Multilingual Search - global search marketing news » Germany

Forrester Research, Inc. data on mobile instant messaging (IM) in Europe

Sante J. Achille — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 10:16:50 +0000

A recent study from Forrester Research, Inc. indicates mobile instant messaging (IM) on the rise in Europe with 26.7 million users in 2007 and a projected 80 million users in 2013.

The survey was conducted on a sample of 22.000 consumers in:

France
Germany
Holland
Italy
Spain
Sweden
UK

Three years after the launch of IM mobile operators appear less than enthusiastic about this technology, fearing cannibalization of profits deriving from text messaging services (SMS), however the growth of IM is seen as “inevitable”

Niek van Veen, analyst di Forrester Research identifies IM as a means to differentiate mobile operators services and improve user experience.

All this will have a significant impact on web and search technology as mobile devices become an integral part of work and leisure.

Source: Spot and Web - N.15

Europe, France, Germany, IM, Italy, mobile instant messaging, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, UK, United Kingdom

24 European states go borderless under Schengen

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 14:54:49 +0000

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. As Europe opens its borders, and search grows quickly in Europe, Schengen makes European business roll-outs more attractive and achievable with faster distribution and lower border costs.

The new countries joining the agreement are:-

Czech Republic
Slovakia
Poland
Hungary
Latvia
Lithuania
Estonia
Malta
Slovenia

I decided to test this with a visit to the most northerly Balkan state of Slovenia travelling from Austria through a 5 mile tunnel to the south side of the Alps. True enough the European blue flag and stars had become the standard border crossing notification and the rows of kiosks and border controls were empty and unmanned as we headed to the capital Ljublana.

Ljubljana is a town of around 230,000 people with a pretty baroque style and attractive old quarter. The local search engine is “Najdi” and the local domain is .si.

The Schengen agreement was first signed by five countries in 1985 in a small Luxembourg town ‘Schengen’ - these original five were later joined by ten others and the agreement came into force in 1995. The agreement basically means that the internal borders between the treaty countries are removed - but that those same countries cooperate to strengthen the outer border using the Schengen Information System - a database where data is exchanged. There are also special rules on how police forces work together.

The original five countries were:-

France
Germany
Netherlands
Belgium
Luxembourg

Other countries which joined up to 1995 when Schengen was finally realised are:-

Spain
Portugal
Greece

Countries who joined after 1995 but before 1997 are:-

Italy
Austria
Denmark
Norway
Sweden
Finland
Iceland
Monaco

The Schengen Agreement has only ever, in part, been deployed by the British or the Irish for fear of it encouraging immigration and terrorism - though it doesn’t seem to have helped much staying out.

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German online advertising to beat 800 million Euros in 2007

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 11:10:30 +0000

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 Welt”. This forecast for the full year is based on an increase of 68% in the first three quarters of the year.

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.

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EURid suspends 10,000 .EU names squatted in China

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:14:09 +0000

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 reports, the woman was buying the names to sell on to other parties at higher prices - nothing new in that then. EURid says that is has received complaints - not particularly new either. One key point is that only European-based organisations are allowed to hold .EU domain names.

Out-law carries this great quote from EURid, “When we screen our data bank we see that some people have an amazing amount of names. Nobody needs 10,000 names.” Strange. You’d have thought that EURid had a little more knowledge and insight about the industry in which they operate. Perhaps that’s why there were so many complaints at launch!

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Google webmaster tools starts to think international

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 17:20:03 +0000

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 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!

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What is happening to ASK in Europe? I must ask!

Kristjan Mar Hauksson — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 07:17:37 +0000

Recent studies have shown that in Germany Google leads with a market share of 88.5% (I though Google had a foothold in the UK with around 79%). Yahoo has just over 3%, followed by the only local engine, ISP T-Online with 2.2%. Others on the list with just under 1.5% are MSN and AOL.

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 ?

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European travel market to hit 25% of transactions online

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 13:52:22 +0000

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 to low outbound travel and fewer low cost carriers
Spain and Italy are further behind thanks to lower broadband access and less internet use (and let’s face it if you live you don’t need to travel so much do you!!)

