Baidu's net income rose by 118.5% YoY in Q2 2010

"Leading Chinese search engine, Baidu, Inc, announced last week its unaudited financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2010. The big news this quarter has been the significant gains the search leader has made in the wake of the marginalization of its next closest competitor, Google Inc, which fell out of favor with the Chinese government when it refused to abide by its content regulations (aka – censorship requirements.) According to Chinese market research company iResearch the country’s entire search market revenue grew by an impressive 53% Quarter-over-Quarter (QoQ)and Baidu was the largest beneficiary. Baidu’s share of the market increased to 70.8% from 67.8% in Q1 while Google’s share fell to 27.3% from 29.5%.
Key financial highlights for Q2 2010 include:
Total revenues grew 74.4% Year-over-Year (YoY) to RMB1.914 billion ($282.3 million),
Operating profit grew 129.8% YoY to RMB971.8 million ($143.3 million), and
Net income grew 118.5% YoY to RMB837.4 million ($123.5 million).
[...]
Key operating highlights for Q2 2010 include:
After a slightly down quarter in Q1, Baidu’s active online marketing customers grew again to 254,000, a 25% YoY increase and a 15% Quarter-on-Quarter (QoQ) increase,
In addition to growth in total customers the company also saw strong increases in the average revenue per user (ARPU). Baidu’s ARPU grew to RMB7,500 (US$1,106), a 39% YoY increase and a 27% QoQ increase,
Traffic acquisition costs (TAC) of RMB186 million accounted for 9.7% of total revenues compared to 16% in the year earlier period and 13.2% in the previous quarter."
Source:  DigitalEastAsia, 26th July 2010

11% of phones sold in 2009 were touch-screen only

"All mobile phones sold in 2009 by input method
Touch screen input only - 11%
QWERTY input only - 13%
Combo input Touch and keypad - 3%
Basic T9 keypad only - 73%"
Source: TomiAhonen Consulting 2010, quoted in Communities Dominate Brands, 29th July 2010

Mobile ad server Opera serves 1 billion ad views to mobile devices per day

"Opera joins the exclusive one billion served per day club. According to Opera Software statistics, Opera Mini users viewed more than one billion pages on July 25, 2010. Every second, Opera Mini servers compressed more than 11,500 pages before sending that content to phones around the world.
Opera Mini has experienced tremendous page view growth in recent years. In June 2008, Opera Mini servers processed 100 million page views per day for the first time. In June 2010, Opera Mini users viewed more than 910 million pages on average every day, an increase of more than 161% since June 2009."
Source:  Press release from Opera, 29th July 2010

Digital accounted for 28% of Publicis' H1 2010 revenues

"Publicis Groupe, the French owner of ad agency networks including Saatchi & Saatchi, has reported a like-for-like revenue increase of 7.1% to €1.38bn (£1.15bn) in the second quarter.
[...]
Publicis said that 33% of revenue came from advertising, 20% from media planning and buying and 47% from "specialised agencies and marketing services", which includes digital activities. Taken on their own, digital activities accounted for 28% of first half revenues."
Source:  The Guardian, 29th July 2010

Disney paid up to $763m for social gaming company Playdom

"Walt Disney is making a big move into social games, with the purchase of fast-growing social game developer Playdom for up to $763.2m. The deal includes a "total consideration" of $563.2m, in addition to a performance-linked earn-out of up to $200m.
[...]
The deal price represents a big return for Playdom's investors, who had put $73m into the company since last November. Just last month, Playdom had raised $33m in an add-on to its first round. That round included an investment by Disney venture arm Steamboat Ventures. Other backers included New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners.
The acquisition shows just how quickly the valuations of social game startups are soaring. The last major acquisition in the space was last fall when Electronic Arts paid $275m in cash and up to $100m in earnouts for Playfish, which had 60 million monthly active players of its titles at that time. Playdom, by contrast, claims only 38 million monthly active users."
Source:  The Guardian, 28th July 2010

