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Yahoo has filed an intellectual property (IP) lawsuit against Facebook.Yahoo claims the social network has infringed 10 of its patents including systems and methods for advertising on the web. Facebook denies the allegation.

The move comes ahead of Facebook’s planned flotation next month.

Patent litigation has become common between the smartphone makers, but this marks a new front in the battles between technology companies.

A statement from Yahoo suggested the web portal believed it has a strong case.

“Yahoo’s patents relate to cutting edge innovations in online products, including in messaging, news feed generation, social commenting, advertising display, preventing click fraud and privacy controls,” its suit said.

“Facebook’s entire social network model, which allows users to create profiles and connect with, among other things, persons and businesses, is based on Yahoo’s patented social networking technology.

The social network signalled that it believed that Yahoo had not tried hard to settle the matter without involving the courts. It described Yahoo’s action as “puzzling”.

Yahoo recently overhauled its board appointing Scott Thompson as its chief executive in January. The former Paypal executive replaced Carol Bartz who had been ousted in September.

Yahoo’s co-founder, Jerry Yang, also resigned from the board in January. The firm’s chairman and three other board members announced their decision to step down shortly afterwards.

The Wall Street Journal had reported that many Yahoo employees expected fresh job cuts following consecutive quarters of revenue declines.

Mr Thompson’s decision to sue may secure fresh funds or other assets if the courts rule in his favour.

The latest suit was filed in the US district court for the northern district of California.

China has more than 513 million internet users, and nearly half of them are using microblogs – mostly Chinese microblogging tools collectively called Weibo.The numbers from China Network Information Center’s report sound staggering, but China’s Internet penetration rate is actually only 38.3%.

The country added around 55.8 million new internet users in 2011, which represents a 4% annual growth — lower than the average annual growth rate of 6% between 2006 and 2010.

Interestingly enough, the slowdown was to be expected, as most people with a high school diploma (90.9%) and nearly all with a college education (96.1%) are already online.

The rest simply haven’t got the funds or the education level to use the web.

Microblogging might be the answer for further web usage growth, as it has become an extremely important way of accessing the web in China.

The number of microbloggers increased by 296% year-on-year to 250 million in Dec. 2011.

For comparison, Twitter reported 100 million active users and 200 million registered users in Sept. 2011.

Unfortunately for the largest microblogging service outside of Asia, grabbing a chunk of the vast Chinese market is, for now, an impossible task.

“We would love to have a strong Twitter in China, but we need to be allowed to do that,” said Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey at the AsiaD conference held in Hong Kong last year.

Weibo services, the largest of which is Sina Weibo, can compete anywhere they want. Sina Weibo is currently working on an international version; it’ll be interesting to see what it can do on the Western markets.

From: http://mashable.com/china-500-million-web-users/

Search Clinic wishes you a prosperous New Year.Search Clinic wishes you a prosperous New Year in 2012.

It’s been a very busy year with growing use of the internet to boost businesses’ ecommerce activities.

And lots of new marketing initiatives from technology companies to develop their investments.

Onwards and upwards into 2012!

UK shoppers are buying more online products and services and at a faster pace than many other countries- a survey of global shopping habits by KPMG has found.Seventy seven per cent of British shoppers prefer to buy goods like CDs, DVDs, books and video games online – compared with 65% globally.

But when it comes to mobile banking, consumers in the UK are more reluctant than those in other parts of the world.

KPMG surveyed 9,600 consumers aged between 16 and 65, across 31 countries.

When buying goods or services, the majority of customers (both in the UK and globally) now said that they look at social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and online review sites.

“From buying goods on their mobile phones to keeping up with friends on social networks, consumers are increasingly reliant on a range of technologies that perform important – yet often overlapping – tasks,” said Tudor Aw, KPMG’s European head of technology.

“This new ‘converged lifestyle’ will have huge implication for retailers.”

Eighty eight per cent of respondents in the UK and worldwide reported downloading an app to their mobile.

In the UK, 74% of consumers said they were more likely to buy flights and holidays online and six in 10 used some form of online grocery shopping.

In the US, by contrast, the same amount would book flights but only 21% said they were more likely to buy groceries online.

