The Complexity and Social Networks Blog presents an interesting paper on mobile phone users and data stored in service provider databases around the world, discussing the different types of data captured and how it can be used to provide insight into human cultures.

Examples are provided from a variety of cultures and hundreds of millions of individuals, illustrating how phones can be used as a cultural lens, improving understanding of a particular cultures pace of life, reactions to outlier events, and social networks.

The paper in PDF format can be downloaded here.

According to the The European Information Technology Observatory (EITO):

• Revenues from Internet access growing by more than 10 percent
• Telephone flat rates and online video sales are stimulating business
• Germany is the largest single market in the EU with a 25 percent share

The increase in revenue (+10,7% in 2008) is attributed to the falling prices of high speed DSL connections. Lower connection costs and higher speed stimulate consumption for online services (Music and Video on Demand).
According to the the latest EITO forecast, by the end of 2008 there will be an estimated 114 million broadband Internet connections in Western Europe, making fast data lines available to 26 percent of the population.

• Download press release (.doc)
• Download data sheet ICT market overview of the EU (.pdf)

The revenue percentage from the UK was $774 million down from $803 million in the first quarter of 2008 but up by 33% from the $600 million against the second quarter of 2007. Seasonally adjusted this still means the UK is on a roll as January is a particularly strong month leading the first quarter to higher revenues.

Meanwhile, checkout this chart from Google’s investor relations information showing the situation in the US compared with their international revenues clearly showing static US growth with international development - including the UK - leading Google’s current growth.

Source: Google Investor Relations Webcast

Audiweb, powered by nielsen, has published panel data gathered in the month of May.

• 24 million users went online at least once during the month of may, 2008, a 5% increase compared to April
• The number of users increases to 25,6 million if instant messaging and software to download music or films are included
• The average Italian user went online 30 times and was connected for an average of 21,5 hours (30 minutes more than previous month) totalizing 1.650 page views
• 19,6 million domestic users (+8% from April) averaging over 14 hours online with an average of 1.170 page views
• Consumer electronic websites were up 6% with 15,7 million visitors: forums and news sites were those showing the most significant increase to 6,9 million
• 7 million flocked to price comparison shopping portals and online purchasing guideline sites (+10% )
• 5,9 million went to online game sites (+12%)
• 3,3 million searched for friends and romance (+26%)
• 5,3 million were in search for wellness and body building (+14%)
• 4,2 million were on the outlook for webistes on food and cuisine (+22%)
• 4,2 million took an interest in DIY and gardening (+15%)

Source: AUDIWEB

Sales figures for leading Latin American markets, with sales in millions of dollars for 2007, 2006 and the percent change:

Following are the categories cited by consumers, with the percentage of consumers saying they shop each category:

Source: Internet Retailer

Previously internet access was restricted to government employees, diplomatic posts and offices of major international companies.

The average monthly salary in Turkmenistan is $200, so it is unlikely that many can afford the price of a home connection, nor is it known if the government will block any websites. Surfing the net will cost around $1/hr on top of a monthly charge of $8. The initial installation costs $42. Turkmentelekom is also offering a dial-up connection to users but this is reported to be extremely slow, which will frustrate many web surfers.

Russian’s largest internet provider MTS has also launched a new high speed wireless service in the country. They are covering Ashgabat, Balkanabat (former Nebitdag) and Turkmenbashi (former Krasnovodsk). This will create some much needed competition for the national provider.

Turkmenistan already has their own version of Google.tm but the market holds potential for Russian providers such as Yandex. As a former USSR satellite, the population of just over 5m speak Terkmen, Russian, Uzbek and Dari. The ccTLD for the country is .TM and is available to foreign owners but requires a minimum 10yr registration period.

Information contained in the report is based on aggregated data from Opera Mini servers, and related to top 10 countries with the highest number of installation.

