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.
 

Increasing demand from Asia and other emerging markets along with growth in the UK and Europe is broadening Dell’s sales beyond the U.S., the company said. An executive at the company said that international sales were growing much faster than its domestic market.

Steve Felice, president of Dell Asia-Pacific and Japan, said revenue from international regions surpassed U.S. revenue for the first time, with sales in Brazil, Russia, India and China creating 73 percent growth in the first quarter.

At the current pace, " two-thirds could come in five years," said Felice speaking about sales outside of the U.S. His remarks came after Dell had higher than expected quarterly profit, due to cost cuts and strong demand from consumers and foreign markets.

Dell said the solid quarter was evidence that a year-long turnaround led by founder Michael Dell, who returned as CEO in January 2007, was netting results. The company did say that U.S. corporate customers remained cautious about buying because of the uncertain economy.

Dell plans to slash 8,900 jobs to cut costs, but said Asia with faster sales growth and a big part of the company’s supply chain, would have more job growth. "You will continue to see continued head-count growth in Asia," Felice said.
 

 Asia Pacific Region Has Over 300 Million Internet Users

This is a 14 percent increase over a year ago and makes Asia Pacific the largest of the five worldwide regions. Latin America and Middle East-Africa also had above average growth during the past year, while North America and Europe have grown at more modest rates.

According to the comScore report the U.S. now accounts for 21 percent of Internet users globally. The growth in the number of Internet users in the U.S. has slowed, but several Asian and Eastern European countries continue to add news users at a high rate.

Google is the primary search brand in most countries, including Europe and Latin America. The exceptions are in countries where Chinese, Korean, and Russian languages dominate.

Chinese language search engine Baidu currently ranks # 3 in worldwide search market share, behind Google and Yahoo.

The number of global visitors to social networking sites has grown 34 percent in the past year to 530 million, representing about 2 out of every 3 Internet users. MySpace and Facebook are in tight competition for the worldwide leadership position, each pulling in more than 100 million visitors per month.

Online video has become the dominant online entertainment format, led by the global popularity of YouTube with more than 250 million visitors in January.
 

Sandra Hanchard included these items in a list of “fast moving search terms,” and they ranked seventh and thirteenth, respectively.  By way of response, I looked up the word “bizarro” in Wikipedia.

Superman (and Seinfeld) stuff is best saved for another day, though, as research on another term required my attention.  “lasoo,” “www.lasoo.com.au,” and a repeat of “lasoo” were listed in first through third place on Hanchard’s list.  Lasoo is apparently a new-ish shopping search engine that serves the Australian market.

“hampers” came in fourth, and Wikipedia again helped by letting me know that this term can be used to describe a food-carrying contraption.  The fifth term – “christmas lights” – was of course familiar, and so was “christmas presents,” which placed eighth.

Those are pretty much the highlights of Hanchard’s list.  But it looks like, regardless of location, one eBusiness is set to have a happy holiday – eBay ranked as the eleventh fast moving search term.

This seemingly special accomplishment isn’t too unusual; we’ve seen oneSearch expand by leaps and bounds before.  Still, the development took place in an area that greatly interests many American companies – the Asia Pacific region – and will bring Yahoo up to a noteworthy level of market penetration.

Marco Boerries, the company’s top mobile executive, put the figure at “roughly 40 percent coverage of all subscribers in those countries” in an interview with Eric Auchard.  (“Those countries” include India, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines.)  Boerries also indicated that Yahoo doesn’t plan to stop there, adding, “We have a clear goal to lead the market.  The goal is to exceed 50 percent.”

It’s hard to see why this wouldn’t be achievable, given the lack of competition from another giant like Google or Microsoft.  Yahoo will still have to challenge local services, of course, but its oneSearch monetization and revenue-sharing plans seem to have caught carriers’ eyes.

The average person in the Asia-Pacific region went online 13.8 days in the month and spent 20.2 hours viewing 2,171 pages. This is below the global average of 17.1 Internet usage days per month, 25.2 hours of viewing 2,519 pages per month.

South Korea had the greatest rate of Internet usage, with 65 percent of its population going Online in May, followed by Australia with 62 percent, New Zealand 60 percent and Hong Kong 59 percent. India has the lowest penetration at only 3 percent.

China has the largest online population with 91.5 million but a penetration of just 9 percent of the country’s population. Japan has 53.7 million users with 49 percent penetration and South Korea 26.3 million users and 65 percent penetration. The 3 countries combined account for 60 percent of the regions Internet population.

South Korea has the most active online population, who use the Internet an average of 17.4 days per person in May and spending 31.2 hours to view 4,546 pages during the month.

New Zealand has the smallest online population with 1,949 million people but they are online 16.4 days per month above the regional average of 13.8 days.

"We all know that the Asia-Pacific region is large and that Internet usage is growing rapidly. What is fascinating about this study is that it allows us to compare Internet usage across countries using a consistent measurement methodology and to then determine where PC-based Internet engagement is most developed.

"We are looking forward to providing additional insight into the online dynamics of this important region in the future," said Bob Ivins, executive vice president of comScore.