Google Buys Brazilian Tech Company

Google annouced it purchased Akwan Information Technologies, a Brazilian search company. Google plans on establishing a Research and Development division there and to use it as a base to spearhead their Latin American efforts.

IP tv

Telecom Italia and Tiscali announced the launch of IP tv starting at a T.B.D. date some time between September and November of this year.

Telecom Italia is now broadcasting Video On Demand via Rosso Alice 4 Mbit ADSL which they are planning to use for the newly announced IP tv service. The service will initially be available in 21 cities reaching an estimated 4 million families.

Source: Corriere della Sera

Google China Hire Starts MSN Lawsuit

Seems a new hire at Google, formerly of Microsoft, has created a stir and has been served with a lawsuit by MSN.

ZDNet reports that Kai-Fu Lee is being sued by Microsoft for "the confidentiality and non-competition agreements he signed when he began working" and was now disregarding.

Canada May Outlaw Google

Interesting article about the impact of new laws in Canada. Search engines in Canada will have to be very aware of copyright laws, though the international nature of the web may make it hard to enforce.

The only possibility is that the engines create different submitting procedures for the .ca version of the business.

Chinese search engine - Baidu - to float its shares

Baidu is reportedly about to float increasing the speculation about Google's position in China. Baidu is the leading Chinese search engine - and one which Google bought a 4% stake in during 2004.

It is known that Google CEO - Eric Schmidt - flew to China last week and there are rumours that Google will attempt to buy Baidu as Google's own site does not have the leading position the company's become accustomed to!




Google facing search engine China quandary - Yahoo! News

Yahoo makes first moves on Poland

Yahoo is heading towards a Polish launch - at least that's the conclusion of the Warsaw Business Journal which reports that Yahoo has launched Polish-language email accounts with 1 GB capacity.

Currently, the Yahoo domain for Poland - pl.yahoo.com redirects to Yahoo's UK site.

Yahoo currently operates native-language portals in Europe as shown by the map on their world.yahoo.com portal - but despite having a Russian language portal - Yahoo has little eastern European presence. In fact, they include the Russian language site as part of their presence in the US - targeting Russian speakers in north America.


Source - Warsaw Business Journal Online

China Joins Spam Fight

An article at internetnews.com, annouced that China is joining the internation battle against SPAM.
China, the article notes, is the leading nation for zombie computers - infected computers that are used to send Spam. They have joined the 29 nation (and 17 private sector groups) task force to combat Spam.

Mozbot: New French Search Engine

Gary Price over at Search Engine Watch pointed this new engine out today. The engine is still in beta, and is getting its listings through a partnership with Google.

The add-ons seem to be the interesting elements that could make them popular. They have a personal "blacklist", a link to the archive.org (The WayBack Machine), Whois information, dictionary definitions and other additional features.

According the article Mozbot is looking to expand to the UK and US.