Read more: the Opera Mobile Report 1st quarter 2008

The European Interactive Advertising Association published the first report on different media consumption habits of European families. The results of the study show 73% of families with children are connected to the internet and online at least once per week, against 52% of the adult population without children.

Adults with children are also involved in a wider variety of online activities.

Source: EIAA

The European Commission proudly made the announcement yesterday and reported that .eu domains are the 4th most popular choice amongst Europeans, and 9th worldwide.

The countries that have been most active in registering .eu TLDs are:

• Germany
• Holland
• Great Britain
• France
• Italy

What the European Commission fails to report is how poorly the entire startup and sunrise operation was handled with phony, phanton (overseas) operations registering thousands of .eu domain names - high level systematic cyber squatting - making it literally impossible for thousands of companies and professionals to activate their company name or a decent substitute.

Source: ANSA

Of course Google dominated the study, with 62% audience share, followed by Yahoo! with 12.8%. Microsoft came in 4th with 2.9%. Yandex the Russian search engine now appears on the statistics, with 0.9%.

Source: ComScore

The survey results clearly show the website is a major revenue driver requiring online marketing budgets to support the activity.

Search is going global, of that there’s no question. Many previously non-internationally focused companies are scrambling to get on the global ladder – one of the reasons why globalisation specialists such as WebCertain are expanding so rapidly.

In March of last year, Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe announced that

“Internet users outside the U.S. now account for 80 percent of the world’s online population, with rapidly developing countries experiencing double-digit growth rates year-over-year.”

If 80% of the internet audience is outside the US, then 80% of Microsoft’s purchase price must reflect a stronger positioning outside the US and of the $45 investment, 80% or $36 billion is being paid for Yahoo outside the US.

A general look at the degree of overlap between Yahoo and Microsoft worldwide shows that Microsoft has a total of 42 localised search sites - where localised means that the local language is applied – and 13 English language varieties. Yahoo has a total of 23 localised search sites and 8 English varieties – but this includes 7 localised languages in India. It should be noted that Live.com also exists in a wide number of countries – including 14 where there is no MSN portal. So in general Microsoft has a much wider world spread than Yahoo. This, of course, would not matter if the Yahoo acquisition was incrementally adding a greater presence throughout the world or a greater market share.

In terms of overlap – all but 4 of Yahoo’s localised versions are competing with Microsoft – though the exceptions are interesting. Yahoo has an ‘Asian’ English portal where Microsoft does not – and Yahoo also appears in the Catalan language in Spain, in Italian in Switzerland and in Vietnam in Vietnamese. All told, not a huge advance over the Microsoft roll out. In incremental terms, the only big difference is Vietnam.

Meanwhile, Yahoo is missing from a number of locations where Microsoft has a presence including Arabian countries in English, Belgium both halves, Bulgaria, Chile, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey and Ukraine. In other words, Yahoo is absent from at least 16 countries where Microsoft has a presence and that can be summarised as eastern Europe and the Baltic states as well as Greece and Turkey.

The overlap then is quite clearly in Microsoft’s favour and from a simple presence perspective the acquisition makes no sense at all.

Could it be that the justification lies in audience shares? Back in June last year comScore released figures comparing web properties throughout Europe for the first time. Looking at monthly unique visitors, it gave Yahoo third place when combined figures across Europe were looked at – but most crucially out of 16 countries examined Yahoo didn’t manage a single second or first place and only managed to achieve third place in Ireland, Italy and Spain – a very poor result. These comparative figures give Yahoo first place in the US.

More intriguingly, Microsoft scores better. Of course this is partly due to Microsoft’s wider produce offering – but nonetheless to be the second most visited property in 13 countries beaten only Google in all cases – is a significant achievement and position to have. Microsoft actually manages to achieve firsts in those figures in Norway and Sweden! And for the record in Russia, Yandex takes the top spot.

So it would seem that the Yahoo deal is not justified by the European zone. How about South America? As described before, in terms of presence Microsoft wins here too – though Yahoo does have TeRespondo which is similar to an older version of Overture but which conveniently feeds MSN properties in south America. But the cost saving from this situation does not remotely justify the Yahoo price ticket.

