Mediaboss Marketing

By Belinda Cao - Tue Feb 28 18:40:11 GMT 2012

Chinese Internet stocks climbed, led by Sina Corp. (SINA) (SINA), after the company said its Twitter-like Weibo service may start contributing to sales in the second half.

Sina, owner of China’s third-most visited website, jumped the most in four months and was the biggest gainer on the Bloomberg China-US 55 index of the most-traded Chinese stocks in the U.S. which added 1.7 percent to 108.57 by 1:08 p.m. in New York. Youku Inc., owner of China’s largest video sharing website, surged to a six-month high while Baidu Inc. (BIDU), operator of China’s biggest search engine, climbed to the highest level since Feb. 16 based on closing prices.

Shanghai-based Sina has jumped 37 percent this year as Weibo users rose by about 50 million to more than 300 million in the past three months, according to Chief Executive Officer Charles Chao. Prospects the government will take further steps to preserve Chinese growth, the fastest of major economies, has helped drive a 13.4 percent gain in the Bloomberg China-US 55 measure in 2012. Policy makers cut the reserve ratio for banks for the second time in three months on Feb. 24.

“China’s Internet stocks, especially the bigger names like Sina and Baidu, still have lots of room for growth going forward,” Agnes Deng, a Hong Kong-based portfolio manager whose $405 million Greater China Fund invests in Chinese equities, said in an interview at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York yesterday. “China’s economy will be able to maintain growth of more than 8 percent” this year, she said.

Shanghai-based Sina leaped 13 percent to $71.25, poised for the biggest daily gain since Oct. 13.

‘Meaningful Monetization’

The company plans to start “meaningful monetization” from Weibo in the second half of 2012, CEO Chao said in a conference call yesterday.

“We do not expect that total monetization on Weibo will be significant this year,” he said. The company will start a Weibo-based display advertising system in the second quarter and several fee-based services beginning in the second half, Chao said.

Weibo may contribute $20 million to $30 million to Sina revenue in 2012, Andy Yeung, a New York-based analyst at Oppenheimer & Co Inc. wrote in a research note issued yesterday.

Net income of Sina totaled $9.3 million in the fourth quarter, from a net loss of $100 million a year earlier and a loss of $336.3 million in the previous three months, it said in a Feb. 27 statement.

Deng at the Greater China Fund said she is looking for better “valuation levels” to buy Internet stocks including Sina, after selling holdings of the company when its stock price reached $140 in April. The fund she manages has increased 18 percent this year after posting a 23 percent loss in 2011.

China ETF Climbs

The iShares FTSE China 25 Index Fund, the biggest Chinese exchange-traded fund in the U.S., climbed 1.5 percent to $40.31 yesterday, extending a 3.8 percent advance this month. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (SPX) added 0.3 percent to 1,371.57, set for the highest close since June 2008.

Beijing-based Youku advanced 8.3 percent to $24.93 in New York and was poised for the highest close since Aug. 31.

The company is scheduled to report its fourth-quarter results on March 14. Sales for the quarter probably rose 97 percent from a year earlier to 300.07 million yuan ($47.6 million), according to the average estimate of five analysts in a Bloomberg survey. That would exceed the company’s previous forecast of 297.3 million yuan.

Youku competitor Tudou Holdings Ltd. (TUDO), China’s second- largest video sharing website, advanced 4.5 percent to $15.89. Renren Inc. (RENN), a Beijing-based social networking website, jumped 8.6 percent to $5.58, set for the highest closing level this month.

Beijing-based E-Commerce China Dangdang Inc. (DANG), the biggest Internet-based online book retailer in China, advanced 8.1 percent to $6.79 in New York, the biggest gain in a month. Baidu jumped 2.7 percent to $138.12.

Sohu.com Inc. (SOHU), which owns the third-biggest search engine, rose 5 percent to $51.44 while online games operator NetEase.com Inc. (NTES) climbed 4.9 percent to $53.60.

To contact the reporter on this story: Belinda Cao in New York at lcao4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Emma O’Brien at eobrien6@bloomberg.net

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Sina’s Weibo Outlook Buoys Internet Stock Gains in N.Y.: China Overnight

Russia's new Internet-savvy opposition is going online to protest and monitor the presidential elections on March 4, bringing its iPhones and Twitter into the fray against Vladimir Putin.

As jokes and spoof videos about Putin, expected to win back the presidency in Sunday's polls, spread like wildfire on social networking sites and YouTube, opposition activists are using the Internet to promote their cause.

After a slow start, Internet use has sky-rocketed in Russia in recent years and last year the country overtook Germany as having Europe's largest number of Internet users, a development the opposition have not hesitated to exploit.

