vnunet.com Asia news wrap: 13 January 2006

Asia news wrap: 13 January 2006

Microsoft has announced the opening of a new research lab in China that will work on online advertising technology.

The software giant is competing for advertising dollars with local rivals in China, such as the popular Baidu search engine, and foreign giants like Google and Yahoo.

The new 'adLab' will work on improving MSN adCenter, Microsoft's pay-per-click advertising platform. Early versions of adCenter deliver context-sensitive adverts on web pages.

In most respects the service is similar to the text advertising pioneered by Google, which still generates the lion's share of Google's revenue. Microsoft has predicted that online ad spending will rise to $30bn a year by 2008.

Microsoft said in a statement that the research lab will employ scientists specialising in "data mining, information retrieval, statistical analysis, artificial intelligence, auction theory, visual computing and digital media".

There are signs that Microsoft has targeted the potentially huge Chinese advertising market since the early days of its online ad technology development. Among the company's original testbed locations for adCenter was Singapore, where Chinese is one of the official languages.

US retail giant Wal-Mart has won control of Chinese language versions of its internet domain names from a Chinese company.

Nanjing Zhongtie Technological Development, a small manufacturer of car batteries, registered four variants of the name in 2003 and refused to cede them to the US company.

A court in Beijing ruled earlier this week that the Chinese firm's action constituted improper competition, and ordered the names to be returned to Wal-Mart China, according to local media reports. 

Despite the ruling, some of the Chinese language versions of the Wal-Mart name registered by Nanjing Zhongtie still point to that company's site and not to Wal-Mart's.

In addition, one of Wal-Mart's potential English language domain names for the Chinese market is in use by a small Chinese telecoms service provider which appears to have no connection to the US retail giant.

Wal-Mart operates 45 stores in China. Worldwide, it has more than 5,000 stores in 10 countries.