But when it comes to mobile banking, only 27% in the UK said they had used some form of mobile banking in the past six months.

That compares with 52% globally – a massive jump from just under 20% in 2008, according to the audit firm.

Consumers in the UK are also more reluctant to embrace the cloud – storing their data online rather than on their own computers – with 53% of respondents saying they do some compared with 65% globally.

“The report also shows that consumers’ concerns over privacy and data security have increased over the last few years and companies across all sectors need to take this concern seriously,” Mr Aw said.

Online sales rose faster than expected in the US on Black Friday, according to surveys- with more expected next week.Internet sales totalled £524 million ($816 million), a 26% gain on last year, said Comscore. IBM Coremetrics put the rise at 24%.

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is treated by many retailers as the start of the Christmas shopping season. They offer one-off discounts to mark the occasion.

Analysts said heavy promotional activity helped drive demand.

By comparison, a report by Shoppertrak suggested that in-store Black Friday sales were up by 7% on last year, at £7.12 billion ($11.4 billion).

Around 50 million Americans visited online retail sites on Friday, according to Comscore.

It said Amazon was the most popular destination, with 50% more visitors than any other retailer.

Walmart, Best Buy, Target and Apple were next in line, said the analytics company.

“Despite some analysts’ predictions that the flurry of brick-and-mortar retailers opening their doors early for Black Friday would pull dollars from online retail, we still saw a banner day for e-commerce,” said Comscore’s chairman, Gian Fulgoni.

IBM Coremetrics also noted a trend towards shopping on smartphones and tablet computers.

It said Black Friday purchases made on mobile devices had accounted for 9.8% of all online sales, compared with 3.2% last year.

IBM described mobile shoppers as having had a “laser focus” since they had been more likely to view a single page on a retailer’s site rather than browse what else was for sale.

IBM said Apple’s iPhone and iPad had generated the most mobile internet visits to online stores, accounting for more than double the traffic originating from devices running Google’s Android system.

The company also noted a jump in Black Friday related chatter on social networks. It recorded a 110% rise in discussion volumes after consumers had shared tips on how to secure products before they sold out and the best places to park.

Friday’s internet sales are expected to be eclipsed today on what is referred to as Cyber Monday – which many experts believe will be the US’s busiest online shopping day of the year.

Close to 123 million Americans plan to make an online purchase according to a survey commissioned by the US National Retail Federation, an industry lobby group. That would be a 15% increase on last year.

NRF said nearly eight in ten online retailers would run special promotions including “flash sales that last an hour” and “free shipping offers”.

The federation also highlighted the shift to mobile devices, saying it expected 17.8 million Americans to use them to shop today, nearly five times the number in 2009.

“Retailers have invested heavily in mobile apps and related content as the appetite for Cyber Monday shopping through smartphones and tablets continues to rise,” said Vicki Cantrell, executive director of the NRF’s website shop.org.

UK internet retailers said it was less clear which day will be the UK’s busiest online shopping day this year.

“Over the last couple of years we have seen a fortnight of peak activity over the period corresponding to both this and next week,” said Andy Mulcahy, a spokesman for the industry body Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG).

“We expect £3.72bn will be spent online over the two week period.”

Mr Mulcahy said that although some retailers are trying to generate interest in the idea of a cyber event in the UK, but they are split over which day to mark.

Visa Europe said it believed today will be the UK’s busiest internet shopping day, with £303m spent online.

eBay has forecast that it would experience its peak in activity this Sunday with more than 5.5 million people expected to log onto the UK version of its auction website.

Amazon said it expected to experience more demand the following day.

“In recent years, the first Monday in December has been Amazon.co.uk’s busiest day with orders for over 2.3 million items being placed on Monday 6th December last year,” said Christopher North, the website’s managing director.

Yahoo has reported a quarterly profits fall of 26% as it struggled to boost earnings from online advertising.Net profits in the third quarter were £188 million compared with £247 million during the same period last year.

Last month, Yahoo sacked chief executive Carol Bartz after its online earnings failed to keep pace with those of rivals Google and Facebook.

However, its performance beat market expectations, and its shares ended 3% higher.

