Bassel Ojjeh left Yahoo in October 2009 after his 5 year tenure as SVP of Engineering at the company’s headquarter in Sunnyvale, California. Since then, Mr. Ojjeh has been active in the technology space in the region whereby he joins today d1g.com as an investor and board member.
While working at d1g.com Ojjeh’s focus, knowledge, and experience will be instrumental in driving the growth of the company; while maintaining focus on operational excellence and efficiency. Previously at Yahoo, Ojjeh oversaw the group that processed for 25 Terabytes of data per day and powered Yahoo!’s global infrastructure for targeting and advertising.
Yahoo acquired Maktoob in an excitement to be part of the Arabic web growth in the region. And it seems that Yahoo Ex- Senior Vice is also excited to be of d1g.com; Ojjeh stated: ” I believe this is the right time to be in this space. The market is growing rapidly; more users are jumping online, more advertisers are spending online, and more people are buying online.”
d1g.com which is the online platform that allows users to share, discuss, and distribute rich content on the internet including video, sound clips, images and photos etc. Recently, d1g.com has been broadened its offerings into the relevant Arabic social networking community. The company closed its first financing round in Summer 2009 and is in the process of formal fund raising round to finance its next stage of growth and community acquisitions.
Dr. Usama Fayyad, Executive Chairman of d1g.com, who served as Yahoo!’s Chief Data Officer and Executive Vice President from 2004 to late 2008 said “I have been working with Bassel for the past 5 years at Yahoo!, and before that for a decade at Microsoft and as partners in two high-tech startups we co-founded in the U.S. I am delighted to be working with him again to help grow and scale d1g.com.” Dr. Fayyad added: “Both Bassel and I strongly believe in d1g.com’s business model and we believe the Internet will increase in relevance and reach in the coming years.” added Dr. Fayyad.
Mr. Majied Qasem, the Company’s CEO said “Our biggest challenge and opportunity is to ensure that we can remain relevant to our Arabic users in the region, while at the same time staying globally competitive.”. Mr. Qasem added: “Mr. Ojjeh’s insight and experience in this space will be of great value to further enhancing our competitiveness and relevance in the region and to adapt to the rapidly evolving on-line developments and the needs of our users in the Region.”