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According to a Reuters report, an administrative court order government ministries to block YouTube from being viewed in the country for its role, such as it was, in hosting the controversial video “Innocence of Muslims.” The film, said to have been made by an Egyptian born US resident named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who used the pseudonym “Sam Bacile.”

The case had been brought months ago when the controversy about the film erupted and brought on some violent protests against American embassies consulates in several countries including Egypt, Yemen, Sudan, Tunisia, and even Greece and India. At the time Google had blocked access to the video in Libya and Egypt, which seems not to have made a difference to the court. A spokeswoman in Cairo told Reuters that company hadn’t received official notice of the ruling.

The thing is, it’s also sort of convenient timing. The government of President Mohamed Morsi has been besieged by protests for several weeks, protests in which Internet tools like YouTube and Facebook have tended to be a frequent information-sharing and coordination tool.

Since Egypt’s revolution began YouTube has been widely used to distribute videos of crackdowns on protesters. And last month Mohammed El Baradei, and former UN official and founder a leading political voice there turned to YouTube to call for renewed protests on the anniversary of the start of the uprising that ultimately toppled Longtime president Hosni Mubarak. During that period, Egypt infamously blocked Internet access in and out of the country.

Looking forward, if such a country has the largest population of Internet and mobile users in its region with one of the largest youth populations in the world; is a large consumer market in the early days of e-commerce; is a global tourist destination where roughly only five percent of all travel revenue is booked online — might this be an intriguing investment opportunity?

Am I describing Germany? China? Brazil?

Try Egypt.

Two years after the Arab uprisings and in the midst of wrestling significant economic and political change, the Internet is quietly and increasingly growing as a central platform of economic development around the country as it is around the globe. And according to a new Google-commissioned study by The Boston Consulting Group — Egypt at a Crossroads: How the Internet is Transforming Egypt’s Economy — policy makers, executives and investors alike are poised at a central moment of opportunity to embrace this platform for economic growth, job creation and returns.

David Dean, Senior Partner and Managing Director at the Boston Consulting Group — and one of the authors of the study — told me that this is the latest of fifteen country-wide studies his company has done, and he was impressed by what he found. “I think the biggest positive surprise was that there are many entrepreneurial companies using the Internet to grow their businesses.” The report highlights a handful of among hundreds of recent Egyptian startups as diverse as the content portal Masrawy, which now reaches over eight million unique users per month; e-commerce destination Nefsak, which offers over 25,000 products; and Alexandria’s Vimov, whose paid weather app WeatherHD was the fourth-best seller in Apple’s App store after its recent release. It notes that Vodafone, among other global investors, is making serious commitments both to the infrastructure and to funding startups in the region. “The report makes clear that there is much uptapped potential for Egypt’s nascent Internet ecosystem,” Samir El Bahaie, Google’s Head of Policy in the Middle East and North Africa, said — adding that “there is also a great opportunity for investment, economic growth and job creation waiting to be seized.”

The study underscores that the opportunity is now. Egypt’s population of 31 million Internet users is the largest in the Middle East, and while mobile penetration exceeds 100 percent in many parts of the country, the big news is that smartphones — with real computing capabilities — are expected by some to reach 50 percent penetration in the next three to five years. Unmeasured in penetration and GDP figures are what the report calls “ripple effects” on the Egyptian economy and society: The ability to reach new markets, to have better informed consumers, to have greater work efficiencies in the knowledge economy, to have simplified access to government and social services for people to take more control of their lives. Egypt, with its mobile penetration, is especially poised to capture opportunities in mobile banking (as significant success has been seen in Africa) and to fully embrace all the opportunities offered for tourism. Dean notes, in fact, that travel and tourism is “possibly the largest short-term lever that the Internet can have in the country.”

If the opportunity is now, however, so is the potential for missed opportunities. While access to the Internet is growing, there is still a lack of Internet skills in the workforce, even as compared to other emerging markets. While business adoption of the Internet as an economic platform in Egypt is competitive among larger enterprises, small- and medium-sized businesses still rank lowest among emerging growth markets. More fundamentally, there remains significant question of the most appropriate, entrepreneurship-driving policies — areas such as rule of law, copyright protection, lessening bureaucracy in starting businesses. “Of course, these are clearly not just questions for Egypt,” Dean explained to me. “What would really be encouraging would be a commitment by the Government to the Internet as an economic factor — which would mean simplifying the process for opening businesses, encouraging investment, demonstrating the benefits of the Internet in the way the government operates, and using the Internet to address some of Egypt’s most pressing problems, such as youth unemployment.”

Google hopes to play a continued role in working with governments like Egypt’s. Studies like these are extremely useful as they provide factual economic data points around the value of the Internet, El Bahaie noted. “We hope to work with the government of Egypt to leverage these data points to unlock the potential of eCommerce and mCommerce and well-informedly create a more enabling business environment for Egyptian small- and medium-sized business, and to help the country reach its full economic potential.”

Christopher M. Schroeder is a leading U.S. Internet entrepreneur and venture investor, a member of the advisory boards of the American University of Cairo School of Business, the regional entrepreneurship portal Wamda.com and incubator Oasis500. He is the author of “Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution That’s Remaking the Middle East,” to be published September 2013 by Palgrave/MacMillan. He can be followed on Twitter @cmschroed.

When you remember the basic fundamental truths about the Internet — the part about how it was designed to be used in the event of a nuclear war and thus has redundancy and survivability in mind — one can’t help but wonder how such a thing could happen.

It comes down to control, and creating a single, easily accessible choke point run by loyal people. Every single Internet connection in Syria is funneled through a single government agency that authorizes them all — the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment — and indeed all of them are run out of the same building.

Today, the folks at Renesys, who were the first to notice Syria’s government-ordered outage (for it could be nothing other than that), have tackled the question of how readily what has happened in Syria — and in Libya and Egypt before it — could happen in other countries.

Here’s its map. Countries where there’s a significant risk — speaking logistically, not necessarily politically — of a government-ordered shutdown are shown in darker green. The lighter the green, the lower the risk.