Bloggers, by country

Click to enlarge

"It should not be much of a surprise that the most bloggers (29.2%) are located in the U.S. In fact, there are more than four times as many bloggers in the U.S. as there are in the second most populated country within the blogosphere - the U.K., which is home to 6.75% of bloggers.
Japan accounts for the third-most bloggers (4.9%), followed by Brazil (4.2%), Canada (3.9%), Germany (3.3%), Italy (3.2%), Spain (3.1%), France (2.9%) and Russia (2.3%)."
Source:  Inside Blog Demographics, Sysomos, June 2010

The demographics of bloggers

Click to enlarge

"Not surprisingly, the most active bloggers are younger people who have grown up during the blogging "revolution", which started about seven years ago. Bloggers in the 21-to-35 year-old demographic group account for 53.3% of the total blogging population. This group is followed by the generation just behind them - people 20-years-old or under are 20.2% of the blogging landscape. This group is closely followed by 36-to-50 year-olds (19.4%), while bloggers who are 51-years-old and older only account for 7.1%.
The difference between genders in the blogosphere is balanced with women making up 50.9% and males 49.1% of bloggers. This suggests the Internet is a gender neutral environment."
Source:  Inside Blog Demographics, Sysomos, June 2010

One in ten phones sold on contract in the UK has the Android operating system

"Sales of Android phones have risen by more than 300% from the beginning of 2010, with one in 10 contract handsets sold in the UK now running Google's mobile operating system.
Android's share of the UK mobile contract market grew by 10.2 percentage points from the first quarter of 2010 to the second quarter, from 3% to 13.2%, new figures from retail watcher GfK show.
From the beginning of 2010, most of the UK's major mobile operators have started selling a number of hotly-anticipated mobile devices running Google's Linux-based software. The HTC Desire and HTC Legend are among other devices lauded by critics."
Source GfK data, reported by The Guardian, 26th July 2010

During the World Cup final people from 172 countries tweeted in 27 different languages

"The World Cup final represented the largest period of sustained activity for an event in Twitter’s history.
Throughout the match, Tweets-per-second (TPS) were much higher than average; during the game’s final 15 minutes, this jumped to more than 2,000 TPS. (Spain’s winning goal in the final scored a 3,051 TPS.)
During the final, people from 172 countries tweeted in 27 different languages.
At the moment of the winning goal, people from 81 countries tweeted in 23 different languages. This moment is represented on this Wordle infographic."
Source:  Twitter blog, 15th July 2010

19% of mobile handsets shipped in Q2 2010 were smartphones

"The second quarter saw 60 million smartphones shipped around the world, a 43 percent jump from a year ago, according to a study released Thursday by research firm Strategy Analytics.
Growth was driven by robust subsidies from carriers, strong competition between high-end vendors, and a rising selection of lower-cost phones running systems like Android and Symbian, according to the study. Overall, smartphones accounted for 19 percent of all handsets shipped during the period."
Source:  Data from Strategy Analytics, reported by CNET, 22nd July 2010

The Old Spice 'Responses' videos have generated more video views in 10 days than the original ads have done in 5 months

"The 186 responses that Old Spice pitchman Isaiah Mustafa recorded for fans of his beauty, intelligence and outstanding physique took just a week to eclipse the original TV ads themselves in total views, according to new numbers from Visible Measures.
Those video responses, recorded in seven-minute spurts over several days last week, have accumulated 42.3 million views so far and more than 35 million last week alone, a Viral Chart record. The TV spots have also done well on the web, but have accumulated only 34.7 million views since "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" was first posted online in February.
[...]
For those keeping score, total views on the Old Spice campaign including all original spots and responses stands now at 113 million views. Here's how it breaks down:
"The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" (launched Feb 4): 22.3 million
"Different Scents for Different Gents" (launched Feb 5): 4.2 million
"Where Freshness Smells From" (launched March 15): 2.6 million
"Odor Blocker" (launched March 31): 29.2 million million
"The Return of the Man Your Man Could Smell Like" (launched June 29): 12.4 million
"Old Spice Responses" (launched July 13): 42.3 million"
Source:  Visible Measures blog, 22nd July 2010

