- As we blogged last week, a Dubai-based telecom services company just scored a healthy injection of private equity cash and expertise, and hopes to use it to gain its share of the booming market for building and maintaining mobile networks in India. Check the story for a few interesting words from the company, Vox Spectrum, and the private equity guys, Delta Partners.

- For the entrepreneurs out there, a couple of good opportunities to turn your idea into something bigger. Jordan's Queen Rania Centre, one of the region's most active promoters of entrepreneurship, has launched the MENA 100 business plan competition, and Qualcomm have $500,000 worth of venture funding on the line in their QPrize business plan contest (via Wireless Duniya).

- Al Jazeera, which has some serious clues when it comes to new media, is now taking tweets from its audience, according to this post on Arabcrunch.

- On the other hand, the editorial chief of News Corporation in Australia dropped a major bah-humbug on Twitter in an interview. Along with saying he doesn't like his journalists using the service, he said the company was holding back on doing something formally via the platform, because "we don't want to spend a lot of time developing policies ... and in three months' time everyone's realised it's another way of having fairly boring conversations." (via Fake Plastic Souks)

- The Intel-Nokia collaboration announced this week is a turning point in the history of two industries that are destined to converge, I argue in an analysis of one of the most important technology partnerships of the decade.

- Middle Eastern startup tech companies looking for venture capital will have a hard time, in the short term at least, according to a bunch of finance professionals who spoke at a venture cap / private equity forum at the DIFC yesterday.

- David George-Cosh, the co-author of this blog, wrote an interesting story on the "Hostage in Qatar," whose clever use of twitter is getting his story out in among the media and chattering classes.

- Gulf News have unearthed a hot new trend emerging in the internet industry that few people are talking about. It's called "search engine advertising" and apparently it involves placing advertisements alongside search engine results. "Many in the industry are calling it the hottest trend in digital advertising," they say.

- Naguib Sawiris, the second loudest mouth in Middle Eastern telecoms, told Reuters that France Telecom are "in the business of value destruction," in reference to their long running dispute with Sawiris over ownership of the Egyptian Mobinil mobile network. The story also has an interesting peek at plans for mobile banking services in the Orascom empire.

- WiMax operators would like to see regulators in the region issuing more "unified" communications licenses, Business 24-7 reports, although it is not entirely clear what that means. And another 24-7 article says IBM is thinking about building a data centre in the region. 

- 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.

Delta Partners, a Dubai-based tech and telecom private equity group, have just made a new investment, putting US$7 million into Vox Spectrum, a telecom services company based in Dubai.

Vox works on "the design, engineering, construction, installation and maintenance of a broad range of voice, data, video and wireless infrastructure solutions." I haven't come across them before - but that doesn't surprise me, as there are a whole bunch of behind-the-scenes tech and telco service providers operating out of Dubai that you never hear about until something like this happens.

Vox Spectrum certainly keep a low profile - a Google News search shows just a handful of mentions in the media since 2002. But the business of building up infrastructure for telco operators, call centres and offices has been a pretty lucrative one in the past decade, and I'm not surprised that a niche player with a tight focus on the Middle East and Subcontinent (which Vox seems to have) is doing well. And unlike, say, antivirus software, this isn't the kind of industry that requires lots of mass market public relations.

Delta Partners have been investing out of Dubai for about a few years now, and have made some interesting plays, including working with the Abu Dhabi Investment Company (Adic) to buy Orasinvest, the infrastructure service provider wing of Egypt's Orascom Telecom.

The important point to be made here - as stressed time and time before - is that private equity players like Delta depend on a steady flow of small, growing companies that need PE cash to take it to the next level. And those companies need venture capitalists and angel investors to get off the ground, and those guys are few and far between right now in the Middle East.

Anyhow, more on the deal after the jump: 

Check out this great story from Business Today Egypt, my former employer, about Egyptian entrepreneurs minting ridiculous amounts of cash by using Facebook as a low-cost online business platform.

Mr friend Ethar el-Katatney, one of Egypt's best young writers, found a whole bunch of people who are making good money as importer-middlemen, using Facebook groups as their marketing and communications system. I love the example of Fadwa Attia, an aspiring fashion designer:

For a whole year, she would paint designs on T-shirts -- which typically takes her a couple of hours per T-shirt -- and sell them in booths at events. She was moderately successful, but outside of events she would only get two or three orders a month.

In September 2007, Attia set up a Facebook group for her friends. It instantly took off. Within a month she had over 1,000 members and more orders than she could possibly fulfill. Within six months, she had quit her job to focus solely on her new business, which she branded Fofo, complete with a caricature of herself. Today, her group has over 5,000 members, and she paints not only on T-shirts but on bags, sweatshirts, tank tops and sweaters.

"I could never have done what I've done without Facebook," she says. "It's truly incredible. The minute I upload new designs people find out about them. I get 15-20 orders a week now and I can't keep up. People like my designs, and I make enough money to live on quite comfortably."

A few things come to mind after reading this story:

Much ado has been made of Apple's new $99 price point for the iPhone 3G. You can safely ignore all of this. Rinse and repeat - there is no such thing as a $99 iPhone.

First, this number, like the $199 figure bandied about before, is the price on the American AT&T network: locked, after subsidies, on a two year contract, bought with an American credit card. Once the phone gets out of that little economic fishbowl, it becomes a whole lot more expensive - more on local prices after the jump:

If you think you're paying too much for phone calls and internet access, it may be worth checking out a report released yesterday. It gives a perspective and context on the cost of telecom services across the Arab world, when compared to average OECD prices.

The bottom line is basically what you would expect - people in the Middle East are paying a lot for internet access and way too much for international calls, while the relative cost of mobile services is decreasing.

Some thoughts on all of this, after the jump:

I had a great week reporting from Jordan, which has easily the best community of startup tech companies in the region. Comparisons to Sillicon Valley are extremely premature, but it was very cool to see some of the pieces fitting together.

One interesting thing that I haven't had the chance to write about in the newspaper yet was El Hassan Science City, which combines a good technical university with research centers, startup incubators and investors, all on a single campus in Amman. As an attempt to replicate that great Sillicon Valley combination of academic, business and investor, it is something I really hope policy makers here in the Gulf are keeping their eyes on.

In case you didn't catch them, here's the stories from the trip that have been published so far:

After a busy week of reporting, I'm heading down to the coastal city of Aqaba this weekend, and was planning on flying there from Amman until a friend told me it would be almost as fast to drive.

This surprised me, and I wanted to get a feeling for the distance / time involved. And hence The Great Amman-Aqaba Search Engine Battle begins.

The most outspoken man in Middle Eastern telecoms has to be Saad al Barrak, chairman of Kuwait's Zain group. He is also the most successful. I can only hope that this prompts other industry leaders, who typically speak only in guarded comments if they speak at all, to get out there and shake things up a little more.

Until yesterday, my favourite Barrak moment was when he told reporters that "there will be peace with Israel before there is an independent telecom regulator in Kuwait."

He is certainly not afraid of running his mouth, and he was the highlight of a pretty lively morning at the Arab Advisors telecom conference here in Amman yeterday.

Choice pieces of Barrak wisdom from the morning, after the jump: