The Yahoo! – Maktoob acquisition deal that was announced last August, has officially closed today at noon (UAE time).

It had already been announced upon signing the definitive agreement back in August that the deal was expected to be sealed in the fourth quarter of the year.

So starting noon today, Maktoob.com and all its sub-divisions (including Maktoob Research, Bentelhalal and others) are officially part of Yahoo!, marking the completion of the first major deal of its kind in the region.

The first steps for the company are to work on introducing flagship products like Yahoo! Mail and Instant Messenger in Arabic, as well as the Yahoo! Maktoob Arabic homepage; then to keep moving on to provide other Yahoo! services in Arabic, and help enrich Arabic content online. Other local services for the region will also be considered and developed.

[Full Disclosure: I have personally been working with Maktoob.com ever since the beginning of 2009.]

4SITE Forum (Investing in Sustainability, Innovation, Technology & Entrepeneurship) is an event being held in Beirut, Lebanon, bringing together over 200 investors, innovators, and entrepreneurs in Lebanon and the Middle East region. The goal of the event is to promote innovation and entrepreneurship towards sustainable economic development and social impact.

The event is organized by RootSpace and Baraka Group in conjunction with Global Entrepreneurship Week (a yearly event taking place in November in over 80 countries worldwide), and will be held over two days, full of participatory panels, keynotes, workshops, demonstrations, and networking.

The event will be taking place at Bayt El-Tabib Conference Center in Beirut, Lebanon, on November 17-18th. The plan is for this event to be the first in a series of other 4SITE Forums to take place around the region.

The keynote speakers at the event include Joi Ito, the CEO of Creative Commons, John Wilbanks, the CEO of Science Commons, and Rabea Ataya, the CEO of Bayt.com.

Besides the fixed program, there are some slots in the schedule that are planned for Barcamp-style presentations and demos by the participants.

The full program schedule for the event can be viewed online at the official website here: 4SITE Forum Schedule. Tickets to the event can be bought here.

Along with the event, 4SITE Forum and Hibr are also hosting the Global Innovation Tournament (GIT), an initiative of Global Entrepreneurship Week, in Lebanon, with this year’s challenge being to come up with a way to make saving money fun, in light of the current global recession.

Bayarat is a new media search engine that was recently launched in its alpha version catering to the Arab world and aiming to make it easier to search for and find Arabic media content online.

Bayarat is currently only indexing video content from around the web and across online video sharing portals, with plans to add more types of media content in the near future.

A translation layer is integrated into the search engine in order to enable it to search for the same term in Arabic, English, French and Spanish; to broaden the search and return all relevant results.

One of the integrated features to enhance the search experience is an Arabic spell-checker, that suggests corrections for misspelled words that users type into the search box, in order to help them find better results for their searches.

The search engine has already crawled and indexed over 3 Millions videos ever since its launch just about a month ago. The site’s interface is available in both Arabic and English.

Bayarat was created and launched by Monther AbuShaikh, who previously brought us TweetShell, and is also CTO at Ikbis, the popular Arab video and photo sharing service.

Just a few hours earlier, it was announced that a definitive agreement was signed for mobile advertising network AdMob to be acquired by Google for $750 Million in stock.

AdMob was founded in January 2006 by Lebanese entrepreneur Omar Hamoui, as a mobile advertising marketplace, offering solutions for discovery, branding and monetization on the mobile web. It was able to attract investments from Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, DFJ Growth Fund and Northgate Capital.

The company grew to take a lead in display advertising on smartphone platforms, such as Apple’s iPhone OS and Google’s Android, working with thousands of advertisers to serve mobile ads on their publisher network of over 15,000 websites and mobile applications. AdMob received 10.2 billion total ad requests in September of this year, and has served more than 125 billion mobile ads since its inception.

With this deal Google aims to strengthen their push into mobile advertising, complementing the solutions they already have, and roll out more effective tools for creating, serving and analyzing emerging mobile ad formats.

The deal should also bring mobile advertising to the forefront and get more people interested in the space.

Google has created a specific site to talk about the AdMob deal and its benefits here: Google’s acquisition of AdMob.

This deal marks Google’s second acquisition of a company founded by an Arab entrepreneur, the first being their September 2007 acquisition of mobile social network Zingku, that was founded by Jordanian entrepreneur Sami Shalabi in May 2006.

Berytech, the Lebanon based tech startup incubator, has launched a set of new incubation awards of up to $100,000 US Dollars  for the most innovative technology projects.

A committee of experts will be selecting the projects based on the following merits: technological and scientific quality, creativity, economic sustainability and growth potential, job creation potential, target market and export potential, as well as the motivation and implication of the candidate(s) and the quality of the team behind the startup.

The obtained award should allow entrepreneurs to take their idea from project to company phase, while benefiting from the following services of Berytech: Business hosting (including office space, furniture, desktop facilities, …etc.); Computer equipment, Internet connection, web hosting; Coaching throughout the project development phase; Participation in communication, marketing and other networking events; Expert consultancy; Entrepreneurial training; and access to funding sources such as Kafalat or the Berytech Seed Capital Fund.

Applications are open until November 30th, 2009; entrepreneurs just need to download and fill in the following application form, and submit it in time.

The winning projects and teams will be announced in December 2009, with their integration in the incubator to start happening as early as January 2010.

One of the problems that all web designers face is the limitation of what fonts they can use online, and having to use only the default system fonts that are available with all operating systems.

