eBay's China site to join global network
Published: September 16, 2004, 5:48 AM PDT
By
Reuters
SHANGHAI--Online auctioneer eBay will plug a recently purchased China site into its global network on Friday, creating new opportunities for a nascent but fast-growing operation, the company says. eBay bought homegrown Internet player EachNet in two bond transactions for $180 million over the past two years, and the auction giant now owns the company outright.
Since sealing the deal a year ago, EachNet has gradually been integrated into eBay's worldwide system--a process that will be complete with the Friday launch of a mirror EachNet site (at www.ebay.com.cn), said EachNet chairman Shao Yibo in an interview at the company's Shanghai headquarters.
"There are a lot of worldwide features (on eBay) that are not in China that would be useful locally," said Shao, who at 31 is a throwback to the Internet bubble wunderkinds of the 1990s.
eBay Eachnet, as the unit is now known, had 6.9 million users who traded $63 million in goods during the second quarter. The number of users was up 25 percent from the first, and the number of dollars spent up 28 percent.
New listings for the quarter grew 38 percent to 4.2 million.
Shao said those growth rates were generally in line with recent increases, but he declined to give any projections.
"In the long term, becoming part of the global network will help our growth rate. But it's harder to say in the short term," he said.
EachNet controls an estimated 60 percent to 70 percent of China's online auction market, worth an estimated $232 million (1.92 billion yuan) last year. It is the only one of the country's three best-known players to charge fees.
Two newer sites, a joint venture between Yahoo and Chinese online media company Sina, and Taobao.com, operated by homegrown Alibaba.com, both offer services free of charge as they seek to build their businesses.
Shao said eBay EachNet charges sellers a fee for listing, a sales commission and an optional fee for making listings stand out from others. Buyers pay no fees.
He said that payments for goods--often considered a stumbling block in a nation where credit cards and checks are relatively rare--was receding as an issue because more people are getting credit cards, and banks have started allowing online money transfers.
The rise of express delivery and alternatives to China's post office have also boosted the medium.
"Five years ago when we started, we encouraged local trading and estimated (that) 95 percent of (actual goods exchanges) were done in person," he said. "Today, over 70 percent of transactions happen between users in different cities. Of the remaining 30 percent, many don't meet in person. The spy movie (scenarios) are very few and far between now. They still exist, but users are very resourceful."
Story Copyright © 2004 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
Market share of Internet Explorer is dropping
By Wolfgang Gruener, Senior Editor
September 16, 2004 - 17:49 EST
According to web analytics firm Websidestory and a report published by eWeek, Microsoft's Internet Explorer suffered the most significant drops in usage in more than eight years. Microsoft's browser has dropped by 1.8 percentage points over the past three months to 93.7 percent of the market, Websidestory said.
One of the benefcators was Mozilla's Firefox browser which is recorded comined with AOL's Netscpae browser. The software has gained 1.7 percentage points since June and now is used by 5.2 percent of Internet users. Opera's browser rose 0.1 percentage points to 1.1 percent.
After releasing PR 1 of its Firefox browser yesterday, the Mozilla foundation announced record download figures of more than 300,000 within 24 hours. That level of downloads represents 10 percent of Firefox 0.8's total downloads over its first four months of availability, Decrem said to eWeek.
Microsoft said that it was not concerned of a major shift away from Internet Explorer.
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AOL Won't Use Microsoft Anti-Spam Standard
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - America Online Inc. on Thursday shunned a Microsoft Corp. proposal to help weed out unwanted "spam" e-mail because Internet engineers are reluctant to adopt technology owned by the dominant software company.
AOL, a division of Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX - news), said it would not adopt Microsoft's SenderID protocol because it has failed to win over experts leery of Microsoft's business practices.
"AOL will now not be moving forward with full deployment of the SenderID protocol," AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said in a statement.
The decision is the latest fallout from a dispute between Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) and advocates of free, "open source" software commonly used across the Internet.
Rather than agreeing on one common standard to weed out fake e-mail addresses used by spammers, e-mail providers will be forced to use two slightly differing standards that until recently had been combined as one.
A Microsoft spokesman said the two standards will be identical in nine out of 10 cases.
"It's still going to be one standard, there's just going to be two flavors," Microsoft spokesman Sean Sundwall said.
Spammers often appropriate the e-mail addresses of others in order to slip through content filters, a tactic known as "spoofing."
Several proposals by Microsoft and others would allow Internet providers to check that a message from joe@example.com actually comes from example.com's server computers. Messages that do not match up could be safely rejected as spam.
The technology would be invisible to everyday users.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates (news - web sites) in January said the technique could help eliminate spam by 2006. Spam currently accounts for up to 83 percent of all e-mail traffic.
Microsoft in May combined its proposal with another developed by entrepreneur Meng Wong and submitted them to the standards-setting Internet Engineering Task Force for approval.
But several key players have said they won't use the standard because Microsoft holds patents on the underlying technology, even though Microsoft has said it won't charge royalties for SenderID.
The Apache Software Foundation, which develops open source software, told the IETF on Sept. 2 that it could not use SenderID under Microsoft's terms.
"We believe the current license is ... contrary to the practice of open Internet standards," the group said in an open letter.
AOL said it will continue to use Wong's Sender Policy Framework proposal to check incoming e-mail, and will test other methods as well, such as one proposed by Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) that would use encrypted digital signatures to authenticate e-mail.
AOL will use both standards to send outgoing mail, Graham said.
Microsoft will use SenderID on its Hotmail service starting Oct. 1, Sundwall said.
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IBM, LG Electronics to End PC Venture
SEOUL - International Business Machines Corp. and LG Electronics Inc. will end an eight-year alliance that helped expand the U.S. computer maker's presence in the booming South Korean PC market.
The joint venture formed by the two companies, LG IBM PC Co., said Tuesday it would dissolve itself by the end of the year.
IBM owns 51 percent of the company, which manufactures and markets personal computers in South Korea (news - web sites). LG Electronics, which makes consumer electronics and home appliances, owns the remaining 49 percent.
"Today's positive market conditions are favorable for IBM and LG Electronics to explore growth opportunities independently," said Kim Kwang Won, a spokesman at IBM Korea. "We believe this separation will bring better brand and market opportunities for both companies."
The two companies said the separation was unrelated to a bribery case in which three officials of LG IBM as well as three from IBM's Korea unit were indicted earlier this year, charged with paying off government officials to win contracts to supply computer parts and services to state agencies and state-run businesses.
Those six employees have since been fired because of their involvement in the case.
Established in 1996, LG IBM opened a door for IBM to expand its presence in South Korea. IBM was looking to boost its network and personal-computer businesses. For LG, the deal offered an opportunity to gain expertise in the manufacturing of PCs, a new product for the company at the time.
LG Electronics declined to comment on the announcement. But analysts said they didn't see the separation significantly affecting the bottom line of either company.
Both companies said they plan to continue exchanging technologies and jointly implement large-scale projects in the Korean market.
IBM Korea will sell its ThinkPad notebook PCs while LG Electronics will sell its Xnote notebook PCs after the split.
On Tuesday, LG Electronics shares closed down 2.6 percent in trading on the Korea Stock Exchange.
New York Stock Exchange (news - web sites)-listed IBM shares closed Tuesday at $86.72, up 23 cents, or 0.3 percent.
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