It must be Asia then. Clearly Yahoo does have a strong market position in Asian coming first in Japan – a major market – and first through Naver in Korea – so there’s unquestionably a prize to go for here – though the shareholding structure of Yahoo in Japan means it’s not even clear what Microsoft would be buying. Softbank, the Japanese telecommunications group owns 41% of Yahoo Japan and has already said it will not sell to Microsoft. Due diligence will definitely be required here.

And then in China, Yahoo does have a better position than Microsoft – but it’s not exactly something to write home about coming in behind Baidu the clear market leader and Google.

Could it be that the personnel employed by Yahoo or natural search are the real attraction? Possibly, but that would mean Microsoft buying largely US-focused skills which weren’t ideal to take on the global markets effectively. So the Microsoft deal does not appear to have any really strong justification outside the US where Yahoo remains even now relatively strong.

Forgive me for saying it, but it seems like a deal driven by US egos – and not by the realities of the global world.

So what should Microsoft do with its $45 billion? First they should spend $15 billion buying Yandex which would bring them a lucrative eastern European strength. Yandex is strong because it still leads the way in search through its better use of algorithms to handle the slavic Russian languages. Yandex engineers could certainly create a better natural search tool for eastern Europe giving scope for Microsoft’s AdCenter technology to be rolled out in Poland, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia. Yandex is virtually a Google style search engine in many ways and is still wide open for a Google acquisition. Microsoft should get in there first.

Baidu would be a tougher nut to crack costing let’s say roughly $20 billion – but should also be on the shopping list. If that fails, they should buy up Sogou, Sina and ZhongSou as well as any other operations in China they can lay their hands on.

We still have $10 billion left and with that we should recruit the best Google engineers and buy all the smaller successful search engines such as Seznam in the Czech Republic, Voila in France, Libero in Italy, Ilse in the Netherlands and so on. And we’ll still have a few billion left for fun! Microsoft don’t do it.

Online travel expenditure is expected to rise another 18% during 2008 and should reach nearly € 67 Billion in 2009.

Countries leading the European online expenditure in travel are:

• UK (30%)
• Germany (19%)

Additional information:

• Direct sales accounted for 65% of the market
• Intermediaries 35%
• Air travel 57%
• Hotels (and other accommodations) 17%
• Package tours 14½%
• Rail 7½%
• Rental cars (and car ferries) 4%

Among Internet users with Internet access using it shop, the highest percentage shopping online is found in:

• South Korea (99%)
• UK (97%)
• Germany (97%)
• Japan (97%)
• US (94%)

The most popular and purchased items are:

• Books (41% purchased in the past three months)
• Clothing/Accessories/Shoes (36%)
• Videos / DVDs / Games (24%)
• Airline Tickets (24%)
• Electronic Equipment (23%)

The complete Press Release and detailed data is available here.

Each report will also provide a snapshot of search engine usage and activity around the world, which can be compared against for the following year. This should help identify growth or decline for the search engines in each local market.

In the 2007 report we have covered the following 17 countries:

• Bulgaria - Georgi Georgiev (Investor BG PLC)
• China - David Temple (China Search Marketing Tour)
• Czech Republic | Slovakia - Katerina Rotterova (BenedaGroup.com)
• Denmark - Rasmus Sørensen (TLA Media)
• Estonia - Robin Gurney (Altex Marketing)
• Iceland - Kristjan Mar Hauksson (Nordic eMarketing)
• Israel - Gilad Sasson (Search Marketing)
• Italy - Sante Achille (Search Engine Consultant)
• Japan - Motoko Hunt (AJPR)
• Portugal - Nuno Hipólito (Search Marketing)
• Russia | Ukraine - Nick Wilsdon (e3internet)
• South Korea - Ebina Cho
• Spain - Oscar Carreras (WebCertain)
• The Netherlands - Peter Kersbergen (WebCertain)
• United Kingdom - Andy Atkins-Krüger (WebCertain)

The report can be downloaded free of charge by clicking the following link.

