AP Photo | J. Scott Applewhite)

By David Alexander | Reuters | April 26, 2010

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama launched a new effort on Monday to build business and social ties to the Muslim world, but analysts said the need for progress on big issues like Middle East peace would overshadow the initiative.

Obama hosted a two-day Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship that brought together about 250 successful entrepreneurs from more than 50 countries, most with large Muslim populations, fulfilling a pledge he made in his Cairo speech to the Islamic world last June.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke opened the gathering by challenging the entrepreneurs to take “the tremendous success that all of you have had individually and expand it throughout the Islamic world.”

Obama will address the summit at the end of the first day to underscore his commitment to “deepening our engagement around the world with Muslim-majority communities,” Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said.

While the summit was widely viewed as a positive step that demonstrated follow-through on the Cairo speech, analysts said Obama ultimately would be judged on his handling of key issues in the Muslim world — the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Iran’s nuclear program and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“In some ways Cairo is not going to be fulfilled until you get grander solutions to some of the big geopolitical problems,” said Juan Zarate, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and an ex-deputy national security adviser to former President George W. Bush.

“The president is going to be judged by his ability to move those big issues much more so than whether or not he hosts a conference at the White House,” he said.

Obama has struggled to advance many of those issues. His effort to revive the Middle East peace process has been hampered by Israeli settlement activity, and his attempts to engage Iran over its nuclear program have been rebuffed.

SENIOR OFFICIALS, PRIVATE EXPERTS

In addition to Locke, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and other senior U.S. officials were participating in sessions alongside private sector experts like Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus and Arif Naqvi, head of Abraaj Capital, the largest private equity firm in the Middle East.

The aim was to bring together successful entrepreneurs from different countries, venture capitalists, development bankers and other business experts to discuss ideas and share experiences with a view toward creating support networks that would help promote development in the region.

Yang, in a luncheon address, said entrepreneurs needed an entire ecosystem to flourish, including education, capital and research and development. He said he saw increasing signs of a willingness in the Middle East to support entrepreneurs, noting Yahoo’s recent acquisition of the Arabic-language email service Maktoob.

The White House has urged groups outside the government to take advantage of the summit by organizing related events. That has spawned more than 30 other sessions by groups such as the National U.S.-Arab Chamber of Commerce, the Arab Empowerment Initiative and the Middle East Youth Initiative at the Brookings Institution.

Observers and participants said the success of the event ultimately depended on whether it produced concrete results — financial and otherwise — after it ended.

“What kind of networks does it establish? What kinds of funds will come out of it? What kind of … concrete recommendations for legal reforms that need to take place in certain countries?” said Ehaab Abdou of the Middle East Youth Initiative, which is participating in an event on using entrepreneurial techniques to address social challenges.

Obama planned to announce some new financing to support entrepreneurship, but administration officials made clear the government wants to be seen not as a funder but as a catalyst bringing together entrepreneurs with potential investors.

Rajiv Shah, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, announced 13 partnerships aimed at supporting entrepreneurs in the Muslim world with education and programs to encourage market opportunities and financing.

(Additional reporting by Diane Bartz, Editing by Paul Simao and Cynthia Osterman)

Photo by Michael Samway

from Yodel Anecdotal

While industry analysts estimate that about 1.6 billion people are on the Internet today, this still leaves three out of every four people on this planet without access.

This Sunday, at the Internet Governance Forum’s annual meeting, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang delivered a keynote address to discuss the impact of the Internet on people’s lives, the need to get the next billion people online and the importance of providing those next billion–in emerging markets and beyond–with locally relevant content and communications tools.

“The Internet isn’t just about getting as many people online as possible,” said Jerry Yang. “But making sure that once they’re online, they have something productive to do, something to gain, something meaningful to experience.”

The IGF meeting took place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, and you can watch the full opening session and keynotes here.  Jerry’s speech starts at about 59 minutes into the opening session, directly after Tim Berners-Lee.

In addition to the IGF keynote, Jerry is meeting with customers, employees and both local and U.S. government officials while in the region.