Renesys, in its corporate blog, breaks it down like this:

If a country has more than 40 companies providing Internet infrastructure at its international border, it is categorized as “resistant,” meaning that it would be difficult if not impossible under whatever circumstances for anyone to order a coordinated takedown of the Internet. There are simply too many moving parts to make it a realistic worry. The good news is that much of the world is in this category, including the U.S., Canada, most of Europe and Russia.

There are two other categories where the risk incrementally increases — infamously authoritarian China is notably in the “low risk” category — and the last one is “severe risk.” This one includes 61 different countries, and Syria is one, where there are only one or two companies providing Internet infrastructure at the international border. No surprise this group includes places where there has been a lot of political turmoil in the last year: Tunisia, Algeria, Turkmenistan, Libya and Yemen, but also the usual suspects among the world’s harsher dictatorships: Cuba and North Korea. Another notable member of this club is Myanmar (a.k.a. Burma), which has recently been opening up, (President Obama visited there last week) but which actually did pull the Internet plug in 2007.

Meanwhile, the Internet remains off in Syria. Google has restarted its @Speak2Tweet Twitter account, that allows people to call a number and leave voice messages via Twitter. I have no idea if the person in the message below is actually in Syria, but if he is, his message is especially heart-breaking.

voice-to-tweet : http://t.co/Nw8JB3fj

November 30, 2012 7:13 am via SayNowReplyRetweetFavorite

@speak2tweet

Speak To Tweet

Here is a National Public Radio Story about all this. It mentions, almost in passing, some computers with satellite connections that have been given to members of the Syrian opposition by the U.S. Department of State. I’m going to try to learn more about them next.

The research firm Renesys, which keeps track of the status and health of the technical underpinnings of the Internet around the world, just reported that at 10:26 UTC this morning — which, by my watch, would have been 5:26 am ET — effectively all of Syria’s international Internet connectivity shut down.

More technically, what happened was that within the global routing table, all 84 blocks of IP addresses assigned to Syria have gone unreachable. That means that Internet traffic destined for that country is going undelivered, and also that traffic coming from within it cannot get out to the world.

Renesys is still investigating what’s going on, but, as we’ve seen in other countries, cutting off the Internet is usually meant to try and control the flow of information to the world. It’s also a pretty sure sign that the regime of Bashar al-Assad is either getting nervous about how it is being perceived in the world, or that it is planning something unspeakably harsh in the coming days and wants as little information emerging from that country as possible.

People on Twitter are starting to notice. And hashtag #SyriaBlackout is showing up:

Can’t call Syria. Scary blackout, as if things can get scarier still. #Syria. #SyriaBlackout

November 29, 2012 7:36 am via UberSocial for BlackBerryReplyRetweetFavorite

@BSyria

BSyria

So I’m not the only one not getting through RT @BSyria: Can’t call Syria. Scary blackout, as if things can get scarier still. #SyriaBlackout

November 29, 2012 7:41 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@kyrah404

kyrah

The Associated Press (via the Seattle Times) has a report citing Syrian activists saying that the government has cut off Internet and wireless phone connections in and around several neighborhoods of the capital city of Damascus. There have been some clashes there between government forces and the rebels.

Reuters is reporting that there has been some heavy fighting along a road leading to Damascus International Airport, southeast of the city. The road has been closed, and Dubai-based Emirates Airlines has suspended flights in and out of there for now.

The AP is now reporting in a Beirut-datelined story (via The Washington Post) that Akamai has confirmed Renesys’ findings describing a “complete outage.”

Akamai tweeted this about an hour ago, including an image:

Akamai traffic data supports @renesys observation (http://t.co/uxC2ZhTo) that Syria is effectively off the Internet http://t.co/haNHwb5y

November 29, 2012 7:48 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@akamai_soti

StateOfTheInternet

Obviously, this will be compared to previous actions by governments in Egypt and Libya where popular uprisings, some more violent than others, toppled authoritarian regimes. In Egypt in particular, world outrage ticked up significantly and people sought different alternative methods to help protesters in Tarhir Square and elsewhere coordinate their efforts. Eventually, the Internet came back on, but it was only a small step in the right direction for that country.

Update: Now Google has confirmed what Renesys and Akamai are seeing. (Click the image to make it bigger.)

The blocked video, which is available for viewing on YouTube’s website in most countries, is a 14-minute segment billed as “Muhammad Movie Trailer.” The clip depicts Muhammad as a sex-fueled womanizer, among other negative traits, and has been viewed more than 200,000 times since being published on the site in July.

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Mohamed Elsayyed / Shutterstock.com

It is equally unsurprising, checking in a year later, that the momentum of entrepreneurship in Egypt, if anything, has increased amid the ups and downs of the macro economy and political uncertainty. “Generation Z” has come of age in Egypt like everywhere else, never knowing a time without access to information technology. They have at their fingertips communication and collaboration tools that allow them to innovate with friends from around the country, the region and the world. The cost of starting a business can be merely thousands of dollars in Egypt, and an ecosystem of angel and venture capital is rising in the region, as well as coming from Europe and the United States. Dozens of start-up competitions, hundreds of hackathons, thousands of new start-ups later, the entrepreneurs we have reconnected with believe there is no turning back.

No story is more encouraging than that of Amr Ramadan, whose company Vimov caught our attention last year. We were impressed that we were both users of Ramadan’s first consumer app, Weather HD, then the fastest and largest selling weather app in the Apple Store, with over 400,000 downloads at $.99 a pop — not knowing it had been built by him and three young guys in Alexandria, Egypt. Egypt-based venture capital firm Sawari Ventures — which has since launched one of the most successful incubators in the region, Flat6Labs — subsequently invested in Vimov in the midst of the turmoil of last spring without hesitation.

