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Emmar In Pakistan
07 June, 2006
Emaar announces new developments in Pakistan
Posted: 01-06-2006 , 06:13 GMT
Emaar
Properties, the leading property developer, has announced three real
estate developments in the cities of Islamabad and Karachi in Pakistan.
The projects, with a total investment of AED 8.8 billion (US$2.4
billion), will include a series of master planned communities that will set new benchmarks in commercial, residential and retail property within Pakistan.
The nation’s capital, Islamabad, is home to
two Emaar Pakistan projects: the Highlands and Canyon Views. With 1,500
acres between them the Islamabad communities offer 9,000 luxury
single-family town homes and villas in a range of architectural styles with easy access to amenities including retail centres, community club houses, parks, lakes, schools and mosques.
Karachi will be home to Crescent Bay, a
75-acre development featuring high- and mid-rise towers for residential
and commercial use, a shopping centre and five-star beachfront hotel.
The towers will contain approximately 4,000 residential apartments.
Mohamed Ali Alabbar, Chairman, Emaar Properties said
Pakistan represented a vital link in Emaar’s global and regional plans.
“These current projects are only a small and initial part of our
commitment to providing world-class living and infrastructure in
Pakistan,
Thirty-five percent of the packaged software installed on personal computers (PC) worldwide in 2005 was illegal, amounting to $34 billion in global losses due to software piracy.
However, some improvements in a number of markets indicate education, enforcement and policy efforts are beginning to pay off in emerging economies such as China, Russia and India and in Central/Eastern Europe and the Middle East & Africa.
These are among the findings of an annual global PC software piracy study commissioned by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and conducted commissioned by IDC, the information technology (IT) industry’s leading global market research and forecasting firm.
In the first quarter of 2006,
Israeli exports to Arab countries rose 35% as opposed to the same
period last year, for a total of $57 million, revealed Yechiel Assia,
Director General of the Israel Export & International Cooperation
Institute. The Export Institute announced that these figures do not
include indirect exports to Arab states via third-party countries –
amounting to some $3 million in Q106 – in the form of joint projects
between Israel and Arab companies.
According to Assia, 27 Israeli firms are currently
exporting to Iraq, mainly to the American army (telecommunications
equipment, machinery and gear). These companies exported a volume of
$320,000 to Iraq in the first quarter of the year, comprising a 46%
increase over the corresponding period last year. In 2005, all exports
to Iraq peaked at $780,000.
The Director General of the Israeli Export Institute
added that 1,343 Israeli exporters are currently active in Jordan – a
25% decline compared to 2005. The Export Institute’s data analysis
indicates that exports to Jordan decreased in the first quarter of this
year by 6% compared to the same period last year, with a total of $26.5
million. Most of the exports are lumber, furniture, paper and printed
matter, machinery and equipment.
Assia stated that last year saw a 110% rise in the
number of Israeli exporters working with Egypt, for a current total of
257. In the first quarter of this year, industrial exports to Egypt
grew 148.5% compared to the same period in 2005, for a total of $26.5
million. Most of the exports consisted of textiles, clothing, etc.,
chemicals and refined fuel.
The Export Institute data also indicates that 46
Israeli exporters are currently active in Morocco, say a 64% rise over
2005, and that in the first quarter of the year exports to Morocco went
up by 23.5% for a total of $2 million. Exports to Tunisia in Q106
dropped 16% compared to the same period last year, totaling $0.5
million.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Yahoo Inc. (YHOO)'s
Web site is unveiling a new look Tuesday as the Internet powerhouse
strives to remain the world's most popular online destination and
strengthen its advertising appeal.
The overhaul marks the first facelift to Yahoo's home page since September 2004.
The
redesigned page, initially available in the United States and Europe at
, includes more interactive features that reduce the need to click
through to other pages to review the weather, check e-mail, listen to
music or monitor local traffic conditions.http://www.yahoo.com/preview
Another
addition, called "Yahoo Pulse," offers recommendations and insights
about cultural trends culled from the Web site's 402 million users
worldwide.
Yahoo is making the upgrade as it battles for traffic with longtime rivals MSN, AOL and Google Inc. (GOOG) while also trying to fend off an intensifying threat posed by the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace.com.
"Our goal
is to have the best page on the Internet," said Dan Rosensweig, Yahoo's
chief operating officer. "We feel like this (redesign) does something
great for everybody."
Sunnyvale,
Calif.-based Yahoo regards the latest changes as the most dramatic
renovations made to its front page since the site's 1994 debut as a
bare-bones directory developed by Stanford University students Jerry
Yang and David Filo.
The new
look is long overdue, said Jupiter Research analyst David Card. "The
site was getting pretty long in the tooth and looking pretty old
fashioned," he said. "Now, it looks clean, crisp and modern."
