- Convergence between telecom and media companies is always a buzzword. But how about this: The National's Keach Hagey reports that the telecommunications industry is now the largest advertiser in the Middle East, bankrolling the region's still-growing media industry. I, for one, would like to welcome our new telco overlords.

- Turns out the Vodufone thing was no big deal, just a reaffirmation of their partner agreement. Vodafone did say something about bringing some of their specially-commissioned handsets here, but I'm not sure how big a deal that is, given that those handsets are usually pretty average.

- The Financial Times has a group hug / pat on the back for Jordan and its excellent community of entrepreneurs. Worth noting - the opener to the piece says Yahoo paid in excess of $150 million for Maktoob, almost double the initial estimates. If you haven't seen it before, here's The National's take on why Jordan kicks all kinds of entrepreneurial backside.

- Dubai's ruler yesterday launched the Arab Knowledge Report, a look at how the Arab world is doing when it comes to education, research etc. The announcement says that "Emphasising the triadic relationship among development, freedom, and knowledge, the Report views the upgrading of Arab knowledge performance as a gateway to reform the Arab development situation. In addition to calling for optimal deployment of the Arab knowledge repertoire, the report also stresses the importance of productive intercommunication with the accumulated global knowledge." Not totally sure what that means, but you can download the report here.

At the beginning of the year, du signed a "Partner Market Agreement" with Vodafone. At the time, they said the agreement would let du access some of Vodafone's goodies - custom devices, special network services, technology etc. There was also the obligatory roaming deal.

This was back when neither du or Etisalat was offering the iPhone in the UAE, and Vodafone was rolling out the iPhone across its global network, including Egypt and Qatar. So I wrote a story heavy with iPhone innuendo, suggesting without actually saying that Vodafone would help du land the iPhone.

I was probably wrong (although rumours have suggested that du is getting its iPhones through Vodafone), but whatever happened, it seems like something is going on.

Another very good talk at the Social Media Forum yesterday came from Martin Newland, the founding editor of The National, who is now the editorial director of Abu Dhabi Media Company, our publisher.

The obvious disclosure, before moving forward: not only do I admire Martin as a great editor and passionate newspaper man - and as a sort of Churchillian leader of men - but as the boss of the boss of my boss, he can also get me fired.

With that in mind, here are some of the interesting bits from his talk:

Want to take advantage of the cheapest mobile data plan you're likely to see in the Gulf this decade? Heres the deal: you need to buy an iPhone 3G (the offer does not work with the new 3GS) from Etisalat during the Gitex tech conference this week.

Pricing details for the special offer below. Shufflegazine has a good summary of the fairly decent offers du launched on Friday night for the brand new 3GS, which it will have available in the UAE by the end of the month. Isn't a price war a wonderful thing?

Etisalat's special Gitex-only (for now) offer:

Andrew Bleeker, who headed the new / social media side of Barack Obama's election campaign, gave a really interesting talk today at the Social Media Forum in Abu Dhabi. Obama's engagement of a massive online audience - and conversion of this online crowd into an offline movement - is one of the main reasons he, not Hillary Clinton, is now president.

By the numbers, Obama's web operation raised a cool US$500 million, more than any other candidate in history. And they raised it primarily from more than three million small online donors. It also put together an email list of 12 million people - all who opted in via the website - who organised more than 200,000 offline, real world campaign events across the US.

I wasn't recording the speech so I won't use direct quotes, but here are a few of the interesting points from what was a great talk:

This just sent out by du - pre-orders begin tomorrow:

"du and Apple have reached an agreement to bring iPhone to the UAE end of October. iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, the fastest most powerful iPhone yet, will be available to qualifying customers. From October 17, customers can pre-book their iPhone online at http://shop.du.ae/iphone, in any du or Axiom shop or at any authorized retail outlet across the UAE. For more information on iPhone, please visit www.apple.com/iphone."

As you can see on this page, du are now offering unlimited "unlimited" mobile data - really, properly, unlimited - for Dh360 ($98) a month. That's a 22% discount on Etisalat's price for an "unlimited" account, which is actually limited to 10 gigabytes of downloads with the 11th gigabyte costing a cool Dh3000.

(UPDATE: reader Gerald D tells us that du also limit their "unlimited" package to 10GB. That is disappointing coming from du, because at least Etisalat are open about their limited "unlimited" deal on their website)

Here's a screen grab of the new price structure:


A 2GB monthly package on du no costs Dh200, which is what you would pay for 1GB through Etisalat. What does this all mean, and why haven't du publicised these huge discounts? One theory spings to mind.

A group hug and general hip-hip hooray for two members of the Middle East startup community:

Woopra, in my opinion the most exciting internet startup coming out of the Middle East today, have taken their real-time web traffic monitoring system out of beta and unleashed it on the big wide world. Until now the service has been in trial mode, open only to beta testers on free accounts (more than 85,000 web publishers signed up, with a long waiting list). But as of last night, Woopra is now open for business - check this post on the Woopra blog for all the details.

And ArabCrunch, a great resource for the regional startup community, has also reached something of a milestone, launching a new Arabic-language site. Aside from being a translated version of the original site, it will cover international startup / dotcom news in Arabic, targeting an audience that still has plenty of room to grow. It is also open to contributions from the community.  Here's a post from ArabCrunch explaining the new site.