YallaStartup - one to keep your eyes on

[ Habib Hadad, the Lebanese entrepreneur ]

behind

and general darling of the Arab startup community, has just told me about

, a new project he is working on.

More details will come soon, but in short, Habib has put together a team of mentors and advisors who will support new tech ventures coming out of the Arab world. If you got to the site right now, you can register to find out more. Working together on the project are

[ Elie Khoury, the founder of Woopra ]

, and

[ Sami Shalabi ]

, who founded a mobile applications company called Zingku

[ which was acquired by Google in 2007. ]

One thing that we all know is

[ seriously lacking in the Arab startup scene is the support structures ]

. The most obvious ones are venture capitalists and incubators, but equally important are the less institutional things, entrepreneur networks, democamps, programs like Y Combinator and Seedcamp, angel networks etc. Its cool to see things like YallaStartup emerging not from government policy or corporate PR, but from some of the success stories of the community.