Yahoo’s net revenue in the three months to September was £668 million, compared with £700 million the year before.

“My focus, and that of the whole company, is to move the business forward with new technology, partnerships, products and premium personalised content,” said interim chief executive Tim Morse.

Yahoo has been looking for a new chief executive since firing Ms Bartz in September amid mounting frustration at failed efforts to turn the firm around.

Analysts say that in recent weeks there has been increasing speculation that Yahoo, or parts of its business, might be sold to an assortment of buyout firms.

There have been rumours that Microsoft is considering a second attempt at a takeover. Microsoft last offered to buy Yahoo for £29 billion in 2008.

China’s internet firm Alibaba has already said it might be interested in buying Yahoo- however american political sensivities will complicate any chinese purchase due to data spying senstivities of the Yahoo email system.

After testing in Brazil, Spain, and Portugal, Google will roll out a new algorithm globally that gives more weight to landing page quality when it comes to AdWords Quality Score. This means ads with landing pages that Google deems to be most relevant to the query will be able to rank higher for lower cost per click bids.

“What we’ve seen is that there are ads available in the auction that are as good a quality as the top ads. But the landing pages — the merchant sites, the advertiser landing pages — are of much higher quality than the ads that we see at the top of our auction,” Jonathan Alferness, director of product management on Google’s ad quality team.

This, says Alferness, means the user experience isn’t what it could be. Hence the change to give more weight to landing page quality. “In the end, we believe that this will result in better quality experience for the users.”

Landing page quality has long been a factor in Google AdWords, but more as a negative signal.

If an advertiser’s landing page was particularly terrible or misleading, advertisers could have their ads rejected or their accounts suspended or revoked — depending on how bad the policy violation was.

The new change will assign landing page quality a positive value, incentivising advertisers to make sure the landing page’s keywords and content are closely aligned with the keywords for which they’re bidding.

Ads with high landing page quality will get a “strong boost” upward in the auction, according to Alferness.

Alferness says Google will crawl the landing pages associated with every ad and make a determination as to its quality.

“What we always ask our advertisers to focus on is relevance — choose a landing page or site experience that is both relevant to the keywords that you’re targeting and also a good experience for end users,” said Alferness. “This is just continuing to push on those best practices. I gives us the ability to really reward those advertisers that have been doing this, whose landing pages really are some of the best in our systems.”

The change will roll out in the next week or two. Advertisers may see some variations in ad position and keyword Quality Score at first, but things should settle down within a couple of weeks, according to Google.

From: http://searchengineland.com/google-tweaks-adwords-to-give-landing-page-quality-more-weight

More than half of online traders failed to give full refunds to customers who pulled out of online purchases during a cooling-off period, research have found.Under consumer rights law, all costs – including delivery costs – should be refunded if consumers decide to cancel the contract in the allotted time.

Test purchasing by European authorities found that in 57% of cases, traders failed to reimburse delivery costs.

When buying from the internet, unlike in a shop, customers are unable to examine the goods before they buy them. As a result, a cooling-off period is available to people shopping online.

In the UK, shoppers have seven working days to return items bought on the internet that they do not want to keep. In some European countries it is longer.

There are a few exceptions, such as unwrapped CDs and perishable goods, but otherwise the money should be credited to the buyer’s account as soon as possible and within 30 days at the latest.

Consumer rights online

• In the UK, there is a cooling-off period of seven working days for unwanted items
• Traders should refund within 30 days, unless previously agreed otherwise
• Delivery charges should also be reimbursed
• Some perishable goods such as foods and flowers are exempt
• Rights for goods that are not of satisfactory quality are the same as the High Street – a refund, replacement or repair
• Any refund should include delivery costs incurred by the customer.

During a mystery shopping exercise by European authorities in 2003, these delivery costs were not reimbursed in 53% of cases.

But 305 tests earlier this year, by the European Consumer Centres’ Network, found that this had increased to 57%, although refunds for the items themselves were paid in 90% of cases.

“This needs to improve in order to ensure a continuous positive development in cross-border e-commerce,” a spokesman for the UK European Consumer Centre said.

In 7% of all the purchases made, the trader did not inform the customer about the price of the delivery costs at all.

