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Who’da thought that an awards ceremony would be so funny?

The digital media awards (or Dimas as they are so cleverly called) in Hove were awesomely entertaining last night.

It was a bit of a strange venue, in a church, especially with full bar service and the host’s dirty mouth…but it made for an amusing atmosphere.

The highlight of the night was when we were all given glow sticks, and asked to use them to vote for our favourite animation. There were four animations shown to us, and they were all fantastic.

When it came time to vote, we were asked to wave our glow sticks in the air and yell for the animation we liked best. Some amazing digital media contraption somehow was able to register the light from the glow sticks, and also the sound in the room. The more light and more sound, the higher the score the video got.

One thing I learned is no matter how grown up and business-like a crowd is, give them some glow sticks and they’ll throw them, wave them and play with them like five-year-olds (myself included)…

Watch the winning animation here. This is a shortened (and they cut out the FUNNIEST bits) version but it’s still hilarious.

From the host’s constant sarcasm, to the off-the-cuff remarks made by the keynote speaker, Kevin Carey, to the team of geeky scientists who came on stage to explain the glow stick voting and couldn’t seem to pronounce one of the company’s names (Zeroh-h-h-h-h-h-h),

I was honestly laughing all night.

Good job, Wired Sussex and Co.

Cheers! Kaila

(last image: credit)

SEO and marketing numbers to thrill and fascinate…

Some very interesting statistics from the British Library! These are all from eMarketer, but can’t be accessed by the website from your home computer unless you have a subscription. So pay attention, for some very valuable (literally!) information.

Firstly, some disparities in online spending growth worldwide. It appears that non-search (for example, banner ads, classified ads, e-mails) spend is going down, and will decrease by as much as 2.1 percent in 2009. HOWEVER! Paid and contextual search is on the rise – rising by 33 percent in 2008 and then another 19 percent in 2009.

Also interesting was that young adults in a 2008 survey said that they use search engines 46 percent of the time to access information about brands. This is over top of their favourite sites, personal homepages, and portals.

Another study showed the top social networking sites in 2008, by country. Guess what!? It’s not just Facebook and MySpace! In Brazil, it was Orkut; in Indonesia it was Friendster; the Japanese favour Mixi; in the Netherlands they like Hyves best; the Poles prefer Nasza-klasa.pl; and in Russia Vkontakte is most popular.

It’s fascinating to see the different ways all these cultures are engaging with the internet.

There was loads of other very useful information but I’ll save the rest for my articles

Cheers!
Kaila

In this edition of Oban’s search market news, Mo focuses more on Yahoo and Google related issues.

Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang announced his resignation from the position, but he will stick around.

On November 17th Yahoo announced that Jerry Yang, Yahoo’s co-founder, will be stepping down from his position once a suitable replacement is found. Of course, he will be working with other board members to find his successor. Yahoo has been on a rollercoaster since Yang took the CEO post. The highlights include Yang’s decision on Microsoft’s deal to buy yahoo that I covered to some extent in my previous post and the most recent Google/Yahoo partnership fallout. Yahoo’s stock reached a longtime low of $9.07 after the deal’s fallout. The stock value increased after Yang’s resignation announcement.

On another note, Microsoft announced that it is now open to a search-only partnership with Yahoo. It is worth mentioning that Steve Ballmer not long ago said that Microsoft is done with Yahoo. It seems like they were looking forward to Yang stepping down. Many believe that Yang should have made this decision long time ago, but one can only wait and see how this decision will affect Yahoo’s struggling stock value. (more…)

Today is Women’s Enterprise Day. It’s fitting because I’ve just written an article about how female entrepreneurs can take advantage of multilingual online marketing to go global.

The article was written because I’ve been reading quite a few articles lately about female entrepreneurs. They’ve all had a similar tone, saying that women are just as capable of men, that it gives women the flexibility and freedom to start their family while working, and also that women don’t have the same go big or go home mentality that men do, and therefore tend to have small businesses that operate in a single market.

Statistically, women tend to start businesses in the retail and service sectors. These sectors offer the best opportunities for expanding into international markets.

Women should not be intimidated by the words going global. It doesn’t mean building an empire. It just means being smart.

When the IMF released its predictions for the 2009 economy next year, it was the emerging markets that came out on top. The UK and US posted very bleak looking numbers (the UK actually fared the worst of all the world’s countries in these predictions). Those who did not diversify were likely to have felt the economic crisis worse than those who did.

Women should see going global as actually being less scary than not going global!

And power to them!

Happy Women’s Enterprise day, ladies of the world.

Cheers! Kaila

Sinead travels the world in four days and lives to tell all:

The world flocked in its droves to Excel, East London for the annual World Travel Market. Traveling to the conference provided the biggest challenge for its visitors, with packed trains and overcrowded platforms.

Oban Multilingual had a stand in the Global Village for Online Travel and Technology. We met with people from around the world from as far as Mauritius, Israel, The US and India. Visitors to our stand represented travel operators, travel agents, hotel chains to independent hoteliers, who all expressed an interest to maximise their website traffic and explore new and exciting markets.

