24 March 2015 – Global Marketing News
Qihoo a threat to Baidu with mobile OS
Qihoo is developing its own mobile operating system.
The operating system, called 360 OS, is based on Android and will be launched later this year on Qihoo’s own-brand smartphones.
Qihoo is a popular Chinese internet technology company. Its free security software has around 95% penetration in China and its search engine Hausou has a 25% share of the market just 2 years after launch.
Qihoo is hoping that its reputation in these related industries will make 360 OS a strong contender for breaking into the notoriously difficult to enter Chinese mobile market.
Qihoo is not the first Chinese internet technology company to develop its own mobile operating system. Alibaba and Baidu have also been working in this field, although Baidu recently took a step back, saying it was to stop offering updates and support for its Baidu OS. Qihoo’s OS could therefore give it an edge over Baidu.
Naver launches online video encyclopedia
The leading Korean search engine Naver has launched its own online video encyclopedia.
The online encyclopedia contains over 20,000 videos and intends to be an educational resource covering topics such as science, medicine, maths, art and sociology.
Previously, the videos had been scattered in a disorganised manner across Naver’s digital archives. Now, however, they have been organised into categories so that users can easily search for their desired material.
This effort is just one of several changes Naver is carrying out in a bid to improve the quality of its Naver Encyclopedia content. As well as this video encyclopedia, Naver also recently joined forces with KBS to produce multimedia content about global foods.
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Mobile plays important role in global online retail
Research by Demandware has revealed that mobile devices made up a significant proportion of global online retail traffic and sales last year.
The research studied 100 million online shoppers from all over the world during 2014 and found that mobile devices accounted for 47% of online retail traffic and 33% of online orders.
When looking at the types of mobile devices people used, smartphones accounted for 33% of traffic and tablets accounted for 14%.
Meanwhile smartphones accounted for 16% of orders and tablets accounted for 17%.
Both smartphone and tablet shares of traffic and orders were up significantly from the previous year, and Demandware expect this trend to continue, with smartphones predicted to account for more than half of all global online retail traffic by the end of the year and smartphones and tablets predicted to account for around 40% of all orders.
WeChat reaches 500 million monthly active users
The Chinese technology company Tencent has announced that its messaging app WeChat has reached 500 million monthly active users.
This is an increase of around 150 million users in the last year, or a steady growth rate of around 7% each quarter.
Location data was not released by Tencent but it is assumed that the majority of the monthly active users are from China, although WeChat did announce in 2013 that it had reached 100 million users outside of the country.
WeChat is the most popular messaging app in China. Its main competitors worldwide are the Facebook Messenger app, WhatsApp, Skype, Line, Viber and BBM.
Facebook opens Innovation Lab in Brazilian slum
And finally, Facebook has opened an Innovation Lab in Heliopolis, one of Brazil’s largest slums.
The Innovation Lab offers lessons to small business owners on how to use Facebook for digital marketing, completely free of charge.
Heliopolis was chosen as the location for the Lab due to the high levels of Facebook penetration in the area, where around 9 out of 10 residents use the site.
Only 14% of small business owners in Heliopolis have a Facebook page for their business, however, and Facebook hopes that the Innovation Lab will encourage more business owners to create pages for their businesses and ultimately become paying advertisers.
Facebook has said that if the Heliopolis Innovation Lab is a success, it plans to create more such Labs in other slums in Brazil and other South American countries.
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