SEO, Website Content Optimization
& Software Development

Exports to Europe from China this June increased to 43 per cent year-on-year with an increase of 44% to the U.S as the widely anticipated slowing of growth globally leaves China unaffected. China have recorded another increase in their exports last month in comparison to the same period last year. Already achieving a surplus of $19.5bn in May, June has stacked up an additional $20bn.

The Chinese central bank issued a statement on June 19 signalling the end of the peg to the US dollar. The RMB value has increased 0.77 per cent against the dollar since then, however many global economist see the Chinese currency as undervalued. Last week’s U.S governmental report states that the Chinese renminbi currency  “remains undervalued”.

Imports however fell from May’s level of $48.3 to $34.1 in June. Experts believe this could be as a result of intervention domestically to reign back the property market. This affects the demand for raw materials as property and infrastructure development slows. (more…)

Google’s new “Blue Jazz” user interface (as reported over at Search engine roundtable) has made at least one appearance on this side of the Atlantic.

One of our technical team was served the new layout when searching Google this morning and immediately spotted (or rather didn’t spot) a potential usability issue - the “pages from the UK” search option seemed to have vanished!

After some initial surprise, consternation and a few new conspiracy theories it was noticed the UK option wasn’t gone; it had been moved over to the Search Options panel (home of the Wonder wheel and other oddities)…

Pages from the UK: Hidden in plain sight?

OK, the techie in question may not be at his most alert before he’s had his first coffee of the day, but this kind of reaction is often a problem when making UI changes - however much they might make sense, you are still likely to cause temporary confusion amongst existing users. (more…)

Coverage of Google Street View, the 360° street-level photography service incorporated into Google Maps, has just been massively extended and now includes images of over 96 percent of the UK’s roads, adding another 210,000 miles of our streets to the 28,000 already available.

Most of the areas already mapped by Street View’s cameras were the areas in and around the major cities; now it’s the turn of our small towns, villages and little-used back roads to step into the limelight.

Predictably, some people are up in arms at the intrusion into their privacy; residents of London Road, a cul-de-sac located outside Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire, were miffed that Google’s cameras would allow tech-savvy burglars to see over their walls and prevented the camera car from driving up their road. (more…)

Google is best known for the integrity of its search results. Before it got a name for spitting out endless new services, each more hyped (Knol, Wave, Buzz - I’m looking at you) and broken than the last, what brought people to Google was clean, spam-free search results. You didn’t need to wade through a sea of crap to find relevant content, and (in the early days at least) you could be fairly sure the websites at the top were there on merit.

As highlighted in recent posts from SearchEngineLand and SERoundTable, the distinction between natural and paid results on Google has gotten a little less clear recently as sponsored listings have started to appear on Google.com’s local business results.

Screenshot © Rustybrick

In a statement to SearchEngineLand, Google confirmed that although the listings were enhanced, they did not affect the ranking of listings (as frequently happens on some other search engines, such as China’s Baidu.com). (more…)

In what increasingly appears to be a quest for global domination, Google has recently announced a foray into providing satellite navigation services and is also rumoured to be eyeing the UK property market.

The news stories of Google’s latest product launches saw the share prices of leading companies in these sectors tumble; SatNav firm TomTom lost a third of its market value overnight, while property website RightMove suffered an initial 13% slide in value.

The message from the financial markets seems to be clear - if Google move on to your patch using their “free” services model, you’re as good as dead.

OK, Google is a massively successful company - in the space of a decade they’ve grown from nothing to become arguably the most powerful online business in the world - but should their competitors really just roll over and give up?

Of course not.

Google do enjoy great success, but they are not the great innovators or invincible combatants they are commonly believed to be.  To illustrate the point, take a look at how some of their ventures outside natural web search have fared: (more…)

Backbone IT Group attended the EU - China summit yesterday in Nanjing, attended by the country’s premier, Wen Jiabao.

The premier captured headlines as he spoke of the increasing number of states putting pressure on the Chinese government to strengthen its currency.  Although European representatives had attempted to persuade China to let the renminbi appreciate, Wen Jiabao made it clear that little progress had been made and labelled as unfair the stance of protectionism by some countries in light of demands for the renminbi to increase in value. (more…)

With the success story of the Chinese economy retuning quite dramatically to growth, the world’s eyes remain fixed upon China. With the country being such an economic powerhouse and remaining a “holy grail” for Western businesses, it’s easy to forget that China is not a democratic nation and that differences in culture and law are not only significant, can often appear draconian or unaccountable.

The companies who have fallen on entering or in doing business in China are many. Plenty of corporate giants litter the path to successful domestic Chinese business activity.

The latest of these is Microsoft. The US giant has recently announced the launch of Windows 7. However, a Chinese court has now ruled that Microsoft must stop selling versions of their Windows operating system which include fonts designed in China by a Chinese company. (more…)

We were surprised yesterday to receive a letter entitled “Notice of class Action Settlement.  It appears that some time in the past 10 years, (and it will now be nearly 10 years ago) we may have purchased text pay per click advertising on go to.com which then became overture.com and later Yahoo!. A settlement has been entered into by parties in action called “In re Yahoo litigation”.  We are informed that a class has been certified in the action and also of the terms of settlement.

We were very puzzled to receive this a class action - taking place against a company we have rarely had any dealings with directly, also in a different country to us, and relating to a time long ago.  Nevertheless, there are former Yahoo! (overture etc) pay per click search advertising customers who brought this class action back in 2006, alleging that the “Sponsored Search” and “Content Match” products provided by Yahoo! (overture etc) were in breach of contract because adverts were also displayed in spyware, domain name parking sites, sites are available under common misspellings known as “typo squatting” sites amongst other things. This was seen as unfair business practice. (more…)

Currently, there is a lot of consternation amongst local IT businesses here in Lancaster.  In fact, they are extremely angry.  They have realised that the local university is actually in direct competition with them. The programme is called ISIS and it offers help to businesses for software development, websites and web-based applications, amongst other things. http://www.infolab21.lancs.ac.uk/business/isis/

Clearly, as businesses, we have competitors and competition from many places.  So one more competitor, why worry?

Well, in this case, the anger of the local digital and IT business community has been awoken due to two key factors.  Firstly, the university has a high profile in the local business community, has worked in conjunction with local IT businesses as a facilitator for many years and has benefited from funding with a clear remit to involve local businesses in its IT strategy.  For companies previously involved with the University they see this as a betrayal. (more…)

In a landmark move, internet regulator ICANN has approved the use of non-Latin characters in top-level domains, with the first expected to appear some time next year.

Genuine Arabic, Chinese and Cyrillic domains will now become possible rather than the imperfect system of internationalized domains (IDNA) relying on character conversion which has already been in limited use.

Given the global nature of the internet, the real question is What took them so long?

(more…)