This week a Moscow-based programme developer, Alexei Chistyakov, 29, presented a new iPhone app to allow election monitors at polling stations to instantly report violations.

It will link up to a call centre organised jointly by Yabloko liberal party and the League of Voters, an umbrella group of celebrities and bloggers who are using their clout to rally election observers.

"It's an easy way to report violations," Chistyakov said of the free app, which he designed and developed with a French company, fearing repercussions for the Russian company where he works.

The elections "are already unfair, let's start with that," he said. "We are doing all this so that people on the outside also acknowledge they are unfair."

Activist Ilya Yashin, 28, of the Solidarity movement said he feels equally at home with the audience of his blogs as when yelling out speeches at the mass rallies for fair elections.

"I feel comfortable with the Internet audience and with people who have never used the Internet. I feel that's my advantage, I was never just an offline politician or just online," he said.

Putin, who has slammed the Internet as "50% pornography", has barely entered the Internet battle. But worryingly for the Russian strongman, that's hardly representative of Russians today.

Forty-four percent use the Internet as one of their main news sources, a December poll by the independent Levada centre found, although state-dominated television news remains stronger, with 78 percent watching.

"Obviously there is a trend for the growing influence of the Internet, but of course the Internet cannot compete with television. The status quo remains that public opinion is shaped by television," said Yashin.

Aiming to change that are Internet sites such as Ridus.ru, a "citizens' news" service founded last autumn where anyone can submit a story and which covers the opposition rallies in detail.

"I think the Internet will become the main source of information for people who are interested in news. At the moment, it's television, but that's changing," said Timofei Vasilyev, a staff journalist at Ridus.

"Fewer and fewer people believe in the television. More and more people believe in the Internet."

The founder of Russia's largest social networking site, Vkontakte, Pavel Durov, ran an online poll ahead of December's parliamentary elections. Out of more than 4 million votes, only 21 percent were for ruling party United Russia.

Putin's campaign manager, film director Stanislav Govorukhin, recently called the Internet a "rubbish dump."

In a possible own goal, the campaign recently posted online television ads with celebrity endorsements of Putin.

The result -- bloggers and journalists pored over them and concluded a popular actress looked as if she could have been coerced into appearing to protect her children's charity.

And popular television and radio host Ksenia Sobchak went on to score far better online with a spoof video in which she demurely backed Putin, only for the camera to cut away to reveal guns pointed to her head.

Yashin was scornful of Putin's team's attempts to win hearts and minds on the Internet.

"I think it looks pretty ridiculous. They make quite a mess of it. We're not afraid of competition on the Internet," he said.

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Internet: Russia's new anti-Putin weapon

BARCELONA, SPAIN--(Marketwire -02/27/12)- Mobile World Congress -- Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO - News) -- Bell Mobility continues to build out its 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile services with the Cisco® ASR 5000 Series mobile multimedia core platform. Bell Mobility now delivers 4G LTE services to its most populous markets in western Canada, Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia.

The Cisco ASR 5000 Series is the foundation of the packet core for Bell Mobility's LTE network, delivering higher bandwidth and greater intelligence for faster mobile Internet services and improved user experiences.

Highlights/Key Facts

Bell Mobility has completed the rollout of 4G LTE services to customers in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Yellowknife, London, Greater Toronto Area, Hamilton, Guelph, Kitchener-Waterloo, Belleville, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City and Halifax-Dartmouth. With capital expenditures of approximately $3 billion per year, Bell is rapidly expanding Canada's communications infrastructure with ongoing fibre and mobile broadband rollouts. Designated as a 4G mobile specification, LTE is designed to provide multi-megabit bandwidth, more efficient use of the radio network, latency reduction and improved mobility. This combination aims to enhance the user's interaction with the network and further drive the demand for mobile multimedia services. With mobile broadband, users can more readily access Internet services such as online video, social networking, and interactive gaming -- all on the go. The Cisco ASR 5000 Series is purpose-built for the complexities of the mobile network. It is a robust multimedia services platform that brings a new level of network and customer intelligence to the mobile network. Such intelligence is critical to delivering real-time, personalized mobile services. Key components of the Cisco ASR 5000 Series include: The Cisco Mobility Management Entity (MME), which manages multiple back-end functions, including authentication, paging, mobility with 3GPP, 2G and 3G nodes, roaming and other functions. The Cisco Serving Gateway provides superior throughput and processing Cisco Packet Data Network Gateway acts as policy enforcement and manages quality of service (QoS). By combining multiple functions into a single carrier-class platform like the Cisco ASR 5000 Series, Bell can reduce signaling overhead, distribute session management, and take full advantage of the network's control and user plane capabilities. According to the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2010 to 2015 released in February 2012, worldwide mobile data traffic will increase 18-fold over the next five years, reaching 130 exabytes per year. By 2016 Cisco anticipates that global mobile data traffic will outgrow global fixed data traffic by three times.

