Yahoo! announced today that it has acquired a license to Yamli’s transliteration technology, to be integrated across a number of its products and services. This comes as part of Yahoo!’s focus on developing solutions tailored for the Middle East and North Africa region, and will allow Yahoo! Maktoob to further develop the technology and extend it to a wider audience across its network.
Yamli was founded in 2007 by Lebanese entrepreneurs Habib Haddad and Imad Jureidini, who came up with the idea of a “Smart Arabic Keyboard” that allows users to type Arabic without an Arabic keyboard or if they are not used to using one. They created a technology based on a real-time transliteration engine which converts words typed with Latin characters to their Arabic equivalent. Yahoo! Maktoob’s product is called “3arrebni” (Arabize me).
Ahmed Nassef, Vice President and Managing Director, Yahoo! Maktoob, said, “Yamli is a pioneering startup that created a clever solution for a real user need and built it on a robust technology, which remains best in class. By acquiring a license to the technology, we will be able to marry it with our capabilities to further develop it and scale it to a wider audience through deep integration with our products and across multiple platforms. 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.”
