Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
Thursday, May 13, 2004
Chinese cola brand headed to U.S. market
The Associated Press - SHANGHAI, China
China's homegrown cola brand is taking on Coca-Cola and Pepsi on their home turf, sending its first exports to the United States.
Wahaha, China's biggest beverage maker, says it sent its first shipment of 14,200 cases of "Future Cola" to New York and Los Angeles in late April.
Wahaha, whose name in Chinese is meant to mimic the sound of laughter, markets its cola as the "patriotic brand."
Future Cola will sell at the same price as Coke and Pepsi, Wahaha spokesman Shan Qining said Thursday. He would not give exact figures.
Wahaha began as a milk and popsicle factory run by a school but has grown into a state-controlled conglomerate with 10,000 employees and assets totaling $532 million.
French food maker Danone owns 30 percent of the company, based in the eastern city of Hangzhou.
Wahaha launched Future Cola in 2000 as a challenge to Coca-Cola's and Pepsi Co.'s hold over the local market. It is known in Chinese as "Feichang Kele," or "Extreme Cola." The company's Web site shows cans and plastic bottles with red labels and a logo in Chinese that appears similar to Atlanta-based Coca-Cola's.
"The high content of CO2 and the fine taste has won Chinese people's hearts," said Web site. "With its unique characteristics of nationality, it has become one of the symbols of Chinese national brand."
Wahaha also sells a caffeine-free cola "specially designed for children's physiology" and lemon, apple, orange and salt-flavored carbonated drinks that it says are good for health. Other products include sunflower seeds, health tonics, bottled water and tea and children's clothing.
Although the company is viewed inside China as a model of entrepreneurship due to its humble origins and the strong role played by its founder, Zong Qinghou, it is majority-owned by the government.
Danone has put at least $71.2 million into its five joint ventures with Wahaha, enabling the company to purchase modern production lines from overseas and vastly improving its competitiveness.
The French food and beverage giant claims Wahaha as one of its four biggest brands, along with Danone, Lu and Evian. Danone's tie-up with Wahaha has also helped make it one of China's biggest suppliers of yoghurt and other dairy products, which are marketed under Danone's brand name here.
"Wahaha is still a national brand," Shan said. "As a matter of fact, Danone needs to pay fees for using Wahaha Group brands."
While touting the special Chinese characteristics of Future Cola, Wahaha says the drink is comparable to competing brands.
In taste tests, consumers could not distinguish Future from the other brands, said Shan.
"Even the Pepsi people mistook ours as theirs," he added.
Shan said he was uncertain about future sales in the U.S. market. "It all depends on the reaction of American consumers," he said.
The Chinese carbonated soft drinks market is growing at an annual rate of about 10 percent, according to local reports, with total annual sales expected to reach 2.26 million tons by 2005.
In China, Wahaha has concentrated on expanding sales in the rural market and smaller cities. Future Cola and its other brands are absent from the shelves of top supermarkets in the big cities, where Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Japanese soft drink makers dominate the market.
Coca-Cola, known in Chinese as "Kekou Kele," or "tasty and fun," has poured more than $1 billion into China since 1979 and now holds the biggest share _ 35 percent _ of the carbonated soft drinks market.
___
On the Net:
HASH(0x286391c)
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The Associated Press - SHANGHAI, China
China's homegrown cola brand is taking on Coca-Cola and Pepsi on their home turf, sending its first exports to the United States.
Wahaha, China's biggest beverage maker, says it sent its first shipment of 14,200 cases of "Future Cola" to New York and Los Angeles in late April.
Wahaha, whose name in Chinese is meant to mimic the sound of laughter, markets its cola as the "patriotic brand."
Future Cola will sell at the same price as Coke and Pepsi, Wahaha spokesman Shan Qining said Thursday. He would not give exact figures.
Wahaha began as a milk and popsicle factory run by a school but has grown into a state-controlled conglomerate with 10,000 employees and assets totaling $532 million.
French food maker Danone owns 30 percent of the company, based in the eastern city of Hangzhou.
Wahaha launched Future Cola in 2000 as a challenge to Coca-Cola's and Pepsi Co.'s hold over the local market. It is known in Chinese as "Feichang Kele," or "Extreme Cola." The company's Web site shows cans and plastic bottles with red labels and a logo in Chinese that appears similar to Atlanta-based Coca-Cola's.
"The high content of CO2 and the fine taste has won Chinese people's hearts," said Web site. "With its unique characteristics of nationality, it has become one of the symbols of Chinese national brand."
Wahaha also sells a caffeine-free cola "specially designed for children's physiology" and lemon, apple, orange and salt-flavored carbonated drinks that it says are good for health. Other products include sunflower seeds, health tonics, bottled water and tea and children's clothing.
Although the company is viewed inside China as a model of entrepreneurship due to its humble origins and the strong role played by its founder, Zong Qinghou, it is majority-owned by the government.
Danone has put at least $71.2 million into its five joint ventures with Wahaha, enabling the company to purchase modern production lines from overseas and vastly improving its competitiveness.
The French food and beverage giant claims Wahaha as one of its four biggest brands, along with Danone, Lu and Evian. Danone's tie-up with Wahaha has also helped make it one of China's biggest suppliers of yoghurt and other dairy products, which are marketed under Danone's brand name here.
"Wahaha is still a national brand," Shan said. "As a matter of fact, Danone needs to pay fees for using Wahaha Group brands."
While touting the special Chinese characteristics of Future Cola, Wahaha says the drink is comparable to competing brands.
In taste tests, consumers could not distinguish Future from the other brands, said Shan.
"Even the Pepsi people mistook ours as theirs," he added.
