News Byte

Now You Can Tweet Right to Left

With the help of some clever engineering and six weeks of work by 13,000 volunteer translators, Twitter now supports Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu and allows right-to-left and left-to-right languages to exist happily in the same tweet. This makes 28 languages in which Twitter is available.

Where in the World Is Yahoo’s Carol Bartz? (Here’s the Internal Memo GPS!)

With its annual meeting this coming Thursday, you’d think Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz would be taking a rest. Not so! She has been a regular Carmen Sandiego, in fact, jetting to Yahoo hotspots around the globe from Dubai to Milan to New York and then back to Yahoo’s Sunnyvale HQ.
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Will Secretary of State Clinton's "Internet Freedom Agenda" Finally Get Traction?

Yesterday, in a major policy speech in Washington, D.C., Secretary of State Hillary Clinton jumped on the Internet bandwagon again, unveiling a $25 million government investment for entrepreneurs to allow dissidents to thwart “thugs, hackers and censors.” Since that’s about the amount a third-string social photo-sharing site gets while walking down University Avenue in Palo Alto, Calif., from venture capitalists with bags of money to spend, let me just say the money is, well, underwhelming. Clinton’s speech, thankfully, was much better.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo Says Company Needs to Unify Its Experience Across Devices

In addition, Costolo announced the company will offer crowdsourced translations of the service into Russian, Turkish and Indonesian. Also doing own translation to Portuguese later this year.

Voices

A Fatwa Against Muslim Prayer Ringtones

Mufti Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt and the country’s highest religious legal authority, denounced the use of the Muslim prayer call or verses from the Quran as cell phone ringtones, saying that it trivializes the word of God.

BoomTown Decodes Google CEO Schmidt's Shut-Up-You-Whiny-News-Folk Op-Ed (So You Don't Have To)!

Google CEO Eric Schmidt did one of his patented throat-clearers in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal today and it pretty much begs for translation. Well, BoomTown shall not tarry from the task of decoding the extra-long rumination from the head of Google, who was responding to the recent spate of aggressive attacks by traditional media publishers. They have blamed the search giant for everything from their current business woes to the destruction of journalism to Tiger Woods’s dicey marital troubles. Okay, not that! But the rest for sure.
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Voices

Egypt Grabs First Arabic Domain Name

On the first day that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers opened registration for non-Latin script domains, Egypt says it has seized the opportunity to register the first all-Arabic domain name.

Sony E-Book Links Readers With Libraries

Hopefully, the Yahoo Experience in Arabic Won't Include a "Maktoooooo-ooob!" Yodel

Online ad spending in the Middle East is expected to increase between 35 and 45 percent this year. Little wonder then that Yahoo is pushing hard into the market there. This morning, the company said it is acquiring Maktoob.com, an Arabic online portal that boasts some 16 million users.
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Hopefully, the Yahoo Experience in Arabic Won’t Include a “Maktoooooo-ooob!” Yodel

Online ad spending in the Middle East is expected to increase between 35 and 45 percent this year. Little wonder then that Yahoo is pushing hard into the market there. This morning, the company said it is acquiring Maktoob.com, an Arabic online portal that boasts some 16 million users.
acquisitions1