Abc 7 News

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama will face a tough audience when he delivers his long-promised address to the Muslim world on Thursday from Cairo University.

In some of the Arab nations and territory in the region, most notably his host country of Egypt, public views about the "job performance of the leadership of the United States'' have improved remarkably from one president to the next - from the view that Arabs held of former President George W. Bush's leadership last summer, to the views they voiced of Obama's leadership in March.

Yet even in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the two nations where Obama will begin his journey this week, a positive view of U.S. leadership is still shared by about one in four of those surveyed: Up from 12 percent last summer to 29 percent in Saudi Arabia, according to survey results released today by the Gallup Poll on the eve of the president's trip, and up from just 6 percent to 25 percent in Egypt.

"These upsurges, which ranged from 11 percentage points in Syria to 23 points in Tunisia, may reflect positive reception to Obama and his administration's public outreach to the Muslim world,'' Gallup reports today. "Obama will deliver his message Thursday with an arguably stronger basis of support than his predecessor ever had in many Arab countries. Nonetheless, approval remains low and underscores the work that remains as Obama seeks to pave a new, more positive way forward.''

In nearly all of the 11 nations and territories where the public was surveyed, public opinion of the U.S. leadership has improved from last year - up 23 percent in Tunisia, from 14 to 37, up 22 points in Algergia from 25 to 47, up 14 points in Qatar, from 8 to 22 percent, up 13 in Kuwait, from 20 ro 33, up 11 in Syria, from 4 to 15 percentage point approval.

In two palaces, however, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, the view of U.S. leadership is no brighter today than it was last summer: 22 percent approval registered in Lebanon, down from 25 points last summer, 7 percent in the Palestinian territories, down from 13 points in June.

Reinaldo Normand is terrible at remembering dates, but Feb. 17, 2006, is one he won't easily forget. That afternoon he was chatting with colleagues during a break at the downtown So Paulo offices of Tectoy, a Brazilian gaming and electronics company, when an idea popped into his head. What if he were to make a living-room gaming console for emerging markets that would connect to the Internet over wireless phone networks and sell at prices middle-class families could afford? In Brazil, the choices weren't great: Consumers could pay $150 for a 20-year-old Sega console, $250 for a pirated version of Sony's nine-year-old PlayStation 2, or $1,000 for the latest Xbox 360 made by Microsoft.

Normand, who was then in Tectoy's mobile video games business, admits it was a crazy thought. In the $50 billion global video game industry, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo dominate the console market. They have spent billions of dollars developing the technology and marketing the machines and games that go with them. Their brands are well known globally. It would be financial suicide for a no-name with no money to take on such formidable tech giants.

But a half-hour later, Normand called his boss, Stefano Arnhold, who was traveling in Europe on a business trip. "I told him, 'We need to do this,'" Normand recalls. "'This will be a billion-dollar company. We need to find investors in America.'"

Multimillion-Dollar Investment

A day after Normand's epiphany, Mike Yuen was at his office in San Diego, writing up a business idea that bore similarities to Normand's. As a manager in the gaming division at mobile-phone chipmaker Qualcomm, Yuen had often heard developers complain that playing games on the tiny screens of mobile phones was an unsatisfying experience. He was determined to do something about it.

Two men, separated by nearly 9,500 kilometers [5,900 miles],...