Today, Friday, Facebook's stock starts trading. Public demand is expected to explode and at its initial offering price of $38 a share, the social media giant is now worth more than established heavyweights Disney and Kraft, notes Business Insider . Analysts are still largely divided as to whether the just 8-year old company is a good investment. Cynics say that Facebook's current numbers aren't even close to matching the hype,

New tips from ISS London, as promised in my post yesterday: 1. Think global, act local Lisa Myers did a presentation on Google Places from a global perspective. Google Places now operates in over 100 countries and local results have started to dominate listings. With the proliferation of smartphones we'll only see local searches rising over the next couple of years.

This week's International Search Summit in London brought many interesting search and social media marketing topics to the table. Over the next couple of days key takeaways from the summit will be posted here on Multilingual Search, so stay tuned. Here are 5 tips to start off with )and sorry about the lack of spacing, unfortunately it's not working the way I'd like it to(: 1. Find Your Local Hairdresser So what has this got to do with international search and social?

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In an article published this week, Diane Mermigas stated that "Facebook's developing social search framework will be a catalyst for redefining and monetizing mobile, unleashing a torrent of new revenue and value that eventually will make its $100 billion IPO valuation look like child's play.

It's no secret that mobile internet usage and ad spend are rapidly gaining on PCs, nor is the fact that digital overall is eating into traditional media's share of the total ad market, with 2012 being the year where online ad spend in the U.S. is set to exceed that of print for the first time ever . Some recent U.S. mobile search spend figures were quite surprising, though - particularly the notion that tablets claimed two-thirds of the total U.S.

With more than 513 million internet users, according to the 29 th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China by the CNNIC , China is by far the world's largest online market. Although already being the undisputed global champion in terms of number of netizens, China's online population just keeps growing due to the country's massive scale. Concurrently, the technological infrastructure is improving at the same pace as the increase of its user base,

Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending the International Search Summit in Munich. One of the sessions was held by Managing Director of Yandex Europe, Bernard Lukey, who provided insights into the online Russian marketplace and, needless to say, Yandex. One slide after the other indicated that online has really started to pick up in the vast country. Although the "Runet", as Russians refer to their online market,

Social Media Examiner recently released its 4 th annual Social Media Marketing Report . The 42-page report sets out to uncover the "who, what, where, when and why" of social media marketing based on more than 3,800 responses from marketers across different markets )an overwhelming majority of respondents are based in the U.S., though(. Here are five key findings from the report: The top two benefits of social media marketing are increased exposure and increased traffic,

In my last post here on Multilingual Search I listed 10 brief takeaways from ISS Munich . At the summit, Senior Strategy Consultant at the GlobalWebIndex, Brett Petersen, presented some of the key findings from the company's sixth wave of research into the global consumer adoption of the internet across 27 key markets. Their findings are based on 122K survey responses, making it the world's most detailed on-going research project of its kind.

Last week's International Search Summit in Munich provided a wide range of in-depth quality sessions on international SEO, PPC and social media. Many of the recent developments and challenges that the international SEO community is currently facing were addressed at the summit - here are 10 key takeaways: 1. If you don't already have a business presence on Google+,

The survey on the international impact of Google Places can be filled out here . In February, Google sent out a list of 40 algorithm updates - a new record for the company's monthly series on search quality. While much immediate attention has been given to Panda 3.3 and link valuation in the SEO community, Google's announcement of its "Venice" update - impacting on local search - has so far gone relatively unnoticed.

In a press release earlier today, Yandex announced that it now offers search refiners, helping users to instantly find the results they are looking for as they type in a query. This is a response to unspecified queries, which currently represent about 20 percent of all searches on the Russian search engine, Yandex explains. The new functionality - best described as Yandex's equivalent to Google Suggest - is powered by the company's own proprietary technology, Spectrum,

Leading technology-focused research and consulting firm, Forrester, recently released a report on European e-commerce and its future impact across 17 major European markets. Overall, online European retail sales are forecast to grow 12.2 percent annually, reaching a total value of 230.4 billion U.S. dollars by 2016. While e-commerce is set to increase across all major European markets,

Spain remains the European country with the highest unemployment rate, currently standing at 22.9 percent. Often, marketing budgets stand first in line to get squeezed whenever companies are facing tough times, but despite deep economic crisis in Spain, online ad spending has grown significantly in the past two years and is expected to march on unimpeded in 2012, with a 15.3 percent increase, eMarketer predicts.

Tablets are rapidly gaining popularity around the globe, but does user behaviour differ significantly from that of PCs and smartphones? Last week, Russian search giant, Yandex , released a short report on the user patterns of Russian iPad users. Findings showed that the number of Russian iPad users has grown exponentially over the last year, with 1 million visits to Russian websites coming from iPads during the month of January 2012, as reported by Yandex.Metrica.

Yesterday, comScore released a report which includes statistics on online user engagement in key markets around the globe. Below are some notable takeaways: 45.3 : This is the number of hours the average Canadian spends online each month, placing the hockey-crazy nation as a superior #1 on the list, followed by the U.S and the U.K. with 38.6 and 35.4 hours online, respectively. For further comparison, Canada's monthly online time spend is almost double the global average.

While there is nothing ground-breaking about stating that social networking is a worldwide phenomenon, so far information on the global impact of social networking and how usage patterns vary according to countries and regions has been fairly limited. Yesterday, however, eMarketer released a report on this exact topic in which it is estimated that just over 1.2 billion people used social networking services during December 2011 - for comparison purposes, this equates to 54.

There is one word that comes to mind when evaluating Baidu's 2011 financial performance: gangbusters . Although Google CEO and co-founder, Larry Page, used that very same word to describe Google's Q3 2011 earnings , this seems very applicable to the Chinese search giant's outstanding performance in the year gone by. Baidu's release of its financial results last week revealed astonishing growth across the board, with total revenues and operating profit increasing by 83.

Facebook might be the world's biggest social network, rapidly on its way to reach the magical one billion user mark, but it is not the only one. Here are a few others that are highly competitive in their domestic markets: Vkontakte )In contact( : Russia's leading social network has more than 110 million registered users and 33 million daily unique visitors. According to comScore , the site had Europe's highest overall user engagement in December 2011,