PayPal To Add 1,000 New Jobs In Asia Pacific Region
March 17, 2010
Ebay's online payment service PayPal said today it would double the number of employees in Asia Pacific from 1,000 currently to more than 2,000 by the end of the year.
PayPal said it plans to add more than 100 new jobs at its international headquarters in Singapore. New jobs will be located at all seven offices including Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan. For its Singapore business headquarters, PayPal will be seeking Singapore-based people with background in technology, product development, infrastructure design, risk and engineering.
"While PayPal's growth in Asia Pacific to date has largely been driven by our cross border business, we fully expect the domestic business in many of our Asian markets to explode in the coming years," said Farhad Irani, vice president of PayPal Asia Pacific.
"Our success in the region will continue to rely on partnering with merchants, financial services companies and local governments to deliver the right services for our customers."
PayPal says it processed more than $6 billion of total payment volume in Asia Pacific in 2009, an increase of 38 percent from 2008.
As part of its plans to grow across Asia Pacific, the company also announced the PayPal mobile payment software development kit (SDK) will be available to developers in the region.
Google Again Linked To Australian Data Center Plans
February 16, 2010
The rumor that Google might build a data center in Australia has been circulating for some time; our first report on the subject was written in October of 2008. Now, although construction crews haven't exactly been mobilized, there's at least been a sign that Google hasn't given up on the idea.
Deepak Ramanathan, the head of Google's enterprise marketing arm in the Asia-Pacific region, recently spoke at an event in Sydney. Renai LeMay reported that people representing several Australian corporations expressed an interest in Google Apps while there.
Then here's the more interesting part: according to LeMay, Ramanathan responded by saying that "the search giant was not ruling out an Australian datacentre for services like Gmail, and that discussions were ongoing."
The last time we talked about Google building a data center in Australia (April of last year), the main stumbling block seemed to be the economy. Obviously, it's gotten better (Google's stock, for example, is up about 45 percent since then).
So as more and more Australian organizations go to Google for different services, we may finally reach the tipping point at which the company will see fit to build a data center in that country.
Nearly 20% Of Marketing Emails Fail To Arrive
February 5, 2010
Nearly twenty percent (19.9%) of commercial, permissioned emails never reached consumers inboxes in the United States and Canada in the second half of 2009, according to a new report from Return Path.
Permissioned email reached only 80.1 percent of consumer inboxes in the United States and Canada during the second half of 2009, a .8 percent increase from the 79.3 percent inbox place in the first half of 2009. In the United States and Canada, 3.5 percent of those emails ended up in a junk or bulk emails folder and 16.3 percent were missing with no notification of non-delivery.
In Europe, 85.5 percent of emails reached consumers inboxes, 3.6 percent of emails were delivered to a junk or bulk folder, and 11 percent were missing. In the Asia Pacific region, inbox placement of emails was higher in the second half of 2009 with an 86.9 percent success rate.
"We spent a lot of time in 2009 discussing how inbox placement rates affect ROI, and we're going to continue talking about this issue in 2010. Many senders believe that their email campaigns are achieving a 95% to 98% delivery rate. However, as our latest Email Deliverability Benchmark Report clearly illustrates, senders still do not have the correct data to accurately determine true ROI," said George Bilbrey, President and Co-founder, Return Path.
"If senders and ESPs count only their hard bounces as emails that failed to reach consumers, they're not getting an accurate metric as to how many emails actually made it into subscriber inboxes. Ultimately, only emails that reach a subscriber's inbox can be opened, clicked and converted into a loyal and active customer. Remember, sent minus bounce does not equal delivered."
The top five ISPs for senders to reach consumer inboxes in the United States ranked in order of difficulty were BellSouth, Gmail, MSN, Hotmail, and Yahoo!.
The top five ISPs for senders to reach consumer inboxes in Canada were Primus.ca, Shaw, SaskTel, MTS, and Bell. Primus.ca which uses Postini as part of its email filtering system, failed to deliver 55% of emails that marketers sent to Primus.ca users which represents a 2% increase from the first half of 2009.
The top five ISPs for senders to reach consumer inboxes in the United Kingdom ranked in order of difficulty are Demon, BT Internet, AOL, Orange, and Yahoo!.
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Spam is Getting More Malicious
November 11, 2009
Symantec has released two new reports for the month of November - the State of Spam, and the State of Phishing (both PDFs). The reports highlight a dramatic increase in spam that contains malware. On top of that, junk and malicious email now accounts for close to 9 out of 10 email messages.
The security firm says that a new generation of "Spam Princes" are rising, and that the Asia Pacific region, Japan, and South America have surpassed North America, with regards to where spam is originating from.
"Rising spam levels originating from South America, Asia Pacific and Japan are not altogether surprising when you consider the massive growth of internet connections in these regions," says Amanda Grady, Principal Analyst, Symantec. "Meanwhile, the increased threats to social networking websites is interesting because it shows spammers are hiding behind the reputation and brand trust built by legitimate companies. Social networking sites that have a large user base will continue to be targets of malicious and phishing emails."
Symantec shares the following findings:
- In October, an average of 1.9% of all spam messages contained malware. This equates to a 0.6% increase from September, when the number of messages containing malware hit a maximum of 4.5% of all spam
- Symantec observed a 17% increase from the previous month in all phishing attacks
- 30% of phishing URLs were generated using phishing toolkits; an increase of 24% from the previous month
- Symantec observed a 45% increase from September in non-English phishing sites
- More than 97 Web hosting services were used, which accounted for 8% of all phishing attacks; a decrease of 19% in total Web host URLs when compared to the previous month
Symantec's report of an increase of malware-infected spam is made even more unsettling as news reports surface of computer viruses infecting unknowing victims' machines with child porn.
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> Stealth Phishing Attack Looks Like Internal Email
> Symantec Urges Windows Users to Patch Systems
