One of Yahoo’s senior international execs and longtime entrepreneur Ahmed Nassef is leaving the company to create a new startup called Telfez, which will be a social television effort aimed at emerging markets.

Nassef, who was until now the head of Yahoo’s efforts in the Middle East and Africa, is co-founding the new company with Tamer Rashad, a top Merrill Lynch in the same region. Telfez will be based in Palo Alto, Calif.

“Today the Middle East and Africa region represents an inflection point for television viewership, skyrocketing growth in the penetration of smartphones and connected devices, and heavy social engagement,” said Nassef in a press release. “Increasingly, the millions of TV viewers in places from Capetown and Casablanca to Dubai and Istanbul are watching TV while holding a mobile phone or tablet and connecting with friends on their favorite social platforms.

Nassef has been at the Silicon Valley Internet giant for four years, in which he has doubled its audience and improved revenue growth. He came to Yahoo after the company acquired Maktoob.com, an Arabic language site, in 2009.

Numerous theories abound. The most common one appears to be that the 20-hour outage gave government officials time to install some kind of new surveillance gear on the networks. The other is that it was intended to disrupt the ability of rebel groups fighting against the regime to communicate during a specified time window. Both would make some certain amount of sense.

Officially, at least according to the state news agency SANA, a “damaged optic cable” is being blamed. As I’ve written and numerous others have observed, this explanation is unlikely. The main reason is that all four cables bringing Internet capacity into the country meet at the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment office in Damascus. Three cables come in by sea and one over land via Turkey. For the whole country to go down as it did, all four would have had to fail at the same time.

But here’s another interesting wrinkle: At least two accounts on Twitter monitored by the Canada-based Syria Digital Security Project appear to have warned on April 26 about a coming nationwide Internet outage.

First there was this tweet, in Arabic, from @AnonymousPress:

النظام السوري قد يقطع كل الاتصالات والموبايل والانترنت في #سوريا في الأول من أيار 2013 (إقرأ المزيد وأنشر) http://t.co/qcZQ2y9JfA #Syria

April 26, 2013 3:55 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@AnonymousPress

Anonymous Press

The translation, via Google Translate, refers to plans by the Syrian regime to “cut off all communication and mobile Internet” on the “first of May.” It then links to a document on Pastebin that has since been removed.

A second tweet the same day, from @TelecomixBSRE, warned of coming outages during a Syrian holiday period which took place, SevDev says, between May 1 and May 6:

#Syria Regime plans 2 cut ALL telecoms, Net & Mobile over holidays, possibility of Massacres, B CAREFUL, via #TelecomixSyria #RT #Telecomix

April 26, 2013 3:10 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@TelecomixBSRE

Telecomix BSRE

SecDev also notes in its report that this is the third such nationwide outage in Syria since the civil war began. The first outage, in November, lasted about two days and change. A second, which I didn’t know about, occurred in January, and coincided with a speech given by President Bashar al-Assad.

In another interesting Syria-related development, security blogger Brian Krebs reported today that domain registrar Network Solutions has seized about 700 domain names belonging to organizations in Syria. (Here’s a PDF document containing a list.)

The seizures appear to have gotten the attention of the pro-Assad hacking group known as the Syrian Electronic Army. A report on the group produced by security researchers at Hewlett-Packard noted public complaints by the group that it had lost control of at least two domains it had been using.

The Syrian Electronic Army, you’ll remember, is the group known for a series of attacks against the Twitter accounts of numerous Western media organizations, most notably one belonging to the Associated Press. Other accounts attacked by the group have belonged to CBS News, National Public Radio, the BBC and The Onion.

It turns out that selling domain name registration services to entities in Syria is prohibited by U.S. law because of trade sanctions.

The reports from SANA, the official Syrian government news agency, are also confirming reports I picked up last night via Twitter that domestic phone service within Syria is also down.

SANA’s explanation doesn’t pass the smell test, mainly because it would require the simultaneous failure of four separate fiber optic cables that bring bandwidth into the country. And there would have been the additional reports of service problems in countries that share the same cables. According to Google’s Transparency report, there are no such failures in Turkey, or Lebanon, or Cyprus, or Jordan.

Renesys, the U.S.-based research firm that tracks the health of Internet infrastructure around the world, shared via Twitter a map showing the routes of three undersea cables that service Syria. (Click the map to make it bigger.)

As we on the outside of all this speculate on reasons why the government would shut off Internet access, I have a few ideas. One thing I noticed as I drilled down into Google’s Transparency report for Syria was what to my eye appears to be an unusual rise in traffic from Syria to YouTube relatively early in the day. See the image below and look at the spike that occurs on May 7.

I’m just speculating here, but there have been reports of a significant massacre of at least 62 civilians by a pro-Assad paramilitary force in the coastal city of Banias on May 3 and May 4. I’ve noticed that there are several very grisly videos circulating on YouTube concerning this. (I’ve seen one that nearly made me sick, so I won’t show them to you, but you can find them yourself.)

Perhaps the YouTube-related spike I noticed might coincide with increased interest inside Syria in these YouTube videos, and that the Assad government may find them enough of a threat that it would rather shut down the Internet while trying to find a way to block them or maybe try to scrub them.

