Among the key speakers are Bill Hunt, Director of Global Search Strategy at Neo@Ogilvy; Erica Schimdt, Global Search Director at ISOBAR, and Sara Houlobek, Consultant, DMNews Columnist & SEMPO Board of Directors.

In Brazil that means nothing, because here Yahoo and Microsoft are still operating together, as during the early days of Overture.

Therefore, the “Search duopoly” mentioned by Danny Sullivan in his AdAge article a couple of days before the deal went off, is already a reality in Brazil, where Google is still a dominant player and Yahoo (even combined with Microsoft) cannot face his leadership. And besides those two, there are very few relevant options for your search campaign.

Internet category was introduced only in 2004 and has being lead by UOL (Universo Online) since then. The hegemony ended this year, when Google ranked in first, seconded by UOL.

The other top ten publishers are, in order: Terra, Globo.com, MSN, Estadao.com, Abril.com, Yahoo, iG and Lancenet.

I have being using the 1.0 version in English for quite some time, but the new version keeps the same features, but now it’s avaiable in Brazilian portuguese (prior to that only portuguese from Portugal).

But it also still showing usability problems. For instance, you cannot hide the application on your Blackberry to check email or send SMS. Also, I cannot check all my Flickr albums.

Is anyone facing same problems? Would love to hear your comments.

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 use domain names which exist outside the original 26 characters used for the English-language - but not for too many other languages since many have odd accented characters. Additionally, this brings greater support for asiatic and arabic character sets.

The other new development which is currently being looked at, according to a senior Google source, is the addition of a tool within webmaster tools whereby you can specify the country your site relates to. The countries will be listed in a drop down list - and you’ll almost certainly only be able to choose once country per site.

For a long time it has been a problem if you site was a .com site with no history of activity in a country for Google to pick out the right ‘bucket’ in which to list your site. For some this was an embarrasment - for others a major business hurdle. Matters were worse for those .coms hosted in a country other than the one they were targeting - perhaps for business political or content management system reasons. The result was you might be targeting France with a site hosted in Norway - but not end up appearing in the ‘Pages Francophones’ of Google.fr - even if the language of the site was French.

The simplest way of solving this problem has always been to have local country domains in which case - contrary to what one SES panelist advised in San Jose, the hosting location becomes irrelevant. For many, this isn’t practical - hence the reason why some have chosen to host locally to get around the problem.

These two developments combined will help international SEO specialists manage their projects with less frustration!

The document is in portuguese and is available for download at IAB website

Members of IAB Brazil SEM Committee are major search engines and portals, among them Google, Yahoo, MSN, Buscapé, UOL, IG, and SEM agencies such as AgênciaClick, Cadastra, FBiz, HotList, MediaContacs, MídiaClick, MídiaDigital and Neo@Ogilvy, and vendors (Predicta and Unica).

And, of course, this is the first major step towards local search in Brazil.

As far as I know Brazil is the first latin american country being upgraded to Panama. And that’s a smart move, since it’s the biggest market by far.

Yahoo really need good news after the recently defections on its network

Google now has partnerships with all major brazilian horizontal portals, but Yahoo and MSN: iG, UOL and Terra are part of search and content network; Globo.com ( webdestination owned by Globo TV ) has a deal with YouTube (which by the way now has a portuguese version) to provide video content.

The event is increasing its popularity among brazilian professionals, and all top SEM agencies will be presenting: HotList, MediaContacs, MídiaClick and MídiaDigital will have its tops executives in several panels.

A week later, Ad-Tech Latino will open its doors for the first time, but with a broader content. A lot of brazilian executives there too.

He is in Rio de Janeiro this week, and will visit São Paulo (including a breakfast at GooglePlex with a select group of clients) next week and after that Belo Horizonte, where Google has a research&development facility.

Orkut is the #1 website in Brazil and 8th in the world. 57% of Orkut users are from Brazil, accounting for more than 22 million of unique visitors/month. USA stands at second place, with 18% of users.

Here’s a link to my personal blog with a photo and here is Orkut’s photo album in Brazil.

According to Click Z “The ads on Yahoo’s mobile sites are part of a new publishing platform built to better deliver both content and marketing messages to the company’s mobile users. According to Yahoo, the system can fluidly target ad sizes and creative according to the screen size and other capabilities of a given device. Banners appear near the top of the home pages for the nations where the platform is being offered, which include the U.S., U.K., France, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, India, Thailand and Australia, among others. The ads include click-through and click-to-call features. Eight global advertisers have run ads using the new system, including Infiniti, Intel, Nissan, Procter & Gamble Asia Pacific and Singapore Airlines. “

Now Google has to pay around US$5 million dollars for that!

More recently Cicarelli’s boyfriend and “co-star” filed a new complaint to take YouTube off the air. São Paulo’s State Superior Court ruled in his favor yesterday and YouTube must now filter its visitors to avoid Brazilians. Once again, just as in the Orkut case, Google Brazil said it has nothing to do with YouTube, and the complaint should be addressed to Google Inc. in the US.

Anyway, I guess Google will appeal pretty soon, since Brazil accounts for the second largest YouTube audience worldwide.

Google recently implemented several upgrades in Orkut, in order to provide better control against ilegal activities and communities.

Launch is scheduled for early September.

Google didn’t disclose how many publications are available for search.