Any eBay shareholders who were less than thrilled about eBay’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Gmarket last June may feel better after hearing about a new plan that involves the property.  eBay announced late yesterday that it intends to work with Gmarket’s founder to expand Gmarket’s presence in Japan and Singapore.

The number of people online globally is set to grow more than 45 percent to 2.2 billion users over the next five years, according to a new report from Forrester Research.

Asia will account for 43 percent of the world’s online population by 2013, with 17 percent residing in China.

Growth rates in the U.S., Western Europe, and nations in Asia Pacific such as Australia, Japan, and South Korea will slow to between 1 percent and 3 percent.

Google has acquired Korean "blog specialty" company TNC (Tatter and Company). Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

International business continues to look good for Google, as their search engine attracted the biggest chunk of search share in April.

Registration for .asia domains began at 8:00 this morning, along with a virtual gold rush of domain prospectors looking to connect with an area containing nearly 4 billion people.

Not quite that many in the Asia-Pacific region have internet connections yet, but think of the potential.  In Europe, there are 389 million people; in the US, just 300 million. When two-thirds of the world lives in a specific place with Internet growing at 240 percent of the past seven years, that’s cause for sufficient excitement amongst brands, startups, and entrepreneurs.

Google says it will be able to survive any global economic slow down because of its broad base of advertisers.

Broadband access in the Asia-Pacific region has seen significant growth in the past decade, as operators have upgraded their networks in preparation of future demand for high bandwidth services according to a new study from ABI Research.

It’s nearly Christmas, and that means it’s time for sales of boots and heavy hats to increase.  Unless, that is, you’re in the Asia Pacific, where new Hitwise data uncovered an interest in Crocs and Oakley sunglasses.

Have you noticed how whenever we discuss Friendster these days, we can’t help point out that most of its traffic comes from Asia?

Like Google and Yahoo before it, eBay is eyeing Asia and the best ways to succeed in that region.  And although eBay is focusing on a slightly different group of countries, it, like Google, intends to concentrate on the mobile market.

At this point, Mountain View, California more or less is Google.  Everyone knows Microsoft’s based in Redmond, and Yahoo’s associated with Sunnyvale.  Now, shaking things up, Wikimedia will move from St. Petersburg, Florida to San Francisco.

Bidding on .asia domains began in Hong Kong today, initially open to businesses with trademarks and government offices.

A trans-Pacific cable could be ready to launch in 2009, connecting Google to Asia and the Pacific while delivering a significant cost savings to the company.

Google’s homepage has stayed (pretty much) the same for a long time, and the smallest changes have generated scads of coverage.  Now, in some foreign markets, the search giant is testing major revisions.

The first line of a fresh Yahoo press release describes the corporation as “a leading global Internet company,” and I have to wonder: isn’t that pretty old news?  Yet, following a deal with six mobile operators throughout Asia, the phrase may bear repeating.

After months of rumors, Google has finally opened an office in Singapore.  The search engine giant is also reportedly in talks to open a research and development center on the island city-state – yes, let another round of rumors begin.

Social media and blogging is soaring with Asia a key growth market, according to research conducted by Universal McCann as reported by Brand Republic on May 11.

While I have some concerns about this story (see below), some of the reported stats are quite interesting:

Something new happened in mid-2006 – five out of the top ten websites listed by Alexa (based on traffic for the previous three months) were Asian. Four of those were Chinese.

The Recruit.net search engine can find jobs for coders in China, analysts in Australia, and system administrators in Singapore.

Asian developers are steadily adopting Java EE 5, according to the first volume of Evans Data Corp’s APAC Development Survey. .NET is also doing well in the Asian market, with a heavy majority of developers using it in addition other products.

A nonprofit organization trying to prevent the fragmentation of Linux is picking up its activities in Asia. The Free Standards Group (FSG) is standardizing the handling of Chinese characters, and working with the Chinese government to establish the Chinese Linux certification laboratory.

Bill Gates says that governments trying to censor information on the Internet are wasting their time.