There are 420m people online in China

"According to the report, the number of netizens in China is increasing. By June 2010, there were 420 million netizens in China, including 115.08 million in the rural areas, accounting for 27.4% of the total. Mature netizens take a larger percentage in the age structure of the Chinese Internet users than before, and those above the age of 30 account for 41% of the total.
At the same time, the educational background and income level of the Chinese netizens has lowered. The time period spent in the use of the Internet by Chinese netizens continues to increase and reached an average of 19.8 hours per week per user.
However, insufficient bandwidth is still a problem for the Chinese Internet sector. At present, the penetration of broadband in China has reached 98.1% and the number of people using broadband is 363.81 million. The bandwidth is still insufficient. Statistics from Akamai, a U.S. distributed computing platform for global Internet content and application delivery, shows that the average Internet speed in China is 857kbps, which is much slower than that in the U.S., Japan, and South Korea."
Source:  Data from the CNNIC, reported by China Tech News, 16th July 2010
(The original report is in Chinese.  The CNNIC are pretty slow at getting these reports translated, but the report should appear here eventually)

75% of American gamers have paid real-world money for virtual goods

"July's report reveals that 75 percent of the respondents (a sample size of 2,221 respondents was polled) have used real-world money to pay for virtual goods, and that roughly half expect to continue to spend about the same amount of real-world cash over the next 12 months.
Additionally, women over the age of 25 are stepping up their games and spending more than everyone else. When looking at the median spent on first-party purchases within social-network games, the average female spent $55 dollars, compared to only $30 for males. Females also spent twice as much ($50 compared to $25) when comparing purchases of in-game currency and the median overall expenditure was higher for females than males, at $80 to $60, respectively."
Source:  Digital Goods Spending Report by VG Market and Playspan, reported by CNET, 21st July 2010

Microsoft has sold 175 million Windows 7 licences in 12 months

"Software giant Microsoft has posted a big rise in quarterly profits amid signs of a rebound in technology spending by corporate customers.
Revenues hit 16 billion US dollars (£10.5 billion) in the second quarter, an increase of 22%, as profits jumped 48% to 4.5 billion dollars (£3 billion)
The results, which were stronger than Wall Street had expected, were helped by strong sales of Office 2010 as revenues from the company's business software segment rose 15% to 5.3 billion US dollars (£3.5 billion).
Microsoft added that more than 175 million Windows 7 licences had been sold since its launch last year."
Source:  Official Microsoft results, reported by the Press Association, 23rd July 2010
Note - Windows 7 launched to the trade on 22nd July 2009, and to retail on 22nd October 2009

Amazon customers ordered over $1 billion worth of products using a mobile device last year

""We're seeing rapid growth in Kindle, Amazon Web Services, third-party sales, and retail. We're also encouraged by what we see in mobile. In the last twelve months, customers around the world have ordered more than $1 billion of products from Amazon using a mobile device," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. "The leading mobile commerce device today is the smartphone, but we're excited by the potential of the new category of wireless tablet computers. Over time, tablet computers could become a meaningful additional driver for our business.""
Source:  Amazon financial results press release, 22nd july 2010

Just over 2,000 albums sold more than 5,000 copies in the US in 2009

"Albums that sold at least one copy in 2009: 98,000
Albums selling more than 10,000 units in 2009: 1,319
Albums selling more than 10,000 units in 2008: 1,515
Albums selling more than 250,000 units in 2009: 85
Albums selling more than 250,000 units in 2001: 214
Albums selling more than 5,000 units in 2009: 2,058
Albums selling under than 1,000 units in their first year of release: 92,601
Number of albums selling less than 100 copies in 2009: 81,000"
Source:  Data from Nielsen Soundscan quoted by Tommy Silverman and Eric Garland at the New Music Seminar, July 2010, reported by DigitalMusicNews, 21st July 2010

Pandora has 60m active users

"US streaming and discovery service Pandora now has 60m active users.
The company announced the figure at the New Music seminar in New York. In April, it has 50m users, up from 40m users in December 2009.
Key to the company’s growth has been the development of apps for all the major mobile platforms. The company’s founder Tim Westergren revealed last year that over half of new users were coming to Pandora via mobile.
Pandora also added that of the 90,000 different artists on the service, 80% are played at least once a month.
Last year, it generated $50m (£33m) in revenues and paid out $30m (£19.7m) in royalties."
Source:  Music Week, 22nd July 2010

