The wireless carrier’s new Travel Minutes packages will provide customers with a block of voice minutes in three different regions: Canada and Mexico, Europe, and the “rest of the world.” Three different tiers priced at $30, $60, and $120 are available for each of these regions, though the amount of minutes granted in each is different. For Canada and Mexico, the tiers are 80, 200, and 500 minutes. For Europe and the rest of the world, they are 30, 80, and 200 minutes. Overage fees for Canada and Mecico are $.50 per minute, for Europe $1 per minute, and for the rest of the world $2 per minute.

The new messaging package AT&T will offer replaces the current 500-message package with a 600-message package for $60 per month (that’s 10 cents per message). The messages can be either text, images, or video.

The global data packages for AT&T haven’t changed, and are $30 per month for 120MB, $60 per month for 300MB, and $120 per month for 800MB. However, customers on the two more expensive plans will now have access to 1GB of Wi-Fi data through AT&T’s international Wi-Fi hotspots.

As the prices listed above suggest, keeping connected while traveling abroad is still expensive, especially for longer trips. A full order of voice, text, and data for a month-long European vacation would cost $300 for only 200 minutes, 600 messages, and 800MB.

The company has been testing the feature for months, but is now making it available to all brands “working with Facebook”.

Global Pages allows users to be directed to the best version of a Facebook Page based on the country they’re in. They can see localized cover photos, profile photos, Page apps, news feed stories, etc., while remaining part of the global brand community.

A brand’s Global Pages structure includes local pages for specific markets (which can include single or multi-country regions) and a default page for the rest of the markets. Users from different countries see the same Page name translated into their local language. They also see the same fan count and “People Talking About This”. Brands can still promote a single URL in off-Facebook campaigns. Users will automatically be redirected to their local version. All global user Insights data will be available from one dashboard.

“This structure works for brands that historically have managed one single Page with geo-targeted page posts, as well as for brands that have managed multiple, country-specific Pages,” explains Facebook product marketing manager Kelly Winters. “For example, the Dove team from Unilever transitioned from operating one single Page using the geo-targeting feature to creating new, localized Pages that maximize their global scale while still providing local relevance.”

“At the same time, clients using a multi-page strategy have been able to easily transition their existing Pages to the new Global Pages framework,” she adds. “The global Walt Disney Studios team working on Frankenweenie easily associated their country-specific Pages for France, Ireland, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States into the Global Pages framework. The Holiday Inn team and the Kit Kat team from Nestle had equal success migrating their localized Pages from regions all over the world to the new model.”

Facebook plans on including country-level fan counts for all Pages later this year (even for pages who aren’t using the new framework) in its API.

To use the new Global Pages, you’ll need to get in touch with the Facebook sales department.

Some of this footage you will recognize from the earlier trailers released in February, but each one has some additional scene, making these new trailers worth the watch.

Along with the new trailers, some new posters have hit theaters as well. The graphics keep in line with the overall darker and grittier rendition this film is expected to deliver. Spider-Man is joining the Batman series in those terms, producers electing to take the stories more seriously.

More and more publicity is expected to be released until the film opens in July, so stay tunes for more posters, trailers, and other promotional material in the coming months.

As an interesting side note, Mary-Jane Watson does not appear in any of these trailers and will not appear in the film, rather Emma Stone is the lead as Gwen Stacy, the producers electing to use Peter Parker’s original girlfriend. I wonder if she will make her way into the story in the sequels.

Most thoughts about super hero movies this summer are about The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises, but I think The Amazing Spider-man is going to surprise a lot of people in the box office. The Spiderman films tend to do a lot better with women than other super hero movies. That added element will bring in a lot more money, as many turn it into a date movie.

The Amazing Spiderman is set to premiere July 3rd, 2012.

What do you think? Will this movie bring a new twist on the spiderman franchise, or is this just a cash grab?

Today, Apple’s “best iPhone yet” hits the shelves in the following countries:

Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

In countries on the Euro, the 16GB iPhones 4S is going to run customers around €600. For instance, in Luxembourg, the base price is €616. In The Netherlands, its €599. In Spain, €600. That’s around 850 U.S. dollars.

It’s important to remember that these are prices for the unlocked iPhone 4S. Wired’s Charlie Sorrel in Spain points out how this pricing points to the future U.S. pricing scheme of unlocked phones:

€600 is $850, and that’s for the 16GB model. It goes up in €100 step to top out at €800, or $1,133 for the 64GB model. For comparison, those are the exact same prices as the 3G iPad lineup, which will give you a rough guide to what the U.S prices will be when the unlocked phone goes on sale there, probably some time in November. Up in Canada, the unlocked prices run at $650/$50/$850 (thanks, Jon!), which should also let you see where things are headed.

