A non-profit organization, Japan Web development and Web marketing Consortium was established on April 1 to improve the quality of Japanese web. Current members include, Adobe Systems, Apple, Microsoft, web design companies, and some individual members. They plan to offer …

Mail.ru will has signed a deal to broadcast the Soyuz space shuttle launch through their new online video service, video.mail.ru. On 7 April at 21.00 Moscow time a live audience of millions of television viewers and Internet users can watch …

David Sifry outlines the state of the Blogosphere in the first quaterly report 2007

Japan Registry Services, who handle JP domain management and DNS operation, announced that there are 908,329 registered JP domains as of April 4, 2007, which makes JP domain to be the 10th popular domains in the world. (There are …

Japan University just announced its plan to introduce Google Apps (Education Edition), and provide it to students (up to 100,000 students). The service includes, Gmail, Google talk and Google calender. They plan to provide the service to a …

A report by Nielsen/Net Ratings on the site view changes in February shows most of the popular cooking (recipes) sites had a large increase in site views. 3 of them had more than 30% increase in site view from January, and most of the increase came from female between 20-50.

Marketing Sherpa have released a useful white paper on Website Globalisation, you can download this free of charge until the 11th April. Web globalization isn’t just for large multinational corporations anymore. Companies of all sizes are capitalizing on the Internet to …

Yahoo! Japan announced the opening of Yahoo! Japan Laboratory in Tokyo.
It aims to contribute to a healthy, rich development of the Internet by investigating and researching a further possibility of the Internet with the advancement of the technology, and the …

The project, codenamed SecondUA intends to project the Portuguese University by being one of only 70 worldwide to establish a presence in Second Life. The University of Aveiro bought an island in Second Life and plans to have there six …

The 2nd Internet and Business conference will take place in Moscow on the 18th-20th of April. Some of the topics set to be covered include: Exponential growth of internet in Russia
Contextual advertising/pay for placement systems and future developments
Electronic payments, problems and …

Google is celebrating their first anniversary in Russia at the moment and according to 3dnews.ru, they are marking the occasion by opening a new office in Moscow. In 2006, Google set up two development centers in Moscow and St. Petersburg. …

Nearly 25% of Internet users in the UK is over the age of 50 and a the latest surveys shoe that the Internet is even more popular than gardening among UK pensioners. A generation in the UK is growing up …

Orkut Buyukkokten, the engineer behind Google’s social network website, is visiting Brazil for the first time. He is in Rio de Janeiro this week, and will visit São Paulo (including a breakfast at GooglePlex with a select group of clients) …

Yandex, the leading Russian search portal, has released a new report on the state of e-commerce in Russia. The results are promising, up 42% in 2006, racing ahead of the 25% rise seen in western markets. As expected, Moscow leads …

Yandex announced today that they have acquired the popular networking sites for professionals, MoiKrug.ru. The social network site MoiKrug.ru which translates as ‘my circle’ in English, helps to maintain and build business contacts, find classmates, peers and colleagues. In a similar …

Russian search company Rambler has announced the appointment of former Yahoo! Europe chief, Mark Opzoomer, as General Director (CEO). This move is seen by many analysts as a positive step for the search company. While Rambler were the first search engine …

Workey hasn’t launched their services yet but its a fascinating technology that will enable the users to see all the work applications on the web on one site. It is voted as nb 3 of the most interesting innovations to …

Eniro has bought 48.1 % of Netclips who owns the video clip community bubblare.se.
They want to strengthen their position in the market and have a more vertical approach and of course the ability to compete with more videorelated content in the fields of search. With the recent new launch of their maps and search ability they are predicted to grow as a strong player in the Swedish search landscape.

Baidu.com, China’s leading search engine, reported a fivefold increase in fourth quarter net income as online marketing revenue more than doubled. China’s Internet market is the second largest after the United States, with more than 123 million people …

The Egyptian’s Orascom Telecom has launched their mobile version of search engine http://www.onkosh.com with .mobi top level domain extension onkosh.mobi that compatible for mobile devices.

Since last week anyone can sign-in to Google’s free webmail. Until now you needed an invitation from an user.
Brasil accounts for second largest number of Gmail users, boosted by Orkut.

Following the roll-out in 19 countries, Yahoo introduced banner ads on its mobile-specific Web site.

According to Click Z “The ads on Yahoo’s mobile sites are part of a new publishing platform built to better deliver both content and marketing messages …

Plans by ICANN to delete some of the more ‘outdated’ domain extensions in their index have been derailed. They had opened a public discussion in San Paulo which ended last month. Top of their list of their list for deletion was the Russian .su (Soviet Union) extension and the former Yogoslav Republic’s .yu. However the public proceedings have been dogged by protests and threats of legal action from domain owners, less than happy at the prospect of loosing their domain, marketing and branding expenses. ICANN finally agreed to leave the extensions alone.