There would also be a benefit for the government side in disrupting communications capabilities of the rebel fighters, in order to keep them on the back foot. Meanwhile, any new offensives that the pro-Assad camp might have been planning can go on, and no one on the other side can share any new videos or other information about them with the outside world.

It bears repeating that the civil war in Syria has gone on for two years, and that somewhere between 70,000 and 75,000 people have died in it, most of them civilians.

Right now, Google is showing that none of its products are available in Syria, since a little before 3 pm ET, or about two hours ago as of this writing. Here’s a screen grab of Google’s graphic showing the dropoff.

Akamai has been tracking the outage as well, according to this Tweet from @NMSyria. I’ve reached out to Akamai for a little more color (to the extent that any is available).

Internet seems to have been shut down across all of #Syria. http://t.co/m6hVLroVRF

May 7, 2013 1:28 pm via Tweetbot for iOSReplyRetweetFavorite

@NMSyria

NMSyria

The last time this happened was in November of last year, and that outage, like so much else going on in that country torn apart by civil war, has never been fully explained. The outage lasted about two days.

Last time, the folks at Renesys, a research firm that tracks the health of the Internet’s underlying plumbing, noticed that all five networks bringing Internet traffic into Syria went down more or less at once.

That’s fairly easy to carry out logistically because pretty much all Internet traffic in and out of that country is funneled through one point: The state-run, state-controlled Syrian Telecommunications Establishment, and all Internet providers operate out of a single building. The companies that provide Internet connections going into Syria are PCCW and Turk Telekom as the primary providers, with Telecom Italia and Tata providing additional capacity.

There are four physical cables that bring bandwidth into Syria and three of them land in the coastal city of Tartus. A fourth comes in from Turkey to the north.

Chances are, routers in the telecommunications building were reconfigured to stop announcing themselves in the global routing tables, essentially making them invisible to the rest of the Internet.

The question — as with the last time this happened — is why now?

Update: Umbrella Security Labs CTO has a blog post on what that company says is going on:

Currently both TLD (top-level domain) servers for Syria, ns1.tld.sy and ns2.tld.sy are unreachable. The remaining two nameservers sy.cctld.authdns.ripe.net. and pch.anycast.tld.sy. are reachable since they are not within Syria.

It goes on in more technical detail:

Routing on the Internet relies on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP distributes routing information and makes sure all routers on the Internet know how to get to a certain IP address. When an IP range becomes unreachable it will be withdrawn from BGP, this informs routers that the IP range is no longer reachable.

Like I said, the routers in the telecommunications building have been reset and have stopped announcing themselves to the rest of the world, making them essentially nonexistent until they come back on.

Second update: Apparently there are a few people who still have access. Some people have the means to install satellite-based Internet connections that are independent of government-controlled connections, according to a Tweet by Basma Atassi, a journalist with Al-Jazeera.

Only activists who can afford to install SAT internet are online. Family, friends and most of the hardworking activists are offline #Syria

May 7, 2013 2:26 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Basma_

Basma Atassi | بسمة

Also Renesys has now confirmed the outage.

Renesys confirms loss of Syrian Internet connectivity 18:43 UTC. BGP routes down, inbound traces failing. @geeknik

May 7, 2013 12:30 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@renesys

Renesys Corporation

Here’s a graphic of its monitoring, broken down by inbound service provider.

Third update: Google has just reactivated its Speak To Tweet service for people who still have working phone lines in Syria.

.@speak2tweet available to help people communicate if they have working phone connection. #SyriaBlackout http://t.co/oRg3jCVDQX

May 7, 2013 2:51 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@google

A Googler

This is a service that Google created during the Internet outages in Egypt in 2011 that allows people with working phone lines to leave messages that can be seen and heard by people outside the country via a Twitter account that records the audio.

To use it, you leave a voicemail message on one of four international phone numbers (details here). If word reaches anyone in the affected area, you can listen for messages here.

Fourth update: Syria Digital Reports, a project of Canada’s SecDev Group and which has been following ongoing updates on Syrian infrastructure in real time (power and water and phone service in addition to Internet) and which also provides digital tools to help people in that country maintain digital safety and security, is now reporting that phone service — both wireless and land lines — has been cut off as well.

Confirmed, landlines and cellphones are down in #Syria – #Syriablackout @Syriansmurf

May 7, 2013 3:12 pm via FacebookReplyRetweetFavorite

@DSRSyria

SyriaDigitalReports

Fifth update: Here’s how the outage looked as it happened live on video. Courtesy a software engineer at Storify named Frederic Jacobs.

As I noted in a piece last week about the departure of Yahoo Mail head Vivek Sharma for a new job at Disney, the Silicon Valley Internet giant is likely to see a lot more execs unhappy with the new regime of CEO Marissa Mayer take off after annual bonuses start being handed out in March.

Today, it’s James Carroll, SVP of the consumer and global platform group at Yahoo.

In the job, the former Microsoft exec has been in charge of the company’s global R&D centers in China, India and the Middle East and been “responsible for Yahoo’s content, social and membership platforms and the international delivery of all Yahoo! products and services worldwide.” That has included all its efforts at internationalization, international infrastructure development and localization.

