Some early disclosure here: and are two old friends from Cairo. Mustafa was one of the first people I ever met when I moved to Egypt almost five years ago, and Salman is a member of an exclusive club - about 25 members - who can say with all honesty that they have been my housemate and survived to tell the tale. Both of them now work at , an Egyptian technology company that has developed a pretty , and is working on a bunch of other cool projects. Salman contacted me today to let me know that his new project, (Egyptian slang Arabic meaning, roughly, "I'll tell you something...") is now online and in the wild. It works like an Arabic version of , with one pretty interesting kink - users can vote a story up or down, but the front page stories - which would be the most popular ones, in the Digg universe - are based on the intensity (Salman calls it the "velocity") of the votes, not the popularity. So a story with a thousand negative votes will make it to the front page, not for its popularity among users, but for the intensity of their feelings about it. Seems like an worthwhile experiment, especially in the Middle East, where everybody loves a good argument. And last week Mustafa had his first iPhone application go live on the iTunes App Store. is a nice clean little . I'm not sure exactly how many Middle Eastern iPhone developers are out there with their apps on the store - just getting registered takes actual paperwork and can apparently be quite a hassle for people in this part of the world. So congrats to Mustafa, and he says we can expect more apps from him in the coming months.