If you've seen the film "Up in the Air," you may recall the protagonist puzzling over the term "glocal" in a PowerPoint presentation. Plenty of people in Silicon Valley, I suspect, quickly recognized the mashup of "global" and "local." Perhaps no place exemplifies the valley's role as the crossroads of the flattening global economy quite like the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, with a lobby festooned with flags from around the world. Now angel investors Saeed Amidi and his brother Rahim are taking their Plug and Play incubator concept global by opening new centers this month in Malaysia and Singapore.

If you've seen the film "Up in the Air," you may recall the protagonist puzzling over the term "glocal" in a PowerPoint presentation. Plenty of people in Silicon Valley, I suspect, quickly recognized the mashup of "global" and "local."

Perhaps no place exemplifies the valley's role as the crossroads of the flattening global economy quite like the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, with a lobby festooned with flags from around the world. Now angel investors Saeed Amidi and his brother Rahim are taking their Plug and Play incubator concept global by opening new centers this month in Malaysia and Singapore.

And today, Plug and Play is hosting a daylong confab by the professional group TechWadi to discuss the potential of developing technology entrepreneurship in the Arab and Islamic world. Wadi is Arabic for "valley." TechWadi's stated mission: "To organize and benefit Arab American professionals in the technology industry in North America and the Middle East."

Sad to say, in much of the West, Islam in recent years has been associated more with terrorism than anything else. Just type "Islamic t" into Google, and you'll see that "terrorism" tops "traditions." Israel's own high-tech prowess is often attributed to its survival instinct among hostile neighbors with economies based on oil.

Yet Saeed Amidi, a Muslim of Iranian ancestry, says he believes that someday his operation will put Plug and Plays in Cairo, Beirut or

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The TechWadi group thinks President Barack Obama represents "a new beginning" for their efforts. Included in Obama's speech last June at Cairo University was a pledge to "create a new corps of business volunteers to partner with counterparts in Muslim-majority countries" to deepen cultural and economic ties. He also called for "a new fund to support technological development in Muslim-majority countries and to help transfer ideas to the marketplace so they can create more jobs."

Amid the cultural diversity of Silicon Valley — where immigrants from many nations have long played prominent roles — entrepreneurs of Muslim heritage are often unacknowledged. AdMob's founder, Omar Hamoui, is a devout Muslim who led his startup to a $750 million acquisition by Google. Amidi helped nurture the Iranian immigrants who founded Zoosk, a popular dating application on Facebook, and the young techies behind TwitVid, a video-sharing service on Twitter.

TwitVid co-founders Mohammed Al Adham, born in Jordan, and Adil Lilani, whose parents are Pakistani and Indian, met as students at Canada's University of Waterloo before making the move to Silicon Valley. TwitVid has become a popular site for Twitter users, including celebrities like Britney Spears and Dane Cook.

Al Adham sees bridges already being built between Silicon Valley and the Arab world. Last August, he happened to be in Dubai, he said, when Yahoo acquired Jordan-based Maktoob.com, a major Internet portal for the Arab world and, according to CEO Carol Bartz, a key to Yahoo's strategy of growing in emerging markets. And when Al Adham met Maktoob founder Samih Toukan, he snared him as a new investor in TwitVid.

All of this is a reminder of how Silicon Valley technologies seem to make the world bigger and smaller at the same time.

Contact Scott Duke Harris at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .