Ru-Centre, the Russian Registrar, has released this Monday on the number of domains in circulation. According to their figures 140 000 new URLs appeared last year in the Russian internet, which is 46.31% more than in 2004. In the beginning of 2006 RuNet has gained 40 000 new URLs again, so in total there are […]

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With 60% of the emails in China considered spam, China’s Ministry of Information enacted their first anti-spam measures to take effect on March 30th. Unfortunately these measures are purely administrative and only apply to anyone operating an email service. China has previously attempted to reign in the number of spam emails by implementing an opt […]

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An panel of lawyers concluded on Thursday that Russian notaries are not ready to certify Web resources for use as evidence in court cases. This has implications for company protection against copyright, branding and other intellectual property cases involving the Russian internet.
The notary system is intrinsic to many official functions in Russia. For example […]

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Media post has a good article about this. It’s interesting to note that this is so significant in the US, as it is generally the case in developing Internet markets that even more activity happens offline.
Even if you don’t have access to brick & mortar stores for your products or services, adding points of contact […]

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MarketingSherpa, the popular research site, has released the first of a free two part series on marketing to China.
Special Report Part I: Marketing to China — Overcoming the Top 5 Challenges
The biggest mistake companies make is “approaching China as a single, huge market when in fact, China is a series of markets […]

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The Danish tv station TV2 has quietly launched a new search engine called TV2 Fredo. The search engine presumably offers contactinfo, website links(!), maps and a link to a gift certificate partner.
TV2 describes the search engine as follows (my rough translation):

TV 2|Fredo is a search service for people that wants to shop goods, services or […]

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The Moscow Times is carrying a report on the recent surge in London IPO listings for Russian companies.
Seven Russian IPOs raised $5 billion on the London Stock Exchange in 2005, making Russia the biggest source of international primary offerings in London. Bankers estimate up to 25 flotations this year will raise several times that […]

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The Portal Visir.is, owned by Iceland largest media company, just added to their services “Yellow Pages” called ALLT. This is a addition to their other services in other more “traditional” media. There is currently no none Icelandic search. The company is expanding to Denmark with a similar concept.

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Offline gambling has exploded in Russia in the last three years, particularly in Moscow. It is an estimated $5 billion annual business and draws players to both high-class casinos and the one-rouble slots in small arcades. Russia, the world’s second-largest country by population with an all-cash culture that favours spending over saving may soon rival […]

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The first Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo to be held in China wrapped up and recieved great feedback from the participants. There were approximately 600 attendees at this event and next year promises to bring out even more. Here’s some notes from the keynote speakers, Jack Ma of Yahoo! China and Johnny Zhou […]

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Thanks, Andy for inviting me to contribute to the Search Technology area. Well, since this is my first post, this one is a bit informal. I’ll try to use a reporting style in my next one.
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El Nuevo Día (http://www.endi.com) from Puerto Rico, one of the most important newspapers in the Caribbean region, is featuring today […]

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As my “Hello World” post at this blog, I’ll start with the disclaimer that I’m a firm believer that in most things, the Internet overall not being the least, the US leads the way. Now I don’t mean only in technology, Internet Penetration Rate, investments, etc., but also in social behaviour and what characterizes product […]

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ADEx Nielsen estimates report online marketing expenditure on the rise in Italy up 51,3% over a 12 month span from January 2005
to the same month of this year. Marketing & Publicity investments in Italy reach € 601,4 Million with an overall 2,1% increase. Billboard publicity fell sharply (-7,3%) while online investment confirms a positive trend […]

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Yandex, Russia’s most popular search engine portal, have announced record profits for last year. Net profit of the company in 2005 was $13,6m, and turnover (revenue) was $35,6m (on US GAAP, without including NDS). Those figures have doubled since 2004.
They put this growth down to the wider expansion of the internet in Russia, they […]

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On March 15, Yahoo! Japan opened the beta version of Keyword input assist.
When a search user types the first several character of the search word, it will display a list of related keywords. This function is available to the Windows users with IE 5.5+ and Firefox 1.0+, and Mac OS X users […]

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Pandia reports on a new censorship comparison tool developed by researchers at Indiana University. The tool compares the preeminance of words featured in the top ten results of Yahoo or Google by displaying words graphically giving weight to those terms which are more frequent - the end result is a graphic somewhat reminscent of […]

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In August, we discussed Chile’s move to internationalize the .cl domain, by allowing for non-english letters, such as “ñ”, “ü” and 7 other international characters. It was certainly an exciting step.
But for global internet users and companies as a whole, ICANN’s announcement of a plan to start testing domain names that are entirely composed […]

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The conference season in Russia has taken a great leap forward today with the announcement of a new summit targeted at RuNet e-commerce. The conference has been organised by the leading lights of Russian internet – including the search engines Yandex, Rambler and Mail.ru.
The agenda for the conference is copied below, some very interesting […]

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The Italian Communications Authority has recently deliberated and approved one of the first set of rules and regulations addressing the VoIP sector in rapid growth.
The newly approved legislation introduces the prefix 5 to identify so called “nomad” telecommunications which use the Internet to make and receive telephone calls. The peculiarity of VoIP-In telephone […]

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Japan Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has established Japan Blog Association on February 28, 2006.
Its purpose is to perform research, study, support, etc. about Blog, and to provide the information and environment for Blog users to enjoy blogging freely.
MIAC plans to provide the services and activities through the organization from February 28, 2006 […]

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