Athwal was speaking at a media symposium organized by Arab News, a publication of Saudi Research and Marketing Group (SRMG), in which great scholar, diplomat and former chief of Saudi intelligence Prince Turki Al-Faisal was the keynote speaker.

The event was attended by SRMG Chairman Prince Faisal bin Salman and anchored by Arab News Editor in Chief Khaled Almaeena who introduced the speakers to an elite audience composed mainly of diplomats, businessmen, top-notch executives and senior media persons.

Almaeena said that Arab News had always striven to meet the needs of the readers by providing them with first-hand information on the hottest daily topics in a manner as concise and lively as possible.

“It is a unique newspaper whose green pages speak green truth,” said the chief editor.  “In order to build up a good relationship with readers, Arab News will go an extra mile in terms of news generation, highlighting social issues and liaising with public and private sector organizations."

He said that Arab News has the distinction of having hired for the first time in Saudi Arabia women editors and reporters.

He also commended the role of women in Saudi Arabia in general and especially in the media and information sector. “Our women have excelled in domains that were traditionally dominated by men in the Kingdom,” he said.

In his speech, Athwal predicted the end of the computer mouse and the beginning of the era of the touchscreen interface. Athwal said people in the Gulf countries, where 50 percent of the population is under 25 years of age, have adopted social media to communicate more comfortably and in great numbers.

He said media tools like Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and Ecademy connect people through online social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques that are now prompting the print media to bring changes to the traditional style.  Referring to the growth of OneTVO, Athwal said the TVO has emerged as the world’s first pure online television platform established in the United Arab Emirates. OneTVO is a leader in creating, producing and marketing videos online and broadcasting high-quality shows and informational videos.

Addressing the symposium, Abdulrahman Tarabzouni, country manager for Emerging Arabia at Google, said Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Tarabzouni said that Google Inc. runs over one million servers in data centers around the world and processes over two billion search requests every day.

He said that Google had its corporate presence in Saudi Arabia, a country which has been “focal point of interest among Google users from 2004 to 2010.”