Some results of the test purchases do make better reading for consumers.

For example, the delivery rate for items ordered online improved significantly compared with 2003, as had the number of items delivered within 14 days. There was also an increase in the number of websites offering information in more than one language.

Many of the current consumer rules operating in EU countries pre-date the widespread use of the internet by shoppers.

So MEPs have approved plans to update the rules, including a 14 calendar day cooling-off period for online purchases.

Amazon has launched a new tablet computer called the Kindle Fire- which will undercut Apple’s iPad2.The £130 device will run a modified version of Google’s Android operating system.

As well as targeting Apple’s iPad, Amazon is likely to have its sights on rival bookseller US Barnes & Noble, which already has a colour tablet.

The Kindle Fire will enter a hugely competitive market, dominated by Apple’s iPad who currently have 80% of the tablet market.

Amazon will be hoping to leverage both the strength of the Kindle brand, built up over three generations of its popular e-book reader, and its ability to serve up content such as music and video.

In recent years, the company has begun offering downloadable music for sale, and also has a streaming video-on-demand service in the United States. Those, combined with its mobile application store, give it a more sophisticated content “ecosystem” than most of its rivals.

Amazon Kindle Fire Facts

7″ IPS (in-plane switching) display
1024 x 600 resolution
Customised Google Android operating system
$199 (£130)
Weighs 413 grammes
Dual core processor
8GB internal storage

Amazon sees the hardware almost as a loss leader who can make their money by selling content whereas Apple profit from hardware sales and software sales are a “nice to have”.

Digital content has already proved itself to be a money-spinner for Amazon.

Although the company has never released official sales figures for the Kindle, it did state – in December 2010 – that it was now selling more electronic copies of books than paper copies.

Its US rival, Barnes & Noble, has also enjoyed success with its Nook devices.

In October 2010, the company unveiled the Nook Color, which also runs a version of Android, albeit with lower hardware specs than many fully featured tablets.

While the Nook Color is largely focused on book and magazine reading, some users have managed to unlock its wider functionality and install third-party apps.
Kindle Touch Amazon has dropped the keyboard from some of its Kindles in favour of touch

The Kindle Fire’s £130 price tag undercuts the Nook Color by £30 and is significantly cheaper than more powerful tablets from Apple, Samsung, Motorola and others.

It is due to go on sale on 15 November in the US, although global release dates are currently unavailable.

“These are premium products at non premium prices,” said Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos. “We are going to sell millions of these.”

Facebook has outlined plans to encourage users to share more of the media they consume – including music and movies with friends- as well as once again changing their users’ security options.Its founder Mark Zuckerberg also unveiled a dramatic redesign to the website, replacing user profiles with an audio visual timeline of their life.

The updates were revealed at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference.

A wave of new features in recent weeks have been welcomed by some users and caused annoyance to many others.

Facebook’s latest changes point to a desire to keep users engaged through new features, in the midst of rapid innovation from social networking rivals.

The site’s application platform has been redesigned to allow users to share what they are consuming on streaming music services such as Spotify, and the movie rental site Netflix.

Depending on privacy settings, users will be able to see what friends are doing – for example, playing a song – then listen-in themselves.

Mr Zuckerberg said he wanted to create, what he called, “real time serendipity”.

“Being able to click on someone’s music is a great experience, but knowing you helped a friend discover something new and they liked your taste in music, and that you now have that in common is awesome,” he added.

Facebook said that users would only be able to do as much on the site as its media partners allowed in each country, so free music sharing through streaming apps would only work where that service was already available outside Facebook.

Alongside the deeper integration of media content, the restyling of Facebook’s profile pages is also likely to prove a hot topic among users.

Identities will now be defined through a densely packed vertical timeline of major life events, made up of photos, videos and other items. The level of detail diminishes the further down a reader scrolls.

Profile pages had previously been limited to basic information along with a stream of every single item posted by a user.

Facebook stressed that all of its new offerings could be controlled by members using its recently simplified privacy controls.

In particular, it stressed that timeline items could be modified within the new “activity log”, allowing users to limit who can view certain events from their past.

The updates are expected to start appearing on users’ computers in coming weeks.