 Download Global Search Report 2007 21 Pages (1.3MB)

The Asia-Pacific region, which includes large markets such as China, Japan and India, saw 258 million unique searchers conduct 20.3 billion searches. Europe reported the second-most searchers (210 million) and searches (18 billion), followed by North America, with 206 million searchers and 16 billion searches. The Latin American region demonstrated the heaviest search activity per person, with more than 95 searches per searcher in August. The search market in the Middle East-Africa region is the most underdeveloped thus far, with the fewest searchers (30 million), searches (2 billion), and searches per searcher (70).

The report also found that in terms of worldwide search property, MSN has now lost third position to the Chinese engine Baidu. Korea’s Naver has also made a strong appearance at 5th place.

Google Sites ranked as the top worldwide search property in August with 37.1 billion searches conducted. Of that total number, 31 billion occurred at the Google search engine and 5 billion occurred at YouTube.com. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 8.5 billion searches, while Baidu.com, a Chinese language search engine, followed in third place with more than 3.2 billion searches. Microsoft Sites ranked in fourth place worldwide, while Korea’s NHN Corporation, which owns Naver.com, ranked fifth with 2 billion searches worldwide.

Source: ComScore

This means that online advertising in Germany is still behind TV and print advertising - but from a growth rate point of view there is no comparison - online is taking off.

This story serves to back up the view that the European online market is growing very rapidly indeed. Germany is the largest economy in Europe and this pace of growth must eventually take it ahead of the UK. The figures don’t include the market in other German speaking countries and areas - such as Austria and Switzerland.

The forecast from Fevad (la Fédération du commerce électronique et de la vente à distance) is for 16 billion Euros in 2007 followed by 30 billion Euros by the year 2010. In total there are 19 million online buyers in France.

According to Médiamétrie/Net Ratings Ebay is the most visited site with 9,5 millions visitors in the second quarter, followed by the French rail network voyages-sncf.com (5,6 millions), laredoute.fr (5,5), fnac.com (5,3) et cdiscount.com (4,7).

The conclusion: If you have something to sell which appeals to French consumers - they are becoming serious online buyers. The French were a little slower to move online than other countries because they have had access in most homes to a sophisticated electronic consumer directory provided by France Telecom and La Poste called Minitel. Minitel - which is now also available online . This provided not only information quickly and electronically before the web, it also allowed travel bookings and online purchases to be made using credit cards. In most of the rest of the world, people were still relying on Yellow printed guides delivered to homes! Now that’s changing rapidly and the web is replacying Minitel as the information source of choice.

Most surprisingly is however France that seams to have embraced this American invention, Google has just under 90% market share with Yahoo coming next with just over 3%, MSN has 2.48% with two locals following Orange and Free, 1.89% and 0.72%.

Noticeable is the total lack of ASK’s market share both in France and Germany. Also it’s worth noting that while Google has a large market share in the US it’s nothing when you compare their foothold in France, Germany and the UK.

But Google is not this strong everywhere in Europe. Neighbours to Germany are Swiss and there Google has just under 50% of the market with Yahoo’s healthy 22% following and MSN has around 11%. Russia has the strong Yandex Direct as shown here at Multilingual search on a regular basis.

If we look at Poland there worth noting that there are at least couple of strong locals, NetSprint, OnetSzukaj and Szukacz with combined market share of 20%. In Poland Google seems to have around 80%.

Google has a strong market share also in Slovakia but has a strong competition in SZN.sk.

Since the arrival of Google in Iceland in 2002, they have slowly gained around 50% of the market share with the local Leit staying strong at around 45% and the rest shares the remaining 5%. This is a according to research by Nordic eMarketing in early 2007.

It’s always good to know the search engine market shares in Europe ?