Despite New Law, World Cup Betting Will be Big in Hong Kong
All eyes are in the Far East this week as South Korea and Japan prepare to co-host the World Cup 2002, and a recent study indicates a windfall on the horizon for online bookmakers despite recent legislation in Hong Kong criminalizing illegal forms of betting, including online betting.
According to the NFO WorldGroup, 57 percent of respondents in Hong Kong support legalized sports betting there and 70 percent of those indicating they would be placing bets on the upcoming games said they would likely use Internet bookmakers to facilitate their bets. Thirty-four percent of bettors said they would use underground syndicates locally to place bets and another 10 percent indicated they would utilize foreign bookmakers through alternate means (other than Internet).
Offshore bookmakers are predicting a healthy bounty from bets taken on the World Cup games, with some estimates reaching $97.4 billion--10 times that of the betting on the previous World Cup in 1998 in France.
Spaniards Play Online Games More Often Than Players of Any Other European Nationality
Spain may not have the lead in Internet penetration in European, but recent research by NetValue indicates Spaniards are leading online gamers.
Spain topped the list of countries with the highest percentage of users logging onto online games in Europe with a robust 25 percent of its online population partaking in the activity. Twenty-five percent translates to about 1.77 million Spanish Internet users.
Countries that trailed Spain in online games users were the United Kingdom, where users numbered 3.5 million (up over 1 million compared to the same time last year); France, with 2.5 million users visiting online games sites; and Denmark, with 1.96 million Web gamers.
Italians are apparently not as fond of online games, with a mere 10 percent, or 280,000 of the online population logging onto games sites in the month of March.
Non-English Internet Flourishes
New research from Global Reach shows the dominance of non-native English speaking people on the Internet.
The percentage of worldwide Internet users that are non-native English speakers is 59.8 percent, or 338.5 million users according to Global Reach's data European languages (excluding English) account for 33.9 percent of total world online population, while Asian-speaking users account for another 25.8 percent.
Spanish is the most widely-spoken European language, with 40.8 million users, followed by 38.6 million Germans and 20.2 million Italians. Chinese is the most widely-spoken Asian language with 55.5 million users, followed by 52.1 million Japanese speakers and 25.2 million Korean-speaking users.
Outside Cities, Australians Log More Internet Hours
Nielsen NetRatings has compiled data on first-quarter Internet usage in Australia and has found interesting geographic patterns.
According to the data, Internet users in rural or non-metropolitan areas of Australia access the Internet more frequently and spend more time online than their city-dwelling counterparts. The rural users averaged 55 Internet sessions and 29 hours and 5 minutes of online activity while the city slickers averaged 42 Internet sessions and 24 hours online over the first quarter of this year.
The study also noted findings that suggest the rural Internet users are more apt to participate in online banking, spending 55 minutes banking online and visiting the online bank 4.9 times during March, whereas the metropolitan users only spent 42 minutes and visited only 4.2 times per month.
E-mail Is Key to Slovakian Businesses
Reported by Europemedia, a new study by Taylor Nelson Sofres describes business communication habits of Slovakian companies.
Almost 90 percent of Slovakian companies responded that they use e-mail to contact customers, and the same percentage use e-mail to communicate with foreign companies. A healthy 79 percent of companies polled indicated they e-mailed with their suppliers frequently and 74 percent use e-mail for interoffice correspondence.
Most of the Slovakian companies polled also said they plan to use electronic signatures this year, and 22.4 percent of the respondents utilize online advertising.