Internet portal Kimo.com (網景奇摩站) will team up with Hong Kong Telecom's Netvigator (網?W|? and China's Netease (網易) to form a one-stop advertising channel with an eye toward slashing ad rates and supplying Web users with more Chinese content, Kimo President David Lu (盧?j為) said Thursday.
The venture, to be called the Greater China Portal Alliance (GCPA,
"We expect there will be more regional content on the Chinese sites in the region, which will stimulate more cross-region traffic within Greater China," he said. "It is the whole concept of the Internet -- no geographical boundaries to information and service."
The alliance has also planned e-commerce business-to-customer initiatives, Netease chief executive officer William Ding (
A GCPA survey showed that users in the region were interested in receiving more Chinese content, with 95 percent of those surveyed saying they would use a portal which provides regional information and on-line community services.
China's Internet surfers were more avid users of Hong Kong or Taiwanese sites than the other way round, the survey found.
A June report by consultancy firm Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong found that Netease was Asia's second largest portal after Singapore's Asia1 portal.
The rankings were derived by looking at the variety and volume of on-line content offered by portals, as measured by the number of hyperlinks to other Web sites.
Asia1 had around 16,000 hyperlinks compared to Netease's 15,000. Kimo came in fourth place with nearly 6,000 hyperlinks, while Pchome, another Taiwan Web site, had 2,000 links.
The strategic alliance increases Hong Kong Telecom's stake in Taiwan's Internet and telecommunications market.
PEACE AT LAST? UN experts had warned of threats and attacks ahead of the voting, but after a turbulent period, Bangladesh has seemingly reacted to the result with calm The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) yesterday celebrated a landslide victory in the first elections held since a deadly 2024 uprising, with party leader Tarique Rahman to become prime minister. Bangladesh Election Commission figures showed that the BNP alliance had won 212 seats, compared with 77 for the Islamist-led Jamaat-e-Islami alliance. The US embassy congratulated Rahman and the BNP for a “historic victory,” while India praised Rahman’s “decisive win” in a significant step after recent rocky relations with Bangladesh. China and Pakistan, which grew closer to Bangladesh since the uprising and the souring of ties with India, where ousted Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina
FAST-TRACK: The deal is to be sent to the legislature, but time is of the essence, as Trump had raised tariffs on Seoul when it failed to quickly ratify a similar pact Taiwan and the US on Thursday signed a trade agreement that caps US tariffs on Taiwanese goods at 15 percent and provides preferential market access for US industrial and agricultural exports, including cars, and beef and pork products. The Taiwan-US Agreement on Reciprocal Trade confirms a 15 percent US tariff for Taiwanese goods, and grants Taiwanese semiconductors and related products the most-favorable-treatment under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, the Executive Yuan said. In addition, 2,072 items — representing nearly 20 percent of Taiwan’s total exports to the US — would be exempt from additional tariffs and be subject only to
The Taiwan Space Agency (TASA) yesterday released the first images from its Formosat-8A satellite, featuring high-resolution views of Hsinchu Science Park (新竹科學園區), Tainan’s Anping District (安平), Kaohsiung’s Singda Harbor (興達港), Japan’s National Stadium in Tokyo and Barcelona airport. Formosat-8A, named the “Chi Po-lin Satellite” after the late Taiwanese documentary filmmaker Chi Po-lin (齊柏林), was launched on Nov. 29 last year. It is designed to capture images at a 1m resolution, which can be sharpened to 0.7m after processing, surpassing the capabilities of its predecessor, Formosat-5, the agency said. It is the first of TASA’s eight-satellite Formosat-8 constellation to be sent into orbit and
President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday approved a special pardon exempting a woman in her 80s convicted of killing her disabled son from imprisonment. After carefully reviewing the case, Lai pardoned Lin Liu Lung-tzu (林劉龍子) from the prison sentence while acknowledging her conviction, citing the extreme circumstances she faced, Presidential Office spokeswoman Karen Kuo (郭雅慧) said in a statement. Under Article 3 of the Amnesty Act (赦免法), the two kinds of pardons are exempting an offender from the execution of a punishment or declaring the punishment to be invalid. Kuo said Lin Liu had spent more than 50 years caring for her son, before
RSS