Norway’s FAST, a leader in search engine technologies in the world has launched its private-label monetization platform called AdMomentum for online media publishers, retailers, and telecommunications service providers. Publishers now can have their own network and advertisers without any third party intervention. AdMomentum will help publishers to build direct relationships with their advertisers with customized interface and advertising options like: Text, Images, Video, and audio.

“NicoNicoDouga” is not a website for you to submit videos, but to comment about videos you viewed at YouTube and Ameba Vision.

Since the opening of its beta version on January 15, 2007, they received 10 mil comments by Feb 7, …

Yandex, the leading Russian search engine, have announced their preliminary financial results for 2006. Revenue is reported to total $72m (USD), more than double that reported for 2005.

“Our internal research indicates that 2006 was the first year that search/context …

MSN China has announced it will roll out a job search engine.

Company spokesperson Richard Feng said “we are going to offer a job-hunting service in the next few months”.

The online job market in China last year was 1.15 billion yen, …

The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) recently found that at the end of 2006, the number of Internet users in China had reached an estimated 137 million. This puts them second only to the United States in number of …

Naseej is one of the popular ISPs in Saudi Arabia has launched mobile search engine and directory called “Daleel Raheeb” http://www.raheeb.com for Saudi market only at least in the first phase. This new service is still Beta version, which works with two mobile operators Jawal and Mobily.

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.

Google established their Middle Eastern branch in Egypt last year for Business Development purpose; now they are strengthening their regional existence by taking part of the most important IT events in the region at Cairo ICT Exhibition from February 4 – 7, 2007.

I read an announcement by Rakuten that consumers can soon view the information about the products sold at Rakuten by entering product codes on Rakuten catalogue into Rakuten’s mobile site.

This sounds great, but why stop there?
This is what …

Daum Communications, Korea’s 2nd largest Internet company has confirmed in 26th January 2007 that it has teamed up with Google in keyword ads and has been already paid for 222,8 Million USD from Google for 3 years gurantee. According to …

JASRAC (Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers) announced that the U.S. video-posting website YouTube’s CEO and CTO will visit them in February to discuss the request made by them to remove the large volume (about 30,000) of …

Social media and Web 2.0 are rather recent concepts, but well known ones in the US. But in Portugal its praticaly unknown.

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

Red Herring reports that Google is using Seedfund.com to spread start up funds to new tech companies in India.

The article can be found here.

MSN has partnered with Chinese-based travel agency, ctrip.com. The two will market to the young and affluent Chinese market, according to a report at Adotas.com.

People in Sweden are still reporting that they’ve had problems with Gmail and that their email from the beginning of January still hasn’t been found. Google says its fixed and hasn’t been a problem after December 2006, but it seems …

Eniro has relaunched their website and claim to have a better service now. They are still using Googles search index but is integrating it better now with their other services on maps and address-information. For instance, they provide you additional …

McAfee developed a strong base in China by partnering with China Unicom and Baidu. McAfee offers virus protection, internet security software, personal computer updates, hacker protection and anti-virus downloads. China Unicom (China United Telecommunications Corporation) which is the second …

Japan’s largest social networking service site “mixi” announced that its mobile service “mixi mobile” had more than 100 million page views on January 15th, 2007.

As of December 2006, mixi mobile has 2.3 million unique users, and has more than 12,000 …

There are some changes in PPC ad market in Japan in December. Here’s some notes for those people who are running the ad campaign in Japan market.

- MSN Japan’s Live Search result pages now show the ads from Microsoft Digital …

Jupiter Research and the SEMPO Europe Working Group have developed the first pan-European Research on Search Engine Marketing. Online since January 15th, the objective of the research is to acquire a global vision of Search Engine Marketing in Europe.
Participants have …

According to marktest, during 2006, 848 thousand young people (15-24 years old) surfed the web a total of 156 million hours.

That’s an average of 22 minutes online each/per day.

Hi5.com is the page that gets more views, with an average …

According to the Internet Guide 2007, a recently released report from the Internet Society of China, Internet users in China spent RMB 276.76 billion ($35.5 billion) on Internet services in 2006. This represents an increase of nearly 50 percent …

Just four months after its redesign ByIndia.com has been recognised as the most used Indian search engine. Alexa noted a 700% increase in traffic since the redesign which incorporated many web 2.0 styles.

To continue the growth and viral impact …

According to a report by Adotas, Rakuten - one of the largest Japanese online malls - plans to expand into the United Staes, Europe and China.

The company already owns US affiliate portal LinkShare which should help them in their efforts.

Interestingly, …

The Study Concluded that the typical British computer user spends just over 160 minutes on the internet every day, compared with 148 minutes watching TV - that’s about 41 days spent online every year. Apart from sleeping and working this …

Google and China Mobile announced a joint venture in setting up an online search technology for China Mobile, a carrier with roughly 300 million subscribers. The new services are expected to be launched early this year. The partnership …

São Paulo State Superior Court through its PR office said today that the decision is not to take YouTube off the air in Brazil, but only filter brazilian users to avoid the exhibition of “Cicarelli’s sex tape”.
Of course, defense attorney …