Sources said he is leaving to head international at Go Daddy, one of the world’s biggest Web hosting and domain registration companies. Go Daddy is led by former Yahoo product head Blake Irving, who had hired Carroll at Yahoo in 2010.

And, as NBC announced earlier today, editor in chief of Yahoo News, Hillary Frey, has taken a job there as editorial director of news at NBCNews.com, which is undergoing a major refurbishment. She had been at Yahoo since late 2011.

Many more to come, I am told, as execs either decide to depart or Mayer continues to clean house. It’s still unclear who will be taking over these key jobs at Yahoo.

One thing for sure: I don’t expect a comment from Yahoo PR on the changes.

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.

The custom Baidu browser is to be pre-installed on new Android devices sold through Orange in Africa this year.

It’s specifically designed to compress data and give users easy bookmarks to Web services like Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter.

The aim is to serve a fast-growing group of mobile Internet users; Orange said demand for Android in Egypt doubled in the second half of 2012.

The partnership also gives Baidu a chance to show that its understanding of emerging markets, developed in China, can be applied to the rest of the world.

Baidu had officially launched its Android browser in China in September 2012, where the mobile browser leader in China has historically been UCWeb.

The new Baidu-Orange browser is a separate project that was exclusively designed for Orange, said Xavier Perret, Orange VP of strategic partnerships and business development. Perret wouldn’t disclose terms of the agreement, but said it was more about user experience than revenue.

The browser is launching today in Arabic and English and coming soon in French.

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 folks at Renesys, who were the first to notice that something was amiss with the telecom infrastructure of the war-torn Middle Eastern nation, have been hard at work sifting through their data — and they’ve found something interesting.

At least five networks operating outside Syria, but still operating within Syrian-registered IP address spaces, are still working, and are apparently controlled by India’s Tata Communications.

These same networks, Renesys says, have some servers running on them that were implicated in an attempt to deliver Trojans and other malware to Syrian activists. The payload was a fake “Skype Encryption Tool” — which is, on its face, kind of silly, because Skype itself is already encrypted to some degree — that was actually a spying tool. The Electronic Frontier Foundation covered the attempted cyber attack at the time.

Cloudflare has also been monitoring the situation in Syria and has made a few interesting observations.

First, pretty much all Internet access in the country is funneled through one point: The state-run, state-controlled Syrian Telecommunications Establishment. The companies that provide this capacity running into the country are PCCW and Turk Telekom as the primary providers, with Telecom Italia and Tata providing additional capacity.

There are, Cloudflare notes, four physical cables that bring Internet connectivity into Syria. Three of them are undersea cables that land in the coastal city of Tartus. A fourth comes in from Turkey to the north. Cloudflare’s Matt Prince says it’s unlikely that the cables were physically cut.

Cloudflare put together a video of what it looked like watching the changes in the routing tables happen live. It’s less than two minutes long.

For what it’s worth, Syria’s information minister is being quoted in various reports as blaming the opposition for the shutdown.

So the question is: Why now? Clearly, the Syrian regime is under more pressure than ever before. Previously, it tended to view the country’s Internet as a tool to not only get its own word out to the wider world, but also to try and spy on and monitor the activities of the rebels and activists.

With fighting intensifying in and around the capital and the commercial city of Aleppo, the decision to throw the kill switch might indicate a decision to try to disrupt enemy communications. Or it might mask a seriously aggressive military action that it wants to keep as secret as possible. We don’t know yet.

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.)

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.

Yahoo beat Wall Street estimates in its first-quarter earnings report today, with revenue of $1.08 billion and earnings of 23 cents. That’s a gain of 28 percent from a year ago in net earnings and 38 percent per diluted share.

Analysts had been expecting Yahoo to report revenue of $1.06 billion and earnings of 17 cents a share. But, as I reported earlier today, sources had indicated that the results would be on the upside.

Still, revenue was only up year over year by 1 percent — not exactly a great achievement, given exploding growth across the Internet industry. The real drag was the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions, whose revenue was down 9 percent — which Yahoo attributed to the weak economy there — with its “contribution” down 27 percent. That region has been run by Rich Riley, who is now Yahoo’s sales lead in the U.S.

One interesting note: While display revenue was down, search revenue was up. And unique visitors to Yahoo were up 7 percent, which was lower growth than in previous quarters. The reason was declines in search and communications, with media up strongly.

Now, investors are hoping to get more clarity from new CEO Scott Thompson in a call at 2 pm PT about the overall strategy for the troubled Silicon Valley Internet giant, which just restructured its management again and also had layoffs of 2,000 employees.

Thompson has yet to articulate a specific plan beyond the broad strokes of media, commerce and data/platforms as Yahoo’s aim.

But there is a lot more to deal with and in detail, including figuring out its troubled advertising search partnership with Microsoft, the talks around selling off parts of the company’s lucrative Asian assets, Yahoo’s patent lawsuit against Facebook, how Yahoo is going to deal with activist shareholder Third Point’s possible proxy challenge and whether more layoffs beyond recent firings will be needed.

“In the first quarter, Yahoo!’s results came in at the high end of our guidance range and beat consensus on revenue and profits,” Thompson said in a statement. “We also made changes to resize the organization and establish a new leadership structure to quickly deliver the best user and advertiser experiences at scale.”

