But about two years ago China made its ccTLD a lot more affordable and easier to get. Since then, the country has been registering roughly 20,000 country codes a day. The country went from 2 million registrations to 10 million registrations in an amazing 12 months.

Within the past two months, China overtook Germany for the top spot, with approximately 11.4 million registrations. It’s safe to say that Germany isn’t going to take that lead back.

Below is the list of the leading countries overall:

The country that stands the best chance of one day giving China a run for its money is India. But I’m not holding my breath. India stands at only 1.2 million registrations currently and is growing at 46% annually. It’s an impressive growth rate — a rate that is bound to increase, but China is also adding registrations at a good clip.

Why isn’t .us higher on the list? Blame .com. Most Americans assume .com is synonymous with USA. Over time, I expect this to change, but that’s a topic for a future post…

This, together with the wide availability of access, is essential to enable India to take it’s rightful place as a major economy in the modern world. Google provides natural search in just 6 languages currently - English, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi and Tamil. Paid search is only available in English and Hindi currently. Yahoo and Live.com are only available in English.

The search plugins enable, for example, spelling corrections in the Hindi language where multiple ways of spelling the same word correctly exist as well as cross linking searches from language to language. For this development to achieve its potential, the tools really need to be adopted by the major search engines.

“Because Google and Yahoo! have a strong presence in many Asia-Pacific countries, they account for the majority of searches conducted in the overall region,” said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president. “However, there are several strong, local country search engines that also play a significant role in the region. Most notably, the dominant search engine in China, Baidu.com, accounts for one out of every six searches in Asia-Pacific notwithstanding the fact that its users are primarily from China.”

What interesting is that 5 out of the Top 10 Search Properties in Asia-Pacific (April 2008) were the region based engines such as Korea’s Naver and China’s Alibaba.

comScore’s data also shows the country by country breakdown of Internet audience in the region. China ranks #1 with 82,814,000 unique searchers and Japan ranks #2 with 60,050,000 unique searchers. Korean searchers have most number of searches per searcher (103.5) followed by Japan’s 102.6 searches per searcher.

The survey shows more than 85 per cent of Internet users in the world are purchasing goods or services online, with credit cards as the most used method of payment.

Source: Mumbai Mirror

“These strategic partnerships demonstrate Yahoo!’s continued momentum, building on seven previous partnerships with Asian mobile operators and reinforce Yahoo!’s strong leadership position in mobile audience reach, mobile search services and mobile advertising,” the company said in a statement.

eMarketer also estimates that 25.5 million Indians used the Internet at least once a month in 2006 and expects India’s online population to reach 33.2 million in 2007 and 71.6 million by 2011.

Source: eMarketer

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 article can be found here.

Yahoo is also starting their “Big Thinkers” lectures in India in January 2007.

The President of Bharti Airtel Ltd explains,

“In India, mobile is fast outgrowing the growth of PCs. Mobile users outnumber PC users in India by a factor of six. The first computing experience for the majority of Indians in the next few years will be on a mobile phone. Airtel is delighted to partner with Google, a company that literally reinvented the Internet, to bring its cutting edge technology to our customers.”

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, Google’s VP of Asia Pacific and Latin America (now that’s a territory….) added,

“India is one of the fastest growing mobile markets in the world. We are very pleased to partner with Airtel, a company that has played a key role in leading India’s explosive mobile growth, to bring Google services to the millions of mobile users in India. By providing immediate access to Google, Airtel is creating a compelling experience for its users, who will now be able to quickly and easily find information that’s important to them.”

The domains will cover China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and other asian countries.

Middle management seems to be an area Google has troubles finding suitable employees in the India area.

The Pew Global Attitudes Project has released a report illustrating the rapid growth of internet use globally. Much of this growth can be put down to more women and over 50’s coming online across Western Europe.

The report also contains some interesting figures on internet growth across a range of countries, including Russia, China and India, comparing data from 2004 and 2005.

Usage has risen across the board with 35% (rise of 16%) for Russia and for India 21%(rise of 15%).

The Netherlands has the most mature market, with 84% of its inhabitants going online. They are followed by Canada (79%), UK (76%), US (76%)and Germany (67%).

In terms of access Netherlands again came out on top (72%) with established western markets close behind. Access has risen though for Poland (20%, up 18%), China (33%, up 14%), Russia (15%, up 8%) and India (14%, up 11%).

