Dubai: In a bid to attract a wider audience across its network, Yahoo! Maktoob has acquired a licence to Yamli’s transliteration technology that allows users to type Arabic without an Arabic keyboard.

Yahoo! Maktoob will focus on developing solutions tailored for the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region and will develop the technology with a view to boosting advertising revenue, Ahmad Nassef, Yahoo! Maktoob vice-president and managing director, said.

Yamli’s technology is based on a real-time transliteration engine which converts words typed with Latin characters into their Arabic equivalent.

Yahoo! Maktoob’s product is called ‘3arrebni’ (Arabise me).

“When looking at opportunities, we seek innovations that we expect to add significant value to our offering, and Yamli, with its technology that brings exceptional accuracy and seamless usability, was a natural fit,” Nassef said.

Nassef said: “We are excited about how the digital advertising market is going and things are looking positive amid cautious and we expect to record the same revenues as last year at 30 per cent.”

He said 2011 was the worst year for the industry.

The digital ad revenues in the region grew 15 per cent last year. Global digital ad spending was around $140-$160 million (Dh514.2-587.6 million) last year.

Yahoo’s user base has grown from 19 million, before the acquisition of Maktoob, to 50 million today.

Habib Haddad, co-Founder of Yamli, said: “More than 3.5 billion words have been typed with Yamli to date, at a rate of 150 million words per month.”

He said private sector is moving very slowly with start-ups in the region while Yahoo is enabling a platform for entrepreneurs in the region.

The big success story within the entrepreneurship eco-system in the region was when Yahoo acquired Maktoob three years ago.

“We are enriching Arabic content online by enabling participation that brings Arabic characters to the forefront, which often times would have been done using the English language or Latin characters. We’re very excited to be bringing this service to our users, and potentially introducing this solution to a whole new audience for the first time,” Nassef said.

As a first phase, ‘3arrebni’ has launched as a standalone destination page and will seamlessly be integrated with other products.