Both leading anti-virus and Internet security companies Trend Micro and Symantec have warned their users not to simply open their emails, especially those sent by people that they don’t know without a cautious manner. Symantec has prepared a succinct list of email headings and URLs that their users “must” beware of. Meanwhile, Trend Micro has also warned users not to click a link with the URL http://newyearwithlove.com/.

Their messages seemed simple enough, we should celebrate new year by cautiously open any greeting email or new year Website.

Happy new year to you all.

Magento, an open source eCommerce platform has announced it has achieved a new milestone by reaching 100,000 downloads, and the number is expected continues to grow. It has gained popularity amongst users that want a platform that enable them easily open an online store and sell products since its first preview version was released in April this year. Magento has a bunch of built-in features, such as easy to use, and less pain when integrate this shopping cart platform to an existing site. Meanwhile, they also have plan to release the 1.0 production version in the near future. Perhaps the most exciting news for the users will be the upcoming Magento Connect, a marketplace for the exchange of Magento products, services and extensions.

Magento is a project of Varien, an open source eCommerce development and consulting firm.

Finally, Baidu is launching its patent search services in China that called Baidu Zhuanli. In my previous post, I’ve briefly introduced this service, that is a joint-product cooperated with the SIPO, State Intellectual Property Office of the P.R.C.

When you type some keywords to this patent search engine, the relevant results will appeared on the Baidu page. Click on any hyperlink on the page will bring you to the patent (in Chinese), however in contrast to Google’s Patent Search, Baidu Zhuanli does not offer any document related to the patent that can be viewed in PDF format. You will only get a brief information about the patent and is meant to be barely viewed through a browser interface, such as patent number, filing date, issue date, inventor, inventor’s address, and patent classified number, as shown in the below picture.

In response to the needs of the potential users, Baidu Patent Search is integrated with a whopping patent database which amounted to 2.7 million of China’s patents.

Source: available at http://zhuanli.baidu.com/pages/sipo/9511/93/18b6ff719e8e8159c0bbfaf7edd3d5f4_0.html, accessed 29 December 2007

AOL has announced that they won’t provide any support on Netscape browser after February 1, 2008. In matter of fact, the shrinking of user base with the stiff competition likely put the end of a browser’s era. However, the Internet portal of Netscape will always open to serve the other needs of their users, but not that surprise, they recommended their existing users to switch to Firefox.

Indeed, people nowadays no longer speculate on the next generation of Netscape browser. What’s on their mind is how powerful the Firefox 3.0 when it ready to be released to the market. For existing Netscape browser users, a switch to Firefox is a wise move as Mozilla has provided more support on its browser through shorter release cycles.

To celebrate the 20-year history of Perl, this week the Perl dynamic language has a newest version that is Perl 5.10.0. This is the first major upgrade in more than five years that was released by perl5.porters. This version is not considered as a bug fix version but a new version with lot of features. No doubt, the Perl developers have planned for their next version, i.e. 5.12. But I hope they won’t take another few more years to develop it.

Today CNNIC is releasing the 2007 China Bloggers Survey Report. The data below is based on the analysis of the responses to this survey which was collected from November 20 through 30, 2007 in China. There were 1,862 responses (randomly selected) received and utilized in which 486 survey participants are the bloggers.

- Internet users represented by 73.9%, bloggers comprised of 26.1% in China, as shown in picture 1 below.
- Bloggers that update their blogs in a regular basis represented by 36%; the remaining 64% neither not update their blogs nor registered, but not visit their blogs in a long period of time.
- Bloggers in China amounted to 46.98 million, each has 1.55% account which bring a total blogging accounts to 72.82 million blogs.
- Of which 16.91 million active bloggers, 55% hold one blog account, 27% hold two blog accounts, and 18% are the bloggers with three (3) and more blog accounts.
- Bloggers in China that joined the blog networks represented by 20%, the remaining 80% are not.
- 40% of the bloggers provide links to other blogs or Websites, while 60% wrote their blogs without any other external links.
- 43% of bloggers in China are males whereas 57% are females.
- 93% of bloggers in China visited other blogs before while 7% are not.
- From year 2002 to 2007, the universe of blogging was still evolving rapidly in China, see the picture 2 in below.

Picture 1

Picture 2

The year 2007 is just about to wrap up and there are several predictions on the Web for next year. Whilst several bloggers are arguing on the statement that Web 2.0 will die in year 2008, predicted by an U.K. research firm SciVisum, however in China a nice little Beijing based startup Lonol has quietly launched its homepage with the adoption of Web 3.0 methodologies and technologies.

Lonol is a Web platform that allowed its users to personalize the homepage in addition to aggregate the news content. In a news source (in Mandarin) from Lonol, they have a perspective that Web 1.0 is purely solved the “read” problem when Web surfers surf on the Web. On the other hand, Web 2.0 solved the “write” problem, and with the emergence of Lonol personalized homepage, it will solve the problems of informational needs when users want to get the information on the Web. Since Lonol personalized homepage will initially available in Chinese, and rather than being impediment to non-Chinese users, they’ve planned to add a translation engine that translate all their content to other languages that include: English, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, just to name a few.

A new online advertising network was launched on Christmas in Asia, called Nufflets. It is probably a new startup that want to build an empire based on online advertising. They currently ran a promotion whereby a new publisher that approved by them will be entitled to US$15; at first they credit an approved publisher $5 and the remaining $10 is credited after the publisher provide a link back to this Ads network. Additionally, they have some strict requirements on the approval processes. The publishers that they approved must own the domain names, and the publishers must reside in Asian countries, mainly Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Australia, China or Japan. The entry requirement for a blog or Website is that it must generate at least 3,000 page views per month and Nufflets reserve a right to terminate a particular blog or Website when its page views is below 2,500.

I think they trying to compete with Google in this field when I saw they payout a check when publisher accumulated $50. This contrast to the minimum payout $100 by Google. Instead of fearing gorilla like Google, I think that they used Google as a motivator but their market is completely different.