Russian users are still overwhelmingly young people. Only 3% of Russians aged from 50 to 65 have access to the Internet. To compare, in the USA and Canada 68% from this age group use the Internet, in the UK this index is equal to 67%, in Germany – 53%, in France – 52% and in Poland – 22%.

Source: RataNews | Pew Global Attitudes Project

With the expansion of its database the search engine could be useful for those marketers who wish expand their sales & marketing to Indian territories and are searching for initial information and /or the statistics.

Indian travelers abroad can search for Indian Restaurants and get sites which can provide names, addresses and telephone numbers from nearly 120 countries.

Sushil,
Bombay, India

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.

Chennai (Madras) based G V Films Limited has decided to capitalise on this by commencing online web streaming of nearly 6000 Indian filmsand expects to launch it in next 4 months,

The company has also signed a Memorandum of Understanding with 1-Net Singapore to stream and distribute live films to a global audience - particularly to Indians abroad and in India. Kimberley Foo, assistant director, games and entertainment division of Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore.1-Net, a technology solutions provider and operator of Singapore’s broadband network - SingaporeOne, will host the portals “gvtamilfilms.com” and “telugupictures.com”.

Addressing a press conference, Mahadevan Ganesh, chairman of GV Films said that the company had invested Rs.90 crores in attaining the internet copyrights for the 6,000 films in the last four years. 1-Net Singapore will share about 15 per cent of the revenues from movie portal during the first year, however, Ganesh declined to comment further on the revenue sharing method.

Two portals Viz., gvtamilfilms.com and telugupictures.com will be hosted by 1-Net Singapore who have invested resources for content distribution. The websites, which are paid sites, have both subscription and pay-per-view modes with a download time of 15 minutes for which the customer payment will be through credit cards.

Sushil, Bombay, India

10 million mobile subscribers grows to 43.9 million

In January 2003, two years before, India had just 10 million mobile subscribers. Every month, India adds another 1.5 million mobile subscribers to the 28 million mobile phone users registered last December. Subscribers grew by 1.4 million to 44.9 million last month, overtaking the 43.9 million registered land line users, TRAI said.

Revenues from the Indian cellular services market will reach $24 billion by the end of 2009, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35.6 percent, according to a study released Wednesday by the research firm Gartner.

Online stock trading growth 150% P.A to over Rs.700 Cr in 2 years

There has been a massive rise in the number of internet traders. At the end of July 2005, there were 108 registered brokers on the NSE, and about 1.054 million Internet trading subscribers. Industry experts believe that online trading will take off in a big way in the years to come.

Online Websites with Travel packages to Europe, USA, Canada and Australia

In India as elsewhere, the travel websites are the first as an industry to call the attention of net users and sell them travel packages online or select online and purchase offline.

More and more net users planning to travel abroad are turning to the internet. They get much more information to study, plan and re-plan their destinations and packages, Indians with higher disposable income and low air fare are readily willing to buy travel packages online.

This move towards online commerce is an opportunity for small and medium western online travel marketers to position themselves prominently among Indian net users and win their confidence. No matter if you choose to start a small with limited number of packages but it must be well planned and positioned. Normally it’s difficult to retain travel customers as they always look for new packages and destinations. But Indians, having no adequate knowledge about traveling abroad, place their reliance on the word of mouth from their relatives and friends and in most cases they follow the package plan recommended to them. With a small dose of incentive, such schemes can be highly successful and opens gateways for other hospitality products and services.

Companies with strategic tie-ups to provide package from port of embarkation
to each destination are sure to win confidence and goodwill for repeat patronage.

Last year nearly 6 millions traveled abroad and this year it is likely to exceed10 million.

Online Advertising & Marketing

The total spending for 2004-2005 was about 18 million dollars, but a reputed indian online association predicts this will touch 34 million dollars in the next financial year and will exceed 57 million in 2006-2007. According to a study by MSN it’s reboot time for Indian advertising with predictions that the online segment is likely to cross the 100 million dollar mark by 2010.

The internet is increasingly a part of the media mix for advertisers as they realise its high potential in reach and penetration The growth over the past three to four years has been good and the growth is pegged at 50 per cent a year for at least three years in a row.

Marketing pundits say that the advertising agencies should explore multiple ways to engage and involve consumers. Digital media is the future. New media vehicles will play an increasingly important role in consumers’ lives; therefore, brand marketers would lose out if they do not leverage the emerging media options.