Oban were astounded that most companies in the travel industry still only have an English website, despite 900 million people not speaking English on the web and 79 percent searching in their own language first.

Carol shows off our wares at our WTM stand

We received comments like “amazing”, “interesting” and “unique service”. And now we have a large box full of hot leads to follow up.

Our MD, Greig Holbrook presented a successful workshop on Global SEO to a packed audience of large and exciting companies all planning to widen their marketing reach.

Cheers! Sinead

Carol tells all about last Friday’s visually enticing Luxury Travel Fair…

I had a great day out at the Condé Nast Luxury Travel Fair in London last week.

Mingling with sellers of luxury travel experiences including exotic escapes in the Seychelles, safaris in Africa, relaxing breaks on the French Riviera and out-back adventures in Australia, it was a great way of tuning out the bad economic news.  And what a collection there was!

I swooned over the visual prompts of miles of pure white sandy beach, magnificent scenery, gorgeous food, beauty treatments and much more.  And succumbed to so many invitations to enter free draws that if I don’t win at least a cruise down the Nile, I will be very cross.

Lots of promoters of these fab holidays are small, web-based entrepreneurs; often with years of specialist experience. It’s encouraging that the internet has allowed many of these niche companies to emerge fast into the big league.

Fingers crossed I’ll be in Barbados in 2009!

Carol

Oban’s international holiday e-marketing tips have been published in the Retail Bulletin and on the Canadian Marketing Association blog. Here is the original article all its glory.

Christmas is one of the most celebrated holidays in the world. But not everyone celebrates it in the same way. Indeed, not everyone celebrates it at all.

Internet sales in the upcoming holiday season have been predicted to grow about eight percent. While the number is low compared to last year’s 19 percent holiday season growth, it still looks better than the mere one percent sales growth expected in physical department stores.

With overseas online markets growing at an incredibly rapid pace, they deserve special attention. Brazilians, for example, have become some of the most active online shoppers in the world. In addition, last year saw 147 million Chinese buy products and services online, a number representing more than the total population of all but the world’s seven most populous countries. In less than two years, this number is projected triple. Add on to this e-sales figures in Russia, which doubled in 2007 to hit nearly £2 billion. (more…)

Our Finance director, Grant, “figures” out recent retail sales numbers:

It’s too early to predict the effects of the larger than expected Bank of England 1.5% interest rate cuts on X-mas sales, but some fairly gloomy retail sales figures came out yesterday with the British Retail Consortium (BRC) sales monitor for October.

They showed that like-for-like sales were down 2.2 per cent and total sales fell 0.1 per cent, the first annual drop over three years . However, you guessed it, online sales of non-food items actually rose 16 per cent during the same period.

Although non-store sales as a percentage of total sales are small by comparison, this reflects people are still willing to buy if the price is right and are using the internet more and more in this research/buying process.

So prospects to grow online sales are out there for the taking, and Mark’s and Spencer are one company who are taking this opportunity seriously. They announced recently that they are launching international online store a bid to reach online sales of £500m by 2010.

Cheers! Grant

Still in the Americas, but on her way back shortly, Kaila takes another stab at interpreting the Canadian business news on a grander scale…

I know I keep latching on to stories in the Canadian media for these blog posts, but honestly, they’re gold mines!

The other day, I read a fascinating article in the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business. I actually wrote out two pages of notes by hand (it’s that good) since I was reading the paper in a coffee shop and all I had was a notebook and pen, so imagine my frustration when I found the exact text of the article here.

According to reporter Gwyn Morgan, 75 percent of Canada’s trade is done with the US. It makes sense, I mean, they’re right there. He suggests, and I wholeheartedly agree, that Canadians need to reduce their dependence on the US and “exposure to the unpredictable winds of US trade policy.”

Morgan suggests a major diversification of Canada’s tradition relations, pointing to the EU as the world’s largest and richest market. Canada and the EU, he explains, share a rich history. Huge portions of Canadians are of European descent, and we share similar values to those in our ancestral motherlands.

He also points out that Canada and the EU are partners in global security, and that the EU is Canada’s 2nd largest trading partner and source of foreign investment, and the two regions will be shortly embarking upon free trade talks.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper shakes hands with French President and President of the EU, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Photo courtesy of Xinhua/Reuters

(more…)

Self-proclaimed “office stapler” Mark discusses the joys and complications of switching servers:

Ah phone support, what a joy! I just spent a good hour:

* Trying to get the nice-but-clueless support assistants to understand the problem
* Being passed around like an office stapler
* Listening to cheesy cheesy music… which made me wonder while I sat drumming my fingers – instead of the awful music, would it be possible route the radio through the phone… press 1 for Chris Moyles, 2 for Terry Wogan, etc.… I’m sure its technically possible, but you would probably have to get a broadcasting licence/pay royalties/taxes… ANYWAY I diverge.

So a little background to the problem I found myself in:

The French domain is registered with EuroDNS. I want to host with 1&1, so I use an external domain and try changing the name servers to 1&1. All fine and dandy… until suddenly an error from EuroDNS – “You must set up the postmaster email address first”. (more…)