Until Thompson gives more deets on the earnings call, which I will be liveblogging, here’s Yahoo’s official press release and cool charts on the subject:

YHOO News 2012-4-17 General

YHOO_Q112EarningsPresentation

In a move that AllThingsD had previously reported was coming, Yahoo said it had laid off 2,000 employees, or 14 percent of the workforce.

“Today’s actions are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo! — smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require,” said Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson in a statement. “Unfortunately, reaching that goal requires the tough decision to eliminate positions.”

While Yahoo has had periodic layoffs over the years, this one is its most significant in its history, and will also result in another large-scale restructuring of the management organization. More cuts are also likely to follow in the months ahead, due to the reshaping of Yahoo.

The latest employee action is being pushed by Thompson, who joined the Silicon Valley Internet giant in January from eBay’s PayPal unit.

“Change is never easy,” he wrote in an internal email to Yahoo employees (it is below in its entirety), in a well-worn cliché I am dead certain few appreciated hearing today from the top leader.

At an internal meeting with top staff last night, Thompson — who has gotten what seems to be a well-deserved reputation for chewing folks out at Yahoo — was more direct with the execs gathered, berating them extensively for not delivering and getting the company to this sorry point.

Ouch, Scott! It’s Easter, so it might be time for some forgiveness. (And no more ranting about my reporting to those inside Yahoo, since I have been 100 percent accurate so far. FYI, will aim for 110 percent next week!)

Yahoo said it will save about $375 million with the cuts, incurring a $125 to $145 million pretax cash charge for employee severance in its second quarter. Before the cuts, Yahoo had 14,000 staffers and has many thousands more hired as contractors.

The layoffs touch all units of the company, but the hardest hit is the product division, which is headed by Blake Irving, as well as its marketing, research and international units. Yahoo gave no details on the layoffs other than the number.

But the fate of two key parts of the soon-to-be-blown-apart unit — Yahoo’s advertising technology businesses, Right Media and APT, and its search business — is still being contemplated, as I have previously reported. Possible scenarios include a sale or a joint venture transaction for both, which employ thousands of Yahoo staffers.

The layoffs tomorrow are not the end of the road in cutting costs. Along with the likely shedding of its ad tech and search businesses, Yahoo leadership is also looking at future cuts as it evaluates current businesses, which could lop even more employees off its roster.

That said, Yahoo will be doubling down in some older and new arenas, so there would also be simultaneous hiring in the months ahead.

As wrenching as they will be today at Yahoo, the layoffs come as no surprise. Thompson had told employees in memos and also in recent meetings that “real change” was coming to the company.

Along with the trauma of the layoffs, Yahoo is also facing two other tense face-offs externally. In one, activist shareholder Third Point is waging a proxy fight for board seats and stepped up the public pressure this week; and Facebook struck back hard at Yahoo’s patent lawsuit with a counterclaim of its own.

After the layoffs tomorrow, sources say Yahoo will be announcing a new organization by next week. Thompson, along with outside consultants he has hired from the Boston Consulting Group, are making what appear to be profound changes.

Sources said that Yahoo will most likely be comprised of a global media division, one that encompasses Yahoo’s consumer products businesses and one focused on global and regional sales. There could also be a small organization of about 50 employees aimed at future innovation.

Americas head Ross Levinsohn is pegged to run the media arm, which will also include its leads/commerce businesses, such as autos; Shashi Seth — who now heads search and marketplaces — is likely to run consumer products, which will include Yahoo’s communications and search businesses.

Yahoo has already been conducting a search for a new worldwide sales head, who will also be boss of the U.S., Asia and Europe, Middle East and Africa sales regions. Rich Riley, who was recently running EMEA, is reportedly the pick for U.S. sales; Rose Tsou, who is running Asia, would presumably stay put; Yahoo is looking for an EMEA sales lead.

Some current operational execs — such as service engineering and ops head David Dibble, CFO Tim Morse, and top lawyer Mike Callahan — are likely to continue to operate as before.

One big question mark is how Chief Product Officer Irving fits in the possible new org, in which the new units get control of their product development. Irving has reportedly had several incoming job offers, although it is not clear if he has responded to that interest.

But today, the focus is on the layoffs and letting go all those employees, many of whom have worked at Yahoo for years. Even if it will result in a stronger Yahoo, as Thompson promises, it is still a very sad day in Sunnyvale.

Here is a video on the topic that I did with the WSJ.com “Digits” show today, after the cuts were announced early this morning:

Here’s the entire terse statement from Yahoo:

Yahoo! Statement

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Yahoo! today confirmed that it is taking important next steps to reshape the company for the future.

“Today’s actions are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo! — smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require. We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities. Our goal is to get back to our core purpose — putting our users and advertisers first — and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal,” said Scott Thompson, CEO of Yahoo!. “Unfortunately, reaching that goal requires the tough decision to eliminate positions. We deeply value our people and all they’ve contributed to Yahoo!.”

