Friday, April 28, 2006 Fortune Mag. Analyzes US Spanish-Speaking Population Demographics NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - Flip on Univision or Telemundo on any given night, and in between the melodramatic telenovelas and campy talk shows, you'll see the biggest consumer brands in the world pitching their products in Spanish. It would seem every major company, from car makers to fast food franchises, is trying to reach the nation's fast-growing Hispanic population, now more than 40 million strong. But marketers looking to reach a lucrative swath of the U.S. Hispanic population may be speaking the wrong language. It turns out that much of the $4 billion spent annually on Hispanic advertising targets individuals born outside the United States, yet the majority of Hispanics in the United States - some 22.3 million - were born in the states. For the full article, see http://money.cnn.com/2006/04/27/news/companies/pluggedin_fortune/. 12:01:20 PM    comment [] New Arabic Language Search Engine Announced Arab News -- RIYADH, 28 April 2006 -- The first Arab-centric Internet search engine will be launched this year to meet the needs of the Internet users in their own language. "We will launch Sawafi (meaning sandstorm) this year," said Hermann Havermann, managing director of the new Seekport Internet Technologies Arabia. This joint venture, with the Saudi Arabian MITSCO Group, will be based in Dubai and will address in particular the challenges of the Arabic language and culture and will challenge Google, which provides an Arabic-language version of its popular search engine. The other partner is the German Internet search specialist Seekport Internet Technologies GmbH, based in Martinsried near Munich. Seekport is to provide the baseline technology, which will be expanded with the support of the local partners to meet the specific needs of the Arabic language. The search engine index will cover the full array of all Arabic-language websites, in conjunction with English- and French-language content from Arab countries. An important factor will be the adaptation of search to the specific needs of the Arabic user while addressing the numerous peculiarities and dialect variations of the Arabic language. The Arabic Internet search market is currently one of the most dynamic and least exploited worldwide, with an estimated 24 million users in 2005 -- and as many as 43 million users expected by 2008. Estimates put the total number of Arabic-language websites at around 100 million at present, doubling every year -- a very small proportion of the total worldwide Internet content of more than 12 billion sites. One of the reasons for this relatively smaller number of Arabic websites compared to those at the international level is the fact that the requirements of Internet search engines in terms of the Arabic language are very high. Current search algorithms in the usual Internet search engines are hardly capable of observing even the simplest morphological conditions required to process Arabic-language contents in a meaningful way for users. That is why search engines have so far been underutilized in Arabic, the spokesman said. 11:45:49 AM    comment [] © Copyright 2007 Global Translations.

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