Gasta News: Digital Industry awaits the Carter Report

It will be a case of Get Carter as the Digital Industry rushes to find out the proposition of Stephen Carters report on Digital Britain.

The digital industry is buzzing ahead of Stephen Carter's much-anticipated Digital Britain report, but let's not forget the compelling vision at the centre of Carter's report: the aim to make the UK a world-leading digital creative capital.
Speaking last week, Carter hinted at a need to create greater opportunities and protection for the creative industries, in order to help the UK become a location of choice for the content industries. The plan is to create the regulatory framework and structures to help shape a Britain that is fit for purpose in the digital future.
Reports today suggest Carter will push for BBC Worldwide to be freed from its regulatory shackles to allow the commercial organisation to become a "British rights company on the global stage".
It's part of Carter's vision to ensure British content continues to be exported around the world in order to reap the economic and cultural benefits. With the UK largely viewed as a leader in digital advertising, it's time the content and technology industries were awarded the same kudos.
Carter's vision is imperative as the global content market accelerates. The UK market needs to create infrastructures that support the nurturing and growth of home grown talent and businesses.
Channel 4 CEO Andy Duncan has said the report could be one of the most important elements in deciding how the UK competes in the global economy. He believes it could determine how Britain contributes culturally, creatively and economically through the turbulent times ahead and has urged the UK media industry to work together to support the UK's cultural and economic future. Duncan's not wrong on this point. The potential to create an established vision is both necessary and inspiring - if it works.
Interestingly this comes ahead of the Competition Commission's decision on Project Kangaroo due early next month. While local rivals and the CC itself have major concerns about the potential lessening of competition in the UK market, the shareholders - ITV, Channel 4 and BBC Worldwide - have always argued that Kangaroo is crucial to the UK's ability to compete on a global stage as the likes of Hulu and iTunes continue to grow internationally.
With Carter's vision likely to stir up much debate in this area, is it possible that the controversial video-on demand service may still manage to limp across the line?

Gasta News: China online growth explosion

China's online population, already the world's largest, has expanded to 298 million.
This marks a 41.9% increase on the previous year and is still growing fast, said the government-linked China Internet Network Information Centre.
The study also showed huge increases in the number of people in China accessing the internet through mobile phones.
The report by Cinic also noted that internet use in the countryside was increasing faster than in the cities.
At the end of 2008, the number of net users in China, which has a population of 1.3 billion, was almost the same as the entire population of the United States.
Users in the countryside surged by 60.8% year-on-year to 84.6 million, compared with much more modest growth of 35.6% in the urban areas, the report said.
The Cinic report said 117.6 million people accessed the internet using their mobile phones last year, up 133% from 2007.
Students are the main strength of mobile internet users, the study said: 43.5% of them use their mobile phones to read online news, download music, check email and perform a variety of other tasks.
3G boom
China, with 633.8 million mobile phone users, last week issued long-awaited licences for third-generation (3G) mobile phones to China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom.
CHINA'S INTERNET USE
Total users: 298 million
Year-on-year increase: 41.9%
Mobile net users: 117.6 million
Internet penetration: 22.6%
"With the coming of the 3G era, wireless internet will have exponential growth," Cinic said in a statement accompanying the release of its report.
3G phones enable faster data transmission and services such as watching TV, playing online games, wide-area wireless calls and web surfing.
By 2011, the three operators expect to start 3G services all over China, a move which analysts predict will spur further massive growth in mobile internet use.
As the categories of mobile internet services increase, charges have also been dropping fast.
China's internet penetration is still low at just 22.6%, leaving more room for rapid growth, Cinic said.
Constraints
The study said 234 million people surfed the internet to read or watch news by the end of 2008, a much higher estimate than recently made by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
In 2007, 155 million Chinese internet users relied on the web to read news, accounting for 73.6% of the total internet population, according to Cinic.
It also said the number of Chinese bloggers hit 162 million by the end of 2008.
China's booming internet use comes despite the government's tight grip on the web.
Certain websites deemed politically sensitive are blocked; these include the BBC's Chinese language news site, Reporters Without Borders and some Hong Kong and Taiwan sites.
Access to sites offering diverse political opinions remains highly restricted, even as Chinese intellectuals and activists regularly brave the constraints to post new statements.
The government is also targeting what it calls unhealthy content on the internet. Earlier this month, it launched a campaign to get rid of vulgar and pornographic content, targeting 19 websites and search engines it said had failed to remove unsuitable material.
Authorities in Beijing, meanwhile, actively use the internet to sway opinion, put across actions and ideas, and promote top leaders.

Gasta News: Brand turf war

Paid Search:Low intensity warfare on Google plains

Agencies aren't practicing what they preach when it comes to using paid search to market their brands, according to Adweek, and while these agencies are sleeping, some of their smaller competitors are using paid search to their advantage.

Buying your brand name would seem logical, but of the 56 agencies assessed by Adweek, only five had sponsored links tied to their names on Google. The others did not have paid search links, but their web pages generally appeared near the top of the search results.

"It's very difficult to recommend certain things to your clients if you're not in the game yourself," said Craig Conrad or Interpublic Group's Campbell-Ewald. "So often we're focused on our client business [that] sometimes it's easy to forget about our own brand."

While brand advertisers are up in arms over Google's lack of enforcement when it comes to piggybacking, it seems that some smaller agencies are actually using the practice themselves. A search for OgilvyInteractive yields a sponsored link for Stein Rogan + Partners, a small New York agency.

"Why not put ourselves out there as a viable alternative?" said Tom Stein, Stein Rogan's CEO. "It's a little bit of counter-marketing."

Gasta search convergence

The Register reports that Microsoft is to acquire Norwegian business search engine company Fast Search and Transfer for 6.6bn kroner ($1.23bn)

The software giant said it would pay 19 Norwegian kroner a share for the Oslo-based firm, which represents a 42 per cent premium to the closing share price on 4 January, the day before Microsoft stepped in with its bid.

Fast's board of directors and nearly half of its shareholders have already voted in favour of the buy-out and urged its remaining shareholders to accept Redmond's hefty offer.

In recent months Microsoft has beefed up its Web 2.0 intentions by investing in a number of data centres inside and outside the US as it clambers for a larger chunk of the search engine pie.

The Fast deal, which should be completed in the second quarter of 2008 subject to the usual regulatory approvals, will give the firm tailored internet search functions for corporate customers that include the likes of United Parcel Services and Deutsche Telekom AG.

Publicly-listed Fast said it welcomed the arrival of the Bill Gates jamboree, perhaps unsurprising given that in its last set of results the firm reported a third-quarter loss of $100m.

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Gasta , Fidel Castro "Globalisation:the new atomic bomb"

In an interview with The New Yorker magazine in 1999 Fidel Castro said that "Globalisation was the new atomic bomb" we here at Gasta HQ had a debate at the time about what that he could mean, we thought it might be a statement about the enviroment or an isolationist nightmare, but what is now apparent is that Fidel Castro was talking about the big bang of communication. Information is now spread so fast across the globe that a blip on the economic markets in Asia/Europe or one of the other 'emerging markets', can cause a nerve jangling pulse in the market worldwide, everybody is watching everything! We in Belfast are famous for our corner boy politics, now we have our corner boy economists and doomsayers! The recent credit cruch is a typical example of the 'rush to fear'; financial journalists and the media as a whole have been quick to deny any cause and effect of their reports, but every force has an opposite and althought the media may not have meant to start a run on the Northern Rock, they did! Is this the new atomic bomb that Castro predicated? Can modern communication cause widespread panic and fear at such a fast pace that the shockwave hits us all at once?