How are things today? “We are approaching our five millionth download,” Amr told us last week, “half of which are coming from the US. We also released Weather HD for the Mac, which stayed at the number two top-selling spot in the States during its week of launch.” They just released their most ambitious version on July 31 in the iTunes App Store, which is visually stunning and offers new features like “MultiForecast,” allowing users to see weather information from more than one weather provider. They have grown from three to 30 employees, all engineers from Amr’s home town in Alexandria, Egypt.

Navigating historic uncertainty was not easy, Ramadan notes. “We tried to take it slow in terms of growth after the protests of January 25, expecting the dust would settle in a few weeks. It quickly became apparent it wouldn’t settle down soon, and it wouldn’t be clear fast enough where the politics or economy would go.” Facing too many questions and scenarios, Vimov did what great entrepreneurs do around the globe: Hope for the best, plan for the globally competitive business they dreamed of, and execute. “Let me be clear,” he smiles, “[Revolution] causes tremendous pressure on top of that of simply being a start-up. One is always re-evaluating, guessing what could happen next, and building backup plans. But focus and execution is the only way; slow is not an option in the technology business.”

And execute they have. With growth rates that would be coveted by many in Silicon Valley, Ramadan has pushed his team to constantly redefine what a great weather application can be. Proud of their unique, graphic visual interface, they immediately improved navigation between the many cities their average viewers monitor. “We just launched Quickview, which shows weather animations of several locations all at once in a simple, elegant way,” he beams.

Weather HD’s Quickview

But can Egypt and the Middle East really play with the exciting innovation coming not only from the United States, but Europe, Israel, India, Asia and Latin America? For Ramadan, the now accepted precedent of innovation coming from all corners of the globe, even places once ignored, only suggests things could move faster in the Middle East. “Technology here is at its infancy, but that means there are opportunities around every corner,” he believes. “The reason why this huge market of some 400 million users has been under-served was that the young people were not encouraged to innovate, not from anyone around them, and they themselves had little hopes that a dream can come true.” He believes that this way of thinking has been forever shattered in the last year. “The number one motivator of great engineers is having great problems for them to solve,” he speaks as an engineer himself. “I have a world-class team at a fraction of the cost of what we could get in Silicon Valley — but we all love Alexandria, make great livings here, and are proud of building great products made in Egypt.” Thousands of other start-ups, he notes, have concluded the same all over the Middle East.

Neither Seth Goldstein nor Chris Schroeder are investors in Vimov.

Seth Goldstein @seth is a San Francisco-based angel investor and chairman of turntable.fm. Christopher M. Schroeder @cmschroed is a Washington, D.C.- and New York-based angel investor and former CEO of the online content and social platform start-up healthcentral.com, which he sold last January. He is writing a book on innovation and start-ups in the Middle East.

Google’s site has rolled out a face-blurring tool that’s supposed to let video makers automatically obscure the faces of everyone in their clips. YouTube offers a number of reasons why you’d want to do this, like protecting the privacy of kids at a basketball game.

But it seems most intent on presenting it as a human rights tool: A blog post suggests that the feature could be used to “share sensitive protest footage without exposing the faces of the activists involved.” An accompanying screengrab shows the tool in action for a “Demonstration for Egypt” event.

YouTube takes pains not to promise total protection. It describes the tool as a “first step towards providing visual anonymity,” and goes on to explain that the tool may not work at all in some cases, “depending on the angle, lighting, obstructions and video quality.”

It’s still interesting to see the company offer any kind of service that makes it easier to duck a camera’s gaze. Because much of the tech world, including Google itself, is spending a lot of time on visual recognition tools, like “face-finding” features.

Apple’s iPhoto has offered a face-recognition option for several years. And Facebook seems increasingly interested in exploiting that technology to “tag” its users; last month, the company spent some $60 million on facial-recognition start-up Face.com.

Late last year, Google offered face recognition as an opt-in feature for its Google+ service (it also bought a start-up of its own). But the company has taken pains to say that it’s moving slowly with facial recognition because of privacy concerns.

I’m here attending the Brussels Forum, which has been described to me — I think accurately — as a D: All Things Digital conference for people who care about transatlantic cooperation. It’s put on by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a policy organization that promotes “better understanding and cooperation between North America and Europe on transatlantic and global issues.” It’s about the same size, has similarly high-impact speakers and panels — it even has red chairs on the stage for those speakers.

I’ve never been to the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, but people at Brussels Forum compare it to Davos — but without the annoyance of celebrities trying to be photographed trying to look serious. “We’ve been to Davos, but we prefer this,” observed former Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah, who was having breakfast with his wife at the table next to mine in the hotel restaurant.

Bennett was only one of the people I recognized here: There’s a handful of people attending from the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives: Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire was on a Friday panel about Europe’s place in the world; Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida has been impressing everyone — including me — with his frank and forceful views on the humanitarian crisis in Syria. I’d quote him, but the session was off the record. More on that later.

Syria was top of mind during Friday’s main event here, an address by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former prime minister of Denmark who is now the Secretary General of NATO. He made news by saying that NATO has no intention of intervening in Syria. (See the first video, below.) Meanwhile, there are a pair of Washington-based Syrian activists here (one of which you’ll see in the second video, below), basically pleading for the international community to do something, anything, to help them out just a little.

Syria is a big topic here. The newspapers are buzzing about the sanctions imposed by the EU on Asma al-Assad, the British-born wife of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. While he’s been on a determined campaign over the last year of systematically killing pretty much anyone in his country who thinks he ought to leave power, she’s been saddled with sanctions that ban her — personally — from entering all EU member states except the U.K. (she was born there, after all). Her taste for luxury shopping and travel amid the outrageous slaughter that is taking place in that country has finally proven too much to bear for the EU.

There has also been a lot of chatter about the leaking of some 3,000 personal email messages to and from the Assad household, showing that while the Syrian president is carrying out his campaign to stay in power, he’s concerned about his inability to buy songs on iTunes, and has sought the help of a friend in Lebanon.

