Dubai Internet City seem to be closed - nobody has answered knocks on the door for a while.

As you can see from the photo on the left, taken at around 2pm today, this does not look like the main entrance to a working office. (Pic by Sarmad Khan / The National).

Today, ITP.net seem to have a pretty solid looking story that the company is bust, quoting a retailer who says his contact at the company confirmed that it has shut down, and saying staff were told at a meeting last week that it's all over. It's all anonymous sources for now, but ITP have done some decent digging, and I imagine we will get some confirmation of this next week after the Eid holidays.

For a while in the mid-2000s, i-mate were a real competitor in the smartphone market, and had some pretty nice phones like the JasJam, back when HTC were their manufacturer. But then HTC decided to go it alone and sell phones under their own brand (which has worked out pretty well) and i-mate never really recovered.

It goes without saying that i-mate benefited from the lack of serious competition - back in 2004, if you wanted a phone with a big screen, web browser, email etc, you either had to go for a Nokia Communicator or a BlackBerry, and back then i-mate's phones could compete with both. With Apple, Palm, Android, Blackberry and Nokia all stepping up their game, this is now a market that you need to take extremely seriously to have a chance in.

I would also like to use this as an opportunity to get something deeply personal off my chest.
 

Kuwait's Kharafi group put an advertisement in Kuwaiti newspapers today, inviting Zain's smaller shareholders to join the company's proposed sale of a 46% controlling stake in Zain to foreign investors. Via our intrepid Kuwait correspondent, here it is:

Kharafi has offered the 46 per cent stake in Zain to a Indian / Malaysian consortium, but does not own that much of the company by itself. This public advertisement is a sign that it has not roped together the 46 per cent already, and that this deal is still very much a work in progress.

Key points from the notice:

The biggest ever foreign acquisition of a GCC company was announced last week, when a consortium led by India's Vavasi Group said it would buy a 46 per cent controlling stake in Zain.

But there are now so many questions surrounding the deal, and every party involved. So I thought I would put together a quick summary of everything that we know. It's a long post, but if you're interested, read on...

Last night at simultaneous suhoors in Dubai and Cairo, Google unveiled Ejabat (Answers), a new product developed by its Arabic Labs team. Think of Yahoo Answers, but in real time, and in Arabic.

As the Google guys kept telling us (to a backdrop of bubbling shishas), this is not an Arabic translation of an existing product, this is a dedicated new product for the region, developed in the region.

It looks pretty slick, although I haven't had a chance to play with it that much. It definitely has that Google look and feel of industrial-strength minimalism. Basically, users can register as "experts" who will answer questions on certain topics, and others can simply visit the site and ask a question, with the question answered (ideally) in something approaching real time by the pool of users who are online at that moment.

Obviously the viability of the service really depends on getting a critical mass of users participating. Without that mass, the whole thing will flop. With that mass, it could get very interesting.

The Arab world is full of a lot of "hidden knowledge" - things that are commonly known but not publicly known. The best recipes, the best shisha / shawerma place, the store that can fix your laptop for half the price of all the others - and lets not get started on directions and traffic tips. There is a lot of stuff already out there in the collective knowledge that has yet to make it online, and if Ejebat can get it out there, good luck to them.

And can more product launches please be done over shisha?

Full press release from Google is here:  

The future of Zain, the Arab world's second-largest telco, has been under the spotlight for months now.

After weeks of rumours, it emerged yesterday that the Kharafi Group, a big Kuwaiti family company, has managed to amass 46 per cent of Zain's shares. It may not own them all directly, but it has them for sale. When you take out the KIA, a sovereign fund that owns 25 per cent, and Zain itself, which holds 10 per cent of the company in treasury shares, that means Kharafi have managed to rope up about 70 per cent of all the Zain shares in free float on the market.

That's pretty incredible in and of itself, especially when, as pointed out in The National today, at no point has the Kuwaiti stock market, Zain, or Kharafi actually made a disclosure about any of this. That the second-largest telco in the Arab world - and Kuwait's largest public company - can effectively be bought out without disclosure is a pretty amazing story.

More amazing is though, is the fact that somebody is about to pay about US$14 billion for less than half of Zain.