Via www.hotelexecutive.com

AdTech Hamburg: Forrester VP Favier says Second Life will be the new Google

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Tue, 22 May 2007 17:56:42 +0000

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.

It’s about searching for things and its a richer experience - Google is just about text, he said.

He presented findings from Forrester which categorise consumers into:-

Creators
Critics
Collectors
Couch potatoes

It sounds very similar to the ‘Diffusion of innovation’ curve which we all learned about in marketing with exactly the same approach required. Make contact and talk to the most important groups - here creators and critics - and let them tell the rest.

His full title is: Jaap Favier, Vice President, Research Director of Marketing & Customer Experience EMEA, Forrester Research

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European telecoms operators threaten US search hegemony

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 19:51:32 +0000

The UK’sTelegraph online reports that 12 of Europe’s largest telecoms operators - with one American firm - are planning to launch a mobile phone search engine to rival Google and Yahoo.

The companies concerned include Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia and US firm Cingular. Combined, they have a user base of 600 million people - with some 20% in the UK expected to have broadband speed mobile phone access by the end of 2007.

According to The Telegraph, declining mobile phone revenues are forcing telecoms operators to look at all angles - and the lucrative search advertising market is clearly attractive. For telecoms operators it is very appealing to keep a larger percentage of the revenues rather than ’sharing’ with Google, Yahoo or Microsoft.

However, both Google and Yahoo have already done deals with mobile phone operators and it is not clear what impact this will have!

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German economics ministers reveals move away from ‘Quaero’

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 18:00:34 +0000

Heise.de brings us the news (in German) that the German Government will be moving away from co-operation with the French over the search engine research project ‘Quaero’ even creating their own new project with a new name ‘Theseus’.

The announcement came from Germany’s Economics minister, Hartmut Schauerte, at an IT Summit in Potsdam. He said (translating) “The co-operation is at an end and although we won’t be cutting all ties, the project will in future be a national German project with the political and economic aims of this summit.”

Apparently, the co-operation had “Not been easy”. Heise.de reports that Hartmut Schauerte said the French were more interested in pursuing a ‘conventional search engine’ whereas the German Government expressly did not want to go into direct competition with Google and others and wanted to concentrate more on the development of the semantic web. Theseus would fulfil these aims. The partners previously involved with Quaero would remain on board, he said.

The Potsdam Summit aims to focus more German development effort on innovation in the digital field. Senior German Government ministers attended including Chancellor Angela Merkel.

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‘We’re all helping to create the Google monster,’ Exalead CEO, SES Paris

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 11:09:14 +0000

The Google monster came under concerted attack from Francois Bourdoncle, CEO and founder of France-based search engine Exalead in the opening keynote of Search Engine Strategies Paris. The press in particular should be worried about becoming sub-contractors of Google, he said. Whilst at present Google News brings plenty of traffic to sites under the brand names of the press outlets, this would change to Google’s brand in the future. Portals - by which Mr. Bourdoucle is referring to all the major search engines - are the “Walmart of the digital world,” he added.

In a considered talk which revolved around the concept that search is not that effective and there is plenty of room for other search engines despite Google’s dominance, Mr. Bourdoncle explained that an IFOP Omnibus study had shown that 75% of searchers actually have problems finding ’stuff’. 22% think there are too many results and 45% never bother to look at the second page.

Much of search, he explained, now revolved around Yellow Pages-style search where the user knows that a particular keyword produces the set of results they are looking for - even though apparently it is a free text search - the reality is now very different.

The 30 ‘verticals’ which Google now has cannot be presented in the results. Searcher intent is problematic because searchers don’t always know what they want. This was the reason Exalead is focusing on ’search by serendipity’ whereby the user has the option to ‘zoom out’ as well as ‘zoom in’ and to discover things they didn’t even know they were looking for.

He also criticised the new sitemaps collaboration announced by Google, Yahoo and MSN at Pubcon in Las Vegas. He said, “The sitemaps specification is not nice and open and it is not nice and closed”. He believes the initiative aims to close the door to new entrants to the market place.