The Brussels Forum is not a technology conference, by any stretch of the term. People here are discussing world-changing ideas such as food security, the Iranian crisis, the Arab Spring and President Obama’s strategic “pivot to Asia.” Yet technology hangs in the backdrop of many of the discussions.

Access to technology and the ability to share information and organize has been a core feature of the many changes that have shaken the Middle East during the past year. When Egypt tried to cut itself off from the Internet, it made headlines around the world.

On that topic, I made the acquaintance last night of two people with interesting views. I made Twitter friends with Marietje Schaake, a Dutch member of the European Parliament. She serves on the EU Parliament’s committee on Foreign Affairs, and is also a founder of its Intergroup on New Media and Technology. I hope to chat with her about her ideas on making sure that people in Iran — despite the many economic sanctions imposed on that country — still get access to tech tools they need to express themselves and organize politically. She has also been tweeting like crazy about the Brussels Forum proceedings.

My neighbor at dinner last night was Jovan Ratković, the foreign policy adviser to Serbian President Boris Tadić. Ratković was a founder of Otpor!, a Serbian resistance movement that stood against the nationalist government of Slobodan Milosevic. Had Facebook and Twitter existed during the heyday of Otpor!, they would have been excellent tools for that group. As it was, Otpor! — the word means “resistance” in Serbian — used the Internet early and often to organize and get its message out.

Otpor! led directly to the foundation of CANVAS, the Belgrade-based Center for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies, which has had a direct influence on the protests in Egypt that led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. CANVAS, I’m told, has been so influential on the various youth uprisings around the world that it is soon to be the subject of a profile on the CBS TV news program “60 Minutes.” In short, having Ratković walk me through all this made for an interesting dinner conversation, with a not-inconsequential tech theme.

So the question you’re probably have is, what the heck am I doing here in the first place? I’ve been asked to moderate a Sunday morning panel entitled “The Future of Privacy in the Digital Economy”; the panel participants are Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy for Product Engineering at Google, Erika Mann, Head of EU Policy for Facebook, and Alexander Alvaro, vice president of the European Parliament.

Like most of the other panels here — except for those held in the main ballroom — the proceedings will be conducted under “Chatham House Rule,” which is a polite way of saying the discussion will be off the record. I hope to talk about with the panelists in an on-the-record setting, as well, though probably not all together.

The subject of consumer data privacy is certainly heating up on both sides of the Atlantic. On Monday, the U.S.S Federal Trade Commission is expected to lay out a new, wide-ranging policy framework on the subject. Expect lots of references to “do-not-track” mechanisms. And earlier this year, the EU unveiled a draft of a new European Data Protection Regulation. In Europe, the view of privacy is very government-centric, and data privacy is considered a key piece of human rights law. In the U.S., there’s a lot more willingness among policymakers to let companies regulate themselves. One question I’m definitely going to ask my panelists: How do the different legal approaches change how they do business in Europe versus the U.S.? I’ll bring you what on-the-record answers I can.

So, anyway, that is what I’m doing here in Brussels.

(Image is of the Grand Place, one of the primary tourist attractions in Belgium that I hope to visit.)

Basically, the argument goes like this: Since the protestors in Egypt organized and collaborated via Facebook and Twitter against a government that didn’t understand the tools, companies that don’t embrace social enterprise and collaboration tools like Chatter will wind up like Mubarak — overthrown, or rather defeated by their competitors.

Yes it’s a stretch, but you certainly can’t fault Benioff on the passion and enthusiasm of his delivery. And since it’s a Salesforce.com event — Cloudforce New York — there’s no one to yank him off the stage.

There will also be news. Benioff will talk about a new mission for Radian6, the social media monitoring outfit that Salesforce acquired in March for $326 million. Expect to hear him talk about the “social marketing cloud” quite a bit.

What does that mean? Radian6 will be getting some new features around engaging and messaging sales leads and contacts on Facebook and Twitter and Web forums, and so on. It will have some powerful tools for filtering all the junk that people post and look for places where people are expressing clear sentiment or intent to buy, asking for guidance, or maybe looking for a deal.

In an example Salesforce showed me in a demo yesterday, if someone is looking for an online stock broker and asks their Twitter friends for a recommendation or about a specific broker they’re thinking of, that company’s social media team will see the message, classify it as a sales lead, and can reach out with special offers. The same thing goes for customer service messages. When someone is unhappy about something — say, their cable service — those posts can be automatically assigned to the right person for a follow-up, a special offer, or whatever the case may be.

People so often turn to Twitter and Facebook to give feedback or to express outrage about products these days, and companies are still figuring out how to respond and work with those platforms. It’s all about protecting brands.

Benioff’s talk takes place against the backdrop of a lot of uncertainty around Salesforce’s share price, valuation and growth prospects. Salesforce stock has been slapped around a bit following an earnings report that analysts didn’t exactly love, yet you can’t deny its revenue growth rates are impressive: Salesforce is on its way to being a $3 billion company next year.

The problem with Salesforce is how the market should calibrate its valuation. The shares have traded as high as $160 and as low as $109 this year, and closed yesterday at $110.58. Premarket sentiment this morning shows Salesforce stock headed up about 3 percent as of 8:08 am ET. Some people — namely hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson — have argued that Salesforce is fairly valued at about 75 percent lower than where it’s trading now. Expect Benioff’s comments today to give the shares a lift. But given how volatile the shares have been, don’t expect it to last.

Snip.it is functionally very similar to a bookmarking service like Delicious, allowing users to share pages through a browser bookmarklet and group them in thematic connections. Other users can then subscribe to those collections.

Start-ups like Tumblr and Pinterest thrive in part because users can express themselves through content that other people have posted. Often it’s far easier to pin or reblog a photo or quote than to compose a blog post or a pithy tweet. Snip.it hopes to extend that kind of activity to sharing news stories and other content accompanied by a line or two of opinion from the poster.

Snip.it launches an invitation-only beta today and should be open to the public in about a month. At this point it requires a Facebook account to register.

The company is funded by Khosla Ventures (where Adeeb was formerly a principal), True Ventures, Charles River Ventures and SV Angel.

