It’s been a little over three years since I wrote this post (November 2007) predicting that Yamli will be acquired in about two years of its launch. Unfortunately, the 2008 financial meltdown hit everyone by surprise, and most VC and M&A activities since then have been recovering at a careful pace.

However, many signs of recovery are abound in the M&A world. In 2010, Google made six acquisitions, many in the mobile app arena. Meanwhile, Yamli has been steadily growing its profile. Nearly all the items on my wish list for Yamli (noted in the blog post) have been developed. Consequently, Yamli reported last week that approximately 2.5 million Arabic words are typed daily using its service.

Given the pace of recovery, and assuming Yamli continues to do all the right things, I believe Yamli will be looking at options by summer 2012.

Google has done it again!

Ofcourse, the title of the blog is not meant to be an accurate valuation.

The ‘innovation’ factor, while important, is not the only determinant of the worth of a new online service/software. When it comes to acquisitions, the value of a .com lies more in its reach (for advertising and revenue generation purposes), and that is mainly a function of the size of its users/subscriber base and their demographic, among other things.

I can list countless examples of dotcoms that did not introduce anything new, but were either (a) able to provide an existing service a little better/simpler than everyone else, or (b) capture a niche demographic earlier than everyone else. Some examples are in a previous comment on this post.

The April 28 ’08 issue of Canadian Business magazine had a story about a dotcom from British Columbia. In 2005, entrepreneur Lane Merrifield launched a site called ‘Club Penguin’, which is a virtual world where kids create penguin avatars to play and interact. Interactive virtual worlds are nothing new here, right? World of Warcraft, Sims, Second Life, etc.

By August 2007 (only two years after launch), the site had garnered 12 million users, and the Walt Disney Corporation bought it for $700 Million.

Where is the innovation? its a nice website offering a service out of a set of rules to convert English letters into Arabic prints, what else is great about it? don’t get me wrong I admire the effort, however I’m more into criticizing this blog’s title than anything else!

Oh, and have you checked http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic ?

It would be nice if a:

1- Transparent
2- Three-D
3- Arabic keyboard gets activated every time you click on the search field

When you start typing, it should show the keys being pressed, and you would be able to type faster than what is available in yamli. Especially for those users who CAN type Arabic but are not on a platform that enables Arabic. Or don’t have administrative privileges to enable Arabic support in their operating system.

Rational:

1- Transparent, so that it will immediately disappear when you leave the search field, and even while typing, you can still see your desktop. User friendly.

2- Three-D, so that way you can stretch it along the screen, much like the star-war introductory story-text, and that way you can actually have the keyboard occupy a smaller on small laptop screens.

3- It should be an Arabic keyboard, and added just as an add-on feature that can be enabled by the user him/herself.

The interface of yamli should also be a bit cleaner.

Otherwise, a nice effort overall.

Citigroup analysts are speculating that there is a 25% chance that Yahoo will hire Google to run its search operations in a very lucrative contract.

In the world of software, if someone can do what you are doing cheaper and better, the market will follow. When it comes to big businesss like Google, it is easier to buy complementary services instead of spending money to develop/improve their own. Specially when the service in question is for a niche market that is projected to grow significantly (Arabic Content and Search).

Just look at Orkut, Google’s attempt at a social networking platform. People are just not picking it up. And so rumors are now flying about a possible YouTube-ish offer to buy Facebook for $2.3 Billion.

Transliteration is not a new concept indeed. But, as shown with all the above examples, some platforms are better than others. Sometimes a number of factors combine just right to propel one service provider of an existing prodcut into being THE main destination for such product. That could be Yamli, or memac, or someone else. It all depends on the steps the creators are planning to take next.