Following the Opening Ceremony for the Arabnet 2012 Summit held in Beirut, an interesting panel on hot trends in web and mobile kicked off Thursday with TechCrunch editor MikeButcher, National Net Ventures CEO Rashid AlBallaa, Angel Investor Hussein Khanji, CMEA’s Saad Khan and Hummingbird Venture’s Pamir Gelenbe.

According to AlBallaa, mobile youtube in Saudi Arabua is the second worldwide. “The Middle East market is hugely growing and most of start-ups tend to evolve around entertainment or e-commerce, entertainment because a huge percentage of the population in the Middle East is young.”

Sony on Wednesday brought together blockbuster console title action and popular free-to-play style gaming in its Home online community for PlayStation 3 users.

Sony Computer Entertainment America rolled out "Cutthroats: Battle for Black Powder Cove," which lets as many as 24 people at a time serve as gunners or captains of rival pirate ships out to sink one another in timed sessions.

Google and Oracle continued legal wrangling in a dimming effort to reach a deal to avoid facing off before jurors in a patent case trial.

The trial remained set to start next month in a San Francisco federal court after Oracle spurned a proposal that Google pay about $3 million in damages and potentially cut the company in for less than a percent of Android revenue.

Facebook will make its stock market debut in May with a record-setting initial public offering of shares, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

The world's leading online social network has stopped selling shares on the secondary market in order to get a precise count of investors, the Journal said, citing unnamed sources.

Google on Wednesday began letting people get monthly reports summarizing what they have been up to at the Internet titan's free online services.

A freshly-added feature keeps people posted on patterns at Gmail, YouTube, online search and other Google venues visited while signed into their user accounts with the California-based company.

The ArabNet Digital Summit kicked off on Tuesday at the Metropolitan Hotel in Beirut. The five day summit will tackle the latest in web and mobile with panels hosting top executives from the digital sector, numerous hands on workshops covering the hottest platforms in addition to highlighting the 20 most anticipated startups and ideas with the Ideathon and Startup Demo competitions.

Arabnet introduced a new day this year to its summit, the Industry Day. The day focuses on the way that web and mobile are transforming traditional industries, including healthcare, banking, travel, education, and government. Professionals from across the spectrum were able to gain a better understanding of the technological future of their industry and learn about ways to enhance their business and stay competitive.

Struggling cellphone maker Nokia Corp. launched its first smartphone for China on Wednesday, looking to the world's biggest mobile market to help drive its 1-year-old turnaround effort.

Nokia said its Lumia 800C will be supported by China Telecom Ltd., one of the country's three major state-owned carriers.

Facebook has warned potential investors that a patent lawsuit against the company by Internet pioneer Yahoo! could deliver a significant blow to its business.

The world's leading online social network amended initial public offering (IPO) paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to include the Yahoo! case among risks to the company's bottom line.

Apple Wednesday offered to refund Australian customers who felt misled by advertising about the 4G capability of its new iPad, which can only access the ultra-fast wireless network in North America.

Apple's problems in Australia could have wider repercussions in markets where the US company also advertises the iPad as featuring 4G, despite those countries having an incompatible network, or no 4G networks yet.

From mosques, to homes and streets, Pakistanis are increasingly seeing the light and realizing that year-round sun may be a cheap if partial answer to an enormous energy crisis.

"It's the best thing I bought this winter," says Sardar Azam, a former civil servant retired to a river-side home in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, showing off his water-heating solar geyser installed on the terrace.