Text messaging is declining Y-o-Y in Finland and Hong Kong

"One of the pioneering text-messaging markets of late Nineties showed substantial declines in text-messaging during the key Christmas period. Customers of Finland’s dominant mobile carrier, Sonera, sent 8.5 Million text messages during the Christmas Eve of 2011. This is a surprisingly steep tumble from the 10.9 Million text messages sent during the Christmas Eve of 2010. The more youth-oriented operator called DNA witnessed a decline to 5.6 Million text messages from 5.9 Million text messages. Christmas Eve text messages traditionally form the biggest or second biggest SMS day of the year in many markets (eclipsed by New Year in some regions). A major winter storm hitting Scandinavia triggered YoY SMS growth on Christmas Day, demonstrating how national disasters still drive consumers towards old school text-messaging.
Signs of consumers moving on from text-messaging to social media, email and IP-based messaging systems started cropping up in 2011 in advanced SMS markets like Netherlands and Philippines. What we seem to be witnessing is a situation where those countries where SMS took off first during Nineties are now the first ones to see a steep decline in SMS usage.
In Hong Kong. the Christmas Day text message decline was nearly 14%. It does seem as though the SMS erosion rates in countries that originally pioneered the service are higher than most observers anticipated in early 2011. Possibly because new services such as mobile Facebook and Twitter are now widely adopted in the same markets where SMS took off after 1995."

Source:  Forbes, 29th December 2011

Smartphone penetration in APAC by market

I created this chart with Google's new online mobile data too.  Data comes from Google and Ipsos.

Click to Enlarge

There are lots of other markets & measures.  Create your ownhere.
Source:  Google, Ipsos & MMA 2011.  Full info here

Asian online marketplace Alibaba has more than 50m registered users

"During the first quarter, we made steady progress in all fronts. We added 2.5 million registered users, more than 458,000 storefronts and more than 43,400 paying members. This represents a key milestone as Alibaba.com surpasses 50 million registered users with 7.3 million storefronts and 658,701 paying members worldwide. We are particularly encouraged by the strong performance across revenue and net profit in the quarter. The quarterly revenue growth continued to accelerate and increased 49.3% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2010, compared with the 35.8% year-on-year growth in the fourth quarter of 2009. Despite generally weaker seasonality in the first quarter of the year, we maintained decent growth in recurring free cash flow and deferred revenue. Deferred revenue grew 43.6% year-on-year to reach RMB3.6 billion. These achievements showcased the strong execution by our team and confirmed Alibaba.com’s value to our small business customers."
Source: Company announcement of unaudited results, 13th May 2010
Background info on Alibaba here

Nearly 4 times as many Young Asians download music illegally than pay

"Only 11% of young Asian consumers paid for downloads in the past month versus 41% who downloaded “free” music during the same period. Korea (20%), India (19%), China (12%) and Vietnam (11%) had the largest shares pf consumers paying for music while the largest share of unpaid downloads occurred in China (55%), Malaysia (50%), Vietnam (49%) and Hong Kong (47%)"
Source: Synovate presentation to the Music Matters Asia Pacific Music Forum 2009, reported by Digital East Asia blog, 5th June 2009
Download the full presentation here

YouTube was the top search result for 2008 in 11 major countries

YouTube was the top search result in Google for 11 major countries in 2008 - Austria, Finland, France, Hong Kong (OK, not a country), Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, & Taiwan. This is 11, out of a total of 34 countries reported on by Google.
This shows two things - that YouTube is incredibly popular globally, and that people use search for navigational purposes - that is to find specific things that they already know (rather than type in a term like 'video site')
Source: Google Zeitgeist 2008