Δευτέρα 9 Μαΐου 2011

Naver is embarrassing Google in South Korea

Naver is a the biggest search engine in South Korea by far, with a marketshare over 70%. Google's marketshare in South Korea? 2%.
Unlike Google, Naver doesn't crawl and index pages and rank them according to links. When Naver was started, the South Korean-language internet was too small to do that.
Instead, Naver is like a question and answer service. South Korean internet users help each other out find things, and Naver used that information to crowdsource a page ranking and create South Korea's best performing search engine.
Social search is a big buzzword in Silicon Valley but it's been a reality in South Korea for over 10 years.

Meituan could end up embarrassing Groupon

Image: flickr

It's somewhat hard to tell given how new this market is and how fast it's changing, but it seems that Meituan is the biggest Groupon clone in China.
Groupon has yet to crack China, and with Meituan reportedly raising $5 million from none other than Sequoia Capital and it has a chance to make sure Groupon is never a factor.

Taobao is embarrassing eBay in China.

EBay bet big on China. Where is it after all these years and all this money spent? Pretty much the same place where it started.
Meanwhile Taobao is China's biggest consumer-to-consumer marketplace. The site generated $29 BILLION in gross merchandise volume in 2009.

Tudou is the Chinese answer to YouTube

Tudou is the "YouTube of China", although maybe it would be more fair to call YouTube the Tudou of the US. Tudou went live in April 2005, whereas YouTube was launched in November of that year.
Today Tudou is a roaring success, hosting over 40 million videos, viewed by over 200 million people a month, and raised over $130 million from marquee investors. Tudou began with user generated content, but that's hard to monetize even in China, but it has moved into premium licensed content and is actually now more like a Hulu of China than a YouTube of China.

Tencent is embarrassing Facebook,

Tencent is embarrassing Facebook, Zynga, and AOL with its success.

Image: Familymwr via flickr

You don't hear too much about Tencent relative to its size, but it's the third biggest publicly traded internet company in the world, bigger than eBay or Yahoo.
Tencent started out as an instant messaging service called QQ, and now it's the biggest social network in China. It makes money not just from advertising but from sales of virtual goods and social games. Meanwhile the biggest internet companies in those sectors, Facebook and Zynga, are nowhere in China.
(We should also note that Tencent did something AOL couldn't -- make a business out of instant messaging.)

Baidu beat Google in China

Google has been trying to tap into China for years, but basically gave up earlier this year with little to show for it.
Baidu, on the other hand, is the phenomenally successful Chinese search engine that beat Google. It has almost 60% of the Chinese market -- and over 6% of the global market, making it as big as Bing globally.
Even more impressively, 99% of Chinese internet users use Baidu at some point. (They also use other search engines, explaining the 60% marketshare.)

Δευτέρα 2 Μαΐου 2011

Is the US Worse Off Than Greece?

Wealth Wire

Is the US Worse Off Than Greece?

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Posted by Adam Sharp -

Analysts in the US like to point out how bad Europe's debt problems are. What they don't often mention is that America's own problems are arguably even worse.
us-vs-greece

Chart by Sudden Debt, along with this commentary:

Not fair to compare the US to Greece, you say? Correct, because the figure for Greece is for the general government, i.e. it includes all local and municipal budgets, whereas for the US it involves the federal government only.

In other words, the real picture is even worse than it looks in the graph.
DC-heavyweight James Baker recently weighed in on the issue:

"The United States of America, if we didn't have the dollar as the de facto reserve currency of the world, we'd be Greece," former Treasury Secretary James Baker told CNN Sunday. "I mean, we are broke, bankrupt. Really bankrupt."

The question is: How much time does the dollar's reserve-currency status buy America? And how much longer will the dollar remain the reserve currency, with Bernanke & co. printing like mad?