Planetarabia, seeking to focus on its primary Gulf market, has launched its restructured portal (www.planetarabia.com) from its recently established Dubai Internet City (DIC) office, joining a company office network that includes Casablanca in Morocco and Silicon Valley in California.

"The restructured portal is one of many initiatives being taken by Planetarabia and which include the launch of a range of professional services spanning advertising solutions, web development and strategy consulting, hosting and managed services," said the company in a statement. It said its new range of service offerings was aimed at positioning itself as a regional one-stop shop for e-solutions.

"Today we serve more users from Saudi Arabia than any other country. Additionally, some of our primary corporate clients are in this region and we need to be here to serve them better," said Planetarabia CEO Imad Benharouga.

Casablanca will now be the company's main web development centre with most of Planetarabia's key executives transferring from the company's Silicon Valley base in California to DIC.

Benharouga said that while architecture and technology would be selected in the US, the company would progress in core development and also commercially, taking advantage of the geographical positions of DIC and Casablanca.

The company said it had teamed up with several new partners to provide more substantial content.

The money channel features business and financial content, which is provided by the London-based portal Zawya.com. Additionally, the company has introduced a B2B component (www.alibaba.planetarabia.com) through its exclusive agreement with Hong Kong-based Alibaba.com.

The newly launched portal also offers community features and interactive content in Arabic, English and French.