"@" Name - Chinese couple applied for her baby.

A Chinese couple tried to name their baby "@", claiming the character used in e-mail addresses echoed their love for the child, an official trying to whip the national language into line said on Thursday.

The unusual name stands out especially in Chinese, which has no alphabet and instead uses tens of thousands of multi-stroke characters to represent words.

"The whole world uses it to write e-mail, and translated into Chinese it means 'love him'," the father explained, according to the deputy chief of the State Language Commission Li Yuming.
While the "@" simple is familiar to Chinese e-mail users, they often use the English word "at" to sound it out -- which with a drawn out "T" sounds something like "ai ta", or "love him", to Mandarin speakers.

Li told a news conference on the state of the language that the name was an extreme example of people's increasingly adventurous approach to Chinese, as commercialisation and the Internet break down conventions.

Another couple tried to give their child a name that rendered into English sounds like "King Osrina."

Li did not say if officials accepted the "@" name. But earlier this year the government announced a ban on names using Arabic numerals, foreign languages and symbols that do not belong to Chinese minority languages.

Sixty million Chinese faced the problem that their names use ancient characters so obscure that computers cannot recognise them and even fluent speakers were left scratching their heads, said Li, according to a transcript of the briefing on the government Web site One of them was the former Premier Zhu Rongji, whose name had a rare "rong" character that gave newspaper editors headaches.

Amazing Ratings Reviews and Study Facts

80% of online shopping time is spent researching products rather than buying them. (TechCrunch)

71% of online shoppers read reviews, making it the most widely read consumer-generated content. (Forrester)

Marketing Experiments tested product conversion with and without product ratings by customers. Conversion nearly doubled, going from .44% to 1.04% after the same product displayed its five-star rating. (Marketing Experiments Journal®)

63 percent of all word of mouth is positive. Across all of Bazaarvoice clients, 80 percent of product ratings are 4 or 5 stars out of 5. As a third confirmation, JupiterResearch’s study concludes that 60 percent of online shoppers provide feedback about a shopping experience, and are more likely to give feedback about a positive experience than a negative one. (Keller Fay)

Positive bias: Average ratings across all Bazaarvoice clients = 4.3. 80% of all reviews are 4 stars or higher. (This is what's known as "The J-Curve"). (Bazaarvoice)

Ratings and Reviews is the second most important site feature behind search and online buyers who site ratings and reviews most useful site feature has more than doubled from ’05 to ’06. The report, entitled Retail Marketing: Driving Sales Through Consumer-Created Content, cites user-generated ratings and reviews as the second most important site feature behind search, and says that retailers who adopt ratings and reviews as a differentiator and retention strategy will gain market share. (Jupiter)

In a study of 2,000 shoppers – 92% deemed customer reviews as “extremely” or “very” helpful and ~ 71% used keyword searches to find products. (eTailing Group)

59% of their users considered customer reviews to be more valuable than expert reviews. (Bizrate)

The Shop.org State of Retailing Online study, conducted by Forrester Research, found only 26% of the 137 top retailers surveyed offered customer ratings and reviews, but 96% of them ranked customer ratings and reviews as an effective or very effective tactic at driving conversion. (Forrester)

After their order, PETCO asked customers, "What online tool most influenced your purchase decision?" The #1 answer was Product Ratings & Reviews, with site search coming in a distant second. (PETCO)

CompUSA exit survey: 81% consider the availability of customer reviews to be Very important (33%) / Somewhat important (48%) (CompUSA & iPerceptions study)

63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. (CompUSA & iPerceptions study)

Of consumers who indicate product ratings are important to them, 50% are more likely to purchase from Amazon than Wal-Mart. (CompUSA & iPerceptions study)

Shoppers who browsed the site’s new "Top Rated Products" page, which features products rated most highly by customers in departments like hunting and fishing, had a 59% higher conversion rate than the site average and spent 16% more per order than other browsers of products. (Bass Pro Shops )

Dave Seifert of Bass Pro Shops noted at a Shop.org round table discussion that Top Rated Products were "the #1 merchandising technique ever utilized on their site." (Bass Pro Shops )

Conversion rates are higher on products with less than perfect reviews (less than 5 stars) than those without reviews at all, indicating that the customer feels that the product has been properly reviewed by other customers. (Burpee)

Average order value of those who have left a review is $200 (Bazaarvoice)

Site Navigation: Top-rated products path featuring four- and five-star products in each category delivered 35% higher conversion and 40% higher average order value. (Bazaarvoice)

Email study: PETCO realized a 5X increase in email click-through rates by including relevant ratings and reviews content in the campaign promotion. (PETCO)

Nearly half (49 percent) of online holiday gift purchasers recall seeing online customer product reviews. Overall, the 49-percent group's satisfaction score was 21 percent above the average score of all survey respondents (91 versus 75). (Foresee Results Study, 2006)

39 percent of those who bought from sites with reviews cite the reviews as the primary factor influencing the purchase decision. (Foresee Results Study, 2006)

Among first-time buyers on review-equipped sites, 42 percent said they were the primary factor. (Foresee Results Study, 2006)

Purchasers who cited reviews as the primary purchase influencer are 18 percent more likely to buy from that retailer the next time they buy similar merchandise (92 versus 74). Customer product reviews benefit the retailer all the way to the bottom line. (Foresee Results Study, 2006)

Source : Bazaarvoice.com