Yahoo! acquires مكتوب | Hacker News Reader

Yahoo! acquires مكتوب

techcrunch.com

35 pointssibilsalim24 comments

For HN readers who may not be aware that much about M.East tech scene, let me state that this is huge. I am in UAE and even though I've been only an ocassional reader of Maktoob and not much attached to Yahoo, still I am excited.

Yeah? I always thought there were hardly any start-ups in these countries. Can you name some?

There is watwet.com (a twitter clone) which apparently has more users in this region than twitter. Then as mahmud mentioned, souq.com and cashu both from maktoob group (not part of this yahoo acquisition). As I said I am quite new here and quite out of personal touch in the tech scene here, so I am myself looking out for people to connect with. You can follow <a href="http://www.arabcrunch.com>arabcrunch.com</a> for more startups from this region. This deal is also heavily covered there.

Define "start-up".

Shameless self promotion ... my (part time) startup http://yoolki.com

Impressive how it does the harakat as well.

patrickas, unless you want to alienate friends and disenchant people, please don't use a national flag to stand for a language. It irks me when I see the British/American flag used to mean "English Language"; just yesterday we were talking about a site that used the Saudi flag to mean "Arabic language".

Either use the letter `Ain ع. Or if you need a flag to fit in with the rest of your icon set, use the flag of the Jami`a alarabia:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Fla...

Good luck, you have a "cool", darling of the media competitor :-(

Thanks for the feedback!

The flag is a bug not a feature! It was supposed to display the flag of the country the user is connecting form but I messed up the geolocation api and forgot to remove it :-) It is gone now. (actually replaced by a white image until I have time to work on geolocation again).

Having a "cool", darling of the media competitor is not so bad actually keeps me from getting too lazy.

This is a great development. And another win for the Jordanian tech scene (Maktoom is based out of Jordan). Hope to see more news like this.

How is the tech scene in general in Jordan? Mostly we hear about the Israeli tech scene, so I'd be interested in hearing more. Amman is one of my favorite cities, I'm always looking for an excuse to go :D

Hah! Allow me to introduce you to at least one middle-eastern tech startup founder, yours truly here :-)

Checkout

http://www.startuparabia.com/

http://arabcrunch.com/

And if any other fellow middle-easterners here are starting up there, they should most definitely shoot me an email.

OK,

I must be missing something.

The guy kept his EBay equivalent, he kept his PayPal equivalent, he kept the Arabic search tech, and arguably most crucially he kept Tahadi, the MMO games equivalent.

I mean think about it, try to make an Arabic Twitter, without Arabic search tech.

So Yahoo gets the 'portal' part?

What exactly is the plan here?

Why is this a good deal for Yahoo?

Because it SEEMS like a slick, young businessman just sold a boat anchor that was slowing him down, to a Western sucker who was in the process of drowning.

If anyone has a better idea of what Yahoo might have been going for here I'd be interested in what you have to say. I'm just having trouble putting it together on my own.

Well, Yahoo doesn't have PayDirect any more, they don't do search tech internally any more, and they don't do MMO game development internally either. It would be really bizarre for them to buy stuff - even if it's high growing - that they don't do in their US/EU regions.

Yahoo is a portal site if you haven't noticed. This is in-line with their website properties. Why would they want to acquire the search tech or an MMO?

I think after a long time in the wilderness, the people who are in charge of Yahoo! have finally figured out exactly what their strategy is and where they're taking the company.

Instead of investing their time, effort, and money trying to compete in search where they can't possibly hope to win, they're focusing on strengthening, investing in, and expanding their already-popular core brands and services. I think this is a really good move.

way to go! "portal" is the name of the game! ;-)

I think you are being sarcastic, but to me, this is a great move. Yahoo clearly can't cut it in search, but they do know what is going on in the portal/news/email space. I don't know the terms of the deal, but assuming it was decent, they just bought a fairly large and growing demographic.

yes, I am being sarcastic. And yes, it is true I don't really know what they bought (and many thanks to mahmud for expanding on this). My criticism is exactly of Yahoo's strategy. Is the "portal" space a business? How big, important, current is it? What about "news"? Is Yahoo! really strong there? Do they have an innovative product? Really? Do they? Finally, Yahoo! Mail was great. 10 years ago, it was great.

Maktoob is not a portal, it's a conglomerate; the most real, brick and mortar Web startup you have ever seen. They have enviable and very deep ties with government, academia, NGOs, banks and everything you can imagine. They're humongous.

(they're not part of the deal, but Maktoob also owns Souq and Cashu; middle-eastern equivalent of Ebay and Paypal, imo)

True dat!

mahmud, you seem to belong to this region or atleast have previous ties with working with people in this region. (I don't know, I'm just guessing based on some of your previous comments), so I guess you are the best person to ask this. Any news/info about if they are going to invest in expansion and hire more people? And any ideas how I can get plugged in the tech industry here in MiddleEast? I am a relative newbie in this region (previously worked in Bangalore/US for Fortune-10 companies, 7+ yrs work-ex) and even though I love the work here (we are a small shop with a big govt cust), I feel I lack an environment where I can come across other technical people and events and exciting things happening here and keep learninng and upgrading myself. Most of the tech companies (and hence I suppose the happenings) here are concentrated in glitzy Dubai Internet City, far away from my place. I guess I need a meetup with a techie or two and who knows where the network takes you.

If you're looking for technical anything, Dubai Internet City is a joke. It's all sales/PR people.

Agreed - I took a tour of DIC and it was exactly what you mentioned; basically sales offices for corporate IT firms. It was glitzy not techie.

Thanks for that info. Actually, I haven't even visited it. Just from what I've heard and considering that most tech. companies are situated there I assumed there must be atleast some dev. going on there. Any ideas where I should look at?

I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but if you're really interested in tech stuff I'd suggest moving to a western country (preferably the US).

I know of a few hackers in Dubai, and at least two HNers. Shoot me an email and I will CC a few people.

Cheers!

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