Google released Google Shopping Express service to rival Amazon Fresh Prime. This service covers with more than 20 states and regions in United States. Express operation manager, Brian Elliott, claimed Google will explore this service to the whole country by the end of this year.

To achieve this goal, Express operation department made a hard decision, that is, stopped selling fruits and vegetables in some grocery business for the
moment.

Shopping Express was released in 2013 to keep its search business. More and more people search water bottles and flat screen tvs on Amazon which threatens to Google’s advertising business. Google aims to use Express to help consumers to search what they need with ease.

Express encountered difficulties in past three years as well. Tom Fallows made job-hopping to Uber and Google appointed Brian Elliot as general manager of operation department. Now, Shopping Express found the suitable business mode for itself.

Express applied several delivery modes: same-day delivery, overnight delivery and two-day delivery. Consumers can also choose different payment modes, pay as per order at least $4.99 each, pay as subscription with $95 each year. They can also experience other payment mode with $10 monthly.

Express has signed with 50 cooperative merchants, including Target, Walgreens, Petsmart, REI,Wayfair and 99 Ranch Market.

Epxress also explores the national service for Whole Foods and Costco. Consumers can make shopping at Costco with a bit higher price even though they are not membership of Costco.

It indicated that Express will focus on the business of daily necessities. But consumers can still place orders for temperature-controlled goods, such as dairy products, eggs and ice creams.

The French Supervision Department keeps holding caution attitude to Airbnd. It will strengthen the supervision of Airbnb.

Recently, the Parliament in France is disussing act which the landlord qualifications is forced to cancel by rental platform. The landlords who breaks the law might face with huge fines or even imprison. In 2015, about 20 landlord qualifications were cancelled.

Paris city hall enacted a reporting system concerning the illegal homestay. It built a public data website named opendata.paris.fr. where it would post the landlord lists who obtained the certification of renting over 4 months. In the meantime, the government encourages the citizens to report those illegal homestays.

According to Paris rule, the govenment agrees anyone who rent the local house within four months. As is mentioned above, the website listed 125 landlords who are able to rent their house above four months. While the registered Airbnb landlords are over 41,000, among 16,900 of them are commercial, reports The Guardian.

It was reported that Airbnb broke the local act concerning renting the homestays. Some were rented without notifying the landlords and some were rented over four months. The government strengthens the management of Airbnb. Besides, it started collecting city tax from Airbnb in Paris and Chamonix. From August 1st, it will add more 18 cities to collect city tax, including Aix-en-Provence, Ajaccio, Annecy, Antibes, Avignon, Biarritz, Bordeaux, Cannes and Strasbourg.

The well development of Airbnb made threats to some luxury hotels. Hotel News Now reported that, in the first half of 2015, the occupancey rate of Le Bristol Paris declined to 61.2% from 69.2%. Four Seasons George V also encountered a 5% decline of occupancy rate.

Euro Cup 2016 is a good news to Airbnb instead of hotel owners. The statistics showed that about 250,000 travelers chose Airbnb service to watch Euro Cup, among 36% of those travelers even rent apartments to enjoy football matches.

South China Morning Post Publishers Limited announced early today South China Morning Post was free to access web edition and  mobile platform from 6 pm on April 5th, 2016.

This statement was made after 4 months since Alibaba acquired South China Morning Post. Alibaba announced last December that it made final agreement with South China Morning Post Group and acquired its South China Morning Post and other media assets, including South China Morning Post newspaper and its web edition, magazine and outdoor media business.

Besides the announcement of free access, South China Morning Post released new edition for mobile app. The new app adds many features, such as search, personalized settings, quicker loading rate, social networking links and more convenient navigation.

So far, its new app has been introduced to App Store, Goolge Play and Windows Mobile.

It is worth noting that only offers free access on South China Morning Post’s web edition and mobile edition. The newspaper of South China Morning Post and ePaper are still required to subscribe.

Alibaba executive vice president Mr Cai cliamed last December, the company would cancel the subscription mode for South China Morning Post so that more readers could access to more news and information online and mobile devices.

He added:”It is inconvenient for Pay Wall though people are willing to pay for the news. Why not offer chance for those who use mobile devices or cellphones to access the news.”

This post was established in 1903. It was initially called South Qing Morning Post and not changed until by 1913. It is the best selling English post in Hong Kong now.

Chief editor Sammy Tam said the cancellation of Pay Wall paves the way for South China Morning Post to obtain more readers.

It is reported that Apple obtained Taylor Swift’s exclusive copyright of 1989 vocal concert. The video will be displayed on December 20 on Apple Music.

It was Taylor Swift’s 26^th birthday when she posted this news on Twitter. She released the interesting sidelights of 1989 vocal concert as well. It was a big surprise to the fans.

About the concert video discussion, the Beats 1 radio will report the related news. But the officer from Apple firm doesn’t confirm yet.

The analyst from IDC suggested that the cooperation with Taylor Swift will be an important action to Apple. The competitions for music streaming services publishers are intense. Apple Music was released a bit late. It relies much on its subscribed content quality. Obtaining Swift’s exclusive copyright of 1989 vocal concert is extremely important for Apple’s success.

Apple Music was released this June. Tim Cook claimed in October it obtained 6.5 million subscribers, while there were other 8.5 million were on free trial.

Swift once criticized the three-month free trial without paying singers’ copyright on Apple Music. She suggested that she would not provide her hottest 1989 album there.

Apple modified this policy and paid the copyright fee to the singers.

Apple was reported to negotiate with some other music publishers to force Spotify canceled the free music service.

In November 2014, Swift recalled all her music from Spotify and denied to release her 1989 records on music streaming media as the service platform reported fewer sales records.