Spotify has 500,000 premium subscribers

"Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has told Music Week that the service now has 500,000 paying subscribers, as it prepares to roll out in the US and Japan.
The company's £9.99 Premium sub allows users to access unlimited music via the Spotify desktop client and a mobile app, which is currently available for iPhone, Android and Symbian.
“One of the unique assets and the reason why we have more than half a million people paying £9.99 a month for the [premium] service is because they actually use it as their primary media player," said Ek, adding that Spotify's aim to become “the music platform on the internet where you manage your music and then consume it on any device you want."
The recent introduction of a £4.99 PC-only sub has actually driven people to the Premium tier due to its mobile element, said Ek."
Source:  Mobile Entertainment, 20th July 2010

Tumblr gets 1.5 billion page views a month

"One year ago, in July 2009, Tumblr was going strong. They had 255 million pageviews that month. By November of last year, that was up to 420 million pageviews. But some new stats which Tumblr is releasing today show an explosion in growth since then. Tumblr is now at 1.5 billion pageviews a month — their Quantcast data confirms this."
Source:  Techcrunch, 19th July 2010

Africa accounted for 12% of all net new mobile subscribers in Q1 2010

"Africa accounted for 12 percent of global mobile net additions in 1Q 2010, adding 20.1 million new subscribers to the world population of mobile users, and giving Africa a total of 480.2 million subscribers. This is a rather neat 10.0 percent of the some 4.82 billion mobile subscribers estimated to exist at the end of March 2010.
By comparison the Middle East accounted for 5 percent of global mobile net additions, clocking up some 8.1 million in the first quarter. Together Africa & the Middle East therefore accounted for 17 percent of global net additions.
According to research by The Mobile World, 1Q 2010 saw net additions of 168 million, taking the total to 4.82 billion. China and India remain the world's largest, and accounted for almost 28 percent of the global total at the end of 1Q 2010, but their contribution to the net quarterly gain in connections was double this at 56 percent. The USA accounts for 3 percent of net additions: the same percentage as Brazil and Russia combined.
With the world population at around 6.8 billion, the global mobile penetration rate stood at just under 71 percent at the end of Q1 2010. Africa, by comparison, had a mobile penetration of 47 percent, whilst the Middle East hit 86 percent."
Source:  Worldwide Mobile Market Growth, Africa and Middle East Telecom Week, July 2010

Facebook has 500m active members

"As of this morning, 500 million people all around the world are actively using Facebook to stay connected with their friends and the people around them."
Source:  Mark Zuckerberg, writing in the Facebook blog, 21st July 2010 

Users of the music site Bandzoogle have sold more than $2.5m in music and merchandise to their fans through the site

"Bandzooglers have hit a big milestone: $2.5 million in sales directly from their websites! Even more amazing, we were at $1 million only 14 months ago.
The best part? We don't take a cut of your sales (and never will!), so members pocketed this whole amount.
When I created Bandzoogle, my goal was to create a tool to help musicians succeed online. These sales numbers show me that we're evolving into a platform that does just that.
Congrats to all Bandzoogle members who have made this milestone possible. The whole team is proud of your success!"
Source:  Bandzoogle blog, 15th July 2010

Foursquare has had 100 million checkins

Source:  Tweet from Foursquare, 20th July 2010

Amazon sells nearly twice as many digital books as hardback books

"It is an announcement that will provoke horror among those who can think of nothing better than spending an afternoon rummaging around a musty old bookshop. In what could be a watershed for the publishing industry, Amazon said sales of digital books have outstripped US sales of hardbacks on its website for the first time.
Amazon claims to have sold 143 digital books for its e-reader, the Kindle, for every 100 hardback books over the past three months. The pace of change is also accelerating. Amazon said that in the most recent four weeks, the rate reached 180 ebooks for every 100 hardbacks sold. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, said sales of the Kindle and ebooks had reached a "tipping point", with five authors including Steig Larsson, the writer of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, and Stephenie Meyer, who penned the Twilight series, each selling more than 500,000 digital books. Earlier this month, Hachette said that James Patterson had sold 1.1m ebooks to date."
Source: The Guardian, 20th July 2010

