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.

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!

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 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!

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.

As Thomas writes, the implications for local search are significant. With multilingual searches and user reviews this can become a useful tool for companies marketing into the EU zone.

Germany | Spain | Italy

Of course this will also open up new opportunities for API mash-ups and help drive the Google brand in these areas. The results for Moscow are still some way behind the local engines (searching for hotels in Google against a hotel search in Yandex as an example) but as always, it will be interesting to watch this develop.

In the first day of trading in .Eu domain names, over 1.2 million active names were registered through the 1,000 accredited registrars according to EURid live statistics.

The UK lead in the first four hours - says EURid - however Germany soon overtook the UK.
Marc van Wesemael, Managing Director of EURid has expressed satisfaction at the progress saying, “We are satisfied to see that the interest in .eu has been so large and that many already regard .eu as a useful complement to Internet’s national top level domain names”.

Could President Chirac have had some influence over this? Will the French catch up later? We’re taking no bets.

Markus Eggensperger of Lycos claims that “It’s the most important top level domain we have ever seen,” and “Eventually the .EU could rival the .com”.

As we say in the UK, that’s probably “poppycock” but then you never know. Still noone can say how .EUs will affect search engine rankings as the use of .fr or .de has been a very easy way to identify the country of a particular site.

Go and get you .Eu - but don’t switchover today!

France has a population similar to the UK and the Netherlands is much smaller than the UK so the UK is clearly underrepresented. Could it be that UK companies are not getting their act together and going to be caught out with other companies buying their domain names - or are the Brits simply not interested in Europe?

Whatever the case, time is rapidly running out for the .eu sunrise period and organisations would do well to check they are properly listed in the queue for their own domains. The period after 7th April is appropriately called the land rush period. Who will be caught in the rush….?

The priority for .eu domain names is being determined primarily on trademark ownership, followed in priority by other documentary evidence, such as company name or legal trading name. Government organisations and bodies will be rushed through the process ahead of everyone else. The .eu Registry will examine each application on it’s own merit and will refund failed applications, minus their administration fee of £11.

Further data analysis indicate a significant usage difference among sex (males 33%, females 22%), age (18-24 yrs 43%, 55-64 yrs 10%), education (university level 51%, elementary school 5%) as well as between social classes (upper 52%, medium 22%, lower 6%).

He expected more consolidation - but said that this depended on whether the industry “commoditised or personalised” its approach.

Speakers at the conference expressed the view that the search engines have become the new travel distribution system virtually replacing the dedicated GDS system.

Meanwhile, Expedia Europe director, Bruce Redor, attacked the meta-travel search engines. “I believe they bring greater choice,” he said but went on to heavily criticise the approach largely basing his argument on the fact that the travel inventory companies would not be able to cope with the scale of response needed. “Expedia handles 1,000 requests a second,” he said, “And that’s just for the flight path queries”.

Navneet Bali, formerly from e-bookers, is developing a new travel search engine or meta search tool in India under the brand Allcheckin.com. He believes that such travel search engines offer transparency and that customers are looking for that.

Google’s vertical market manager - travel UK - Daniel Robb - revealed that Google has undertaken a major pan-European study of travel search and will be releasing its findings in events throughout Europe in the next few weeks. For the UK, he said that 93% of travel searchers use Google, 34% Yahoo and 18% MSN. The study was principally based on existing Google users and demonstrates a multiple use of the engines.

European businesses abuzz over ‘.eu’ domain names - INQ7.net

Norway and Portugal have been the fastest growers in the last with 19% and 15% respectively. Five eastern European countries score for the first time - Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia, Ukraine and Slovakia. Top scorers are Finland, Germany and Poland.

XiTi - Etude Xiti Monitor

Only at the Hellenic Telecommunications and Post Commission and within a period of four hours, almost 5.000 applications for registration of domain names with Greek characters and the Latin “.gr” were submitted for authorization. This number will tend to increase significantly, since applications were also received by the rest of the officially accredited registrars (almost 260) that operate in Greece.