There are three big announcements coming in Benioff’s remarks, and they’re all connected to Chatter, the social enterprise service that Salesforce promoted in a pair of TV ads that aired during the Super Bowl; Chatter will appear as part of the next upgrade to Salesforce.com, called Winter ’12. The whole idea is to deliver a Facebook- or Twitter-like experience that supplants traditional collaboration methods like email and meetings. Salesforce says its clients who use Chatter are seeing email volume decline by 30 percent; meetings decline by 27 percent.

The first is Chatter Now, which will deliver real-time collaboration within Chatter itself. You’ll be able to see if your colleagues are signed in and available in real time — kinda like on AOL instant messenger or Skype — and you’ll be able to chat and share your screen without leaving your Chatter feed.

The second is Chatter Customer Groups. You don’t need to collaborate just internally, but also with people you do business with. You’ll be able to invite people from outside your company into your Chatter network, and can set rules on what they’re allowed to see and do.

Third is Chatter Connect, which is intended to entice software developers to work Chatter into other enterprise applications — many people think this is where the real action is in the social enterprise field. Ask the soon-to-be-public Jive Software, which can add social features to, among other applications, Microsoft Office. There’s also Yammer, which grabs social feeds from any application that has them, including, uh, Chatter. It’s not the newest idea under the sun, but Salesforce is off to a respectable start: Its first conquest is Microsoft’s collaboration software, SharePoint.

Finally, Benioff will talk about mobile devices. He’s a big fan of Apple’s iPad and has regularly talked about its popularity among enterprise customers. And while Salesforce.com has been available as a dedicated app through the iTunes App store for some time now, it’s about to get a lot more flexible through the iPad browser. Salesforce will announce touch.salesforce.com, which it says will bring the power of HTML5 to enterprise applications.

If HTML5 doesn’t mean anything to you, then you missed one of the more significant controversies about Apple’s iOS devices. They don’t support Adobe Flash, because Apple argues that Flash — which is used widely for Web video and animation — is clunky on mobile devices and drains batteries too fast. When it comes to multimedia and rich experiences on the Web, Apple prefers HTML. So touch.salesforce.com will be the place where users of iPads, iPhones and scores of other mobile devices will be able to go and get an experience that’s geared to their device without having to compromise on the Salesforce features they’re accustomed to on their desktops. Additionally, developers will be able to build their own apps, and all 220,000 apps built using Salesforce’s Force.com development platform will work with HTML5, as well.

That’s an awful lot for one CEO to talk about, and Benioff is a busy man. But, as in the past, he’s not too busy to give TV interviews that coincide with the Dreamforce conference. While he’s regularly found on CNBC’s “Mad Money,” on Monday he showed up on Bloomberg West for a chat with Emily Chang.

The highlight comes early in the interview, when Benioff links the Arab Spring — which has been propelled in part by Facebook- and Twitter-using protesters who have toppled a couple of dictators, most notably Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and now apparently Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Companies are falling, too, Benioff says, but they have a fighting chance to survive if they get a little more social. Get it? Chang, to her credit, doesn’t let this pass without calling it an “extreme analogy.” She then goes on to quiz him about Salesforce landing Groupon as a customer. (And revealing that Groupon CEO Andrew Mason went to Davos. Who knew?)

What else about Salesforce is extreme? Its price-to-earnings ratio is insane, at 602 times trailing earnings; which, of course, leads to the question of whether or not Salesforce is overpriced. Benioff, true to form, dodges the question. It’s all about growing the topline and gaining market share now, he says. No change there. Enjoy the video:

What does it take to build disruptive businesses in the midst of a revolution? As it turns out, it requires a culturally uncommon aversion to risk.

Amr Ramadan, Ziad Aly and Haytham El-Fadeel all hail from Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt — places recently in the international spotlight for news of political disruption.

In that time, though, these three have built high-tech businesses bucking the Egyptian trope of an antiquity-based economy.

Ramadan started Vimov, which developed Weather HD, the top selling weather app for Apple’s iPad. Aly is CEO of ALZWAD, a mobile content platform for feature phones in the Middle East, and El-Fadeel has built Kngine, a Wolfram Alpha-like infosearch service.

The trio recently did a quick tech tour of the U.S. entrepreneurial hotspots — Manhattan and Silicon Valley — on a trip led by Ahmed El Alfi.

Alfi is CEO of Sawari Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm invested in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA is the shorthand for the area).

So, I sat down with the group during the Silicon Valley leg of their tour to pick their brains on the realities of building businesses amidst so much political disruption.

U.S. pundits have been banging away, asserting that the revolution was really fomented by an overabundance of young, educated and unemployed Egyptians.

I asked the trio if those same circumstances might make for a good start-up culture.

Aly agreed that there had been a change since the revolution and he now sees a necessary boldness among founders that wasn’t there before.

“I saw an idea last week that’s a platform around where people can go out — similar to Yelp. The founder came up with the idea and a prototype,” he said. “Before [the revolution] you would never have seen this.”

Even though conditions were right for digital disruption, Ramadan explained that cultural attitudes about risk of failure remain even after the government has turned over.

Because while a failed start-up or two in Silicon Valley can be a mark of experience for an entrepreneur, he observed that in Egypt prior failures just mean you have a history of failing.

But he did acknowledge that things are very much in flux.

“Before [the revolution], the way to get ahead was find a government job and stay off the radar; now that doesn’t seem to be as much the case,” he added. “I think more young people are willing to look at a start-up and say ‘Why not?’”

Alfi, the venture capitalist who arranged the trip and who is invested in companies in the MENA region, said that enough money isn’t really an issue — smart money is.

“It’s the Middle East, there’s plenty of money around,” he said. “What we lack are enough experienced people to help guide these companies.”

The lack of “smart” investment is complicated by what Ramadan described as Egypt’s cash economy. Because there isn’t a large community of investors taking risks on tech start-ups, Egyptian companies have to turn a profit from day one.

