We may not have the iTunes Music Store or the Kindle here yet, but at least we've got Foursquare.

Yes, the mega-popular-with-the-geeks social networking application has just announced a 50-city global addition to its network with Dubai chosen as one of the lucky cities.

Foursquare is a bit tough to describe, but it's basically a real life social network tied to a gaming business model. For example, you get certain credits or titles associated with yourself everytime you visit a certain area (the Dubai Mall, for example). Keep visiting the same place and you'll become the "Mayor" of the Dubai Mall (within the confines of Foursquare, of course). It is (somewhat annoyingly) quite big with Twitter users.

In any case, it should be available to download through the iTunes App Store and the Android Market (if you've got one of those devices). No idea if the program works in Abu Dhabi or any other emirate, but given that the founder of the company expects to make Foursquare available everywhere, more UAE and Middle Eastern cities are likely on the way.

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.

The National's favourite mono-syllabic UAE telecom operator announced their third-quarter earnings this morning (the story is here).

The financial numbers are impressive, to say the least (an almost 400 per cent gain in year-over-year profit, for example), but the interesting stat that really grabs your eye is how many new subscribers du signed up in the quarter.

- 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.