The iPhone 4S has sold well in The U.S., but that doesn’t mean that it is without detractors. Some customers have reported that they are disappointed with the lack of change from the iPhone 4, especially when it comes to the physical design.

But the phone still broke records when it went on sale.

The top three draws of the new iPhone 4S are Siri, the personal voice assistant, the incredibly impressive 8 megapixel camera, and its quicker processing.

iPhone 4 is currently available in France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US for a suggested retail price of $199 (US) for the 16GB model and $299 (US) for the 32GB model. See more HERE

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A glance at the world map of social networks 2010 you see above shows a clear picture of the colonization (for want of a better word) of Europe, for instance, where Facebook has displaced its competitors in France (Skyrock used to be #1) and Germany (StudiVZ, although they might argue the rank).

Map author Vincenzo Cosenza provides an additional view, showing the top three social networking sites (SNS) in nine countries:

An interesting aspect is how Twitter appears in this list: in second place in Australia, Canada and the UK and third place in France, Spain and the US. I’ve always seen Twitter as a social network as opposed to simply a micro-blogging tool; it looks like many others do as well.

Still, in global domination of online social networks, it looks very clear that Facebook reigns supreme.

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He highlights what Yahoo and Google (respectively) search engineers Priyank Garg and Greg Grothaus had to say about the matter:

Priyank, when asked about best practices for "localizing" English language content across domains, noted that Yahoo! does not filter duplicate content out of their results when the works are found on multiple ccTLD domains. Greg confirmed that this is also how Google’s engine behaves and, with the exception of potentially spammy or manipulative sites, reproducing the same content on, for example, yoursite.com, yoursite.co.uk and yoursite.com.au was perfectly acceptable and shouldn’t trigger removal for duplicate content (assuming those sites are properly targeting their individual geographic regions).

Fishkin also notes that for usability and conversion reasons, it’s best to localize languages anyway, just to create a better user experience. Vanessa Fox (formerly of Google) has a very in-depth article on "Making Geotargeted Content Findable For the Right Searchers," which also discusses the issue. She recommends the following:

- Putting content for each country on a subdomain or subfolder. (Either is fine; but  if you’re starting from scratch and have a choice, I’d generally suggest going with a subdomain.)

- Including location-specific terms in internal anchor text. For instance, you might want to create an HTML site map that links to each country’s “home page” on the domain.

Fox’s article contains a ton of additional useful information on international SEO, an important topic for any business looking to expand their customer-base around the globe.

Country-specific TLDs can contribute to relevancy factors that potentially make your site rank higher according to Fox. While there are exceptions, the subject is something definitely worth giving some thought to.

For one, they have released Cross-Language Enterprise Search on Google Enterprise Labs. It instantly translates your Google Search Appliance query from one language to one or more others using Google’s translation engine.

"Wondering if your Paris office has some documents in French that might be relevant to your search?  Frustrated that your first language isn’t English, yet 90% of your corporate documents are in English?  Now users can search in their native language, but find every document within the enterprise on the topic," explains Cyrus Mistry, Google Enterprise Product Manager. "In addition, you can choose to have the results come back in any language and you can even translate the search result snippets (or documents themselves) into any language!" More details here.

Another release from Google is the Google Blog Gadget version 2.0. They released the original version of this gadget back in September. It is basically just a way to keep up with new posts on all of Google’s corporate blogs. This is a useful gadget to a guy like me, who tries to stay current on all things Google. One problem I had with this gadget was that a good percentage of the posts coming through were in other languages that I couldn’t read.

They have corrected this problem and made the new version translatable into a number of different langauges. Those supported include: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.

Now you can just chose the category of blogs you want to read and click "translate." By default, they translate into whatever language your browser is set at. Of course, the usual translation issues are likely to still come into play.

"So, what do we in this global village have in common?" asks Google VP Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer. "Mainly a strong interest in socializing and politics. Social networks comprised four out of the top 10 global fastest-rising queries, while the U.S. election held everyone’s interest around the globe. Republican VP candidate, Sarah Palin, may have lost in the election, but she was the #1 fastest-rising query on our global list (Obama was #6)."

Let’s look at that global list:

   1. sarah palin
   2. beijing 2008
   3. facebook login
   4. tuenti
   5. heath ledger
   6. obama
   7. nasza klasa
   8. wer kennt wen
   9. euro 2008
  10. jonas brothers

As far as the U.S. is concerned, Google provided the following information:

I would have expected the Jonas Brothers to make a top ten list here in the U.S where they are myesteriously absent., but I’m a little surprised to see them make it on a global scale. I apparently have a lot to learn about the Jonas Bros.