Yahoo! has a solid foundation — nearly 700 million users and thousands of advertisers that engage with Yahoo! properties regularly and trust the company with their data and their business. Through its restructuring efforts, Yahoo! intends to grow by responding more quickly to customer needs and competing more effectively in areas where it can win. Yahoo! has identified key parts of the business — a select group of core businesses, the platforms that support those core businesses, and the data that drives deep personalization for users and ROI for advertisers — where the company will intensify efforts and redeploy resources globally, all focused on increasing shareholder value. With a clear focus on profitability and growth, the company will be disciplined in its investments and radically simplify how it builds, launches and maintains many of its properties and products.

Today, the company will begin the process of informing employees about these changes. As part of that effort, approximately 2,000 people will be notified of job elimination or phased transition.

Yahoo! expects to realize approximately $375 million of annualized savings upon completion of all employee transitions. The company currently expects to recognize the majority of an estimated $125 to $145 million pretax cash charge relating to employee severance in its second quarter financial results. The company may incur additional charges in connection with this action. More information will be provided about Yahoo!’s future direction in conjunction with the release of its first quarter financial results on April 17, 2012.

And here is Thompson’s memo to employees, stating the obvious and with nothing new from previous statements and internal memos:

Yahoos –-

Today we are restructuring Yahoo! to give ourselves the opportunity to compete and win in our core business. The changes we’re announcing today will put our customers first, allow us to move fast, and to get stuff done. The outcome of these changes will be a smaller, nimbler, more profitable Yahoo! better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require.

Over the last 60 days, we’ve fundamentally re-thought every part of our business and we will continue to actively consider all options that allow Yahoo! to put maximum effort where we can succeed. As part of this process, I believe we have to focus to win in a select group of core businesses globally:

Core Media and Communications: Our content, media, and communications experiences must be best in class. That includes getting today’s core properties right and innovating on a next generation of great product experiences across all screens.∙

Platforms: We must make our core platforms and systems a genuine strength for Yahoo! — platforms that we can really leverage to support our massive scale, drive the deepest personalization, and boost speed to market.∙

Data: Our massive data sets must become a genuine competitive advantage for Yahoo!. We have to unlock the value in our data to allow us to really understand our 700 million users, encourage and win their engagement and trust, leverage everything they do with us to more fully personalize their experiences, and to give our advertisers the immediate insights they are rightfully demanding.

We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities. Our goal is to get back to our core purpose — putting our users and advertisers first -– and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal.

Unfortunately, reaching that goal requires the tough decision to eliminate jobs, which means losing colleagues and parting with friends. Today, we will begin the process of informing employees about these changes. As part of that effort, approximately 2,000 people will be notified of job elimination or a phased transition. We value our people and for those who will be leaving, we thank you for all you have contributed to Yahoo!. We will treat all of our people with dignity and respect, providing resources to help manage through their transition.

Change is never easy. But the time has come to move Yahoo! forward aggressively with increased focus and accountability. Our values have always been about treating all Yahoos with dignity and respect, and today is a day to embrace those values. This is an amazing company with exceptionally talented people and I know we will all do our best to encourage each other through this difficult period of transition.

Scott

According to sources close to the situation, Yahoo’s massive round of layoffs — which is likely to impact up to 2,000 employees — is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg that will hit the storied Silicon Valley Internet giant in the months to come.

Sources said Yahoo is currently planning to announce the cuts in staff in the early morning, just as the markets open. That could change, of course, but the cuts will definitely occur within the next two days.

The layoffs, which will touch all units of the company, are expected to hit hardest in the product division, which is headed by Blake Irving.

But the fate of two key parts of the soon-to-be-blown-apart unit — Yahoo’s advertising technology businesses, Right Media and APT, and its search business — is still being contemplated, as I have previously reported. Possible scenarios include a sale or a joint venture transaction for both, which employ thousands of Yahoo staffers.

Also set to be hard hit are Yahoo’s local businesses, as well as its marketing and research divisions. While still sustaining losses, its media units will not be as badly impacted. And it’s not clear how many employee terminations will be aimed at the company’s general and administrative staff.

The layoffs tomorrow are not the end of the road in cutting costs. Along with the likely shedding of its ad tech and search businesses, Yahoo leadership is also looking at future cuts as it evaluates current businesses, which could lop even more employees off its roster.

That said, Yahoo will be “doubling down” in some older and new arenas, so there would also be simultaneous hiring in the months ahead.

But not tomorrow, which will be one of the tougher days in Yahoo’s long history of periodic layoffs. Newly installed CEO Scott Thompson had told employees in memos and also in recent meetings that “real change” was coming to the company.

That is indeed the case, which is causing massive strain throughout the company, which now employs over 14,000 and has many thousands more hired as contractors.

Along with the trauma of the layoffs, Yahoo is also facing two other tense face-offs externally. In one, activist shareholder Third Point is waging a proxy fight for board seats and stepped up the public pressure this week; and Facebook struck back hard at Yahoo’s patent lawsuit with a counter-claim of its own.

After the layoffs tomorrow, sources say Yahoo will be announcing a new organization by next week, which will create several major, soup-to-nuts units at the company. Thompson, along with consultants he has hired from the Boston Consulting Group, are making what appear to be profound changes.

Sources said Yahoo will most likely be comprised of a global media division, one that encompasses Yahoo’s consumer products businesses and one focused on global and regional sales. There could also be a small organization of about 50 employees aimed at future innovation.