Even so,
Card believes Yahoo's upgrades won't impress younger, cutting-edge Web
surfers who are spending an increasing amount of time hanging out at
MySpace.com. "They didn't really push the envelope very hard."
The most
notable changes will allow Yahoo users to pull down interactive menus
giving them snapshots of weather, traffic and movie information as well
as providing instant access to the site's popular e-mail, instant
messaging and music services.
Like other
widely visited Web sites, Yahoo must balance its desire to keep pace
with the Internet's constantly shifting trends with the recognition
that changing things too dramatically might alienate a large number of
users comfortable with the status quo.
Yahoo
settled on the final redesign, code-named "Spirit," after months of
testing with selected users. As another precaution, the new look won't
show up as the default page of Yahoo.com for several more months.
"Any time
you touch the most visited page on the Internet, it's going to feel
like a big change and we think this is a really big change," Rosensweig
said.
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)'s MSN and Time Warner Inc. (TWX)'s AOL, the two most visited Web sites after Yahoo, also have tweaked their looks during the past year.
Although
Google still provides a page featuring little else than its
Internet-leading search engine, it also offers an option that enables
users to customize the home page to suit their personal tastes.
In April,
Yahoo led the pack with 105.4 million unique U.S. visitors, an 11
percent increase from last year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings Inc. (NTRT)
MSN ranked second with 92.8 million visitors, a 6 percent increase from
last year, followed closed by Google, whose traffic surged 27 percent
during the past year to 92.1 million. AOL's traffic remained flat at
70.4 million, Nielsen/NetRatings said.
Meanwhile,
MySpace's traffic - consisting mostly of teens and young adults - has
more than quadrupled during the past year to 38.4 million U.S.
visitors. What's more, MySpace's visitors viewed a total of 19 billion
pages on the site in April, surpassing Google (11.9 billion pages), MSN
(11.5 billion pages) and AOL (6.8 billion pages).
Yahoo
remains the Web's most viewed site, serving up 31.2 billion pages in
April, but some analysts believe MySpace's rapid growth foreshadows a
changing of the guard.
"The bar keeps getting raised," said Gartner Inc. (IT) analyst Mike McGuire. "I think you are going to see constant tweaking because of sites like MySpace."
Remaining
the most trafficked and viewed Web site is important to Yahoo because
those measures are critical to the advertisers that provide the company
with most of its profits.
As it is,
Yahoo's earnings haven't been growing rapidly as Google's - a factor
that has weighed on Yahoo's stock price, which has dropped by 21
percent so far this year. Meanwhile, Google's stock price has declined
by 9 percent.
Yahoo's
shares gained 22 cents to close Monday at $31.03 on the Nasdaq Stock
Market, where Google's shares rose $2.07 to finish at $376.20.
UAE authorities pledge to step up anti-piracy drive ahead of annual software piracy study release
14 May, 2006
Posted: 13-05-2006 , 18:20 GMT
The
UAE authorities have announced stepping up of efforts to bring down
software piracy levels in the country by reinforcing their association
with Business Software Alliance (BSA), the organization dedicated to
promoting a safe and legal digital world, with a view to effectively
safeguard the integrity of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR).
The proposed measures include organizing more
awareness campaigns to create better understanding of the detrimental
impact of software piracy, and ensuring rigorous enforcement of IPR and
copyright laws. The move comes just weeks ahead of the release of the
annual worldwide piracy figures by IDC (International Data
Corporation), the IT industry’s leading global market research and forecasting firm.
“Looking at the most developed and progressive
economies in the world, one can find that they all have creditable
records in keeping piracy under check and that stringent enforcement of
IPR laws has been a major contributing factor to the success they have
achieved. For UAE to achieve similar global profile it is essential
that it steps up its drive against piracy, especially in light of the
globalization efforts and the country’s accession to the WTO regime,
HP Middle East, the region’s largest technology
and solutions provider, has conducted two successful seminars on IT
Services Management (ITSM) in Saudi Arabia, attended by enterprise
customers from across the Kingdom. The seminars, held in Riyadh on 25th
April and Khobar on 30th April were designed to help IT decision makers
in large Saudi companies understand how ITSM technology can deliver
lower cost, flexible, and responsive IT infrastructures, able to adapt to change and deal with business realities.
Following global trends, enterprises in Saudi Arabia are today completely dependent on information technology
for business success. IT service readiness can therefore have
significant business consequences and yet many Saudi companies are
ill-equipped to deal with business realities.
“Despite the continued investment in technology by
the Saudi market, many large companies are actually not ready to deal
with business realities, relying on outdated organisational structures,
management systems, processes and tools,
ATI Techologies Inc. names Almasa IT Distribution Middle East region’s best distributor
14 May, 2006
Posted: 09-05-2006 , 12:28 GMT
A
leading IT distribution house in the region with offices across the
Middle East, Almasa IT Distribution achieved the highest volume sales
for ATI Middle East and Africa (MEA), contributing to a significant
share of ATI’s overall revenue in the region from the sale of discrete
graphics solutions in 2005.