Shan said he was uncertain about future sales in the U.S. market. "It all depends on the reaction of American consumers," he said.
The Chinese carbonated soft drinks market is growing at an annual rate of about 10 percent, according to local reports, with total annual sales expected to reach 2.26 million tons by 2005.
In China, Wahaha has concentrated on expanding sales in the rural market and smaller cities. Future Cola and its other brands are absent from the shelves of top supermarkets in the big cities, where Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Japanese soft drink makers dominate the market.
Coca-Cola, known in Chinese as "Kekou Kele," or "tasty and fun," has poured more than $1 billion into China since 1979 and now holds the biggest share _ 35 percent _ of the carbonated soft drinks market.
___
On the Net:
HASH(0x286391c)
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Thursday, September 06, 2001
A summary of XML technologies and theory. A good source to get a little more of the theory under your belt.
http://special.northernlight.com/xml/#intro
http://special.northernlight.com/xml/#intro
The Webmonkey.com Article: Search Engine Optimization
Before I landed my cushy job as a magazine editor, I spent three years under the hood at Hotbot as an engineer and manager. Between days reading our log files and nights shmoozing with other search engineers, I learned more than I'd ever wanted to know about where search traffic comes from, and where it goes to. I even wrote an article about it for Webmonkey.
Dozens of companies had pitched their optimization services to her, but Christina, a former MSN manager as smart about database schema as she is about business plans, balked. Why pay someone to set up bogus domains, build huge farms of gateway pages, and cram hundreds of keywords like "britney spears" into Artloop's HTML? The very idea ran contrary to the information architecture and site layout her staff had worked so hard to make as clean and clear as possible for their visitors. Moreover, as a Web user herself, she'd learned to recognize these traffic-grabbing methods and had become wary of sites using tricks to get her to click. Why should she assume her own customers would behave differently?
And she was right: Trying to fool search engine users with keywords and trick tags makes sense only if your goal is to flash a lot of ad banners, return traffic be damned. That used to be the business model for an entire industry. But most sites in business today hope to convert first-time visitors into loyal customers by building long-term relationships. Sure, searchers need to find your site, but the results on Hotbot's Top Ten lists show that the only results people stick with are the ones that don't try to scam them. Trap doors, redirects, keyword spam, and multiple domains that host the same pages are more likely to make people reach for the back button (a move the Direct Hit technology behind Top Ten results can detect), not their credit cards.
So, rather than waste money on consultants, Christina and I decided to create our own search optimization spec. Using data gleaned from representatives of leading search engines, insider data, and old-fashioned trial and error, we came up with our own strategy for getting traffic from search engines and portals without having to fake people out. In the process, we encountered so many dubious "experts" with something for sale that we decided to raise the bar on them and publish our notes for free.
Imagine our surprise when Google's engineers read this article (when it first published in early June, 2001) and invited us to visit their offices to dig even deeper into the workings of their gigapage Web index. Of course we took them up on the offer, and we've updated this article with our notes from those meetings. We've also included answers to the best questions from the hundreds of emails we've received over the past couple months.
But before you can benefit from the sweat off of our brows, you have to get your priorities straight.
To get the rest of this article, visit:
http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/01/23/index1a_page2.html
Before I landed my cushy job as a magazine editor, I spent three years under the hood at Hotbot as an engineer and manager. Between days reading our log files and nights shmoozing with other search engineers, I learned more than I'd ever wanted to know about where search traffic comes from, and where it goes to. I even wrote an article about it for Webmonkey.
Dozens of companies had pitched their optimization services to her, but Christina, a former MSN manager as smart about database schema as she is about business plans, balked. Why pay someone to set up bogus domains, build huge farms of gateway pages, and cram hundreds of keywords like "britney spears" into Artloop's HTML? The very idea ran contrary to the information architecture and site layout her staff had worked so hard to make as clean and clear as possible for their visitors. Moreover, as a Web user herself, she'd learned to recognize these traffic-grabbing methods and had become wary of sites using tricks to get her to click. Why should she assume her own customers would behave differently?
And she was right: Trying to fool search engine users with keywords and trick tags makes sense only if your goal is to flash a lot of ad banners, return traffic be damned. That used to be the business model for an entire industry. But most sites in business today hope to convert first-time visitors into loyal customers by building long-term relationships. Sure, searchers need to find your site, but the results on Hotbot's Top Ten lists show that the only results people stick with are the ones that don't try to scam them. Trap doors, redirects, keyword spam, and multiple domains that host the same pages are more likely to make people reach for the back button (a move the Direct Hit technology behind Top Ten results can detect), not their credit cards.
So, rather than waste money on consultants, Christina and I decided to create our own search optimization spec. Using data gleaned from representatives of leading search engines, insider data, and old-fashioned trial and error, we came up with our own strategy for getting traffic from search engines and portals without having to fake people out. In the process, we encountered so many dubious "experts" with something for sale that we decided to raise the bar on them and publish our notes for free.
Imagine our surprise when Google's engineers read this article (when it first published in early June, 2001) and invited us to visit their offices to dig even deeper into the workings of their gigapage Web index. Of course we took them up on the offer, and we've updated this article with our notes from those meetings. We've also included answers to the best questions from the hundreds of emails we've received over the past couple months.
But before you can benefit from the sweat off of our brows, you have to get your priorities straight.
To get the rest of this article, visit:
http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/01/23/index1a_page2.html
Gilligan's Island Theme song sung to Staiway to Heaven tune: You need audio on your computer to hear this one.
http://www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~pennywiz/Funhouse/gilliganE.html
http://www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~pennywiz/Funhouse/gilliganE.html
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