You've probably never heard of Samih Toukan, or his website Maktoob.com. But don't feel bad. A decade ago you almost certainly would not have heard of Jerry Yang - the Chinese-American engineering student who launched Yahoo.com from his college dorm. Today it's the world's most popular website.
The analogy isn't far fetched. Seven years ago Jordan's Samih Toukan launched Maktoob.com out of his grandfather's family house, in the Jordanian capital of Amman. Within weeks, Mr Toukan and his partners had signed up 4,000 users. By 2000, the site had 100,000 subscribers, and the fledging firm got a US$2.5 million cash injection from an Egyptian bank.
Today, Maktoob has gone from being the world's first Arabic-language website to the most popular Arabic-language online community in the world. Boasting four million devoted subscribers, and adding 4,500 more every day, the distinctive site has since been steadily breaking down a barricade of social barriers.
Maktoob - the word means 'message' in Arabic - was so far ahead of its time when the website was launched, that Arabic-language keyboards were still rare, so the company had to send out Arabic stickers to fasten on to standard English-language keyboards.
'We started Maktoob as an experiment,' Mr Toukan said. 'We felt that if the internet was to be used in the Arab world, the Arabic language should be a key. People either don't speak English or simply would like to use their native language.'
Having earned an engineering degree in Britain and a masters in business in France, Mr Toukan returned home to Jordan to work as a technology consultant just as the internet was taking off in the west. 'After we saw the explosion of e-mail elsewhere, we knew it was coming to this region,' he said. 'We felt e-mail was the most important application on the net and that this could probably be our entry into the Arab world - if we could help the Arabs use the Arabic language.'