Yahoo! recently closed the acquisition of Maktoob, the largest Arabic-language Internet site.  According to the World Bank, there are more than 320 million Arabic speakers worldwide, while less than one per cent of all online content is in Arabic.  The partnership between Maktoob and Yahoo! aims to strengthen and support Arabic content on the Internet, adapting current products to the Arabic language while also working with local developers to create new and compelling products.

Businessweek, August 26, 2009

On the pages of Arabic-language Web site Bentelhalal, men and women from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other parts of the Middle East and North Africa list personal details and describe the qualities they’re looking for in a mate, such as “polite,” “stylish,” and “God-fearing.” It’s reminiscent of an American dating site, except for one big twist: All of these singles are ready to marry.

Bentelhalal is one popular site within Maktoob, the large Jordanian Internet property Yahoo! (YHOO) said it was acquiring on Aug. 25 for what the Web site TechCrunch reported to be $85 million. It’s also a sign that Yahoo, which trades in tech news and celebrity gossip to assemble its audience at home, has entered a different world.

The purchase gives Yahoo command of one of the most visited online news portals in the Arab world, with business, finance, games, blogging, and other sites that reach an estimated 16.5 million people. Yahoo says it will translate its home page, e-mail, and instant messaging services into Arabic but plans to keep Maktoob’s local flavor mostly intact.

While rivals Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) have waded cautiously into the emerging Middle East, Yahoo will be the first major Internet company from the West to run a full online content business in the region. How the company navigates the cultural and legal norms of the Arab world will be watched closely by competitors back home. So will its approach to Internet censorship.

Maktoob: Supported by Online Ads

The relatively tiny market for online ads in Arab countries has companies stepping carefully into the market. Microsoft partners with an Egyptian ISP for its MSN Arabia site, and Google offers an Arabic-language version of its search engine. But neither has entered the Middle East with as much conviction as Yahoo. “Many of the emerging markets are very similar. You have nascent penetration of online users and ad dollars,” says Keith Nilsson, Yahoo’s senior vice-president for emerging markets. “The Middle East is unique because you have a contiguous language which a very large population speaks—one of the reasons we were interested in this acquisition.”

The market for online advertising and transactions in the Middle East may be tiny by Silicon Valley standards, but experts say the potential is huge. Maktoob is largely supported by online ads, which are expected to make up a $142 million market among Arabic-speaking countries by 2011, according to Dubai-based Madar Research.

“The Arab citizen is hungry for local content in their local language, and this is something that has enormous potential” for Internet companies, says Soumitra Dutta, a professor of business and technology at Paris business school INSEAD. Dutta says the Middle East has improved its technology competitiveness faster than any region in the world over the past five years, according to a study he conducted with researchers from the World Economic Forum. Technology companies that include Cisco Systems (CSCO) and SAP (SAP) are seeing fast growth in the region, and Cisco has been investing aggressively there.

Yahoo sees its success in the region dependent on catering to local markets. “We have to have a team in place that understands the nuances between each country,” says Nilsson. While Maktoob currently has a sales force in five countries, Nilsson says the plan is to develop local sales forces in all countries the site reaches.

“Political Filtering” in the Region

As it expands to the Middle East, Yahoo is taking pains to avoid the kinds of government complications it has encountered in Asia. In 2004 the company was criticized for providing information to the Chinese government that critics say led to a 10-year prison sentence for journalist Shi Tao. Since then, Yahoo has helped form the Global Network Initiative, a symposium of Web companies and advocacy groups that share advice about dealing with foreign governmental requests. So far, the efforts appear to be paying off in Vietnam, where the company is expanding despite government restrictions on blogging and other online activities.

The Arab world will be another test. A March report from Paris-based Reporters Without Borders listed a number of regional states—including Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria—on its annual list of countries it considers “enemies” of the Internet for jailing bloggers and otherwise preventing free speech on the Web. “Political filtering is strong in the region,” says Rob Faris, research director for Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Yahoo says it plans to abide by local laws while operating Maktoob but will also protect users’ freedom of speech. Yahoo Deputy General Counsel Michael Samway says when the company was performing its due diligence, it studied “the potential intersection points with human-rights challenges.”

One cautionary measure was already in place: Maktoob keeps its users’ private information stored on servers “outside the region,” which would prevent them from being subject to local governments’ demands.