Americas head Ross Levinsohn is pegged to run the media arm, which will also include its leads/commerce businesses, such as autos; Shashi Seth — who now heads search and marketplaces — is likely to run consumer products, which will include Yahoo’s communications and search businesses.

Yahoo has already been conducting a search for a new worldwide sales head, who will also be boss of the U.S., Asia and Europe, Middle East and Africa sales regions. Rich Riley, who was recently running EMEA, is reportedly the pick for U.S. sales; Rose Tsou, who is running Asia, would presumably stay put; Yahoo is looking for an EMEA sales lead.

Some current operational execs — such as service engineering and ops head David Dibble, CFO Tim Morse, and top lawyer Mike Callahan — are likely to continue to operate as before.

One big question mark is how Chief Product Officer Irving fits in the possible new org, in which the new units get control of their product development. Irving has reportedly had several incoming job offers, although it is not clear if he has responded to that interest.

Let’s hope that Yahoos who will be let go tomorrow find themselves with many new employment choices after the ax falls.

Yahoo is preparing to begin layoffs of what could be thousands of employees starting next week, according to multiple sources, and is then expected to announce a new restructuring of the company the week after.

The swirl at the Silicon Valley Internet giant has grown more intense this week, as new CEO Scott Thompson has brought in top management for a series of meetings both Tuesday and Wednesday to outline the plans.

What has emerged — although sources noted that Thompson and others communicating the pending changes said nothing was yet set in stone — is the picture of a drastically slimmed-down organization with a focus on media, advertising and new but unclear “future” initiatives.

First the layoffs: Sources said the cuts will be deep and mostly aimed at the product, research and marketing units of Yahoo, which are likely to take place Wednesday. The ultimate goal, said multiple sources, is to cut many thousands from Yahoo’s staff of close to 14,000 employees, which is actually much larger, due to contract workers not officially in its roster.

The entire cut will not take place at once, said sources, since Thompson and others are still trying to figure out how to dispense with its ad technology org and, potentially, its search business. He has been in discussions with both Microsoft and Google about this, although there are other possibilities, too.

Both these parts of Yahoo together have about 2,500 staffers, whose fate is not yet sorted out.

Also still baking is the new structure, although sources said it is most likely to be comprised of a global media division, one that encompasses Yahoo’s communications and search businesses, and ones focused on global and also regional sales. There could also be a small organization of about 50 aimed at future innovation.

Americas head Ross Levinsohn is the likeliest exec to run the media arm, while Shashi Seth — who now heads search and marketplaces — would be the obvious candidate for the the communications/search one.

Thompson has already been conducting a search for a new worldwide sales head, although one possible internal exec for the job could be Rich Riley, who was recently running Yahoo’s Europe, Africa and Middle East region.

It is not clear how Chief Product Officer Blake Irving fits in the possible new org, since much of the development could now move to the decentralized units.

Some current operational execs — such as service engineering and ops head David Dibble, CFO Tim Morse, and top lawyer Mike Callahan — are likely to continue to operate as before.

Thompson, along with consultants he has hired from the Boston Consulting Group, presented the possible plan in front of Yahoo’s senior execs on Tuesday. That was followed by more meetings with a wider range of top management yesterday, although Thompson was not as highly specific in these meetings.

In fact, according to a half-dozen sources, Thompson apparently grew somewhat testy in one of the gatherings, when asked if there was a strategy he was going to announce in more detail to the group.

(Dear Scott, these are very talented employees who love the company and who have been through the wringer and it’s not their fault that leadership has failed them, so it might be a good idea to treat them with as much respect as possible right now.)

More to come, obviously.

Earlier this week, Rich Riley — the nattily dressed SVP and managing director of Yahoo’s EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region — sent an email to his staff that he was stepping down from that top role at the company.

But, unlike other high-ranking execs who have departed the Silicon Valley Internet company of late, Riley wrote: “I sincerely hope to remain with Yahoo! once the transition is complete and am working with [CEO Scott Thompson] and team to find my next big challenge.”

Leave it to Rich to be novel! (My sincere hope is that he’ll be bringing those slim-cut Zegna blazers to Yahoo’s Sunnyvale HQ.)

Here’s the entire Riley goodbye-to-Europe email below:

Hey Team,

I wanted to quickly update you on my personal plans. After an amazing 4+ years in London and Geneva, my wife and I have decided that it’s time to bring our European adventure to a close and move on to our next phase back in the US. We plan to move by the end of the summer in time for the kids to start the school year. As a family, we can’t believe we are going to leave such an amazing place, but those timeless forces of being close to family have led us to the conclusion that it’s time for us to move back. Professionally, I will find it so hard to say goodbye to this amazing team and this impressive business that we’ve built together.

Over the past four years we’ve fundamentally turned around this region. We figured out how to grow revenue and be a leading seller of display advertising and are now taking share in nearly every market in which we operate. We figured out that we had to get onto global product platforms to compete and that transition is nearly complete and our audience metrics are at all-time highs and growing rapidly. We figured out that there were huge opportunities in expansion markets and the Middle East and have executed against them. But most impressively to me by far is the team that we have assembled. A team that from country to country is seen as among the strongest in the market and has the highest morale of any team at Yahoo! I am very proud of this team and will miss you most of all.

