That’s the stance of Boston Analytics, anyway, which analyzed the past, present, and future of mobile value added services in India.  And if anything, Boston Analytics may have taken a conservative approach – James Quintana Pearce believes it significantly underestimated the number of cell phone subscribers.

On to the data, then.  Boston Analytic’s graphs show India’s per capita GDP going up and mobile call tariffs going down.  Also, mobile revenues appear to be rising, even though the average revenue per user is dropping.  And these trends appear ready to continue for the foreseeable future.

So India’s shaping up to be an even more tempting spot for Google and Yahoo than it has been in the past.  Other American companies – including AOL? – could also try out their mobile products in this market.  (AOL has, by the way, given no indication that it would make such a move, but the company’s ongoing layoffs indicate that it needs to try something, and an expansion into the UK occurred just last month.)

We’ll see where this goes, but as with just about everything, don’t expect much to happen before the beginning of 2008.

These individuals have visited MySpaceMaster.net, CoolMySpaceComments.com, and FreeMySpaceBackgrounds.com (among as many as 110 other sites) in an effort to spruce up their profiles.  comScore’s stats put visits to this “Total Unduplicated MySpace Ecosystem” at 11,928 in September of 2007; in September of 2006, only 8,800 visits were made.

A similar rise occurred in the category of “Duplicated – 2 or More Sites”: the number increased from 3,460 to 5,008 in the span of a year.  These are increases of 36 and 45 percent, respectively; it hardly needs saying, but that’s fairly impressive.

It’s also part of a trend of improvements at MySpace.  In the past few days, we’ve seen the social network launch its first original series, announce a new gaming channel, and plan a huge expansion.  A broader pattern may go against this grain – Peter Kafka notes that “Rupert Murdoch seems to have reduced the web unit’s FY 08 revenue goals” and “[u]nique visitors at MySpace seem to finally have peaked this summer” – but MySpace’s most dedicated users seem unwilling to leave it just yet.

“We’ll run out of people in the U.S.,” DeWolfe told Bloomberg’s Gillian Wee.  “Our goal is to be No. 1 in every market and the biggest Web site in the world.”

Yes.  Well . . . good luck with that.  DeWolfe recently signed a new contract with News Corp., so perhaps he’s just sort of floating along on his new funds; the evidence certainly doesn’t suggest that MySpace is about to dominate the planet.

If nothing else, one has to consider the hype – I see dozens of stories a day revolving around Facebook.  Many of them are positive, and the few articles I come across concerning MySpace are usually less glowing.

Then there’s data from Hitwise indicating that MySpace has already lost its lead over Facebook in the U.K., and isn’t looking so healthy in Australia.  These major English-speaking markets could easily lead a trend; it might be stranger, in fact, if they didn’t act as leaders.

MySpace is far from dead – in many areas, it still has more users than Facebook, and the financial backing of News Corp. should never be underestimated.  Just the same, any sort of balance between existing in seven new countries and being the biggest website in the world, is, in the long term, probably going to lean towards the smaller side.

Hat tip to Jordan Golson.

Europe Braces For Google Buildup

Perhaps I’ve been thinking too much about Ken Burns’s “The War,” yet this news called up images of paratroopers and landing parties dressed in Google t-shirts.  And that’s just in my mind.  Europeans, who may or may not be thrilled with America at the moment, could be even more unnerved.

“We are not seen correctly in Europe,” admitted Nelson Mattos, Google’s European head of engineering in Europe, in an interview with Palmer.  “My impression is that Google is seen as a big US company that is here to make money.  There is a lack of understanding of how we work.  People don’t understand the business model, the new computing environment and the employees in shorts.”

The people who are hired by Google (engineers, by all accounts) will probably be able to get over those concerns, but, as you can tell from Mattos’s comments, the search giant would prefer to generate warm fuzzies.

Nielsen’s NPM panel, currently consists of about 12,000 U.S. households and 35,000 people, it will increase to 37,000 homes and 100,000 people as the company completes the introduction of Local People Meters (LPM) into 56 local U.S. markets.

The larger sample size will help Nielsen to accomplish its objectives of its Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement (A2/M2) initiative, which focuses on measuring online video and video on hand-held devices.

"This also has implications for Nielsen’s A2/M2 initiatives, all of which are built around the concept of ‘following the video,’ wherever it migrates," said Scott Springer, Product Leader of Audience Measurement for The Nielsen Company’s Media Segment.

"Our plans for out-of-home viewing, streaming video on the Internet, and ‘third screen’ devices such as cell phones and hand-held video players, are based on integrating these
measurements with traditional television measurement. This much larger national sample creates the necessary foundation for an integrated measurement approach."