“We are very proud to receive this award from ATI Technologies
as it reflects not only our commitment to channel partners and vendors,
but also our continuously approach to drive volume sales through
innovative sales and marketing ideas,
Dubai
World Central – a massive, multi-phase development centred around what
will be the world’s largest international airport – Tuesday made urban
planning history when the final master-plan and branding of the 140 square kilometre city, almost twice the size of Hong Kong Island, was unveiled at Arabian Traveltravel and tourism exhibition. Market 2006 – the Middle East’s premier
The self-sustaining development at Jebel Ali,
some 40 kilometres south of Dubai city centre, includes Dubai World
Central International Airport (JXB) – which when complete will be the
world’s largest with a capacity equal to that currently of Chicago’s
O’Hare and London’s Heathrow – and a cluster of specialised zones.
Dubai World Central will be a new city where eventually some 750,000
people will live and work – that’s more than the present population of
Frankfurt and almost that of Stockholm. The master plan, now refined,
originally had a working title of Jebel Ali Airport City.
It is designed to support Dubai’s aviation, tourism,
commercial and logistics requirements until 2050 and infrastructure
costs alone will run to $33 billion.
At the heart of Dubai World Central is Dubai World
Central International Airport (JXB) – which will be the world’s largest
passenger and cargo hub with a design capacity of over 12 million tons
of cargo a year and in excess of 120 million passengers annually and
capable of handling all new generation aircraft, including the A380
super jumbo.
This new facility will be 10 times the size of the
current Dubai International Airport and Dubai Cargo Village combined.
Its passenger capacity of over 120 million passengers a year can be
judged in context alongside the world’s busiest airport Atlanta which
in 2004, for which the latest figures are available, handled 83.5
million passengers.
Cisco Systems launches office in Jordan and speaks to decision makers at ‘Cisco Expo 2006’
13 May, 2006
Cisco Systems will provide
organizations in Jordan a look at the future of integrated intelligent
networking solutions, at this year’s Cisco Expo 2006. The show will be
held in the country on 3rd May. Cisco Expo is an annual forum where
Cisco Systems and its partners share their vision, expertise and
showcase their solutions to business decision makers, to give them an
insight into how Cisco’s technology can help them transform their businesses. Cisco Systems has also announced the launch of its office in Amman.
Commenting on Cisco’s direct operations in the
Kingdom, Yasser El Kady, Senior Director, Middle East and Africa, said,
“Cisco’s new office in Amman will offer on-ground support and services
to the growing number of clients and partners in Jordan. Cisco’s direct
operations will also provide strategic consultancy and smart business
solutions to establishments operating in the country.
Accor aims at becoming largest hotel group in Middle East
13 May, 2006
Accor, one of the world’s largest hotel and services groups, has confirmed its Middle East strategy for the next three years at Arabian Travel Market with the company expected to increase its operations from 18 to 58 hotels by the end of 2009.
The number of new properties set to open over the
next 36 months will increase total capacity from 3,527 to 16,239 keys,
representing a growth of 360% in 3 years across Accor’s Middle East portfolio in the GCC, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Yemen.
Speaking at a press conference, Accor
management outlined the regional strategy for 2006–2009. The
comprehensive plan incorporates 16 new property contracts currently
under final contract negotiation. Together with the 18 existing
properties and 24 hotels currently under construction, this will bring
their product portfolio to 58 hotels by 2009.
Christophe Landais, Managing Director for Accor
Middle East said: “Our objective is to be the leading hotel group in
the region to offer a truly diversified portfolio of hotel brands. With
the support of our regional partners and investors, we are delighted to
be able to announce the commitment of major new projects over the next
three years across the Sofitel, Novotel, Ibis, Mercure and Suite hotel
brands.
Dubai Ports Authority announces major expansion and modernization of Al Hamriyah Port
13 May, 2006
Posted: 03-05-2006 , 07:41 GMT
Dubai
Ports Authority has announced major expansion and modernization of the
Al Hamriyah Port in Dubai, in line with its strategy to ensure
continual development of all ports under its management in the UAE, in
order to meet the rapid growth in domestic and regional trade. The
project will lead to increased storage and general cargo capacity at
the Al Hamriyah Port.
The expansion project involves development and
expansion of three quays at the port, including augmentation of the
commercial quay by 2.5 km in two phases. Major modernization programs
have been envisioned for the adjacent fishing port, which includes
refurbishment of the port’s quay to allow for smoother traffic flow, as
well as the setting up of a boat-building unit and a multi-storied
office building. In addition, the project includes construction of a
quay exclusively for yachts.
