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Need to communicate with customers in different languages, but don’t have a keyboard for each specific character set? No problem! Check out Keitor.com, where you can find virtual keyboards in just about any alphabet you seek, from Arabic, to Greek, to Hindi, to Polish, Russian, and even Mongolian.

This month, Southeast Asians will find it much easier to surf the internet. A £300 million, 20,000 kilometre cable will be ready for service, offering higher speed broadband connections to Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Vietnam.

Southeast Asians have long suffered from slow connection speeds that have left them frustrated and less likely to shop online. The new cable will provide much-needed capacity, and faster, more reliable connectivity to sustain the massive growth in Asia’s online population, with a capability of delivering 960 gigabytes a second from each of its five fibre-optic lines. With the new Asia-America Gateway, as the fibre-optic cable is called, Southeast Asians will be much more likely to spend more time, and money, online.

The project was headed by Google and an international consortium, and took two years. The resulting pipe that spans from Los Angeles to Japan is 6,200 miles in length.

But they didn’t stop there: Google has just recently signed a second deal with a group of telecommunications firms to connect Southeast Asia with the world’s fastest undersea fibre-optic line. The line has a design capacity of 17 terabytes per second (a terabyte is 1000 gigabytes). This second project is expected to be completed by 2012.

A recent Swedish report “When local becomes global” revealed that there has been an increase in Scandinavians shopping on foreign websites. These results were obtained by interviewing 2000 consumers in Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden.

According to investigations by the centre for Swedish commerce, Swedes spend 500 million SEK on goods from foreign online sites during 2008, and this year it is expected that this figure will have risen to a staggering 750 million SEK by the end of the year.

In terms of the items people shop for on the foreign sites, they’re similar to the goods bought on Swedish sites, with books, magazines, CDs, clothes, home electronics and computers being the top sellers.

In total, purchases from foreign sites comprise approximately five percent of online purchases in Sweden, thus, shopping from Swedish sites is still much more common. Reasons for choosing Swedish sites above foreign sites include a fear of problems with deliveries, potential toll charges, and reluctance to provide card details.

British sites are most popular among the global Swedish shoppers, with German sites being the second most popular. The number of people admitting to never have shopped from a foreign website has decreased from 48 percent to 43 percent over the last year.

Germans spent around €250 million (£224 million) on downloads this year, according to the Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media, BITKOM. This represents an 18 percent increase from 2008.

Downloading music, games, videos, audio books or software has never been so popular. The number of legal downloads has been expected to have continued rising to around 60 million by the end of 2009 – an increase of 24 percent in comparison to 2008.

The vice-president of BITKOM, Achim Berg, is convinced the growth will also remain strong for 2010. He sees it as a result of both the wide range of choices on offer and decreasing prices. Between January and September 2009, the average dowload cost €4.10 (£3.67). Last year, the average cost of a download during this time was €4.34 (£3.91).

Faster internet access and the increase in the number of households with internet connections have also contributed to this boom.

A new product has just been publicly released that could revolutionize how companies learn about cultural reactions to their websites. GlobalMaxer, a product used by OBAN’s own clients for the last two years, is now being released for commercial usage to other companies. It is the next step in multivariate software, allowing users to test how visitors from specific countries interact with their site.

With cultures from around the world increasingly engaging with the internet, and spending their money online, the product is sure to be useful to those companies wishing to design their site to target specific international markets.

The commercial launch took place earlier in the year at an Oxford University seminar with the help of the World Internet Project and the Oxford Internet Institute.

Though multivariate testing is increasingly popular and readily available, the tool, named GlobalMaxer, is one of the few to take culture into consideration. In addition, since Oban’s expertise lies in international e-commerce and SEO, they are able to provide cultural consultation for each project – providing the knowledge for what to test for each culture.

Earlier this year, Oban tested the product on a Jordanian tourism website. The results, which were revealed on ITP.net and USA Today, showed that French and German cultures react differently to various components on a website.

According to Oban MD Greig Holbrook, GlobalMaxer is a response to the growing need for international SEO and cultural multivariate testing:
“Companies have wised up to the use of international SEO to drive quality visitors to their sites and are now looking to retain those visitors to maximize return.”

The tool is user-friendly, and requires no knowledge of HTML.

With prices set to corporate standards, the tool is for serious global companies who have search and conversion at the heart of their strategies. However, Oban is offering a 30-day free trial for those who want to dip their toe into the multicultural multivariate testing waters.

As GlobalMaxer continues to build its knowledge-base, Oban finds itself holding a very powerful database full of data about how specific cultures respond to specific components on specific types of websites. This database continues to grow and learn at an ever-increasing pace.

More and more Russians view the internet as a reliable source to look for a friend, companion, a long term partner, or even a spouse. As many as 17,500 people in 18 countries, including Russia, have been polled for a recent study by Global Market Insite (GMI).

