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US Gambling Market closed to Europe, Japan and Canada

Tim — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:35:50 +0000

The United States Government has made agreements with the European Union, the Japanese Government and the Canadian government to keep it’s online gambling market exclusive to US companies. The US is still in negotiations with other online gambling company hubs such as India, Antigua and Barbuda, Macau and Costa Rica.

European online gambling companies are disappointed with the agreement – who were hoping that a recent case against the US at the World Trade Organisation determined that a US law only allowing US companies to offer horse-race betting services was discriminatory to offshore companies.

Though, since the discrimination case , the US has made it more difficult for foreign online gambling companies by making it illegal for US banks and other financial institutions to send money to offshore gambling companies.

Offshore online gambling companies claim that being refused access to the US market is hindering their business. European online gambling companies believe that they are entitled to as much as $100 billion in compensation -though the European Commission has dismissed the request as an exaggeration.

Opera says Microsoft “deprives consumers of a real choice”

Tim — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 02:00:19 +0000

The Norwegian company behind the web browser Opera – a long-time competitor of Internet Explorer, has filed a complaint to the European Commission regarding Microsoft’s operating system Windows and it’s bias towards the Internet Explorer browser, which fails to properly follow the accepted web standards.

More specifically, Opera claims that the way Microsoft’s Windows connects its browser Internet Explorer to web activity is illegal and “deprives consumers of a real choice” of Internet Browser. Although Microsoft have done this since Windows 98 – there is a lot more competition out there and a whole lot more money to be made. In recent times, Internet Explorer has lost a huge chunk of market share to alternative browsers:

Opera is a member of the European Committee of Interoperable Systems (ECIS) , whose lawyer Thomas Vinje said in a statement: “By tying its Internet Explorer product to its monopoly Windows operating system and refusing to faithfully implement industry accepted open standards, Microsoft deprives consumers of a real choice in Internet browsers”

Whether it will be accepted will be interesting, but it’s not likely that Microsoft will be in for another antitrust case.

Source: Press Release “Opera files antitrust complaint with the EU”

OpenSocial – Over Before It Began?

Tim — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 12:46:17 +0000

Facebook announced that the Facebook application platform would be opened to all social networks, after Bebo announced support for Facebook’s very successful application platform. Unfortunately for Google, this the biggest threat to their open social network platform, OpenSocial.

OpenSocial was meant to be a solution to a current problem – lack of compatibility between social networks. With the support of many major social networks: MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Tagged and of course – Google’s own Orkut. However, Facebook, with it’s own application platform, wasn’t interested. At the time, Facebook’s application platform was closed – applications could only be accessed through Facebook – but now that Facebook will be opened, everything’s different.

With an army of over 100,000 developers and thousands of applications with millions of installations, Facebook has an immense advantage over OpenSocial – momentum. OpenSocial’s advantage is that it’s not propriety and that no new languages are required (like Facebook’s markup language) – OpenSocial uses HTML, XML, and Javascript. The question is whether developers will choose to create applications for an established, proven platform or will they opt for the truly open platform that uses familiar programming languages.

Sadly, OpenSocial now it looks like an uphill battle.

Advertise in PDF Documents – Yahoo and Adobe Team Up

Tim — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 11:20:33 +0000

Adobe and Yahoo have made a deal to allow publishers to sell ad space in PDF documents and advertisers to place dynamic ads inside those documents. The advertisers pay to get their ads in the documents and then a percentage of this is passed on to the publisher. Of course, Yahoo and Adobe would each be taking a slice of each transaction.

This is very innovative territory and if successful, may provide even more opportunities and potential business for advertisers. Yahoo has given advertisers a decent level of control over the ads, and allows them to target specific audiences, rotate ads and more. The ads are hidden when documents are printed out.

PDF is the industry standard for sending and storing documents. With such a huge audience including home users, businesses, and government – PDF documents are used by most of the internet population.

Source: Yahoo to put adverts in PDF files, BBC.

Big Business Prefers Internet Advertising over Mass Media

Tim — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 07:10:56 +0000

A recent study by Veritas Communications has revealed that almost half of business leaders in Canada believe that the internet is more effective for marketing purposes than the mass media. Social media, specifically, was considered more important than traditional media platforms by 46%.

This means that online social media platforms such as YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Digg are going to be (if not already) targeted by more and more businesses for advertising purposes while advertising demand for media such as Radio, Television and Newspaper may decline.

So what makes these social media sites so much more effective for advertising? First of all, these social media sites know the users so the advertising can be highly targeted. The next huge benefit of advertising online is it’s extremely measurable – the ROI (Return on Investment) from advertising can be calculated immediately. Unlike print, the results of online advertising are almost instantaneous. Finally, online marketing is cheaper – though it’s arguable that the lower price is just a result of being more effective and measurable.

With the NASDAQ launching an Internet Index just this week, it’s no surprise that the results of surveys are showing that the Internet is being considered more seriously as a real media platform. It’s just another reason to get your business online – these patterns are only going to continue. If your business is already online and you’re interested in online marketing, check our online marketing services and if you like it – give us a call!

Chinese Addicted to the Web?

Tim — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:09:09 +0000

According to a survey, internet users in China are more likely to be addicted to using the web in their daily life than Americans. This is because the internet makes it easier for Chinese internet users to meet new friends and share their views.

2100 web users between 16 and 25 from America and China were surveyed about their internet use habits. The result showed that nearly 50% of Chinese internet users felt addicted to using the internet, as opposed to around 15% of American internet users.

Only 10% of Chinese people use the internet .

Google Goes Geographic!

Tim — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 14:31:56 +0000

In the last two or three weeks, something that had been long awaited had finally arrived. Google finally allowed webmasters to set the geographic region of the primary audience of a website. Prior to this, webmasters had to go to lengths to get webpages to appear in localised Google searches – they had to host it in that country, get links from that country, mention that country. But now it’s much easier!

The reason that being able to tell Google where most visitors will be coming from is so useful is because it generally improves the position of search results for pages that are more relevant because they are closer. This is just another great step forward in improving the web for users and webmasters alike.

Thank you, Google!

logon2 Blog » Internet News

US Gambling Market closed to Europe, Japan and Canada

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