Nigeria Content Online

The further
integration of Arabic language capabilities in internet and other
technological architecture will grant millions access to the digital
world, Microsoft and Google executives said.

As devices and
applications become more ubiquitous in less developed countries, their
content will grow and an embryonic e-economy should flourish, they said.

“(Microsoft CEO)
Steve Ballmer and I a few years ago talked and believed Arabic would be
an increasingly important language,” said Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s
chief research and strategy officer. “And yet, because of the way the
internet was evolving, it wasn’t a language that was getting a lot of
use.”

Of Arabic content

But while Arab
world internet use since 2000 has grown faster than anywhere else and
access costs have shrunk, content still punches below its weight and ad
spending remains tiny.

Arabic content is less than 1 percent of world totals though speakers constituting 5 percent of the global population.

The Arabic portal
of online encyclopedia Wikipedia carries less words than its Catalan
site, Google’s regional marketing manager Wael Ghonim said.

“There is a lot of
Arabic content but it is not well structured,” he said. “We want more
structured content. We want more of the professional, niche sites, more
businesses. One of our biggest missions is to enable Arabic users to
find the right tools to enrich Arabic content. It would be great to see
more e-commerce in the region, more publishers, more news sites. We are
committed to help them.”

Asked how Google
could aid such regional growth, Mr. Ghonim said: “We have a very
ambitious plan in the next few months, we are working on many
initiatives.” He did not elaborate.

Regional spending
on online advertising was around $90 million in 2009, up from $66.5
million in 2008 and $38 million in 2007 but still miniscule compared to
Britain’s $5.3 billion.

Mr. Ghonim said
Arabic speakers have historically engaged in poorly organised and
difficult to archive forums, citing a message board used by 400,000
teachers in Saudi Arabia.

Both Google and Microsoft place Arabic in their top ten languages in need of prioritised attention.

Microsoft’s Mundie
was visiting the Cairo Microsoft Innovation Centre, a regional hub
launched in 2006 that released Windows extension Maren, which converts
Arabic written in Roman characters into Arabic script. It is
Microsoft’s second most popular service by page views after Internet
Explorer 8.

Web addresses and mobile access

Egypt and Saudi
Arabia registered the first domain names written in the right-to-left
Arabic script late last year, after global internet regulator ICANN
voted to allow non-Latin script to be used in web addresses in November.

In Egypt, internet access is becoming cheaper and the use of internet on mobile devices is blossoming.

Egypt plans a $1 billion upgrade to its broadband capacity over four years to quadruple penetration to 20 percent.

“The next few million Egyptian internet users will be people who don’t really speak English,” Mr. Ghonim said.

Such users will
likely not foray deeply into the internet’s marketplace initially, but
will no longer be hindering from creating part of the fabric of the web
by language constraints.

“Think of the guy
running a very small one-stop shop in (Nile delta industrial city)
Mahalla,” Ghonim said. “You should facilitate for him a complete
experience in Arabic, from the way he registers his domain to finding a
hosting company to communicating to his customers.”

Microsoft’s Mr. Mundie said the Arab world was well-placed to skip PC-dominated use and go straight to mobile internet.

“The arrival of a
very low cost form of computing coupled to the mobile network creates
an alternative entry point into the world of computing and internet
usage,” he added.