The computers, named “Magalhães” in honour of the Portuguese explorer, will cost between zero € (for underprivileged kids) up to 50€. When they come out of the factory (which by the way is in Portugal), the retail price is near the 180€ mark, the remaining value being subsidized by the government and telecommunication companies.

The computers include wifi capability (as well as broad band Internet access), but the price does not include home Internet connections.

6 months ago the request to liberalize the .pt TLD was proposed by the Foundation for National Scientific Computing (FCCN) in order to stimulate the market. Only about 116 thousand .pt domains exist. This number is considered very low, and should be between 200 thousand and 1 million, if compared to similar European Countries.

The campaign isn’t very out of the ordinary, but for one thing: it mentions a blog url . Here’s the concept: people who sign in with ZON are so called “enlightned”. Among them are mostly common folk, one being a cleaning lady that keeps a blog where she talks about her job. Still doesn’t sound that interesting? What if she was the cleaning lady in the Olimpus?

Sure… the idea won’t win any gold lions at Cannes, but it is probably the first time a big tv campaign mentions a blog. And the blog is actually online, and being updated in a fairly regular basis. You can call it a first attempt at mass media viral marketing.

Called Eco Find, it is interely Portuguese in the making, but it uses Google results.

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.

The order of the links in the Portuguese version of Google (Google.pt) is now the following:

Web | Images | News | Groups | Calendar | Photos

This differs sightly from the US version of Google, and that is explained by the fact that Google adapts its navigational menu according to each country.

Each report will also provide a snapshot of search engine usage and activity around the world, which can be compared against for the following year. This should help identify growth or decline for the search engines in each local market.

In the 2007 report we have covered the following 17 countries:

• Bulgaria - Georgi Georgiev (Investor BG PLC)
• China - David Temple (China Search Marketing Tour)
• Czech Republic | Slovakia - Katerina Rotterova (BenedaGroup.com)
• Denmark - Rasmus Sørensen (TLA Media)
• Estonia - Robin Gurney (Altex Marketing)
• Iceland - Kristjan Mar Hauksson (Nordic eMarketing)
• Israel - Gilad Sasson (Search Marketing)
• Italy - Sante Achille (Search Engine Consultant)
• Japan - Motoko Hunt (AJPR)
• Portugal - Nuno Hipólito (Search Marketing)
• Russia | Ukraine - Nick Wilsdon (e3internet)
• South Korea - Ebina Cho
• Spain - Oscar Carreras (WebCertain)
• The Netherlands - Peter Kersbergen (WebCertain)
• United Kingdom - Andy Atkins-Krüger (WebCertain)

The report can be downloaded free of charge by clicking the following link.

 Download Global Search Report 2007 21 Pages (1.3MB)

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 Justice Department’s press release explains that the centre aims to be a place where Second Life residents can resolve conflicts that come about in the 3D world, such as interpretation of contracts or problems with acquiring consumer goods on line.

This initiative is an important one, because it is announced exactly when Portugal is presiding to the European Union and is meant to send a strong signal to all European partners that Europe is now a strong believer in these methods of resolving legal issues. And of course it is also a sign that the on line world is not ignored by the higher instances of goverment, at the European level.

Hopefully it will also mark the beginning of the use of more modern technologies applied to solving the delays of common rule of law in the courts, in Portugal and elsewhere.

Now AEIOU, a portal which was recently bought by one of Portugal’s biggest media groups Impresa, announced they are launching a new sponsored link program. Unlike adwords or anúncios Sapo, AEIOU doesn’t allow for anyone to use their system, but accepts contacts from companies or individuals that may be interested.

Basically they offer the chance for companies to appear in ads alongside the search results of the portal. They see it as a chance to capitalize on the already huge online database of companies in their business directory, which is one of the most used in Portugal.

Since taking charge of the Portuguese government, Socrates has pushed a 430 million euro technological update of the Portuguese educational system, by setting up all the schools in the country with state-of-the-art broadband Internet acess, electronic whiteboards and computer systems.

The so called “technological plan” is set to give all schools 48mps Internet connections by the end of 2010. A great update if you consider that just a few years ago, little or no schools even had a computer room.

The Prime Minister sees in these “Schools of the future”, breading grounds for more prepared individuals, and better prepared profissionals, in what is surely a safe bet in Portugal’s future.

The product is called “Sapohome” and it consists of a touch sensitive screen that allows access to information in a geographical context. This means that the user researches for news, maps, weather, restaurants and other information, based on Sapo maps databases and using the technological platform design by Ydreams - one of the most innovative tek companies in Portugal.

Sapohome can also be used as a digital picture frame, with user defined pictures.

Initially this project is being sold as part of the technologies included in PT’s Smart Home project, although it will be gradually available for sale to individual costumers. The estimated price will be around € 800.

Sapo replaces Google in both search and ads in Hi5.

According to Netpanel, Hi5 is the 4th most visited site in Portugal with close to 900.000 unique visitors/month. Sapo is 5th, with 800.000 unique visitors/month.

The University of Aveiro bought an island in Second Life and plans to divide it into six big areas, dedicated to online classes, study spaces and leisure. A area called InfoZone will serve as the entrance to the project.

Now the 5 million+ users of Second Life can have the experience of going to a Portuguese University, without leaving their couch.

At the same time, PT Multimedia, the branch of PT responsible for cable Internet communications, will be split from the main brand, which will cause, in some opinions, a new takeover race, this time for this smaller, but very valuable, company.

This move follows others from Sapo news pages, that now specifically target sport, technology and economy.

Sapo Local uses AJAX to gather news from different places into a personalized “news homepage”. This different places include blogs and other stablished news websites.

A Sapo user can now access news along a broad spectrum of subjects, without leaving the portal. There is also a cool feature that allows users to search the news, very similar to Google News.

Alongside those news you can also find contextual ads, from Anuncios Sapo (Sapo Ads) and Google Adwords.

A year and half ago, a program called “Empresa na Hora” (Create your company in one hour) was launched to speed up the process of creating a business from scratch. The Internet has played a big part in this program, allowing for faster end results and less red tape along the way.

Costa said in fact that there is presently a 40% monthly growth in people using the Internet to create their businesses. In about a year, more than 200 companies have been created on line, without any paperwork.

When it comes to getting a trademark registered, the Portuguese also use the Internet for speedier processing. Costa revealed that 59% of trademark requests are now made on line.

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!

In fact, only recently did some companies begin to invest seriously in some online initatives, that could be considered web 2.0

Sapo, as the main news and entertainment portal in the Portuguese online world (with 800.000 visitors+/day) is one of them.

Sapo is part of the biggest media group in Portugal, which also ownes copperwire and cable communication businesses - PT Telecom.

This portal has, for some years now, provided basic blog services. But now it also offers a flickr-like web site, called Fotos Sapo. Recently they added a De.licio.us clone, called Sapo Tags, a social bookmarking service.

For 2007 Sapo promisses even more web 2.0. Namely user-specific webpages (NetVibes clone?). They will probably use AJAX technologies, as that seems to be the order of the day now.

Outside of Sapo’s initiatives, there isn’t much else in Portugal right now I can talk about. But I can also name a web site called DoMelhor that resembles Digg in (many) ways.

For now there is no Portuguese equivalent of Second Life or YouTube (although you can find a lot of Portuguese videos in there).