Apple made a net profit of $3.25 billion in the quarter to 26th June 2010

"Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2010 third quarter ended June 26, 2010. The Company posted record revenue of $15.7 billion and net quarterly profit of $3.25 billion, or $3.51 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $9.73 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.83 billion, or $2.01 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 39.1 percent compared to 40.9 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 52 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
Apple sold 3.47 million Macs during the quarter, representing a new quarterly record and a 33 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 8.4 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 61 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 9.41 million iPods during the quarter, representing an eight percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. The Company began selling iPads during the quarter, with total sales of 3.27 million."
Source: Apple press release, 20th July 2010

Next Generation Media Quarterly - July 2010

My new Next Generation Media Quarterly presentation is now online. Lots of cool stats and examples, many of which will be familiar to readers of this, and my 'examples' blog, but this time with a couple of new features:

1 - a 'quiz' slide at the end of each section

2 - a special section on sport in honour of the World Cup

Next Generation Media Quarterly - July 2010

View more presentations from Dan Calladine.

Have a look!

World of Warcraft generated $2m in 4 hours from the sale of Celestial Steed 'pets' to players

"If you haven’t been surfing through Bilzzard’s pet store in the past two days, you might have missed one of the new pets for WoW: Celestial Steed.
This horse has generated $2 million in a little over 4 hours and people were still lining up to get it. These figures are just based on the first four hours since the Celestial Steed was released, but Bilzzard certainly earned a lot more from selling this horse. You will have to spend $25 if you want to get it and the upgrade is purely visual because mounts don’t improve the ability of the character."
Source: GossipGamers, 17th April 2010

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has sold 20m copies

"Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has passed another milestone. In a pre-Electronic Entertainment Expo analysts event tonight, Activision announced that the Infinity Ward-developed first-person shooter has now sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.
Activision believes first-person shooter fans have an insatiable appetite for quality examples of the genre.
If that game's success wasn't staggering enough, CEO Bobby Kotick told analysts that the next title, Treyarch's Call of Duty: Black Ops, could possibly do even better. Kotick noted multiple times that the Call of Duty series has grown more successful with each new installment and said that preorders for Black Ops are tracking higher right now than those of Modern Warfare 2 when that game was this far out from release. Black Ops is set for a November 9 debut."
Source: Gamespot, 15th June 2010

Four of the six biggest levels of internet usage occurred at the 2010 World Cup

The highest recorded internet usage of 20.7m visitors to news sites per minute was on 24th June 2010, when Denmark played Japan, and Cameroon played the Netherlands, while the longest running tennis game was taking place at Wimbledon.

The top 6 events are shown below

Click to enlarge

Source: Akamai Net Usage Index, retrieved 14th July 2010
From their notes:
"The highest peaks since inception of the Net Usage Index for News (August 18, 2005), based on total visitors per minutes. The following data ranks the top peaks, and the corresponding events that were taking place in the world at the time."

Digital albums account for 27.4% of American music purchases

"According to data released July 7 by Nielsen SoundScan, the sales tracking system for music, published by Billboard magazine, digital albums now account for 27.4% of music purchases, up from 21.5% at the same point last year.
The report indicated that physical album sales continued to decline while digital album sales grew during the first six months of 2010. This confirms indications in a June survey by Pricewaterhouse Coopers, "Entertainment and Media Outlook for 2010-2014."
Pricewaterhouse Cooper projects that digital sales will overtake physical purchases next year. Consumers' use of digital platforms is ahead of industry estimates, hitting all segments of entertainment and media, including music, movies and videogames.
[...]
The research indicates that by 2014 digital purchases are projected to rise to $17 billion, doubling from $8.1 billion in 2009. Physical sales will dip $10.9 billion by 2014, a decline of 66% from 2005.
Overall, SoundScan states that album sales (physical and digital) are down 11% so far this year, with 154 million sold. Physical albums declined 17.7%, while digital albums rose 13.7%.
Interestingly, vinyl LPs have increased by 9.1% (1.3 million sold)."
Source: Data from Nielsen Soundscan, reported by The Independent, 8th July 2010

The Daily Mirror sold an estimated 334,000 copies as a result of a Prince album giveaway