Arabic is yet another language where web developers suffer from the same problem, even more so because of the beauty of the Arabic script which displays the very artistic side of typography, and because designers are limited to just a few very uninteresting Arabic fonts online.

Tiba3a is a new project that aims to solve the problem of displaying varied and beautiful Arabic fonts online, in an easy and consistent way across all browsers and operating systems, regardless of what fonts are installed on the end user’s system. The fonts are hosted on Tiba3a’s platform and anyone can link to them and use them in an easy and fast way.

The new service is inspired by Typekit, a project that was launched a few months ago to tackle the same issue for Latin fonts.

On a technical level, the service will depend on the new generation of browsers (Safari 3.2.+ – IE 6.0+ – Firefox 3.2 +), that enable designers to link to an external font file. These files will be securely hosted on Tiba3a’s servers with a licensing scheme for websites that want to use them, also protecting the rights of type owners and designers.

Tiba3a is a project of CloudAppers, the Dubai based company that brought us services like UAE Tweets, Twtlens, Txtget and others in the past.

They are currently talking to some of the Arabic type foundries to try and get them on board the project with their fonts, before they roll it out for usage by Arab web designers.

The 5th edition of Mobile Monday Morocco has been announced and will be taking place this coming “Tuesday”, November 3rd 2009, which would make it more of a Mobile Tuesday, but that doesn’t sound as cool, I guess.

The event will be taking place at l’Office des Changes in Casablanca, from 6:30PM to 8:30PM.

The program of the event will be as follows:

• 6:45PM : Presentation of Mobile Monday
• 7:00PM : 4 presentations, 4 visions of the present and future of mobility:
  • MobileWorks 3D : Search and content accessibility on mobile devices (Christine Maxwell)
  • Online Advertising : Online advertising « from web to mobile »
  • Lemon Way (France) : Mobile Banking solution
  • WebyPass : Social networks through mobile
  • ART UP : Mobile Film Festival Morocco
• 7:45PM : Networking, free discussions, partner connections.

This edition of Mobile Monday is happening on the sides of the Moroccan leg of the regional IT trade show Med-IT which is taking place in Casablanca, Morocco, from the 3rd to the 5th of November 2009.

For more information on Mobile Monday in Morocco and to sign up for the event, you can visit the official site: Mobile Monday Maroc.

Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority (DSOA), the region’s largest integrated technology park, is planning to launch a global technology fund middle of next year.

“Some of the investments will be from ourselves, some from local and regional investors and also international investors,” said Ray Milhem, the new chief technology officer of technology investment at DSOA.

He said, it will largely target companies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, as well as global companies. The fund’s amount has not been finalised yet.

The fund is another means to attract research and development and manufacturing companies to set up a base in Dubai Silicon Oasis. And they are already talking to a number of companies to establish manufacturing in Dubai Silicon Oasis, with a concentration on start-ups.

Even though the focus is on the Middle East and North Africa, there are some start-ups in Europe and North America that they are looking at for potential investments, in order to get them to open higher-engineering offices in Dubai Silicon Oasis.

Earlier, the authority announced a budget of Dh25 billion set aside for investment in the coming years at DSOA. The whole project has already attracted foreign investments worth Dh1.4 billion. It has set aside about Dh500 million to invest in start-ups that will be spent over the next five years.

Additionally, private investment into real estate at DSOA is Dh13 billion, while Dh10 billion is budgeted for the third phase of the project’s development.

According to Milhem, the authority is in talks with several companies and should be making some decisions and announcing some deals soon.

[Source: Gulf News]

twofour54 ibtikar, the media industry funding and support pillar of twofour54 Abu Dhabi, has launched twofour54 ibtikar: creative lab, a grant funding scheme aimed at engaging with young Arabs and stimulating creativity in order to build a long term sustainable media industry in the Arab world.

twofour54 ibtikar: creative lab offers grant funding and business support to talented Arab individuals from the UAE and across the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region, helping great media and entertainment ideas that would benefit from seed funding, development guidance and planning to get off the ground.

It offers funds ranging from US$1,000 to US$50,000 for creative and original ideas across all media platforms including television, radio, film, publishing, online, mobile, music, gaming and animation.

twofour54 ibtikar: creative lab and young Arab funding recipients will engage in regular brainstorming sessions to develop ideas into fully fledged creative projects. A key part of this collaborative process will include budget creation and training in project execution and support throughout.

Tarek Ghattas, twofour54 ibtikar: creative lab manager, added: “We want people to come forward with their media and entertainment ideas. We are looking for passion and originality and there is no such thing as a bad idea. This is an opportunity for young Arabs to unleash their inner creativity and have a go at turning vision into reality – coming to us means never having to look back and wonder what you could have been.”

twofour54 ibtikar: creative lab expands twofour54 ibtikar’s funding portfolio, which also includes ibtikar ventures, an investment fund that focuses on start-up and early stage media and entertainment initiatives.

Qanawati (’My Channels’ in Arabic) is a new mobile based service that was just launched from Saudi Arabia by Remal IT, allowing you to check for flight reservation availability via SMS.

The service enables you to check for the availability of seats to be reserved specifically for the following airlines: Saudi Airlines, Nas air and Sama; as well as for all airlines using IATA data.

Other than that, the service also makes it possible to check the details and status of a specific flight by entering the flight number, and if needed the specific date for it.

Another available option is  to check the arrival/departure activity in Saudi airports to see what planes are coming in or leaving on that day and the details of the flights.

The service is based on premium rated sms messages, and currently works with Mobily and Zain, with STC support on the way.