Adele has the similar attitude as Swift did. The copyright of her album 25 doesn’t authorize to any music streaming media yet.

IAMAI and IMRB International released a report concerned 2015 Indian Internet access. The report predicted that the amount of Indian Internet users will reach 402 million by this December. This figure increased by 49% and it will surpass the amount of American Internet users, ranking as top 2 in the world.

It took 10 years for India to popularize its Internet access from 10 million to 100 billion, three years to double its users from 100 million and one year to increase its users to 400 million from 300 million.

Internet becomes the mainstream in India. It is a good news for the digital industry in India.

The report suggested India will be ranked top 2 by December for the access of Internet users. China has over 600 million people accessed to Internet right now, ranking as top one in the world.

The report pointed that 71% of Indian Internet users are males. Its female users only account for 29%. The increase rate for male users is 50%, while the increase rate for females is 46%. Urban Internet users by male and female is 62% : 38%. The urban female users increase rate is 39%, while 28% goes to male users.

In rural area, 88% of Internet users are males. The female increase rate is 61% there, while 79% goes to males.

The reported addressed 32% of its Internet users are college students, and 26% of Internet users are young people.

It is worth noting that 69% of its Internet users access to Internet each day in October, increasing by 9% in comparison with the same period last year.

General speaking, only 37% of males access to Internet each day, while it only accounts for 23% for females. There are 75% of Internet users access to Internet at least one time each week.

In the urban areas, its mobile Internet users increase by 99% in comparison with the same period last year. The amount of Internet users reached 197 million people. And its Internet uses for rural areas is expected to be 87 million people.

The report suggested there will be more 11.4 million Indians access to Internet next year, two-thirds of them wish to surf the Internet with cell phones.

It was an important day for WordPress, the well-known Content Management Platform last Sunday. According to the statistics provided by W3Techs, there are 25% of the websites are built on the basis of WordPress Platform.

It was initially for bloggers, but WordPress has new function for enterprises as well.

W3Techs claimed: “ among the content management websites we have known, there are 58.7% of them are using WordPress. This figure accounts for 25% of all the websites in the world.” Even though there are changes of using WordPress each month , WordPress’s market share is overall in a steady-state growth.

” By the end of this year, we will glad to see our market share break through 25%. There are still more potential opportunities for us as about 57% of websites have not applied content management system yet. Therefore, I assume there is room to grow for using WordPress”, said Matt Mullenweg, WordPress’s developer and co-founder of Automattic.

In fact, the market share of WordPress did not make obviously growth in the past few years. Its share even dropped down in last year.

However, it is an outstanding achievement if WordPress obtains over half of the market share, and such leading position might possibly result in all kinds of attacks. In the product life cycle, WordPress also encountered a series of information security issues.

Google folds up its online shopping business GOSF in India. GOSF has been launching for three years. It enjoy great popularity as the cyber Monday, GOSF is the first Indian online shopping day that offers the most favarable discounts.

GOSF has similarity Flipkart’s, Amazon’s and Snapdeal’s shopping festivals. There are also intense competitions among those platforms.

Google feels that there are many successful e-commerce enterprises in India, and the users don’t have to wait for 12 months to shop on the best shopping day of the year. Its small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) don’t have to look for localized consumers online.

When GOSF was initial launched in India, Google estimated that only 8 million Indians shopped online among 130 million Internet users. The total online shopping revenue was about $2 billion. India has over 350 million Internet users in 2015. Its online shopping users will increased to 350 million in 2016, and the sales revenue will be over $10 billion.

“We launched GOSF in 2012 to encourage the Indians to shop online and we wanted to provide them the best deals. We aimed to attract all the leading e-commerce enterprises on this platform to develop online shopping,” said Bawankule, industry director of Indian office.

GOSF is known as a platform to help th large-scale e-commerce companies to make big deals and seek for more clients for hundreds of SMEs

According to the statistics, only 90 retails joined GOSF in 2012 and its retailed increased to 550 till December,2014.

Bawankule said the development and influence of e-commerce went well in India. GOSF motivated the Indians to shop in many aspects. Overall, it is time for us to say goodbye. He added Google will continue to invest projects to promote cooperations SMEs in the industry.

It is reported that Amazon worked on a short-lived test this fall, delivering parcels with Tribune Publishing’s newspaper trucks on the way.

You might be able to receive your Amazon parcels in the morning besides coffee, doughnut and newspaper in the future.

According to the confirmed resource, Amazon worked with Chicago’s Tribune Publishing to do this test. The test lasted for one to two weeks and Amazon used the newspaper trucks of Tribune Publishing to send its parcels on the way.

Tribune Publishing is the publisher of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. The taxation issues in related to newspaper deliverers stopped Tribune Publishing to go on delivering parcels for Amazon. In Chicago, the drivers of Tribune Publishing also deliver other publications besides the Chicago Tribune.

Amazon has plans to work with other publishers to test the similar business. Even though fewer people subscribe newspapers in the recent years, the newspaper delivery trucks drive across every corners in the city. It is convenient to deliver Amazon parcels for users.

In last year, Amazon was in attempt to send parcels with taxi and Uber taxi. Recently, it launched another delivery mean named Flex to deliver parcels by using the private cars of contract workers.

If those measures work, they will help Amazon to reduce the delivery expense. The freight of its first half year for Amazon is $4.6 billion, increasing by 28% compared with the same time in last year.

There are intense competitions between one-day delivery and one-hour delivery. For example, Uber and Deliv work with retailers to realize rush delivery.

It is unclear how Amazon operate such kind of delivery service, for instance, how the delivery men collect parcels.