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More competition…

As for the brand recognition I did the excercise myself and asked 10 people . 7 of them have heard of maktoob. I really doubt that you asked 100 people and they don’t know maktoob and if you di dthey probably have never used the Internet!

My answer to Martin is that I am not going to give any numbers so people will not doubt them. We are working on an external Audit for our numbers and then everybody will believe the numbers. One thing I want to say is that our numbers are growing and the latest acquistions we have made have strengthened our numbers tremendously.

I think that is the biggest potential right now for Maktoob.com to utilize on their current strength (user base) and turn that with combined technology and content into revenue streams that will last.

Dotone I agree the cultural understanding is important, however Yahoo (with its Italian and Indian office handling the ME) has done pretty well - first free email provider in the ME and 35% of all web traffic still on Yahoo.com.

What amazes me is that Google (once being run by two 27 year old Standford Phd students out of a garage in Mountain View) has now so much power (potentially) to really take over. Let’s hope that their mission statement ‘to organize the world’s information’ combined with their corporate (internal) policy of ‘not doing anything evil‘ will be followed.

Being a google/gmail fan, I still say Maktoob can do it better understanding the Arabs better, after all an apps usability is broken after the change of language and text-direction, it’s just more than that! Or better yet said, google might acquire Maktoob? And get the 4,000,000 arab account?

1- I doubt that you asked 100 people about maktoob cause i dont think anybody has the time to do that

2- what pisses you off is that maktoob is not announcing how much is going to their pockets?????????? is that what makes sense to you????what if maktoob made all the investment in tech and content and they couldnt get advertising cause the market is just not big ?????

3- “Google has the resources to take everything”…remember that google came after Yahoo (whose resources at that time could take any one) and gues what?????yahoo is now working with Ebay to run at the same speed as google….hey come on be more ambitious….technology is not expensive…you just need (1) some one who is aggressive(wants to DO IT) (2) vision and understanding of the society (sure not some one sitting in San Fransisco or mountain View planning to meet the needs of a some one in Saudi or UAE)(3)proper investment…I think maktoob has 2 and 3 and lets wait to c if they have 1…

4- come on $2 mil worth of transactions in 7 months is something impressive for a WEBSITE only in UAE…you gotta give it some credit

5- Finally, we have to face it…Arabs doesnt have enough confidence in their own potential…We are always impressed with any thing comming from outside and we dont support our own potential…what ever maktoob or any other portal inthe region do there will be some one who Says ” come on they are small and they cannot compete” …

To be honest, I agree with Samih that email as a single profit generator is most likely the wrong bet for anyone running a portal, and diversification into other areas is key.

However, so far Maktoob.com’s traffic remains strong by Email, Chat and Forum - and (quality) content is still weak @ Maktoob compared to dedicated news and other information sites in the Middle East.

Google has the power to utilize their Global reach, technology, bandwidth and storage & search capacity in a way that gets my internal monoplistic alarm bells ringing, but I wouldn’t want to panic either.

I strongly believe that content (text/image/video, user generated or editorial) and technology differentation for any publisher network is essential and key for the success to survive - and especially content will allow you to be a Google friend and not an enemy. Look at Flickr that was bought by Yahoo for 15 million US$ simply for the reason that it had its images properly tagged.

I hope and wish to Maktoob and everyone in this region that they don’t fall asleep again (like so many times in the past, see Arabia.com and focus on content and technology to survive and to be at the top of the game!

The simple rule came from Nike and could have also come from Google - they just launched spread sheets, next Word, then Browser, then operating system, what else?: JUST DO IT !

What big ‘M’? I have literally asked a 100 different young online-savvy Arabs here if they heard of Maktoob. None of them did. No one even knows what profits they make, other than “we are profitable,” and their souq.com had a reported $2 million in transactions, but how much of that goes into their pockets?

The big ‘G’ has the resources to take on anyone, including the joke that is the LINKdotNET-run MSN Arabia, should they cross paths.

Although the email at Maktoob today is the number one section, Maktoob is no longer dependant on email only and is growing its other services and group aggressively. Today Maktoob is stronger than ever and we have been anticipating Hotmail or Yahoo or Google to do an Arabic interface for years but they were late. We have a lot of things to be announced soon and our growth today is unprecedented in the region. Wait for our surprises!