Based on the new regulation, a Greek domain name can be registered in upper or lower case letters based on the Greek alphabet using the equivalent punctuation while at the same time the domain will be registered on behalf of the same user at all possible combinations (with or without punctuation, in upper or lower case letters).

According to the Gr – Hostmaster, the registry of “.gr” domain names, a feature of the registration process of domains will be the concept of “Bundle”. Bundled domains are going to be those that differentiate only in punctuation but are otherwise the same to a main form. Any domain that is a Homograph of the original registration, written with Greek characters that are similar with Latin characters, may also become part of the Bundle.

Domain names that could be registered in each bundle are not automatically registered for the registrant but are instead barred from the list of available domain names until this particular registrant decides to “Activate” one or more of them. Each activation has a cost, depending on the registrar the registrant decides to use.

Even though Greek officials believe that this initiative will further boost the use of internet in Greece, there are some concerns that the new format will confuse people.

It is worth noticing that the maximum registration cost for a domain name for a two years’ period is 44€ (plus 19% VAT), for the transfer of a domain the charge is also 44€ (plus 19% VAT), while the renewal fee for a period of two years is 29.30€ (plus 19% VAT). The companies that have been officially appointed as registrars, need to pay a fee of 11.8€ to the Hellenic Telecommunications and Post Commission for every registration

Sources :
Hellenic Telecommunications and Post Commission
Gr - Hostmaster
List of the Greek characters available for registration
Greek homograph character table

But what really are the characteristics of the Greek internet user? This is a question replied by the 2004 survey* conducted by VPRC on behalf of the Greek Government. According to the data provided, the main reasons** Greeks use the internet are e-mail (21.5%), information seeking for products and services (17.7%), information for news, weather etc (11.7), gaming (11.5%), music (9.7%), education (7.8%), information for Public Services (3.2%), online shopping (2.3%) and rest (14.6%).

From those people that use the internet, 81,3% declare that have not proceeded into any kind of buy through the web, while 18.7% have done so. Specifically, 81% of those who have made a purchase repeated the action within 2004. Greeks usually buy books (21.1%), PC hardware/software (17.2%), travel tickets (8.3%), CDs (8.2%), apparel (7.6%), services (5.8%), auto parts (5.7%), DVDs (5.6%), hotel booking services (3.8%).

The reasons behind their decision to buy online rest mainly on the convenience provided by the web (28.2%), Unavailability of specific products in the Greek market (28.1%), competitive pricing (26%) and variety of offered goods (10.1%). The average yearly amount spent per user reaches 1.114 euro and the charges are mainly billed through credit cards (58%).

Crossing to the other side, those that do not shop online project their own arguments: No trust on the billing system (34.5%), no need to do so (31.2%), cannot see/touch the product (20.1%) and no trust on shipping services (7.2%).

While this is the profile of the internet user/shopper, according to another survey provided by Eurostat, 87% of Greek SME (Small and Medium Size Enterprises) and 100% of large businesses take advantage of the internet.

Concluding, the Greek Government has undertaken a number of initiatives to educate and facilitate users while at the same time assisting companies both financially and by providing the infrastructure with the aim to promote and increase the usage on internet.

(* Full survey is provided in Greek only, here)
(** Survey respondents were able to choose one single reply for each category of questions)

Reported by Travel Daily News

At the present time, Greek web sites only use the Latin alphabet for domain names - due to both technical problems and a lack of preparation by the registration countries, says the EETT.

Unfortunately for the Greeks, as with other non-Latin alphabets, the step is something of a compromise as the Greek characters have to be slotted in between the protocol (Http://www) and the country top level domain name (.gr).

The EETT says, “The measure should contribute to strengthening the Greek alphabet and give a new momentum to the use of new technologies”. Not everyone in Greece knows the Latin alphabet and the recent Eurostat research, reported earlier in this blog, shows that Greece is behind when compared with 30 European nations.