“The idea of losing money for a couple of years … is not something common in Egypt,” he said. “Even the concept of credit is not really there.”

In other words, profit from day one in Egypt is the only way to pay for day two.

“So, a country with a decent crop of engineers and a fresh start seemed to me like a reasonable place to develop a start-up community, especially one that could build products for the Middle East, based around cultural norms that foreign companies might have difficulty designing for,” he added.

Aly, whose mobile content delivery platform is targeted only at Middle Eastern users, believes that the combination of pervasive 3G and 4G phone service and an uptick in social media interest post revolution are good signs for companies entering his market.

“Mobile is the primary [and, often, only] Internet device, as opposed to more mature markets,” he said. “Even the iPhone, until recently, had to be connected to iTunes.”

All three men noted that Twitter and Facebook were the social media platforms of the masses in Egypt, but Aly added a footnote to the popular (and much debated) news narrative about the Egyptian revolution and social media.

Rather than heavy social media usage facilitating a revolution, the opposite seems to be happening.

During the revolution, Twitter was the only way to get reliable information even if not everyone was on it,” he said. “Since the revolution we are seeing much more interest than before.”

The group did acknowledge the difficulties they face building operations in such a politically and socially dynamic region.

But most of their worries echoed the kinds of refrains one might hear from Silicon Valley companies: Difficulties attracting developers, trouble finding good advice and learning the lessons of surviving rapid growth seem to be at the top of everyone’s list — regardless of geography.

But the combo of education, mobile device use and social media adoption in Egypt seems like fertile enough ground for start-ups, at least to Alfi, who will launch an incubator there this year.

He thinks what the region needs most are a few good home runs for investors.

Referencing one such exit, Leslie Jump, Alfi’s colleague at Sawari Ventures, added: “We need a success story. Like the ICQ deal was for Israel, a high-profile exit would bring interest in investing in Egypt.”

Ghonim had been in Silicon Valley last week to visit Google, Twitter, and Dogpatch Labs. Googlers gave him a standing ovation at an appearance at a company staff meeting that was described as “emotional.”

In a speech at Stanford University organized by the school’s Muslim Student Awareness Network, Ghonim “spent the bulk of his talk outlining practical steps that can be taken to rebuild Egypt, calling upon his audience to mimic the ‘independent initiative’ of the protestors,” according to a campus newspaper report. He also invited attendees to sign up to help Egypt on a Google Doc.

Ghonim has given much credit to the Internet and specifically Facebook for helping facilitate the Egyptian uprising.

The move marks Intel’s vote of confidence in the post-Mubarak Egypt, in the earliest days of establishing a new political, cultural and economic identity. In addition, as one of the worlds leading global technology players, Intel has embraced the growing quality of innovation and engineering talent in their first acquisition in the Arab world. Dr. Christian Mucke, Vice President of Intel Mobile Communications, notes that “Egypt has a young, growing talent pool across multiple specializations, including the field of engineering, and we remain committed to Egypt as a strategic market.”

SySDSoft’s CEO and founder Dr. Khaled Ismail is a classic start-up story. Having received his PhD from MIT and the highest recognition from leading engineering institutions, Ismail founded his company out of passion and necessity. When the U.S. company for whom he built the Cairo operations failed to survive the bubble burst of 2001, he saw significant market and talent opportunity in region. Starting with two employees, he reflects on those early days, “It was not very difficult as I was blessed with a great team. My main challenge was always to find new customers abroad, who were willing to trust an Egyptian company to deliver top-notch technical work for them.” Find them he did, and as his operations grew to nearly 100 engineers, SySDSoft quickly moved from offering engineering design services to developing its own IP in the 4G telecom world. SySDSoft was named the first Endeavor High Impact Entrepreneurial Company in the Middle East in 2007.

Ismail has been active in fostering and mentoring young Egyptian entrepreneurs in technology and telecom. Between his success at SySDSoft, sitting on the board of Orascom–the largest telecom operator in the Middle East–and actively advising government and business leaders in how best to incubate new tech ideas, he is optimistic for the new generation following in his footsteps. “What will change,” he hopes, “is that young entrepreneurs may have more guts now to take the risk and hope for a good upside in case they are successful. After Jan 25, 2011, in fact, I am much more optimistic, since the overall environment is very crucial, and we hope that the change that has happened will entice a lot of young Egyptians to have a dream, take the risk, but have the patience to not simply chase quick profit.”

SySDSoft had received two offers to sell in recent years, but now, with the exponential growth in mobile services and pressure on time to market, the time was ripe to harvest opportunities in consolidation. Ismail notes, “During the past six months, there have been so many acquisitions in the domain or wireless technologies more broadly. We witnessed most of our small- to medium-size customers being acquired by big companies during that phase, which indicated that big consolidations are happening.” When Intel bought one of the leading wireless companies last August, Infineon Wireless, it also acquired one of SySDSoft’s most important customers. Ismail concluded, “We had an excellent working relationship with them. Also, Intel is one of the most advanced technology companies in the world that would allow our product, which we believe is best of its class in the world, to reach the hands of hundreds of millions very soon. Our IP is a part of their road map, and as our business is not capital intensive, we represent far less risk than other industries.”

Mucke agrees: “SySDSoft designs software IP solutions and RF/analog circuits embedded in mobile platforms and enhances Intel Mobile Communications’ existing multi-communications portfolio, specifically accelerating its 4G LTE efforts.”

Ismail will remain with Intel as the head of Intel Mobile Communication Egypt. “I have currently no other plans but to make it one of the most successful teams with Intel worldwide, and to win the 4G chipset battle such that an Egyptian product will be in the hands of more than a billion users within five years from now.”

Intel is sizing up the best approaches in Egypt and the region overall. “Intel remains committed to the Egyptian market and the region has a young, growing talent pool,” Mucke explains. “We are currently in the process of evaluating the market and the financial impact to Intel as a result of the Egypt revolution, and are working with the ecosystem on identifying how Intel can help rebuild and restructure the Egyptian PC market.”

