Global marketing news – 6 November 2015
Coc Coc takes on Google in Vietnam
The Vietnamese internet company Coc Coc is pushing hard to take on Google in the country.
Coc Coc is the second most popular web browser in Vietnam, coming after only Google Chrome.
Coc Coc was created by Vietnamese developers especially for a Vietnamese audience. It automatically checks Vietnamese spellings and suggests corrections for misspellings with a 90% accuracy rate.
Its search engine is also doing well in the country, coming behind only Google in terms of popularity. Evidence suggests that Coc Coc’s search engine is growing in popularity, with Google’s share of the search engine market falling.
In an effort to ramp up its fight against Google even more, Coc Coc has also just announced the launch of a new service called Nha Nha to compete against Google Maps.
The company is also in the process of developing a mobile browser, reflecting the fact that over three quarters of internet users in Vietnam use their mobile phones to get online.
New search engine Parsijoo launches in Iran
A new search engine has launched in Iran.
Named Parsijoo, which means “Persian search”, the search engine is aimed at the Iranian market and its homepage is written in Persian.
It already has 1 billion webpages indexed in its database and has separate search result tabs including text, image, video, audio, map, news, science, market and download sections.
Its homepage has a search bar for users to type their queries, and also features Iranian weather, news, financial and sporting information.
Parsijoo hopes that it will gain half a million users in its first year, with ambitions to double this number every year, with user numbers predicted to reach 4 million after 4 years.
Parsijoo is not the only search engine to have been created specifically for the Iranian market. Earlier this year, rival search engine Yooz launched in the country, hoping to compete with dominant international search engine Google.
China makes it illegal to “start rumours” online
China has made it a criminal offence for internet users to “start rumours on the web”.
The crime is punishable by 3 to 7 years in prison, with the exact sentence being dependant on how “serious” the consequences of the rumour are deemed to be.
The crime came into effect on 1 November and covers the “fabrication of false danger, disease, disaster or police information”.
There is concern that the government will use the law to punish human rights activists, however, with China recently being ranked as the world’s worst country for internet freedom according to research by Freedom House.
China’s internet censorship laws ban pornographic and other “offensive” content, including “the spreading of rumours”.
Last year, China made it a criminal offence to broadcast any “defamatory” content online. A perpetrator can face up to 3 years imprisonment if the information has been viewed by 5,000 people or re-posted 500 times.
Europe’s fastest growing ecommerce markets revealed
Research by Prologis has named the UK, Germany, France, Poland and the Czech Republic as Europe’s fastest growing ecommerce markets.
Europe has a healthy ecommerce market, with EU citizens not shying away from cross-border online purchases. Separate research by Ecommerce Europe revealed that around 15% of EU citizens currently buy from other EU countries online.
The European ecommerce market is predicted to generate 477 billion Euros this year, an annual growth rate of 15%.
With this rate of growth expected to hold steady for the next few years, the European ecommerce market is expected to exceed 600 billion Euros within the next 2 years.
Etihad Airways wins social media award
And finally, Etihad Airways has been given the “Best Overall in Middle East” award at the SimpliFlying Awards 2015 for their social media marketing efforts.
Etihad Airways actively engages with customers from all around world on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, WeChat, Weibo and Youku.
It has a multilingual approach, interacting with users in Arabic, English, German, Italian and Mandarin Chinese.
Earlier this year, it ranked seventh in the UAE in a poll measuring positive brand perceptions in the country.
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Cal O'Connell
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