"Last weekend's Prince freebie helped the Daily Mirror sell an extra 334,000 copies compared to the previous weekend. Sister Scottish title Daily Record, which also bundled copies of new Prince album '20Ten' in with their paper, saw a sales uplift of 45,000.
Well, I'm assuming it was the free Prince CD that helped the two tabloids sell more copies. Although I heard somewhere that the internet is dead, so perhaps it's a sign of one time web surfers returning to print.
We don't actually know what either title's total sales were on 10 Jul or 3 Jul (ie with and without the Prince), but Billboard did some maths based on both papers' most recent ABC circulation figures and reckons the Prince CD helped the Mirror score a 27% increase in paper sales, while the Record only had a 14% increase. It's thought that when the Mail On Sunday gave away Prince album 'Planet Earth' in 2007 they experienced an uplift similar to the Mirror."
Source: CMU Music News, 14th July 2010

YouTube mobile receives more than 100 million video playbacks a day

"YouTube consumption on mobile devices has also grown considerably: playbacks were up 160% in 2009 over the previous year. And we’re excited to announce that YouTube Mobile now receives more than 100 million video playbacks a day. This is roughly the number of daily playbacks that YouTube.com was streaming when we joined forces with Google in 2006."
Source: YouTube blog, 7th July 2010

Foursquare has 1.9m users, with 2 men for every woman

"As of today, Foursquare has just over 1.9 Million users. Gowalla has around 340,000.
- At its current pace, Foursquare will surpass 2 Million users within a week.
- Foursquare is adding almost 10x as many new users per day as Gowalla and, despite a significantly larger base, has a daily percentage growth rate that is 75% higher than Gowalla’s.
- Currently, Foursquare has about 5.6 Million venues and Gowalla has 1.4 Million venues.
- 1 in 3 venues on Foursquare have been checked into only once or never. That number is 1 in 4 on Gowalla.
- The most popular venue name is “Home,” followed by national fast food chains like “McDonald’s” and “Burger King”
- On Foursquare, men outnumber women almost 2-to-1. Exact gender breakouts are not available for Gowalla, but the most popular first names suggest a similar distribution."
Source: Article by Robert J. Moore, the CEO and co-founder of RJMetrics, using his company's data (rather than official data from the companies concerned), Techcrunch, 7th July 2010

Nearly 65m Facebook users 'Like' something each day

"Want to know how popular Facebook likes are? According to new statistics we’ve collected [...] just under 65 million Facebook users are liking things on a daily basis through Facebook. This is according to self-reported statistics from Facebook which until now have not been published. While more than 20 million users interact with Facebook for iPhone, this is currently the most active interaction on Facebook."
Source: Estimates by AllFacebook, 7th July 2010
Note - I don't normally list estimates; if Facebook reveal real figures I'll replace these.

Twitter supports 800m search queries a day (misleading stats!)

"Twitter is supporting 800 million queries a day, or 33 percent more than it said it was handling back in April, according to co-founder Biz Stone, who spoke at the Aspen Ideas Festival today.
That means the company, which is trying to brand itself as an “information network” rather than a social network, is handling 24 billion queries a month. The last time the company reported daily search volumes was back in April at its inaugural developer conference, Chirp, when it said it was supporting 600 million queries a day.
It’s hard to compare Twitter’s monthly query volume to that of Microsoft’s Bing or Yahoo, since worldwide figures for their traffic are fairly old. Comscore reported that Bing was supporting 4.1 billion monthly queries worldwide while Yahoo was handling 9.4 billion in December."
Source: Biz Stone of Twitter, reported by VentureBeat, 6th July 2010
Note - I think the wording 'supporting 800m queries a day' suggests that these include the 'live' results within Google and other search engines, and not just searches within twitter.
Update - these figures are misleading, as they include automated scrapes from apps like Tweetdeck:
"By the week's end it was dismissed. Twitter's search query numbers aren't as impressive as they sound, according to Nicholas Carlson at the Business Insider, namely for this reason: "Twitter's search query numbers include "searches" from Twitter apps such as TweetDeck and Seesmic that are actually just automated calls those apps send out every few minutes to populate columns users have set up to see tweets on certain topics."
As for suggestions that Twitter is now the top search engine: one's a network, the other's a news publisher - this is not comparing like with like, is how Paid Content put it. "In the same way, one can't group Twitter together with web search services and proclaim: "Twitter has taken the title." Sure, both such services have a search function, but each indexes a very different kind of material - one, rapid-fire conversations and news updates; the other, deeper, more static and longer-lasting information.""
Source:  Marketing Vox, 9th July 2010

