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Expedia ranks world’s best hotels and resorts

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expediaselect.jpg Online travel provider Expedia will has started rating the best hotels and resorts around the globe with its new Expedia Insiders’ Select.

Identifying the top 1% of more than 70,000 hotels, rankings are based on factors like reviews from Expedia’s 300 expert market managers, Value for money, and Expedia’s Traveler Opinions®, the largest collection of qualified traveler reviews on the Web.

“Expedia.com is committed to delivering the tools and information that help people book their trip and travel with confidence, knowing they’ve selected the best hotel for their trip,” said Paul Brown, President, Expedia, Inc. Partner Services Group and Expedia North America. “The Expedia Insiders’ Select gives our customers another powerful way to find the perfect hotel by harnessing the trusted insight of millions of travelers, and the destination expertise Expedia enjoys by having hundreds of employees in local markets across the globe.”

Originally posted on June 6, 2007 @ 5:18 am

Will China win the porn war?

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china-porn.jpg After a month of heated war against online pornography, China has shut down 300 Web sites and deleted 10,200 porn links plus another 10,000 online porn games. Nonetheless, officials believe this is just tip of the iceberg.

Online pornography remains strong despite the country’s campaign to eliminate unhealthy online content to preserve the Communist ideologies. The increasing internet population of China is expected to complicate this massive crackdown against pornography. Last year, online users went up by 23% and reached 137 million.

Another major barrier is that China can only block foreign sites but does not have the authority to them shut them down.

“Determined to protect their huge profits, porn distributors will do anything to avoid detection,” said Li Baozhong, director of the market supervision and administration bureau under the General Administration of Press and Publication, in an interview with China Daily

But will China win this intense battle? For now, I’ll go for a big NO.

Originally posted on June 5, 2007 @ 3:25 am

Filed Under: Web

Baidu to expand in Europe

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baidu.jpg China’s most popular search engine, Baidu, plans to enter the European market. Details of this new development will be announced by Baidu CFO Shawn Wang this month during a Nasdaq investor conference, according to UK Telegraph.

With more than 59 million monthly users based on comScore, Baidu remains a trivial player when set against Google’s 73% market share out of 635 million users per month.

But its success in home market is enough motivation to expand internationally and compete head-on against its Western rivals. To date, Baidu is the world’s fifth largest search engine with strong non-English speaking customer base.

“The pressure is on for a lot of showcase Chinese businesses to show they can compete in other markets,” said Daryl Arnold, Far East-based chief executive of digital marketing agency Profero.

Originally posted on June 4, 2007 @ 12:21 pm

MySpace acquires Photobucket

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photbucket.jpg News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media, parent company of social networking site MySpace, is currently negotiating for acquisition of Photobucket, a popular Web site for storing personal photos, graphics, slideshows and videos, for an estimated amount $250 million. However, official figures are not yet disclosed.

After operating for about 4 years, Photobucket contains approximately 2.8 billion images coming from 41 million registered users worldwide. Ranked as the 22nd most visited Web site in US, it is a dominant market leader in the US online photo market with about 40% market share.

Recently, there had been a friction between MySpace and Photobucket over some technical disputes. MySpace accused Photobucket of violating some of its house rules, prompting them to block traffic from its site to Photobucket. Last April 23, both companies made peace and established procedures to prevent the same situation from happening again.

Based on Hitwise stats, Photobucket is the third most popular destination for MySpace users after Google and Yahoo.

UPDATE: Fox Interactive Media, a division of News Corporation, announced separate agreements to acquire Photobucket and Flektor, Inc.. Terms of the deals were not disclosed.

Originally posted on May 30, 2007 @ 10:05 am

Introducing Jeopardy! Google Daily Challenge

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jeopardy.jpgAmerica’s classic game show Jeopardy! has partnered with search engine giant Google for a new exciting and challenging game, Jeopardy! Google Daily Challenge Sweepstakes. It will run starting June 4 until July 13.

“Jeopardy! and Google are the perfect complement to each other. America’s top-rated quiz show provides the answers, and the Web’s No.1 search engine helps you find the correct question,” said Jeopardy! executive producer Harry Friedman.

The Jeopardy! Google Daily Challenge Sweepstakes features an extra clue from one of the categories in that day’s Jeopardy! TV broadcast. Watch Jeopardy! and then visit Jeopardy.com each weekday from June 4th to July 13th, to play a new clue and you’ll have a chance to win one of the daily $100 giveaways. By entering every weekday, you’ll increase your chances of winning $5,000, $10,000, or the $25,000 Grand Prize!

Remember, you must enter the correct response for your sweepstakes entry to be valid. Not sure what it is? That’s where the powerful Google Search engine comes in.

Originally posted on May 30, 2007 @ 1:19 pm