Expedia is the No. 1 travel website in the world based on searches per month and received the 2006 Webby Award for "Best In Travel Websites." The Internet-based travel agency books airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rentals, cruises, vacation packages, various attractions and services.
Expanding globally with 15 localized websites, Expedia hired btrax to create original UI designs, icons and text content. Our branding team provided key consultation for their first foray into the Japanese market. "Japan represents the second largest travel market in the world, and is an extremely important part of Expedia's long-term growth strategy," said Tim Besse, Director of Online Marketing, Expedia Asia Pacific.
In 2008, Expedia reaffirmed its confidence in btrax's quality work with a second contract to further develop Expedia.co.jp and their robust global branding. Expedia's new strategy commits the industry's flagship portal to making the long term investments required for success in the Asian market through btrax's expertise.
Although many savvy business people know that China's 1 billion plus population - the world's largest - are not all potential customers for their products and services, few know the explosive rate at which Internet usage and shopping is growing in the Asian country.
With Internet penetration rate now surpassing 10% of the Chinese population, the pace of growth is likely to accelerate based on Internet adoption rates in other countries. After passing the 10% mark, "traffic growth tends to be exponential rather than linear," says Richard Ji, a Morgan Stanley analyst in Hong Kong. "It's leap and jump."
According to Shanghai's China Market Research Group, some 176 million Chinese use the Internet. The majority of this group are males between 18 to 28 years old. Known as China's "little emperors" - they present the most lucrative target for advertisers.
This burgeoning online audience can translate into rapid growth for both fresh startups and mature businesses - if they put the necessary resources into localization. Often times this upfront localization cost is a fraction of what people imagine, particularly if they focus on intelligent marketing to online consumers rather than physical stores or offices.
While larger firms have launched a wave of multimedia ad campaigns to reach the estimated 250 million consumers in China's emerging middle class, smaller firms can still compete at the moment due to the lower entry costs and the fewer number of competitors.
Advertisers at previous Olympics relied mostly on TV commercials to reach audiences in host nations. For the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, however, companies are unveiling marketing across a wide spectrum of media - from mobile devices and Internet portals to subway posters and giveaways. "The new trends have drastically shaken up marketing for the Olympics," says Gilbert Van Kerckhove, founder of Beijing Global Strategy Consulting and a senior consultant for the Beijing government
Despite launching halfway through the fiscal year with limited coverage, the iPhone quickly became the second best selling smart phone of 2007. Since then, the silvery device has triggered revolutions in the mobile carrier, hardware and other industries beyond the scale of its sales success.
For users and content producers alike, the iPhone's killer app has been the full-featured version of Apple's Safari browser. In the past, surfing with a mobile device was often cumbersome as few could afford sites supporting multiple competing page display languages and widely varying screen dimensions.
Websites currently coded in standard HTML can now be faithfully displayed using the iPhone with minimal changes. And the revolution isn't limited to Apple's products. The iPhone's success sets a high benchmark that pushes device manufacturers to rapidly adopt full-browser support.
As users quickly develop new habits of mobile browsing, forward thinking organizations will need to invest smartly to ensure they keep ahead of the palmtop paradigm shift and head off any mobile savvy competitors from eroding their desktop web success.
On top of all of this, Apple has recently opened up its platform to outside developers through a Software Developer Kit (SDK). This allows developers to create custom applications riding the border between web application and device software, giving businesses multi-pronged tools to reach new niche audiences.
So are you ready for the iPhone revolution? btrax can help you tap emerging mobile audiences through branded graphics optimized for smaller full-screen display and multi-touch screens.
