Another piece of good news for Arab entrepreneurs: Abraaj Capital, the Dubai investment bank that was an early investor in Maktoob, has acquired Jordan's Riyada Ventures, one of the region's better VC funds.

Riyada has invested in some pretty cool regional startups, including Mediascope (which runs the MedieME website among others), the tech/media research house Arab Advisors, and Kindisoft, a pretty interesting software company specialised in security for flash applications.

Khaldoon Tabaza, an old hand in Jordan's startup community, will remain in charge of Riyada, which will have $200 million of new funding through Abraaj. 

Al Mal Capital just sent out a research note, upgrading their ratings for du, the UAE's second telecommunications company.

While they have plenty of good things to say about the company (click here to download a PDF of the full report) what is worth noting is their figures on new customers, showing du is really dominating the market. Key numbers:

- The first 9 months of 2009 saw 796,000 new mobile subscribers, compared to 1.46 million in the same period last year.

- 80.6% of the new subscribers chose du

- By 2014, Al Mal thinks that du will account for 45% of the mobile market (up from an estimated 33% by the end of 2009).

This is a fairly bullish assesment, and I am skeptical that du will continue dominating the market like this for much longer. Remember that these numbers are a little skewed by the crazy second quarter results, when Etisalat actually lost customers for the first time in its history. That is unlikely to happen again.

Read on for Al Mal's statement:

When a proposal to sell a majority stake in Zain was first floated back in September, we were skeptical to say the least. The purchase price seemed insanely high, the buyer didn't have a lot of credibility, and management of the company was nowhere to be seen or heard.

As time goes on, the deal keeps looking shakier. Zain reported horrible Q3 results and revealed a serious debt load, the main proposed backer of the takeover balked at the price, Zain's acquisition of PalTel in Palestine has fallen apart, and nobody has come forward with any serious cash or committment to back the deal.

Today, India's junior minister for telecommunications told parliament that the country's two biggest state-owned telcos, BSNL and MTNL, have not joined any consortium to buy Zain. This reiterates plenty of comments made in recent months that neither company has committed to the deal.

This is big news, disguised as small news: Zain's One Network system, which lets Zain customers roam across all the company's networks on a unified pricing package, has been expanded to Egypt via the Mobinil network.

One Network means that a Sudanese Zain customer can make calls at local rates when they are in Jordan, Saudi Arabia or any of Zain's networks in the Middle East. You also recieve incoming calls at a single flat rate on any Zain network, can call your home country's customer care centre for free, and recharge your account using the local prepaid cards of the country you are in.

For a regional or global operator, doing this on your own network is a no-brainer. But Zain's new move, getting other major operators to join the system, is potentially game changing.

NeuString, a Dubai-based start up that develops analytics software for telecom companies, has recieved investment from Intel Capital.

Intel Capital have been fairly active in the region lately - this is their seventh Middle East investment, and their third in Dubai. You'll see more on this story in The National later today, but for now, here's the full announcement from Intel Capital:

Abu Dhabi made headlines this week when it said it will soon be home to a microchip fabrication plant, or foundry. The plant will be the third such facility for Globalfoundries, the chipmaking business that Abu Dhabi owns in a joint venture with AMD.

But according to an interview published this week, we know one thing that will not be produced in the new foundry: Nvidia graphics chips. Speaking to CNET, Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said he will not be taking any business to GloFo, sticking instead with long-term partner and the market leaders, TSMC.

When asked if he was thinking about giving Abu Dhabi's emerging advanced tech sector a high five, he replied:

"Globalfoundries is an AMD fab, right?...Globalfoundries is AMD's fab. Our strategy is TSMC."

That isn't totally surprising, given that one of Nvidia's biggest competitors in the graphics chip market is AMD, who got into the market in a big way when they acquired ATI in 2006. While Globalfoundries is an independent company, AMD clearly wields a lot of management and technical control (it is also the second-largest shareholder and has 50 per cent of the board seats).

With both Nvidia and AMD currently facing a shortage of graphics chips due to manufacturing issues, I can see why one is unlikely to put their fate in the hands of the other. 

Rupert Murdoch, history's greatest media baron / Sun King / Lord of the Sky and the Moon and the Darkness, is thinking of buying his own wireless communications spectrum, according to this interview with The Australian.

The logic is that in an all digital future, publishers like The Murrrdoq will need to distribute their product over the airwaves direct to people's e-readers, iPhones, laptops etc. And because the telecommunications industry has been so monolithic and extortionate in its approach to outside partners (charging an arm and a leg AND demanding a big cut of any revenue), Rupert is thinking of going it alone.

There's still some fairly big questions to answer here - biggest of all is whether Murdoch seriously thinks that rolling out his own mobile broaband network purely for content delivery would be economical (I seriously doubt it). More likely, you could roll out a sort of one-way broadcast network (like radio/TV) that just constantly beams out your new content and updates people's e-readers. Even that would cost a lot, but it might be a smart long-term investment, in that it would put up a major barrier to entry for possible competitors. Gatekeepers love building gates.

For more steamy Sun King action, check out the video  below - in an interview with Sky News, he says that News Corporation may have its content removed from search results, because the kind of people that show up to a site from search engines are of little value to advertisers.
 

- The number of new start-ups registering their businesses in Abu Dhabi has more than doubled in the last year, The National's Charlie Hamilton reports. A decision to scrap the Dh150,000 ($40,000) minimum capital requirements is being credited for much of the spike, although surely being a fast growing economy in a world of painful stagnation helped. Lifting bureaucratic barriers to entrepreneurship is always a good thing, but it's not as if anyone should even dream of trying to do business in Abu Dhabi - even selling sodas on the side of the road - without $40,000 in the bank.

- The Lebanese tech angel fund / incubator, Berytech, has announced a new $100,000 prize for great regional entrepreneurs. They are looking for a good idea(s), and will fund up to the full 100K for the winner. For more info see their site, or this post at Startup Arabia.