A recent report on the state of the mobile Web, released by Opera Software, has revealed that different countries have different patterns, as far as surfing the mobile Web is concerned.

Unique Users

Users in two-thirds of the countries surveyed surf the mobile Web more actively on weekdays, while users in the remaining countries are more active on weekends.

The countries that have more unique mobile Web users on weekends are led by Egypt followed by Iran, Ghana, Ethiopia and Tanzania. In Egypt, there is a 7.6% increases in the number of unique users during weekends.

On the other hand, the leaders as far as weekday usage go are Romania, Belarus, Moldova, the United States and Poland in that order. In these countries there are more users surfing the Internet from a mobile device during weekdays.

Page Views

An interesting point to be noted is that a drop in the number of users, does not necessarily mean a drop in the number of pages viewed. A case in point is the country of Georgia, where there is a drop in the number of users during weekends, but they top the list for growth in pages viewed during the weekend.

In the United Kingdom too, the number of unique users accessing the Web from a mobile device drops by 1.6% over the weekends. However, this smaller number of users consumer a much larger amount of data and register many more page views on average, resulting in a net 6% increase in the number of page views and a 6% increase in data consumption too.

Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software says, “The trends in this edition show that users in different countries do behave differently on the mobile Web. Their reasons to be a ‘weekend surfer’ or a ‘weekday surfer’ may vary, but the statistics remain very consistent throughout the measured period.”

While some countries show more than 10% increase between weekdays to weekends, others show a decrease. Interestingly, the increase in page views from weekday to weekend is almost consistently greater than the decrease after the weekend.

Captions will be automatically generated through the voice recognition algorithm that is used on Google Voice. The technology is known as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology and can be pretty accurate for some cases.

In many cases, though, the automatic captions result in some rather funny output, even for videos by Google’s own employees. This could lead to some very confused users if they relied solely on automated captions!

Funny Automated Captions On YouTube

In order to use automated captions, a user has must click on the upward arrow button on the bottom-right corner of the video control bar and click on ‘Transcribe Audio’ from the captions (CC) menu.

It is also be possible to translate the captions into several languages.

While this will greatly improve YouTube’s accessibility and benefit people who have difficulties hearing, the translation facility will also help people who do not understand the original language used in the video.

Another feature that is being simultaneously introduced is auto-timing for subtitles. If all the words used in the video are provided in a text file, Google will automatically associate the timing of each caption alongside the video timeline.

In other words, the text of the video will be transcribed. This transcript can obviously be indexed and crawled, thus helping users with search engine optimisation of video content.

The new captioning features will therefore eventually allow users to search for a video based on keywords used in the video script.

The automatic caption feature is already available on most educational and Google-owned channels. Automatic timing is now available on all newly uploaded videos on YouTube.

Research from the UK Trade and Investment government offices has found that despite favourable circumstances only 75,000 businesses in the U.K. are engaged in exporting their products and services.

Chief among the reasons for this low turn out are language and cultural barriers, apart from other factors like administrative restrictions, cross-border logistics etc.

To help businesses overcome these obstacles, Google has tied up with Applied Language Solutions, HSBC, Royal Mail, Institute of Export, U.K. Trade and Investment and Alibaba.com, to launch a new comprehensive solution called Export Adviser.

Google Export Adviser

UK-based businesses interested in export can now avail of this service.

The Export Adviser will help novices to start an export business by guiding them through various steps like identifying and evaluating target markets, judging the market demand, creating an English language keyword list, translating that list and forecasting a cost per click for those multilingual keywords.

The opportunity finder tool offers a neat tie-in between three Google tools to translate keywords, mine keyword data and predict demand in the market, as demonstrated by the simple example below, where a search for ‘seo’ brings up a map showing where most opportunities lie among emerging markets, along with suggestions for related keywords and rising keywords in various languages.

Google Export Adviser’s opportunity finder tool

For those who wish to expand their export business, the Export Box, created in partnership with Applied Language Solutions offers a slightly expensive (considering the target market is SME) solution: For a price of £3,000 users will be provided with the following:

1. A translated website, built as landing pages for specific search terms
2. Keywords and Adverts specially researched and designed for the target country in the target language
3. £1,000 worth of paid advertising on Google AdWords using Multilingual PPC, plus a free Google voucher worth £200
4. A free online shop front and discounts on Gold Supplier membership for Alibaba.com to market products to over 8 million international buyers
5. £1,000 worth of language support
6. Membership to the Institute of Export and discounted international banking with HSBC.

SMEs that don’t want the full support of this £3,000 package are lured by an alternative £200 AdWords voucher, the details of which can be found from AdWords account managers.

Screenshot of Google Export Adviser website

Citizen Lab has come across a database, which has thousands of words, that are considered to be politically sensitive. Whenever a Skype message contains any of these words, it gets automatically blocked. The database on which these words are stored also stores the personal information of the users, including their IP address, username and phone number. The database is insecure and hence is publicly available, which is a blatant breach of security for the users.

According to Citizen Lab, there is a surveillance system in place, which selects and stores messages transmitted through online telephones, and text messages. The messages that get deleted may contain some commonly used words such as democracy, Taiwan, Tibet, Voice of America, milk powder, Olympic games, earthquake, Tiananmen and SARS. The database reportedly contains over 1,50,000 messages, and it is possible to identify all the senders and recipients by entering just a username.

The internet service provider Skype, which runs its services in China in a joint venture with the Chinese company TOM online, under the name TOM-Skype, says that they are aware of the filtering of data by the Chinese authorities, but are concerned by reports about the resultant breach of security.

Citizen Lab has enquired whether or not Tom online and Skype are cooperating with the Chinese authorities and if so to what extent.

President of Skype, Josh Silverman has said that it is common knowledge that that Tom Online follows procedures to meet the local laws and regulations, such as monitoring and blocking messages containing certain words, which the Chinese government disapproves of. However according to policy these messages are to be deleted. They will have to investigate to know if the policy has been changed to allow storage of these messages and why.