During the week-long meeting ICANN will address issues like new generic top-level domains, international domain names and how the agency can become more transparent.

"If you are interested in the domain names that can be used on the Internet, if you want to make sure there are enough numbers to allow the Internet to expand, if you care about how the Internet evolves and want to have a say, ICANN meetings are the place for you," said Dr Paul Twomey, President and CEO of ICANN.

"The San Juan meeting gives us an opportunity to talk face to face within the global Internet community, listen to ideas and input, and make sure policies promote the Internet’s security and stability. Even if you can’t be here in person, you can be part of the meeting with our remote participation website, meeting blogs, and webcasts."

Other issues being discussed include:

Progress on a creating a policy to introduce new generic top-level domains (the part of web addresses after the dot — like .com or .info)

Update on the testing process of introducing Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) to the Internet.

A tutorial on IPv6 — a major expansion of the Internet Protocol address space so that the number unique addresses available globally is increased dramatically (from about 4.3 billion available with the current IPv4 to about 340 trillion trillion trillion).

Further discussions of ICANN’s Registrar Accreditation Agreements (RAA) and the Accreditation process, arising out of the RegisterFly collapse.

"ICANN’s task is unique and these meetings help us make sure we’re on the correct path and continue to move forward," Dr Twomey added.

The results are pretty surprising: for identical campaigns, with higher bids at Yahoo, Google still sent 30 times the traffic that Yahoo sent. The anecdote is most likely an anomaly. Other commenters on the thread note that they would expect to see Google sending 4-5 times the amount of traffic that Yahoo does.

paidContent is covering Google’s Press Day in Europe with YouTube Launching Nine Country Sites; UK, Brazil, Japan Included. The other six countries are France, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Poland and Holland.

paidContent described the country-specific pages as having unique content on them for now, but they later will evolve to include “narrowing ratings and comments, as well as the main video, channel, categories and community sections, down to a country-specific level.” Several of the countries, most notably France, have home-grown movie sites which may prove to be stiff competition for YouTube.

Interestingly, this comes exactly one week after Flickr announced its expansion into seven new languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, overlapping with YouTube’s expansion this week (Flickr is also rumored to launch a Japanese site soon). Picture vs. movies–who will win?

Finally, eMarketer reports on McAfee’s latest search engine report card: Search Engine Results Getting Safer. We’ve covered the same survey’s previous results in May 2006 and December 2006. The improvement has mainly been in the sponsored results, but paid listings are still 2.4 times more “dangerous” (likely to lead to adware, malware, viruses, etc.) than organic results. Four out of 100 search results link to dangerous sites.

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The initial word of Baidu’s growth was actually less rumor than report – two writers at the Telegraph stated, “Chief financial officer Shawn Wang is expected to outline the group’s expansion plans in London later this month, when the company attends its first Nasdaq investor day since listing on the exchange in 2005.”

But in the week or so following that article’s publication, a number of reasons have been brought up as to why Baidu might fail in Europe.  And aside from logical and factual issues, some onlookers bear the company a bit of a grudge – its censorship in China has arguably been more pervasive (and certainly longer-lasting) than that which has been employed by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

You have to wonder if all the naysaying changed Baidu’s mind, but the company’s not about to admit to such a thing.  Baidu issued a statement saying, “Recent rumors alleging that Baidu.com is expanding into Europe are groundless.”  Credit goes to Sumner Lemon of the IDG News Service for relaying that statement.

So it looks like the Chinese giant will stay within the Great Wall (and Japan’s borders) for the time being, and the imagined search engine free-for-all in Europe will not take place.  Oh, well.  Maybe some other time.

Participating user-partners will be treated as other content partners and will have the ability to control the monetization of the videos they create. Once they’ve selected a video to be monetized, we’ll place advertising adjacent to their content so participating user-partners can reap the rewards from their work.

Before you start fantasising about the hundreds of pennys you’ll surely make from that video fo Granny’s teeth falling out, you should know that the program is not open to all, just a select invited few.

Interestingly, YouTube’s decided not to open this up to every publisher and they’re also content not to use any kind of in-stream advertising options – instead relying on AdSense ads adjacent to the video.

TechCrunch is as perplexed about this move as I am, saying…

Why not roll out the option of in-video/ pre-roll advertising to all YouTube content creators? Whilst advertising may not be welcome by every one, Google knows the advertising market and it can credit much of its financial success to date to its inclusive embrace of content creators…

Still, if you know Google, you know they never simply roll a product out to everyone. First comes the pre-beta – with just a select few invited – then they allow those users to invite others, before a full roll-out and five more years in “beta”.

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