Global Marketing News – 27th May 2016
Baidu Tieba to close down due to piracy fears
Baidu is due to close its literature forum website, Baidu Tieba, due to ongoing concerns of online piracy.
The move has come as a reaction to reports made in Xinhua news outlets, that accused Baidu Tieba of being the largest source of pirated written content online.
To assist in the closing down of its pages, Baidu has set up a system that the public can use to send tip-offs to the company, which will then be investigated and the content removed within 12 hours.
The cost of piracy to the Chinese online literature industry is an estimated of 1.2 billion US dollars, and with 64% of users reading pirated novels being traced back to Baidu Tieba, the site is due to shut down thousands of pages in the coming weeks.
eBay and Myer launch virtual reality shopping app in Australia
A virtual reality shopping experience has been launched in Australia by eBay and Myer, which will appear as an app on a smartphone.
The app, which is being called the first of its kind, works by connecting a virtual reality headset to a phone in order to set the user up in a virtual shopping world.
Whilst the app can work with the relatively cheap Google Cardboard headset or with Samsung’s Gear VR, it can also be used with eBay’s own Shoptical, developed by Myer themselves.
Steve Brennen, from eBay Australia and New Zealand, said that future versions “will see a shopper in Sydney shopping with a friend in New York from a store in London”.
This step forward in online retail technology comes at the same time that eBay adds another 38 countries to its shipping service, opening up wider global potential with the virtual reality platform.
South East Asian digital market to be worth $200 billion by 2025
According to research from Google and the investment firm Temasek, the South East Asian digital market could be worth up to 200 billion US dollars by 2025.
Whilst it was worth 31 million dollars last year, the findings from the research projected that the increase would be down to the young population, increased internet speeds and the 7,000 start ups in the region, 80% of which are based Singapore, Indonesia or Vietnam.
South East Asia received over 1 billion dollars in investment last year, with 65% of the amount going to five start-ups: Grab, PropertyGuru, Trikomsel, Qoo10 and iCarsClub.
However, the challenges faced in the region are usually caused by difficulty in acquiring talent, poor internet infrastructure and finding payment methods for large, unbanked areas of the region.
TVs and smartphones trump desktops for video viewing in Germany
A survey in Germany has found that over 90% of internet users in the country used a television set to view video content.
According the results published by IP Deutschland, TV was the most popular viewing platform, followed by smartphones on 71%, with laptops in third.
Whilst TV popularity is to be expected, the fact that desktop PCs fall so low, with 39%, whilst smartphones score so highly, shows the growth in smartphone use for video.
The increased size of smartphone screens to accommodate video, combined with the portability of laptops over their desktop counterparts, have reduced the use of desktop in recent years.
100% of Austrian teenagers are online
And finally, Austrian teenagers aged 14 to 19 have reached 100% internet penetration for the first time.
Before the first quarter of this year, Austrians in their twenties were the most active users of the internet, but that now sits in second place behind the younger age group, with 98%.
The next age group sits at 93% but that amount falls steadily as age increases up to the over 70s, where only 48% use the internet.
Overall internet penetration is strong in Austria, with 84% of the population over the age of 14 using the internet.
However, men have a slightly higher usage rate, with 89% of them using the internet compared to just 79% of women.
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Cal O'Connell
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