The reason for communicating this now is that we need to start the search for my successor. We will search internally and externally with a clear mandate to find an amazing leader that can take our great business to the next level and grow revenues to $1 billion and beyond … The future for the EMEA Region is going to be fantastic.

As for me, I sincerely hope to remain with Yahoo! once the transition is complete and am working with Scott and team to find my next big challenge.

Until then, I’m 100% focused as always and we’ll have plenty of chances to say goodbye. It has been a true honor to work with all of you.

Best,

Rich

Yahoo’s massive product unit is readying a major reorganization, which will include a new structure, a move that is being spearheaded by its Chief Product Officer, Blake Irving.

But the ground under Irving, as well as several of the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s top execs, is about to get shakier too, due to a wide range of changes now being plotted by newly installed CEO Scott Thompson.

While still in the early stages of formulation, sources said Thompson has been mulling bringing in a head of global advertising sales or revenue chief, as well as more top product execs, as he moves to initiate a plan to shake up Yahoo and also put his own stamp on the company.

Layoffs and possible wholesale abandonment of certain businesses Yahoo is currently in are likely to be parts of this larger plan.

Confused yet? So am I, but let’s sort through all the latest activity.

First, there’s the Yahoo product redo, which has been in the making for a while, well before Thompson arrived last month.

Under the new plan, which is described as “an evolution rather than blowing up the place,” Yahoo’s famously matrixed product unit could be split into three distinct areas: Monetization, which is expected to be headed by longtime exec Mark Morrissey; platform, with cloud dude Jay Rossiter in charge; and consumer-facing products, possibly in the hands of search kingpin Shashi Seth.

The idea behind the latest setup, presumably, is to spur innovation and make it easier for Yahoo to spit out products more quickly. Its recent Livestand tablet app, for example, was late to the game and continues to struggle to gain any real ground, said sources.

Overall, Yahoo still continues to lag behind other Internet rivals in a number of product arenas, for reasons that Thompson is delving into.

The way products are made got a long look-see this past week, in a day-long meeting that Thompson had with Yahoo’s top team execs. Thompson reportedly quizzed the group on its plans, and pressed it to look less at short-term features and maintenance than on finding the next great thing.

“I think it’s fair to say that Scott is wondering why Yahoo did not come up with innovations like Pinterest and Instagram,” said one person about hot new start-ups that are in the sweet spot of Yahoo’s business. “Or, at the very least, why it did not even try to buy them.”

That’s why Thompson, with the help of board members, including David Kenny, has been on the hunt for new talent for Yahoo. That includes a search that is on for a new head of marketing, too.

Thompson has been doing the same kind of assessment with Yahoo’s media and advertising execs, who include Americas head Ross Levinsohn, as well as Asia’s Rose Tsou, and Rich Riley, who heads its efforts in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Sources said he believes that Yahoo might need a head of global sales or a chief of revenue to better organize and align its key advertising business. Ad revenues now make up a bulk of Yahoo’s business.

As Thompson has said numerous times publicly since he came on board, he is seeking to diversify that revenue, focusing on new businesses and also goosing non-ad ones already performing well. In Asia, for example, Yahoo has a robust online commerce business in comparison to other regions.

“Yahoo has to slim down and focus in some ways and bulk up in others,” said another source.

Of course, all of this might be moot, depending on how activist shareholder Daniel Loeb, who is prepping his own frontal attack on making changes at Yahoo, decides to move. According to sources, Loeb is assembling his own slate and trying to garner support from other shareholders, in hopes of further improving the value of his more than five percent stake.

What form that will take is unclear, but it’s not completely friendly at the moment.

In addition, Yahoo execs and its board are trying to wrap up a deal to sell off parts of its Asian assets in Alibaba Group and Yahoo Japan, part of a massive arrangement that could bring many billions of dollars of assets and cash into the core company that is left.

Which could then make Yahoo more able to compete, and give Thompson a war chest to do so — or make it an even tastier treat for a wide range of outside investors looking for a deal.

Like I said: Confused yet?

A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment.

Orange said it plans to roll out the free service over the course of 2012 to customers in 20 countries, with access in the first countries launching early this year. The service will be available on any phone with an Orange SIM card and the ability to view the mobile Web, with no data plan required.

“In countries where access to information is not always readily available, we are making it simple and easy for our customers to use the world’s most comprehensive online encyclopedia,” Orange Executive VP Marc Rennard said in a statement. “It is the first partnership of this kind in the world where we are enabling customers to access Wikipedia without incurring any data charges.”

Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, said the partnership with Orange will give Wikipedia access to millions who have not had it.

“Wikipedia is an important service, a public good, and so we want people to be able to access it for free, regardless of what device they’re using,” Gardner said.

In November 2010, he left Silicon Valley to launch the online flash-sales shopping club MarkaVIP in Jordan, and in March opened centers in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. Shopping clubs require membership and offer sales at discounted prices for a limited period; flash sales are bargain offers that are available for a very limited time, sometimes only hours. By working with clothing companies that need to get rid of excess inventory, MarkaVIP offers thousands of designer-label fashions at bargain-basement prices.

