Google has changed its trademark policy for the UK and Ireland bringing it into line with its policy for the US and Canada. What this means in practice is that for trademark complaints relating to its Adwords programme, from now on Google will take NO further action relating to the trigger keywords. It will, […]

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A competitive and balanced industry with two search giants fighting it out to deliver better and better services to advertisers and marketers is an appealing prospect. Regrettably, that’s not what a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo is going to deliver. An analysis of the global impact shows that the price is too high and […]

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The Guardian reports on the Russian government pushing for control of the internet inside Russian using Cyrillic characters not just to sit on top of the web pages - but controlling things at a domain level.
The issue here is that the Russian suffix .ru tranliterates into Cyrillic as .py or Paraguay’s domain name. Icann confirms […]

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The Schengen agreement has been extended from 15 countries to 24 giving a wider borderless Europe with no internal border controls or checks and an open market of over 400 million people. Coming into force on the 21st December, the Schengen agreement makes physical inter-trade between bordering countries easier to manage for marketers. […]

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The first European event in the SMX series got off to a great start with good attendance, excellent speaker content and a very good atmosphere. Stockholm, in the SES series, was always a more intimate occasion with a great deal of networking - and SMX achieved the same with its first foray into Europe. […]

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Futurezone brings us the news that the online advertising market in Germany is rocketing and expected to exceed 800 million Euros in 2007. That’s a 67% over the 480 million Euros seen in 2006. The figures are from the Bundesverbands Informationswirtschaft, Telekommunikation und neue Medien (BITKOM) run by Germany’s national newspaper “Die […]

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With very little pzazz, Google Adwords has started to feed the pay per click advertising to searches on top French search engine Voila.fr and the also significant Orange.fr - as reported by Abondance. This means Yahoo Search Marketing has lost an important French partner as they previously powered Voila.
According to the Aposition and Weborama […]

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Finnish newcomer Floobs.com is to launch a tv-channel style video site where anyone can upload their videos. The site will include video feeds. Currently the site is undergoing testing in the Finnish language - but an English-language version is to follow in November.
We’ve seen a rush of video-sites in the last few weeks […]

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Yahoo has been successful in gaining a social networking partner for its UK and Irish advertisers - namely Bebo. Bebo is particularly interesting in Ireland where it has one million subscribers… a whacking proportion of the population. If you’re Irish - you must be on Bebo! And it is Yahoo which powers […]

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French Financial Times subsidiary - Les Echos - reports that 1 million people started buying online in the second quarter of 2007 compared to the first with the result that 4% of all retail is now transacted online in France. The number of active online merchants in the same period has grown by […]

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The .EU domain registrar management organisation, EURid has suspended 10,000 EU domain names which have been apparently legally registered by a Chinese woman - reports out-law. EURid has the power to remove the domain names from the woman - but has said that it would prefer a court to do it.
According to […]

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According to Futurezone from ORF.at, for the first time the number of internet users in Austria aged over 14 exceeds two thirds of the total population at 68% representing 4.6 million people. Intriguingly, the nature of internet use has been changing in Austria more towards multimedia use with 27% of Austrians having accessed […]

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At least two major new features are arriving in Google’s webmaster tools console according to information from the SES San Jose conference and the official Google webmaster tools blog.
The latter has announced support for the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) and a series of further enhancements are expected. IDNA enables webmasters to […]

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North Korea is expected to get its own domain identity from ICANN, according to a France Press report via Inquirer.net.
Internet access in the North of Korea is strictly limited - but the award of an internet identity for the country is, at least, a stepping stone towards opening up to the rest of […]

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PC Advisor brings us the news that Google believes planned acquisitions of Chinese companies will give it the top search engine spot over incumbent Baidu.

Google plans to buy at least two and invest in several more Chinese companies over the coming months and CEO Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying:
It’s a very good start and […]

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A report by PhoCusWright Inc says that the European market on average will hit 25% of transactions carried out online during 2007 - this figure was achieved in the US in 2004.
There are, however some key differences in European markets:-

UK and German buying patterns are most similar to the US
France is behind the average thanks […]

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The Asia Digital Marketing Yearbook - www.asiadma.com gives Vietnam an internet population of 15.5 million users but reports that the country derives little economic benefit.
“However, the internet is not used to any great effect: The websites of many ministries and provinces are not updated and do not have useful information; though all universities are connected,” […]

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The most popular 25 languages of Multilingual-Search.com in 2007 in terms of the percentage of the site’s visitors are:-
English (United States) 45.73%
English (United Kingdom) 19.56%
English 3.28%
French 3.12%
German 2.80%
Spanish 2.17%
Russian 1.77%
Italian 1.31%
Japanese 1.30%
Swedish 1.26%
Chinese (China) 1.26%
Dutch (Netherlands) 1.24%
Portuguese 1.05%
English (Australia) 1.00%
Bulgarian 0.91%
English (Canada) 0.86%
Hebrew 0.76%
Greek 0.71%
Portuguese (Brazil) 0.68%
Polish 0.61%
Turkish 0.61%
Korean 0.60%
Danish 0.47%
Chinese (Taiwan) 0.37%
English (Ireland) 0.36%
Surprisingly, the most dramatically increasing languages of visitors (below) to the site are Thai- and Portuguese-speakers as well as Spanish. Here’s the complete list where […]

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Jaap Favier of Forrester ended his keynote speech to the first Hamburg AdTech by saying that, after all the research he’s done, Second Life will become the new Google.

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