Daily News 2006/03/28

Skype entering into the market of middle and small-sized enterprises

On March 9 this year, Skype launched Skype for Business, a kind of VoIP service designed for small sized companies of less than ten persons. However, analysts think that the company may encounter obstacles because the VoIP solution is not mature yet.
Skype for Business provides low-cost or free-of-charge IP telephone service for commercial users. It includes a new service website--Skype.biz, hardware that has been certified by Skype and a control panel for management of group users and prepayment.

BAIDU and NOKIA cooperating to provide Chinese search engine service

Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU), the world largest Chinese search engine, and the world leading mobile phone supplier NOKIA announced today that they would imbed Baidu searching service in Nokia mobile phone in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
By that time, part of the Nokia mobile phone (based on S60 platform), including Nokia N70 and Nokia No90, will be linked to Baidu searching engine in a wireless way.

CCW: three groups competing on China's search engine market

Following Yahoo and Google, who entered into China in 1994 when China get access to the Internet for the first time, Baidu was born.
According to the data from CCW Research, the total income from searching engine service in China in 2005 amounted to RMB 1,390,000,000, an increase of 47.9％ than that in 2004. With the rapid growth of market size, the growth rate was not as high as before. However, in the coming a few years, this market will keep growing at a high speed.
CCW Research thinks that the search engine providers in China can be classified into three groups:
The first group includes GOOGLE, BAIDU and YAHOO;
The second group includes China Search Engine, SINA, SOHU, and NETEASE;
The third group includes the merging professional search engine (such as shopping search engine)
The first group accounts for 76.7% of the market share, forming a balance between them. However, with the emerging of Microsoft and Tecent, the competition will be much fiercer in the future.