The new project will cover every aspect of
operations at the Al Hamriyah Port, and is designed to enhance the
port’s role as a major re-exporting hub, especially within the UAE, by
increasing its capacity to cater to the requirements of small and
medium ships and by leveraging its strategic location at the heart of
Dubai.
Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, Executive Chairman of
PCFC, said, “The move to expand and modernize Al Hamriyah Port follows
the directive of H.H. Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum in this
regard. This project also comes in line with the strategy of DP World
to ensure continual development of all its ports in the UAE.
Dubai Ports Authority announces major expansion and modernization of Al Hamriyah Port
13 May, 2006
Posted: 03-05-2006 , 07:41 GMT
Dubai
Ports Authority has announced major expansion and modernization of the
Al Hamriyah Port in Dubai, in line with its strategy to ensure
continual development of all ports under its management in the UAE, in
order to meet the rapid growth in domestic and regional trade. The
project will lead to increased storage and general cargo capacity at
the Al Hamriyah Port.
The expansion project involves development and
expansion of three quays at the port, including augmentation of the
commercial quay by 2.5 km in two phases. Major modernization programs
have been envisioned for the adjacent fishing port, which includes
refurbishment of the port’s quay to allow for smoother traffic flow, as
well as the setting up of a boat-building unit and a multi-storied
office building. In addition, the project includes construction of a
quay exclusively for yachts.
The new project will cover every aspect of
operations at the Al Hamriyah Port, and is designed to enhance the
port’s role as a major re-exporting hub, especially within the UAE, by
increasing its capacity to cater to the requirements of small and
medium ships and by leveraging its strategic location at the heart of
Dubai.
Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, Executive Chairman of
PCFC, said, “The move to expand and modernize Al Hamriyah Port follows
the directive of H.H. Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum in this
regard. This project also comes in line with the strategy of DP World
to ensure continual development of all its ports in the UAE.
International Investment Bank
(IIB), a globally focused investment bank based in Bahrain, today
announced the creation of a new real estate development company for
investment in the Saudi Arabian real estate market. To be based in
Saudi Arabia, and with an authorized capital of SR400million (more than
US$100 million), the planned entity will seek to invest some SR2
billion (US$533 million) in the fast-developing Saudi Arabian property
sector over the next three years.
In launching the venture, IIB has partnered with the
Islamic Corporation for Development of the Private Sector (ICD, a
multilateral investment affiliate of the Islamic Development Bank) and
the Saudi Economic and Development Company (SEDCO), a Saudi-based
investment group. Together, IIB and its two partners will work to
identify and invite subscription from additional strategic investors
and partners that can add value and further financial and operating
strength to the company.
Commenting on the announcement, IIB’s Chief
Executive Officer, Aabed Al Zeera, said, “We are pleased to launch this
new venture in conjunction with ICD and SEDCO, with whom we continue to
partner in the creation of compelling and well diversified investment
opportunities across multiple industry sectors, asset classes and
geographic locations.
“Our ongoing relationships with these firms and our
work together on a number of recent transactions reflects IIB’s belief
that success is best achieved through long-lasting partnerships. We are
confident that in joining yet again with ICD and SEDCO, we have created
another exciting new opportunity that will yield positive results. The
Saudi Arabian real estate market offers strong potential for growth and
superior returns and we are confident that in working with the right
partners, we are well positioned to benefit from current positive
trends. These include the further opening of the market to private and
foreign investment as well as the adoption of regulations that are
creating a more transparent investment climate.
Lenovo, the third largest computing
company in the world, today announced the opening of its two
representative offices in Saudi Arabia to take its local customer
service and support to a higher level. The new Lenovo offices in the
Kingdom will be located in Riyadh and Jeddah.
“The move to set up offices in Saudi Arabia
aims to support Lenovo’s growth plans and to add value to its products
and services in the country. Saudi consumers and corporate users are
long-standing Lenovo customers, as they are familiar with the
ThinkCenter desktops
and ThinkPad notebooks. This milestone coincides also with the launch
of the new Lenovo-branded products (Lenovo 3000), which debuted at
GITEX Riyadh. Local presence in the Kingdom will enhance levels of
customer service, and help in driving the PC penetration in this
largely untapped market,
A
leading IT distribution house in the region with offices across the
Middle East, Almasa IT Distribution achieved the highest volume sales
for ATI Middle East and Africa (MEA), contributing to a significant
share of ATI’s overall revenue in the region from the sale of discrete
graphics solutions in 2005.
Dubai
Ports Authority has announced major expansion and modernization of the
Al Hamriyah Port in Dubai, in line with its strategy to ensure
continual development of all ports under its management in the UAE, in
order to meet the rapid growth in domestic and regional trade. The
project will lead to increased storage and general cargo capacity at
the Al Hamriyah Port.