34% of American women aged 18-34 say checking Facebook is the first thing they do when they wake up

"Today’s tech savvy woman 18-34 has a fixed dependence to social media networks. An overwhelming majority (57%) admit to talking to people online more than face-to-face, while 34% say checking Facebook is the first thing they do when waking up in the morning – that includes brushing one’s teeth or using the bathroom. Even more surprising is the 26% who get up in the middle of the night to read text messages and the 21% who confessed to checking Facebook during the night.
More than one third (39%) are self proclaimed Facebook addicts; 37% have fallen asleep with their PDA in their hands; 84% believe its okay to update your status more than once a day; and 78% think it's okay to check someone else’s Facebook profile more than once a day; 19% say they have gotten into fights with loved ones about how much time they spend with their PDAs/cell phones and 31% feel more confident about their online persona than in their real lives.
- 34% women 18-34 say checking Facebook is the first thing they do when waking up in the morning
- 26% women 18-34 get up in the middle of the night to read text messages
- 37% women 18-34 have fallen asleep with their PDA in their hands"
Source: Research conducted for The Oxygen Media Insights Group by Lightspeed Research, reported by RBR.com, 6th July 2010

Foursquare had over 1 million checkins on 2nd July 2010

"Foursquare is enjoying huge growth and getting a lot of good press as of late.
Just days after securing $20 million series B round of capital, the location service has announced another big milestone – 1 million check-ins in one day."
Source: The Next Web, 3rd July 2010

Approximately 108m mobile phones were sold in India in 2009-2010

"If you can source it from China, have large marketing budgets and retail distribution in place, you can sell it in India.
Seeing the success of MicroMaxx, Karbonn, Lava and Lemon – low cost “value for money” entrants in India’s burgeoning handset market – more consumer companies are now adding mobile handsets to their portfolio. A Voice & Data survey revealed earlier this month that local Indian handset brands (including Spice) grabbed 14% marketshare (up from 3-4% a year ago), and Nokia lost 12% market share. Of the Indian brands, Micromax has 4.1% handset market share by revenue, Spice has 3.9%, Karbonn has 3%, Lava has 1.1%, Lemon 1% and Max has 0.9%. Around 108 million mobile phones were sold in the country during 2009-10, adding up to Rs 27,000 crore in sales, according to Voice & Data."
Source: MediaNama, 2nd July 2010

The RIAA warns over 1 million copyright infringers each year

"In less than two years the RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America] has sent copyright infringement notices to 1.8 million Internet subscribers and 269,609 to colleges and universities. Despite this staggering average of more than a million infringement notices every year from the recording industry alone, the effect on file-sharing levels seems unnoticeable.
For years, content owners such as record labels and movie studios have been sending copyright infringement notices to Internet users. They hire companies such as DtecNet and BayTSP, who monitor file-sharing networks and automatically send infringement notices to Internet providers. The Internet providers on their turn are legally obliged to forward these to their customers."
Source: TorrentFreak, 4th July 2010

2 Billion add-ons have been downloaded for Firefox

"Mozilla is celebrating another significant milestone for its flagship Firefox browser – two billion downloaded add-ons.
In an announcement on its rockyourfirefox web site, the company thanked its developers and loyal users, and talked up the customisation features of the browser.
“[This] feat was made possible by the huge community of people like you who use Firefox add-ons as well as the thousands of developers who make the add-ons you use,” wrote Julie Shin Choi, a Mozilla marketing executive.
“Over the years, we remained dedicated to building features and products that make Firefox the world’s most customisable web browser for consumers and developers."
Mozilla passed the one billion mark in November 2008 and at that time predicted that it would take around three years to double that number. However, it beat that estimate with ease, and Choi predicted that another major milestone would be reached soon."
Source: V3, 2nd July 2010