Supporting Quotes:

Stephen Howe, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Bell

"4G LTE is the next step in ensuring Bell continues to deliver the best networks across Canada to consumers and business customers. The Cisco ASR 5000 Series helps us provide a superior wireless experience and offer new and unique mobile services, now and in the future."

Kelly Ahuja, senior vice president, general manager, Service Provider Mobility, Cisco

"We are pleased to partner with Bell Mobility as it deploys its LTE network. As the expectations of mobile users increase, the need for intelligent traffic management, scale, performance and accurate reporting increases. With the Cisco ASR 5000 Series, Bell has a market-leading packet core, built upon an intelligent platform that can integrate multiple functions and is uniquely equipped to accelerate Bell's ability to meet customer needs and grow its business."

Supporting Resources

Tags/Keywords

Bell Canada, Bell Mobility, Cisco, ASR 5000 Series Aggregation Service Routers, ASR 5000, mobile Internet, Visual Networking Index Forecast, VNI

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO - News) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found at http://www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.

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Bell Mobility Delivers on 4G LTE Rollout With Cisco Mobile Internet Solutions

WALTHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

The 20th anniversary of the first standardized email attachment successfully being sent via the Internet will be celebrated on March 5 during an event hosted by Applied Communication Sciences. Dr. Nathaniel Borenstein, Chief Scientist at Mimecast, and one of the technology’s inventors, will address attendees during a keynote marking the significant occasion.

Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is the official Internet standard that defines the way in which multimedia objects are labelled, compounded, and encoded for transport over the Internet. Co-designers Ned Freed and Dr. Borenstein led the specification of MIME and were instrumental in its worldwide adoption, enabling email users to send and receive graphics, audio, and video files via Internet mail systems and support messages in various character sets. Today, Dr. Borenstein is Chief Scientist at Mimecast, the leading supplier of cloud-based e-mail archiving, continuity, and security for Microsoft Exchange and Office 365. The event is being held at Applied Communication Sciences (formerly Telcordia Technologies Research), where Dr. Borenstein worked when he co-created MIME. Ned Freed is currently a Senior Principal Engineer at Oracle Corporation, where he works on the Oracle Communications Messaging Server.

Prior to MIME, e-mail attachments could not be sent between users on different e-mail systems, as those few systems that supported attachments had proprietary ways of handling them. As the general public started embracing the Internet through different service providers in the 1990s, the need for a standardized way to attach files to e-mails became necessary. MIME became that standard and is now used in sending trillions of email messages annually.

Following his presentation, Dr. Borenstein will be joined by John Lamb, Dr. Michael L. Littman, and David Braun to recreate the audio content within the first ever email attachment, a short jingle written to the tune of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”

WHAT: Keynote by Dr. Nathaniel Borenstein to commemorate 20th Anniversary of MIME

WHERE: Applied Communication Sciences, Piscataway, New Jersey

WHEN: March 5, 12:00pm

As a scientist, programmer, inventor and entrepreneur, Dr. Borenstein has been involved in Internet-related innovations since 1980, specializing in e-mail technology, human-computer interaction, and electronic commerce. He co-developed the email component of the Andrew Project. The Andrew Message System was the first multi-media electronic mail system to become used outside of a laboratory. In 1989 he became a member of technical staff at Bellcore (Bell Communications Research). There he developed a series of standards so the various electronic mail systems could exchange multimedia messages in a common way. Often referred to as an "Internet Guru," Dr. Borenstein largely focused his career around taking new innovations and driving them, collaboratively, to become successful products. He specializes in building consensus in diverse groups, and enjoys translating between different perspectives, particularly between software development and business strategy. Since June 2010 Dr. Borenstein has been working as Chief Scientist for Mimecast.

About Mimecast

Mimecast (www.mimecast.com) delivers cloud-based email management for Microsoft Exchange, including archiving, continuity and security. By unifying disparate and fragmented email environments into one holistic solution that is always available from the cloud, Mimecast minimizes risk and reduces cost and complexity, while providing total end-to-end control of email. Founded in the United Kingdom in 2003, Mimecast serves over 4,500 customers worldwide and has offices in Europe, North America, Africa and the Channel Islands.