Christopher M. Schroeder is a Washington, DC-based angel investor in U.S. companies and CEO of the leading collection of condition-specific, social health web sites at healthcentral.com. He recently returned from Cairo, Damascus and Dubai, examining the region’s start-up community, and was a delegate in the State Department Global Entrepreneurship Program as a judge for Egypt’s new venture business plan competition. He can be followed at @cmschroed.

Last night, Bill Clinton–arguably the first Internet President–got a little nostalgic.

“We are actually here today because the people sitting in your seats 20 years ago imagined a different world, though they didn’t know exactly how it would come out,” he said in a keynote speech for the 40th meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN, at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. “They just knew that a networked world would probably work better than a bureaucratic one.”

Yes, indeed, the world has come a long way from when Clinton was in office.

In fact, Clinton noted that to the 800 attendees last night–correctly calling himself “the president at the dawn of the Internet age”–that there were only 50 Web sites in 1993 when he was inaugurated, and 36 million when his term was up in 2001.

Clinton’s speech, a paid appearance, touched on his history with ICANN, as well as the intersection of the Internet, geopolitics, poverty, the global distribution of wealth and infrastructure.

ICANN is the multinational, non-governmental organization that researches, debates and enforces decisions that affect how traffic gets sent around the pipes of the Internet.

It decides, for instance, that Libyan domain names end in .ly.

Clinton’s focus last night was urging the international crowd to try to use technology and their positions around it to build physical and financial infrastructure systems for poorer nations.

He called for a renewed focus on technology-sector job growth and touched the geopolitical implications of free access to the Internet.

Invoking the recent revolution in Egypt, he said that ICANN needed to ensure universal access to a free Internet and the continued vibrancy of the Web.

“That’s why it’s important that you want the Internet to stay forever young,” said Clinton. “One hundred years from now, you want somebody in some godforsaken place that’s been beat down to be able to do what the kids in Cairo did.”

At the conclusion of the address, Clinton sat on stage with ICANN President and CEO Rod Beckstorm and answered pre-selected questions.

The former President mostly stayed above the fray of the major debates surrounding this ICANN meeting, only peripherally mentioning the next day’s headline issue–the possible adoption of the .xxx top level domain.

That issue has seethed online for several years, and was supposed to come to a head Thursday. Several attendees related that a troupe of porn stars were expected at the following day’s meetings to protest the adoption of the .xxx domain for adult sites on the Web, as a modern day scarlet letter.

President Clinton’s most direct response was related to sales tax being levied on online purchases. It was his policy preference at the beginning of the e-commerce era to keep sales tax out of online transactions, so that those companies could have the chance to grow, he explained. He said that e-commerce didn’t seem to need the help anymore, and Amazon’s complaints about recent changes sounded like “a high class problem.”

ICANN 40 wraps up Friday, but won’t conclude before addressing other key topics, such as solving the global shortage of IP addresses–the unique numbers that identify every Internet-connected device–and aiding the proliferation of the next generation of online security protocols.

Adding more numbers to the list of IPs, or verifying a site’s identity, doesn’t sound complex. But, on the global scale, even simple changes require massive coordination.

Another issue: Lack of international enforcement could create a haven for online fraud in countries that can least afford it.

It was on this point that the former President’s speech and ICANN’s actual agenda converged.

“We need to ask ourselves if we are forming a more perfect union across the globe,” he said, urging those in the room not to get mired in small disagreements.

His advice: Focus on the larger mission of ensuring that the benefits of Internet access will be distributed equally, worldwide and beyond the foreseeable future.

“You have to be vigilant, because at some point all institutions are led by people more interested in maintaining the present than creating the future,” he said.

Word, Bill.

The folks at Internet research firm Renesys, who first gained attention for tracking Egypt’s disconnection from the Internet, and then similar events in Libya, say they’re surprised by how little the quakes have affected the undersea Internet cables that keep Japan connected to the rest of the world. Only a small fraction of Japanese connections went down and many of those have come back up since. This is good news because the Internet is providing a badly needed communication link both within Japan and between it and the rest of the world.

It’s a much different story from the Taiwan earthquake in 2006 that broke several undersea cables and knocked several carriers out of service.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been damage. There have been breaks in two segments of Pacnet’s EAC cable system. And the Pacific Crossing system has also gone down since the earthquake. This is the cable once featured in a Wired photo essay “Tracing the Journey of a Single Bit.” The Pacific Crossing site currently displays a message that reads: “The Japanese cable landing station in Ajigaura has been evacuated due to the tsunami on the east coast of Japan and currently information on restoration activities and timing is unavailable. Further updates will be posted as additional information becomes available.”

Meanwhile, I’ve been keeping track of all the aftershocks — and there have an alarming number of them — via the Earthquake Notification Service operated by the US Geological Survey. Subscribe and you get an automated email alert any time there’s an earthquake anywhere in the world, though you can specify by region and by the Richter Scale intensity so your in box is overloaded. For example I get alerts on North American quakes of greater than Richter 5.5, and all quakes around the world greater than Richter 6.5. When a big quake hits you’ll know about it well before the cable networks start flashing their “Breaking News” banners.

Finally, you can keep up with the constant stream of updates out of the Japan via this ongoing blog from our friends at The Wall Street Journal.

(Image via Wikimedia Commons)

The new local versions are for Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Yemen. There isn’t one for Libya, where YouTube has been blocked since January.

YouTube already offers an Arabic version and hosts lots of content from users in the Middle East, including news networks Al Arabia and Al Jazeera. And the site is mostly available to Internet users in the region, though it has been blocked by ISPs in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya at the request of local governments both as a domain and as part of general Internet shutoffs over the last few months.

The most important aspects of the local versions of YouTube are dedicated home pages that show the most popular and trending videos in each country. This makes local videos much easier to find, especially because some of the most interesting videos on YouTube come from people who were previously unknown.