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The disruption, which occurred at about 6 am ET, was still affecting users nearly three hours later, with no time given for a resolution.

“We are working to resolve an issue currently impacting some BlackBerry subscribers in Europe, Middle East and Africa,” Research In Motion said in a statement. “We’re investigating, and we apologise to our customers for any inconvenience caused while this is resolved.”

Another tough break for RIM, which endured a service disruption in Canada last month, and at least two fairly major outages in the U.K. and U.S. last year.

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, Calif., HQ.

As do Yahoos, I get most of the Friday emails she sends out, but I usually don’t bother to post them.

That said, I liked the can-do tone of this one, shades of Bartz early in her term, even in the face of a stock price that’s dropped almost eight percent this month to close at $14.69 on Friday.

(To be fair, the shares of Google are down by a little more in the same time, although its CEO Larry Page seems to prefer to remain holed up in his digital cave in Mountain View and lick his stock wounds.)

No matter, as Bartz writes, it’s nothing a little retail therapy can’t fix!

I myself am off on an international biking vacation in Ireland next week, so while I am gone, please enjoy Carol’s letter to Yahoos:

Last week was a crazy one -– Dubai and Milan in five days! You may not know it, but the Middle East and Italy are two of our hottest markets in the EMEA region (and I do mean hot — it was 114 Fahrenheit and very humid in Dubai — I thought I was going to melt!).

First on the itinerary was Dubai, where I met with government officials, advertisers, the media, and our awesome Yahoos there.

I kicked things off Monday with the Deputy Ruler of Dubai, Shaikh Maktoum Bin Mohammed Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum. Turns out he is a BIG Yahoo! fan. He told me that he’s on our sites every day to check the latest news and sports headlines. It makes sense — we’re huge in the Middle East and North Africa. Since we acquired Maktoob a year and a half ago, we’ve grown from 30 million to 53 million users. That’s impressive in a region with more than 70 million people online today.

We’re tops in entertainment with omg! Arabic, and with our women’s lifestyle site, Helwa. And we’re a strong #2 in News, thanks in part to our new Arabic homepage that launched six months ago. Already, it’s our fourth most popular homepage in the world — right behind the U.S., India and Taiwan. Meanwhile, Yahoo! is #1 in the Middle East and North Africa for display advertising with 40% market share.

Then on Wednesday it was off to Milan, where I visited with advertisers and our passionate Yahoos there. (I love that our Italian headquarters also happens to be located in one of the fashion capitals of the world — so convenient! An hour of retail therapy goes a long way).

We are winning it Italy. In a business review, our folks called themselves the Yahoo! “Italian Racing Team,” and I believe it. They’re firing on all cylinders. The country boasts some of the highest engagement numbers for us in the EU. We reach 66% of the online population in Italy. We’re top three in seven content categories, and #1 in four of them: Mail, News, Answers and Flickr. Plus, these #1 sites are growing faster than the market. And on the ad side, May was a record month for our display advertising in Italy — we’re taking share while growing revenue.

Throughout my trip to Italy and the Middle East, one thing came through loud and clear: Our local teams are able to execute and grow user engagement more quickly than ever before. This is thanks, in large part, to the great work of our Products org.

Take, for instance, our new Yahoo! Publishing Platform (aka LEGO). Our editors have put it to good use on our Italian Movies site. We’ve seen a 90% increase in page views, and a 60% increase in users. And that’s just in the first three weeks! This is exactly what we’ve been working so hard on for the past two years. We’ve completely re-architected our infrastructure, and it’s incredibly satisfying to see it pay off in so many parts of the world.

After all that fun, I headed back across the Atlantic and spent two good, solid days covering a lot of business in the Big Apple — press, investors, agencies and Yahoo! Sales leaders. Then it was back here to Sunnyvale for CEO staff meetings and a great “Coffee with Carol” with 30+ Yahoos.

I’m off to have a good weekend, hope you do too — especially you Dads on Father’s Day!

Carol

McAfee Inc., acquired last month by Intel Corp., has provided content-filtering software used by Internet-service providers in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, according to interviews with buyers and a regional reseller. Blue Coat Systems Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., has sold hardware and technology in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar that has been used in conjunction with McAfee’s Web-filtering software and sometimes to block websites on its own, according to interviews with people working at or with ISPs in the region.

A regulator in Bahrain, which uses McAfee’s SmartFilter product, says the government is planning to switch soon to technology from U.S.-based Palo Alto Networks Inc. It promises to give Bahrain more blocking options and make it harder for people to circumvent censoring.

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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.

Mrs. Clinton made her second major address on the Internet Tuesday and particularly cited the recent leaking of thousands of secret State Department cables by the Web site WikiLeaks as the type of abuses that need to be guarded against. She stressed that nations need to agree on common legal platforms to ensure the Internet isn’t used for theft, espionage and political repression.

But the former first lady hailed the role that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have played in organizing a recent wave of political protests that have targeted dictatorial regimes in the Middle East.

“Finding the proper measure for the Internet is critical because the qualities that make the Internet a force for unprecedented progress—its openness, its level effect, its reach and speed—also enable wrongdoing on an unprecedented scale,” Mrs. Clinton told a gathering at George Washington University.

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