Exalead aims to profit from the Quaero research initiative by bringing new technologies to the search engine which, he revealed, now has a new infrastructure in place which it has taken 8 years to build. “We have moved extremely slowly but now we’re going to move extremely quickly” he stressed. Exalead, which has offices in France, Spain, Italy and Germany is to be re-launched under a new consumer-facing brand soon.

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Blogs influence European consumers

Sante J. Achille — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 08:40:54 +0000

A recent reports on Internet access via mobile devices.

The study was conducted in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, and the US. while 29% of European Internet users regularly access the Internet from their mobile phones, only 19% of US users were accessing the web via their mobile devices.

The highest mobile Web penetration was in Germany, Italy and the UK (at 34% each), followed by France and Spain, and the US.

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The most influential blogs in German, French and Italian

Sante J. Achille — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 17:25:23 +0000

Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion reports on the Edelman and Technorati study of the most influential blogs in German, French and Italian.

Further information will be available during a presentation later this week in Milano where the results will be presented to participants.

The event is open to the public and scheduled on Friday 13, starting at 11,30 AM at Le Biciclette in via Torti, 1.

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Relevant Traffic has sold 36% of stock to Kinnevik

Sara Andersson — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 15:12:24 +0000

Relevant traffic is a big player in Sweden with a focus on selling clicks from the search engine listings.
Kinnevik , a big investement company has bought 36% of the stocks for 28 million Swedish kronors and is hoping to expand in Europe the next two years. They are looking to expand mostly in France and the U.K. and then move into Germany.
Their turnaround was 50 million SEK and the profit was 0.4 million SEK 2005/2006.

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New Emarketer report on European online commerce

Sante J. Achille — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 14:37:30 +0000

Emarketer reports Ecommerce trends for the next few years, associating robust growth in online sales to the increase of DSL lines installed both at home and at work.

The report identifies the UK as the most “mature” of all European markets, outspending european and even american counterparts on an annual per capita basis.

The study shows Spain and France as the fastest growing internet user populations, while Germany and Italy lead in broadband uptake.

The article identifies other markets such as Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden and Norway having active online consumers, forecasting Poland and other Eastern European as “serious online retail marketplaces in their own right”.

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Social Networking catching up with Traditional Internet Portals

Sante J. Achille — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 08:42:47 +0000

A study by Web Stats company Compete provides insight on social networking growth and how traffic levels compare to portals. The analysis concludes that social networks are gathering significant momentum and are catching up with “traditional portals”.

The results presented have raised some questions, however the trend is there for all to see.

Read/Write Web provides information on users behaviour and top web 2.0 applications for the following countries:

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Acoona launches European version of its search engine

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 09:48:14 +0000

Accoona has launched its search engine into the European zone - in fact western Europe. The search engine - which is on a .eu at www.accoona.eu searches by language - rather than country. Currently, the EU version runs in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.

Following the search you have the option to refine your search by geography, person, company, language or publisher.

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Europe studies the Web 2.0 phenomenon with TAGora

Sante J. Achille — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 17:52:57 +0000

TAGora is a Research Project funded by the European Union. The TAGora project aims at exploiting the unique opportunities offered by the increasing popularity of computer-mediated social interaction and social networks.

The project will develop along several lines:

A systematic and rigorous data collection campaign that will produce reference datasets and make them available to the scientific community at large.
The design and implementation of innovative techniques and tools for the analysis and mining of data.
The construction and validation of modeling schemes for the observed phenomenology, involving the comparison of experimental data, simulation and theoretical constructions.
The design and deployment of innovative, proof-of-concept tools aimed at better structuring and navigating information.

The kick off meeting was held on July 14th. The evolution of the project can be followed via the blog.

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France announces that ‘Quaero’ is behind schedule - due to launch in 2011

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 10:57:36 +0000

Abondance tells us that the Agence pour l’innovation industrielle (Industrial Innovation Agency) gave an update this week on progress with regard to 6 of its projects including the European search engine project ‘Quaero’. The project has a budget of 250 million Euros through 5 years and the AII’s press conference gave no new information of any significance - apart from a signifcant delay in progress and the fact that the new tool will bring together existing technologies.

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