The first beta version of website www.edata.sk which shows public procurement requests from Slovakia is online. Every day the robot checks Requests for proposal, Requests for quotation and Requests for tender and adds it to database so the visitors can find it and bid. New functions are coming soon including English version.
Chinese internet population is estimated to be 420 million. Compared with other countries it is much more controlled by the government and there is even Internet Police in China.
Only 1 of 10 people in China use Google. More than 80% of search is done by Baidu. Company which has more than 6 thousand employees was founded in 2000 by Robin Li, who is at the top of Chinese billionaires list.
Facebook is blocked by The Great Firewall of China so social network market is ruled by local companies. Renren which has 160 million users and Kaixin with 100 million users are both expected to do IPO in 2011. Despite being blocked in China Facebook gains more Chinese users mostly among 440 thousand Chinese students who study abroad, mostly in USA, UK and Australia.
Also YouTube is not popular among censors and is on the blacklist of Chinese firewall. Therefore space for local copies is widely open and the most popular are Youku (already listed at NYSE) and Tudou which is preparing for IPO in cooperation with Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank.
Microblogging is very popular among Chinese with more than 120 million users who use local services because Twitter is blocked in China. The most popular microblog is Sina Weibo, the 3rd largest internet company by capitalization Tencent also created its Tencent Weibo in 2010.
Chinese also love online shopping. The most popular retail website Taobao is owned by Alibaba group, founder of B2B website Alibaba.
Skype and MSN are used by some Chinese but instant messaging is also ruled by locals. QQ is operated by Chinese largest internet company Tencent. The number of simultaneous online QQ accounts exceeds 100 million and more than 640 million QQ accounts are active.
Groupon.cn started advertising campaign in China. It is not affiliated with Groupon which uses brand Gaopeng in China.
March is the month when Slovak citizens and most of the companies registered in Slovakia are obliged to report their taxes. Slovak tax office is famous for terrible web page reliability during this peak period. They are not able to scale the performance of their servers to provide services for citizens and web page is usually not available.
This year they decided to perform technical maintenance during the busiest period of the year when everybody needs to report taxes. So if you need any information from Tax office you will not find it online at www.drsr.sk.
Piao is chinese website for online ticket booking. You can book tickets for Chinese opera which is once in a lifetime experience (you see it once and that’s more than enough) but Piao also offers tickets for concerts and sport events.
Baidu is Chinese search engine active in China and Japan. Baidu’s price (NASDAQ:BIDU) has risen from 13 USD (January 2009) to 106 USD per share (January 2011).
There are new projects coming to conquer Slovak internet. DanovePriznanie.com will help you with tax declaration and it should start before the tax declaration deadline. SuperSef.sk and SuperSef.cz will provide services to professionals running their own business.