I’ve noticed a fair amount of traffic lately on this Website of people looking for information relating to “Internet Brand”. I can only assume that the emails from Chinese domain name companies are continuing.

Over the past few months, I’ve received a number of requests from companies in China to register a “Internet Brand Name” for Chinese search engines. The premise is that if you type “Your brand Name” in your address bar, that you will be taken diretly to your site. There are a number of emails, some of which are borderline harrassment, trying to get you to part with your money and sign up for this service.

This is a scam, and by searching on the net, you will find more examples of this. When you type keywords in the address bar of your browser, it usually uses the search engine that is specified by your browser, not some magic ISP thing.

CNN Fortune article: follow this link.

ImportGenius, a search engine that gathers “competitive intelligence” by monitoring U.S. Customs records of ocean containers entering American ports, reported that Apple recieved 188 mysterious containers.

ImportGenius report: follow this link. 

For Canadians: Several of those products carried the Apple computer name in what appeared to be an accidental disclosure on the customs record. With arrival notification addresses in Vancouver, Canada, many of Schenker’s shipments appeared destined for the Canadian market. Apple has thus far not made the iPhone available in Canada, however Rogers Wireless recently announced that it would begin offering the item shortly. They declined to offer more specifics about when they would start selling the phones. 

Opera claims that Opera Mini is used by more than 44 million people. 

So why am I only hearing about this now? Obviously my head is stuck in the ground, or I've been working with Notes too much.

Opera does not appear on our analytic reports at Trapeze, but I've found some iPhone users using the Safari browser - that is cool.

According to Canalys Research, last year Symbian OS held about 65% of the mobile OS market worldwide. I have not heard of anyone using Opera on their mobile phone.

More from the press release:

"In addition to the massive popularity of people downloading Opera Mini directly to their phones, in 2007 there was strong demand for the company’s embedded browser solution, 59 handsets were announced with Opera Mini pre-installed. Altogether, more than 800 different phone models are being used by Opera Mini."

OK. Rogers, here in Canada, supports a list of mobile applications that users can use with unlimited access. Opera is not one of them. If you want to use it, you will get hammered with data fees.

I would be very interested in a breakdown of users by country and provider. I may send them an email. 

http://blog.sinohosting.net/beware-of-chinese-domain-names-fraud/

I had previously reported being contacted by a domain name registrar regarding my company's domain name in China.

See my previous post for an explanation. See above link for information on the fraudsters.

I didn’t see this coming, well at least not this soon. It goes to show how MS is worried about Google (Ads and Apps), and how they are having little success with Windows live. If they were able to lump Windows Live with Yahoo, they could give Google a serious run for their money.

The full letter can be found here.

Steve Ballmer list the synergies of this combination fall into four areas:

Scale economics: This combination enables synergies related to scale economics of the advertising platform where today there is only one competitor at scale. This includes synergies across both search and non-search related advertising that will strengthen the value proposition to both advertisers and publishers. Additionally, the combination allows us to consolidate capital spending.

Expanded R&D capacity: The combined talent of our engineering resources can be focused on R&D priorities such as a single search index and single advertising platform. Together we can unleash new levels of innovation, delivering enhanced user experiences, breakthroughs in search, and new advertising platform capabilities. Many of these breakthroughs are a function of an engineering scale that today neither of our companies has on its own.

Operational efficiencies: Eliminating redundant infrastructure and duplicative operating costs will improve the financial performance of the combined entity.

Emerging user experiences: Our combined ability to focus engineering resources that drive innovation in emerging scenarios such as video, mobile services, online commerce, social media, and social platforms is greatly enhanced.

—

With the combined resources, experience, and talent, I believe they would be a very capable competitor. How they choose to execute their strategy in the event of a merger is ultimately up to them.