Global Web

Unilever is using social-media activities to promote brands including Pond's, Lux and Comfort in Asia, AdAge.com reported.

The company will turn one experiment into a regional marketing strategy, according to AdAge.com: It used bloggers in a blind test of Pond's Age Miracle moisturizer, using sites such as Onlylady.com to seek volunteers to sample an unidentified anti-aging solution. Nine out of 10 were satisfied enough to continue endorsing the brand following the end of the trial.

Unilever vice president of marketing for home and personal-care brands Laercio Cardoso, who is based in Shanghai, told AdAge.com:

This is the first time used we've used social media in China. There is no doubt we will use it more to connect with consumers.

Unilever's global Pond's team in Singapore plans to create similar blind trials to market Pond's Age Miracle in Southeast Asian markets such as Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, according to AdAge.com.

The Asia-Pacific region is also the source of dozens of Facebook fan sites and communities dedicated to Pond's, with one in the Indonesian city of Bandung totaling close to 10,000 members, AdAge.com reported.

The company also invited beauty bloggers from countries including India, Malaysia and Indonesia to encourage followers to view the Lux spot featuring Bollywood star Priyanka and then create and upload their own "Behave Beautiful" clips to the Lux YouTube channel.

Global public-relations manager for the Lux global brand-development team in Singapore Tina Reejsinghani told AdAge.com:

It's a fun contest that invites women to be beautiful rather than be an object of beauty. You don't really see results right away…You have to let things play out…We don't have as much hold and control as we might like, but that's also the beauty of it.

With the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaching Nov. 9, BBC World News America published a special series of Web reports from digital reporter Franz Strasser.

Franz Strasser's Germany features the reporter, who was five years old when the Berlin Wall fell, exploring his native Germany and examining the changes the country has experienced in the past 20 years.

The network said:

The series will include interviews with Germans from all walks of life—from his family to famous public figures—as well as blogs and reports looking at the triumphs and traumas that ensued after reunification and how the country is marking this major event in its history.

MenuPages.com crossed the pond, launching sites for London and Paris, which join its eight markets in the United States: New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, south Florida and Washington, D.C.

The sites are designed for regular users of MenuPages.com domestic pages traveling abroad, and they will offer full listing information (address, phone number, type of cuisine) and menus for a curated selection of restaurants chosen by local MenuPages.com ambassadors in each city—20-year U.K. restaurant-industry veteran Jeevan Perinpanayagam in London and journalist and blogger Caroline Mignot in Paris—with an emphasis on neighborhoods popular with travelers.

The company's launch partners are Delta for London and OpenSkies for Paris.

ESPN originally launched ESPN.co.uk to market its network for the United Kingdom, but paidContent:UK reports that the sports network is in the process of transforming it to a sports portal for the United Kingdom, following its acquisition of English Premier League soccer TV rights.

paidContent:UK reported earlier this month that ESPN was hiring senior online editorial staff for its headquarters in London, and vice president of digital media for Europe, the Middle East and Africa Tom Gleeson told paidContent:UK existing sites Cricinfo and ESPNSoccernet will become part of its U.K. site.

Gleeson to paidContent:UK on site synergies:

It will be a sports site that's relevant to the market, supports and is supported by the TV channel and taps into the huge range and diversity of our sports verticals, whether that;s on (U.S.-facing) ESPN.com or from our sites in Argentina and Brazil.

Gleeson on the potential for video-on-demand:

In truth, I don't know. We will look to acquire rights when we can, when it makes commercial sense to do so.

Over at England's Telegraph web site, writer Matthew Moore lists 50 things the Internet either already has killed or is in the process of mercilessly snuffing out. Says Moore:

The internet is no respecter of reputations: innocent people have seen their lives ruined by viral clips distributed on the same World Wide Web used by activists to highlight injustices and bring down oppressive regimes.

Here are some of the Internet's victims as compiled (in no particular order) by Moore and his colleagues:

The art of polite disagreement The most raucous sections of the blogworld seem incapable of accepting sincerely held differences of opinion; all opponents must have "agendas".

Sure, but that's because they're all corrupt whores and effin' morons.

