Business news for Mon, 17 Dec 2007 & with word online. 52 news.

NEW YORK - Match.com, an old standby of online dating, wants to make some new connections among the fast-growing number of Facebook users worldwide.

NEW YORK - Match.com, an old standby of online dating, wants to make some new connections among the fast-growing number of Facebook users worldwide.

The compensation deal with the European Union over closure of the US internet gambling market is unlikely to reduce pressure for the US to relax its online gaming laws

PETROCHINA Co, the nation's biggest oil company, will start expanding an ethylene plant in northeast China's Daqing at the end of this month to tap rising chemical demand. The annual capacity of the plant will be doubled to 1.2 million metric tons, the largest in the country, parent China National Petroleum Corp said in its online newsletter China Oil News yesterday. It didn't give an investment figure or the completion date for the project. China plans to more than triple the annual capacity of ethylene to 18.13 million tons by 2010, Bloomberg News reported. PetroChina will raise its ethylene capacity to seven million tons a year by 2010 from 2.63 million tons last year, Liu Jie, deputy chief economic adviser at the firm's chemicals and market unit, said on May 24.

BAIDU.COM has teamed up with Huawei Technologies and Intel to strengthen its servers and search technologies to expand its lead in the domestic market over rivals including Google, Nasdaq-listed Baidu said yesterday. Baidu announced it will build a joint lab with Huawei to explore "next-generation" online search and test 3G-related mobile phone services, just one month after Google launched mobile search services in China. "Baidu has to break the bottleneck of the server capacity as the demand for search surges in China," William Chang, Baidu's chief scientist, said. "Baidu has to triple its existing capacity to reach the global level of services." In the third quarter, China overtook the United States to become the world's largest search traffic, with 10 billion hits per month, Baidu said. Baidu has launched a series of new services, such as an Olympics channel, game channel, Baidu TV and online music streaming (partnered with Rock Music Group).

SHANGHAIMART and Dubai-based leading regional online marketplace Tejari announced yesterday they will launch a portal in February next year to facilitate trade between China and the Middle East. Tian Hao, general manager of ShanghaiMart exhibition center, expects the new platform would help its members easily find buyers in the Middle East. China has become a major exporter to Dubai, the gateway to the region, of products including textiles, furniture and toys. "The portfolio of ShanghaiMart matches pretty well with the import portfolio of the Mideast," said Omar Hijazi, Tejari's chief executive.

THE United States' refusal to comply with a World Trade Organization decision on online gambling is threatening to undermine the entire set of rules binding the international trade system. The WTO is to decide soon on a demand from the tropical nation of Antigua and Barbuda for US$3.4 billion in annual compensation from the US, whose law banning Americans from betting on Internet gaming sites was first ruled illegal by the WTO in 2004. The implications of the case go far beyond Antigua, a nation of 69,000. That's because, instead of rewriting its gambling laws, the US rewrote its trade rules to remove the issue from the WTO's jurisdiction. The prospect that other nations may take a similar tack if cases don't go their way has spooked the international trade community. "This is by far the most significant WTO case ever," says Naotaka Matsukata, a policy adviser in Washington with Alston + Bird LLP and a former US trade official. Meanwhile, Antigua, which has

With 2008 approaching and the WGA writers' strike continuing to weigh heavily on advertisers' minds, SpotXchange CEO Michael Shehan sat down with Denuo Group, Publicis' Senior Vice President Tim Hanlon to discuss the future of video -- on and offline.

One of the demands of striking TV writers is for compensation when their work appears online. Now, according to today's Los Angeles Times, some writers are taking matters into their own hands by pursuing deals to develop shows for the Web.

The issue of privacy has long been the online industry's proverbial "elephant in the room," the big looming animal that everybody knows is there but that no one is willing to acknowledge. There are several reasons why this is so: first, that users have, for the most part, been slow to appreciate how much we marketers are now able to know about them, plus the fact that the number of spectacular privacy breaches have fortunately been few. But there's a third reason that privacy isn't taken seriously in this industry: Nobody's figured out how to build a business around it. So here are a few suggestions for monetizable, privacy-enhancing Web-based services

GENEVA - The United States will provide the European Union with new trade concessions in mail services and warehousing as part of a compensation deal over Washington's refusal to lift restrictions on Internet gambling, the European Union said Monday.

Making online access easy use for blind and other disabled users is gaining attention because of class actions against companies like Target

With backing from high-profile investors, Loïc Le Meur is giving new meaning to the idea of "building a company online"

(Reuters) -- Orbitz Worldwide Inc. said it would eliminate the position of global chief marketing officer and would manage the company's marketing efforts on a regional basis going forward. The online travel site said in a government filing on Friday that Chief Marketing Officer Randy Wagner ...

Hundreds of such share certificates are currently on sale over the internet, including that of Imperial Bank of India, the oldest and largest commercial bank of the Indian subcontinent that later became the State Bank of India in 1955. Issued in 1953, the certificate for 10 shares of the Imperial Bank of India, is available for Rs 400 at eBay India, the local website of the world's largest online auction giant.

Facebook is suing a Canadian company that specialises in online pornography, alleging that it hacked into the social networking site’s computers to obtain the personal information of Facebook users.

US consumers, who flocked to malls at the start of the holiday shopping season, have since slowed, hit by the effects of Midwest storms and the growing popularity of online buying, data released yesterday showed. After a strong discount-driven...

"Nothing influences a person more than a recommendation from a trusted friend." Sound familiar? No, it's not from 1999's "Cluetrain Manifesto." It's one of many comments recently made by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg regarding the influential power of social connections online.

OTX (Online Testing eXchange) announced results from a survey among the TV viewers about the WGA (Writers Guild of America) strike, showing that while 51% of TV viewers are disappointed that some of their favorite shows will go or have gone into repeats, 44% say they will continue to watch their favorite shows even in repeats.

Portuguese company Microsoft Lda plans to put its brand name and business up for sale on online auction site eBay with a starting price of $1m, says its chief executive.