According to our editorial board policy, we don’t judge or provide opinion related to religion. Some westerns who are reading this may say what’s the religious part of it, I can tell y0u that there is a debate among Saudi claimed sheikhs that driving women are violating Saudi Arabia’s law, and this law was extracted from the Qur’an and Sunnah. Other Sheikhs (in all Arab and Islamic countries) that “women driving cars” is not innovation in Islam (bed^a) that’s why women drive countries like: Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Morocco, Libya, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc…

While we always have our opinion on events related to the interactive and social media industry, we act like observers only at least because it’s what’s claimed to be a violation of a law of a country.

We will focus on our writing on a pure and solo social media campaign did reach to rally or not.

We’re watching you, Saudi women, everywhere.

P.S. The comments on this article will be published.

Bloomberg TV today interviewed a very renown analyst on technology, Shaw Wu of Kaufman Bros., about the outlook for Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry PlayBook and Apple Inc.’s iPad 2. Here is the interview:

Through the Students Ambassador Program, you become a liaison between Google and your university. Ambassadors plan and host several events during the school year, introduce students to new Google products and features and act as a campus contact for Google teams.

The registration is open until the end of April to apply to become a Google Ambassador on your campus.

Google stated in their blog that selected ambassadors will receive an intensive and fun training about how to be a super-star ambassador, learn about Google technologies and latest products to start off a great academic year prepared and ready to rock the campus.

Register here

Wamda is a newly established Entrepreneurial Support platform by Abraaj Capital and its subsidiary Riyada Enterprise Development, aims at inspiring, empowering and connecting the entrepreneurial ecosystem across the MENA region –the platform was launched in a mega “Celebration of Entrepreneurship” event in November 2010.

You can watch the video here since they didn’t upload it as yet to Youtube.

“Fareed Dairies” is one of a series episode that will be talk about “A daily life of an entrepreneur”.  This teaser campaign is aimed to attract aspiring entrepreneurs to join Oasis500 with their innovative ideas.

Oasis500 has committed to fund 500 start-up companies in the next 5 years and it’s currently chaired by Usama Fayyad, former Sr. Vice President at Yahoo Inc, with a broad support from local and regional expertise.

Watch the video below and keep checking their new episodes on Oasis500 Youtube channel.

This report is a collaborative effort between the MENA Private Equity Association, the VC Task-force Team (team members mentioned in the report) and industry professionals.

Just by reading the table of contents you’d understand that it’s a groundbreaking guide:

• What is the Veeceepreneur Report?
• Introduction
• What is Venture Capital?
• MENA VC Challenges & Opportunities
• MENA VC Investment Process
• Advice from MENA Veeceepreneurs
• Stories & Examples
• Snapshot of MENA VC Firms, Funding Opportunities & Support
• Directory of MENA VC Firms
• Useful Resources
• Supporters

Guide to Venture Capital in the Middle East and North Africa

HH Shiekh Mohammed has around 450,000 fans on facebook and around 380,000 on twitter and suddenly, boom, both pages stopped updating fans and it has been since January 20th, 2011. Previously the accounts were very active and used to share updates, news articles, and photos of the meetings, so what happened?

According to the Protocol, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid is like many Prime Ministers, Presidents, Kings, or Emirs where a news media pool is embedded with his core/advisers team to take care of all communications- and media-related work. Each country or office has it’s own name and we believe HH Sheikh Mohammad calls it “The Media Office”. This news media pool always follow HH Shiekh Mohammed into meetings that are public and private which require media coverage or not; that’s because publicity is not always good publicity, it could be bad one and needs to be controlled.

Then, I was thinking if there is an answer for that: did he get busy with all the social media tools? but he wasn’t updating it personally anyways. Did his media team got busy with all the social media tools? but it’s their job anyways. Does anyone doubt anymore about the power of social media? Well, not anymore.

So I ended up with no answer and would like to know what’s your answer on that would be.

In support of the Lebanese campaign towards a country with fast internet and part of the responsibility to disseminate the demands or needs of the crowd, we unanimously decided to join, help in demonstrations, and promote better policy reform for this issue.

Lebanon has two internet service providers of little competitiveness and unbelievable prices. It’s even said that both ISPs have agreed “under the table” on joint price list in order to avoid killer promotions. In our last report on internet speed in the region, Lebanon was ranking last among the Mid-level income countries with very low internet speed of 0.59 Mb/s.

We invite you to support these campaigns that are uprising on social networks:

1. Lebanese wants fast internet (Facebook page with +27,000 fans)
2. Ontornet (Facebook page with +450 fans)
3. Flip the Swith (Facebook group with +1,100 members)

This is just the announcement, we’ll be running a report on internet speed in the region again and we’ll be writing in-depth analysis on the situation and any new developments.

The situation is literally unbearable.

While Devin Coldewey of Techcrunch blogged about a rumor yesterday between Best Buy and Apple, he remained at the surface of the issue and didn’t dig deep into what could be the core stir.

The rumor said that Best Buy, a specialty retailer in consumer electronic in US, has been blacklisted by Apple because of mishandling iPAD2 at their stores. And it confirms that Best Buy is not selling iPAD2 anymore.

Looking at it from different angle, Best Buy is the exclusive retailer to pre-order (online or in-store) of a new much-awaited tablet after iPAD, Blackberry Playbook of Research in Motion (RIM). If this issue was surfaced recently and appear 100% true, then the stir could be that Best Buy is going to start releasing Playbook product next week.

Therefore, there is a high possibility that Apple starts/already started a war on Playbook retailers with various claims.