Adolescent nerves at first porn purchase The ubiquity of free, hard-core pornography on the web has put an end to one of the most dreaded rights rites of passage for teenage boys -- buying dirty magazines.

These kids today, they have it easy.

continued...

Whether you're a professional journalist researching a health topic or a reader seeking information about a specific medical condition, the Internet can be a vast and bewildering place.

Now a "content intelligence" software provider has launched a semantic-based search engine that aggregates medical content from millions of health sites.

NetBase Solutions says its healthBase search engine "automatically find treatments for any health condition or disease; pros and cons of any treatment, medication and food, and more. healthBase enables users to get summarized answers and insights automatically from millions of online sources."

The key, according to NetBase, is the search engine's ability to read sentences inside documents and to linguistically understand their meaning and context. healthBase searches and aggregates content from millions of medical sites, including WebMD, Health.com, Medical News Today, FamilyDoctor.org and yes, Wikipedia.

NetBase promises that each question submitted to healthBase "takes seconds to answer and is equivalent to someone manually reading thousands of documents." Think of the time that will save researchers, journalists and hypochondriacs.

You can try out healthBase yourself here and check out a demo video below.

(Related WebNewser content: Msnbc.com Offers Health Care 'Dose of Reality')

NBC Universal is running closed trials of cricket streaming in India with an eye toward launching a sports-video site modeled after Hulu in that country, according to paidContent.

Vice president of digital-product strategy and development Sab Kanaujia, who was involved in the early stages of Hulu, confirmed the cricket-streaming trials in a tweet.

paidContent said it was unclear if the new site would be associated with Indian TV conglomerate NDTV Networks, as NBCU owns a 26% stake in that company.

Mexico's come-from-behind victory over the United States in the World Cup qualifier match Aug. 12 saw Futbol Estelar serve up more than 360,000 streams, 205,000 of which were live. Based on that success, Futbol Estelar will also stream World Cup qualifiers between Costa Rica and Mexico Sept. 5 and Mexico and Honduras Sept. 9.

The site said more than 2,500 users connected in over 60 chat rooms during the match. Futbol Estelar also provided news, interviews, videos, photos, contests and player statistics.

Futbol Estelar is a co-branded Website from Spanish-language television network Telemundo and Terra.com.

Telemundo executive vice president of digital media and emerging businesses Peter Blacker said:

In partnership with FutbolEstelar.tv, Telemundo was able to live-stream a soccer match for the first time in network history. This was the most comprehensive "360" event we have brought to Telemundo audiences, and the tremendous success of the live-stream demonstrates our ability to reach loyal viewers across all platforms.

Chinese business-to-business electronic-commerce company Alibaba will target small-business owners in the United States with a $30 million global ad campaign launching this week, AdAge.com reported.

The campaign—with the tag line, "Alibaba.com. Find it. Make it. Sell it"—features fictional characters representing people already using Alibaba to handle sales of pieces and parts, full-scale production or purchases from manufacturers for resale, according to AdAge.com, and the company set up a U.S.-targeted microsite where these stories are housed.

AdAge.com reports that Alibaba's campaign will run online through display and search ads on sites such as InternetRetailer.com, SBTV.com, Entrepreneur.com, Purchasing.com, PriceGrabber.com and Buy.com, as well as on Websites such as CNN Money, Forbes and Women's Wear Daily. Alibaba will also run print ads in Inc. and Fast Company magazines and air a 30-second TV spot on TV-broadcast outlets including ABC's Shark Tank and CNBC.

Alibaba tallies some 32 million registered users in China, including more than 400,000 domestic suppliers, and the site has another 8.6 million international users from more than 240 countries, including 1.4 million in the United States, according to AdAge.com.

The company also owns China's largest online retail site, Taobao.com, and its Alipay online-payment system.

Soccer fans stuck in the office or lacking access to Spanish-language network Telemundo or its English-language sister channel, mun2, can watch the United States travel to Mexico for a World Cup qualifier match on Futbol Estelar, a co-branded Website from Telemundo and Terra.com, Wednesday at 4 p.m. ET.

Futbol Estelar will also feature exclusive interviews, videos, photos, sweepstakes and athlete statistics.

The United States national team has never won at Estadio Azteca, posting an all-time record of 0-22-1.