Previously, would-be viewers might have had to do extensive searching on YouTube or rely on Facebook, Twitter and news outlets to find important new video posts from these countries.

To whatever extent citizens watch and share local videos, the Middle East pages could mean that YouTube is a bigger touchpoint for on-the-street accounts from protests and other timely content. It should also make it easier for the rest of the world to find such videos.

YouTube seems to be playing down the political implication of the Middle East pages, though it seems obvious given the timing. In an announcement written in Arabic on the Google Arabia Blog (and not yet cross-posted on YouTube’s main blog or its news and politics blog), the company highlighted Jordanian cartoonist DinaKaradsheh, popular Lebanese musician Nancy Ajram and professional news networks–rather than calling out the opportunities to more easily find citizen video.

The post, written by Associate Product Marketing Manager Najeeb Jarrar, ended with a sort of plea to keep the Middle East discourse open:

Of course, the YouTube community reflects the whole world, with its vast differences of ethnicity, religion, nationality, language, politics and more. Not everything on YouTube will please everyone, and we encourage people to actively participate, learn the rules and flag content that might violate them. In the end, YouTube is a place where people go to exchange all kinds of ideas, and we hope you will join the conversation.

Repeating a move it made last week, the government of Muammar Gaddafi has once again taken itself off the Internet, according to Renesys, an Internet research firm, and Google’s Transparency Report.

Renesys says its traceroute pings — which are used to measure network heath and uptime — show that the connections remain live, but that traffic is apparently being intercepted as it reaches Libyan territory and sent into something of a black hole. Technically speaking this is different from what happened in Egypt last month, where servers were though to have have been simply shut down.

The Internet may seem secondary right now giving the gravity of events taking place there today, but the flow of correct information always becomes valuable — and therefore vulnerable — in the heat of violence such as this. Today there were reports of forces loyal to Gaddafi firing on people taking part in protests after Friday prayers, with dozens killed and scores more wounded. Meanwhile there was more fighting in the rebel-held town of Zawiya. Government forces tried to retake the town today, and as many as 35 were reported killed, with still more wounded.

It’s also unclear if, as was the case with Egypt, if wireless phone networks have been affected. The Wall Street Journal has a more complete report on the situation there.

That was fast.

Which is probably apt, given the subject matter of a book coming out soon made up of real-time Twitter from Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

“Tweets from Tahrir,” which is being published by Or Books on April 21, says it is chronicling “an entirely new way of telling history.”

It will indeed be interesting to see all the myriad of tweets compiled in one place.

And the impact of social tools on the various protests in the Mideast will definitely be great fodder for some historian in the future.

That said, some think the focus on Silicon Valley social tools, such as Twitter and Facebook, rather than on the people’s will, is overhyped.

Still, social networking is simply a reflection of humanity, so examining its impact is well worth a read.

Plus, tweets are only 140 characters, so it is an easy one too.

Here is the press release on the book:

TWEETS FROM TAHRIR

Egypt’s Revolution as It Unfolded, in the Words of the People Who Made It

Edited by NADIA IDLE and ALEX NUNNS

With a foreword by AHDAF SOUEIF

Gsquare86M Gigi Ibrahim
Everyone in Cairo who wants Mubarak out and stands for justice come to Tahrir NOW!
Feb 2

“Without the new media the Egyptian Revolution could not have happened in the way that it did. The causes of the revolution were many; deep-rooted and long seated. The turning moment had come–but it was the instant and wide-spread nature of the new media that made it possible to recognise the moment and to push it into such an effective manifestation.”

–Ahdaf Soueif

The Twitter accounts of the activists who brought heady days of revolution to Egypt in January and February this year paint an exhilarating picture of an uprising in real-time. Thousands of young people documented on cell phones every stage of the action, as it happened. This book brings together a selection of key tweets in a compelling, fast-paced narrative, allowing the story of the uprising to be told directly by the people in Tahrir Square.

Some of the activists were ‘citizen journalists’, using Twitter to report on what was happening. Others used the social network to organize, communicating the next steps necessary for the revolution to move forward. Nearly everyone online gave instant reactions to the extraordinary events occurring before their eyes.

History has never before been recorded in this fashion. The tweet limit of 140 characters evidently concentrated the feelings of those using Twitter. Raw emotions burst from their messages, whether frantic alarm at attacks from pro-government thugs or delirious happiness at the fall of the dictator. To read these tweets is to embark a rollercoaster ride, from the surprise and excitement of the first demonstration, to the horror of the violence that claimed hundreds of lives, to the final ecstasy of victory.

Many of those tweeting also took photographs with their phones and these are used to illustrate the book, providing remarkable snapshots from the heart of the action.

Edited by young activists Alex Nunns and Nadia Idle, an Egyptian who was in Tahrir Square when Mubarak fell, Tweets from Tahrir is a highly original take on one of the most important and dramatic events in recent world politics. The result is as gripping as any thriller–but it’s all real.

At one end of the spectrum, Columbia Law School professor Eben Moglen is touting low-cost devices, called Freedom Boxes, that can act as encrypted, network-independent routers for news and information sent via cell phones to loosely-federated social networks.

At the other end of the technological spectrum, the owner of a Kuwaiti television station and newspaper, Sheikh Fahad Al Salem Al Ali Al Sabah, is trying to create a network of international satellite TV channels “dedicated to building bridges between civilizations so as to permit greater dialogue between worlds, culture and religions.” According to a statement provided to Digits, “The objective is to utilize citizen journalism and new technologies (i.e. mobile phones) to compile content from everyday citizens acting as ‘reporters.’”

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The following is an edited version of the interview.

WSJ: What is the future of the Internet?

Mr. Cerf: There are several trends which will carry the Internet over the next several years. First is mobile–mobile technology and the access to the Internet via mobile devices is becoming extremely important. We’re also seeing Internet infrastructure reach more deeply into places where there isn’t any–in places like Africa. Another trend is submarine cables and satellite capability while another trend is the ability to bring video and audio to entertainment devices in cars or homes using the Internet.

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