Doug Grose, the chief executive of the new Abu Dhabi-owned chipmaker Globalfoundries, spoke with the Financial Times recently and gave a bit more detail on how the new venture plans on finding customers.

Globalfoundries owns the manufacturing half of AMD, and will keep busy in the early days by continuing to make chips for them. But it is pretty clear that for the venture to reach the scale needed to pay for the enormous cost of building, maintaining and upgrading microchip factories, it will need to find some new customers. And if you talk to industry watchers, the number one question mark is who those customers might be.

Like Etisalat, Zain's key markets are the Middle East and Africa, and the two companies have emerged as major rivals, going head-to-head in markets across the continent. And as we said in The National last year, the battle is favouring the Kuwaitis at this stage:

"The two companies, emblematic of the rising economic clout of the Gulf, are engaged in
direct competition in markets across the continent. From its poorest country, Niger, where people exist on average annual incomes of less than US$300 (Dh1,100), to some of its richest nations, Etisalat and Zain are fighting a tough, long-term battle for customers.

According to detailed first-half results released this week, Zain is winning the fight. In every market where the two companies compete, Zain has a clear lead, and it is the market leader in 13 of the 20 countries where it operates."

You can afford the flight to China, but your bank account handle the roaming fees?

The European Union has announced a big new agreement to regulate and reduce mobile phone roaming fees. It is the latest in a bunch of interventions by EU regulators into the mobile market in the last couple of years.

As any traveller knows, mobile roaming fees are ridiculously high, given that there are almost no increased overheads for the operators. You'll often pay well more than triple regular rates, sometimes way more. Need we recall the story of the Brit who came home from holiday to find a Dh60,000 data roaming bill - the most expensive Friends episodes ever?

Early last year, Arab telco regulators agreed on a standardised regional roaming tariff, which they said would more than half the average roaming costs for customers in the Arab world. They "left the door open" for operators to voluntarily reduce rates before regulatory intervention, which many have since done. Etisalat has even said it will eventually create a single roaming system for customers in all 17 countries where it operates.

But the EU deal is pretty significant. According to the FT article, data roaming rates could be as low as €1 per megabyte. As a comparison, prepaid UAE customers pay four times as much for data downloads even before leaving the country.

There are plenty of reasons why we should not expect such significant cuts here in the Middle East.

The EU is the world's largest economy, so operators there benefit from a scale that still doesn't exist in this part of the word. And the EU is far further along the path toward a common economic and regulatory environment than the famously fractious Arab world. Can anyone seriously imagine implementing and enforcing a common regulatory system from Morocco to Yemen?

For a real glimpse into the wondrous times in which we live, check out this presentation - paying special attention to the response from the crowd - by the tech pioneer Jeff Han, at the TED conference in 2006. He is demonstrating something considered outrageously futuristic at the time - a multi-touch computer screen.

The TED conference is known as being a breeding ground for big ideas and new trends. Some of the world's smartest people give gasp-worthy presentations of their thinking to a pretty clued-in crowd - including, last year, Dubai's own James Piecowye, who has been twittering about it madly ever since.

The crowd literally shriek and laugh with amazement as he manipulates objects on the screen, stretching and shrinking them with two fingers, rotating them with his thumb and forefinger. That is: he does something that tens of millions of people now do with routine boredom every single day of their lives on their iPhone. But to some of the world's sharpest people, it was the most amazing thing they had ever seen, just a couple of years ago. Things change fast. What makes us shriek like giddy schoolgirls today won't even raise an eyebrow in 2011.

As Abu Dhabi's relationship with the microchip maker AMD deepens, so too do accusations of foul play. AMD has long accused Intel of monopolistic practices, saying the company abuses its dominant market position; the practices are the subject of an ongoing lawsuit brought by AMD against Intel.

Now, Intel has come out publicly saying the new AMD-Abu Dhabi deal violates a patent licensing agreement between the two companies. But for some real fighting words, the prize has to go to AMD's chief marketing officer, Nigel Dessau. In a blog post last week titled "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," he goes straight for Intel's throat:

"Today I work for a company that has a relatively small share of the market, while one much bigger player maintains a monopoly (yes, I use that word deliberately and carefully)."

Gee Nigel, why not tell us how you really think? The whole post is worth reading as an insight into how AMD, the perpetual number-two player in the market, sees the role of competition in the industry. Among other things, he credits competition from companies like AMD and ARM for pushing successful Intel products like the Atom netbook chip and the new generation Nehalem processor architecture.

"I believe in our fight to bring balance back to the market," Mr Dessau says at the end of his post. It is now a fight the UAE has a serious interest in: Mubadala owns almost twenty per cent of AMD, and ATIC, a government-owned investment company, owns more than 55 per cent of GlobalFoundries, the AMD spinoff at the heart of Intel's accusations.