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Mimecast Chief Scientist to Keynote at Event Commemorating 20th Anniversary of Internet Email Attachments

WAKEFIELD, Mass., Feb. 27, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Comverse(R) (Nasdaq:CMVT - News), a global leader in BSS, mobile Internet and value added services, today announced that Hutch Telecom Lanka, part of the Hutchison Whampoa Group, selected the Comverse Mobile Internet Data Management and Monetization (DMM) solution for the network's rapidly growing data traffic, accelerating implementation of new plans and offerings to enrich the user experience and generate new revenues in Sri Lanka.

"Mobile Broadband is expanding rapidly in Sri Lanka, accounting for an increasingly large share of our total business. It is vital for us to deliver the freshest and highest quality experience to our users now and in the future," said Mr. Anand Prakash, Chief Operating Officer of Hutch Telecom Lanka. "Easy and rapid implementation of attractive segmented data plans and exciting services will increase our differentiation in the market and enable data to fulfill more of its revenue potential."

The comprehensive solution selected by Hutch Telecom Lanka includes a pre-integrated DMM PCRF Policy Manager with the DMM DPI Traffic Manager and the DMM Application Gateway. The Policy Manager is based on a unique model providing high coverage of desired business cases with excellent performance. Pre-integration with Hutch's existing Comverse Real-Time Billing makes the solution truly end-to-end for rapid creation of data monetization plans facilitating lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and accelerating time to market.

The rich selection of pre-configured use cases and the easy-to-use operator interface further promote the utmost agility and speed-to-profit for segmented plans, offers, incentives and advanced monetization use cases -- including quota-based plans that take into account device information and assure prioritization and QoS for premium services, and location-based plans that leverage cell information and tailored metrics to fine-tune effectiveness.

"Comverse has become a data market leader by enabling smart Mobile Internet service providers like Hutch Telecom Lanka to deliver a richer and higher quality mobile Internet experience," said Amos Marom, Head of Comverse Mobile Internet Unit. "As a trusted Hutch partner in VAS and Billing services, it is our honor to help them extend their competitive edge by taking their mobile data to the next level of management, monetization and user experience -- while lowering TCO."

"Combining BSS with the state-of-the-art DMM Policy Management and Enforcement supports today's and tomorrow's business use cases, accelerating monetization and market innovation," concluded Marom.

Click for more information about Comverse Mobile Internet. To meet with Comverse at Mobile World Congress, contact yael.rohar@comverse.com.

About Hutchison Telecom Lanka

Hutchison Telecommunications Lanka (Private) Limited ("Hutchison Telecom Lanka") provides mobile telephony service under the "Hutch" brand. Its service covers all major population centers and most parts of the country. The Company is constantly expanding its network to reach the entire country. Hutchison Telecom Lanka provides affordable and accessible mobile telephony plus useful value added services. For more information about Hutchison Telecom Lanka, see http://www.hutch.lk.

A subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa Group ("HWL"), Hutchison Telecom Lanka is a member of Hutchison Asia Telecom International, which comprises mobile telecommunications operations in the emerging markets of Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Hutchison Asia Telecom is a key part of HWL's telecommunications division, which includes the 3 Group comprising 3G operations in Australia, Austria, Denmark, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Macau, Sweden and the UK. For more information about HWL, visit http://www.hutchison-whampoa.com.

Hutchison Telecom Lanka is a mobile telecommunications provider offering customers a range of value-for-money GSM services fulfilling the diverse needs of all segments. Hutchison Telecommunications Lanka (Pvt) Ltd. ("Hutchison Telecom Lanka") launched its GSM service in 2004, and has continuously been investing in the expansion of network coverage with the aim of being a nationwide operator in Sri Lanka. (http://www.hutch.lk/)

About Comverse

Comverse is the world's leading provider of software and systems enabling converged billing and active customer management, mobile Internet, and value-added services. Comverse's extensive customer base spans more than 125 countries and covers over 450 communication service providers serving more than two billion subscribers. The company's innovative product portfolio enables communication service providers to unleash the value of the network for their customers by making their networks smarter. Comverse's solutions support flexible deployment models, including in-network, cloud, hosted and managed services. Comverse, ranked number 55 in PwC's Global 100 Software Leaders based on research by Pierre Audoin Consultants, is a subsidiary of Comverse Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq:CMVT - News). For more information, visit http://www.comverse.com.

Statements included or incorporated by reference in this press release may contain "forward-looking statements." There can be no assurance that any forward-looking statements will be achieved, and actual results could differ materially from forecasts and estimates. Important factors that could affect the company include the risks described in the section entitled "Forward-Looking Statements" Item 1A, "Risk Factors" and elsewhere in the company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2011 filed with the SEC on May 31, 2011 or in subsequently filed periodic, current or other reports. The company undertakes no commitment to update or revise forward-looking statements except as required by law.

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Hutchison Telecommunications to Optimize Mobile Internet User Experience With Comverse Data Management and Monetization