According to GMI Poll, 16 percent of Russian internet users who participated in the survey are looking for a spouse online, while 29 percent – for a long-term relationship, which exceeds the global average. Only four percent of French, six percent of Canadians, five percent of British and ten percent of Germans, choose Internet to search for a marriage partner.
At the same time, increasing popularity and accessibility of the internet changes the perception of what is acceptable in a relationship. As many as 32 percent of Russian online users do not consider an online relationship or engaging in “cybersex” equal to cheating on their partner.

Most often Russians are looking to make friends online (30 percent), establish a long-term relationship (18 percent ), entertain themselves (16 percent) or to find a partner (12 percent). Ten respondents pointed to boredom and loneliness as main reasons for online dating.

Source: http://e-commerce.com.ua/1709

There are 65 million people living in Thailand – nearly on par with the population of Britain. Internet cafes are widespread in Thailand, with fast connection speeds even on the remotest of its islands. In the cities, wifi is readily available. A growing middle class is increasingly online (in 2007, over eight million Thais were already online), and ready to buy products and services – that is, if they can find them.

Targeting the Thai market is no easy thing. Thai culture is a huge step away from that of Britain. In order to properly engage with the Thais, it’s necessary to learn the distinctive cultural behaviours, taboos, and social norms, that make Thailand the unique country it is.

Here are some tips for building a culturally-sensitive website targeting the Thai market.

1. There is utmost reverence for the King in Thailand. His face is plastered in every house, in every shopping centre, and on billboards blanketing the busy city roads. A picture of the Thai King (and his Queen, who is loved dearly as well) would be a respectful addition to any Thai-focused webpage.
2. Thais are 95 percent Buddhist, so references to Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter are best avoided. In addition, Thais observe a kind of lent for three months from July to October, where they must give up alcohol and cigarettes, so any mention of these temptations during this period should be avoided.
3. The date in Thailand is different from that which we use in the rest of the world. It’s currently year 2552 in Thailand. Any reference to this date on a webpage would show a respect for Thai history.
4. The Thai greeting is “Sawadee,” followed by “ka” for women saying the greeting, and “krap” for men saying the greeting. A welcome page might begin its content with this greeting.
5. Most Thai magazines feature English headlines (since English is considered ‘hip’ in Thailand), followed by Thai language content. A website would do well to copy this format.

You may never have heard of this holiday before, but you may want to start writing it down on your calendar. August 26th is China’s ‘Qixi’, the most romantic day of the year, or, Chinese Traditional Valentine’s Day.

Qixi is always a golden time for traders. Most of the shops throughout the country start their sales well before the special day. Interestingly, it seems that this year, more and more lovers preferred shopping online.

Love ‘delivering’

Mr. Wang, a civil servant, was planning to buy a classic watch to represent his perpetual love to his wife. When asked why he chose to shop online, rather than choosing gift from a local shop, he said that it would be more convenient and faster to order goods online, since all the matched products and prices would be easily comparable. Also, he added, delivery saves time.

Young generations are fond of online retail, as products are normally cheaper than buying from local shops, and the delivery service is often included in the price.

Source from Beiweiwang (http://news.beiww.com/2009/0827/article_40641.html)
Date: 27th Aug, 2009

Despite the recession, e-commerce is rapidly expanding in Denmark. According to a report by FDHI, Association for Distance and Internet Commerce, e-commerce has increased by five percent from the first to the second quarter of 2009, which is 11.5 percent more than the same time last year.

One reason for this increase is a dramatic increase in internet shopping by 15-to-29-year-olds. The second quarter of this year saw a rise from 58 percent to 83 percent in online shopping in this age group, which is more than double the amount seen in other age groups.

The director of FDHI, Morten Kamper, commented that “as this generation grows older, they are already accustomed to using the internet for shopping, providing a stable, though perhaps more moderate, increase in the future.”

The next challenge for the online retail industry will be to get the older generations hooked on e-commerce, which will happen as more online shops identify how best to attract the older customers.

Among the bestselling products were clothes and shoes (29 percent). Of service products, cinema tickets (25 percent) and plane tickets (18 percent) were the most popular, and for online products, both software/internet/antivirus programmes and access to games take up 20 percent of the market.

Source: FDIH, http://www.fdih.net/, published August 11, 2009.

Oban delivered another International SEO training course for E-Consultancy and its clients last week (October 8th) in London. Businesses from a range of industries were in attendance: Recruitment, Finance, Technology and Online Retail. Even internet marketing author, Dave Chaffey, was present to brush up on his International SEM skills.

The variety of companies who attended the course reflects a growing trend whereby UK companies are actively seeking overseas business via the web. Though many of the companies had been using multivariate testing, albeit in English; they got insights on Cultural Multivariate testing which was highly relevant for them!

The dreaded translation debate rearing its head once again and in many of the cases there were some real doubts on how to approach International SEO. At the end of the day, I believe the message of Do Not Translate and the reasons to justify this came across loud and clear.

I’m looking forward to the next course in 2010.

Greig