119m Olympics-related 'Tweets' were made on Sina Weibo during the 2012 opening ceremony

"While much has been made about this being the 'Twitter Olympics,' it should be noted that China has its own version called Sina Weibo (meaning "microblog" in Chinese) that is making a strong case to call this the "Weibo Olympics" as well.
While Twitter counted almost 10 million tweets during the Olympic opening ceremony, which was more than during the whole of the Beijing games, Sina Weibo counted 119 million opening ceremony tweets. What makes these numbers even more impressive is that Twitter has half the users of Twitter, but generated over 10 times the number of comments, writes Sam Flemming, Shanghai-based president and founder of social business intelligence provider CIC."

Source:  AdAge, 8th August 2012

Live video streams of the Olympics are >300% higher in 2012 than in 2008

"With the Olympics halfway over, NBC has begun to release the success of their digital properties, which includes live streaming of all the games on their iPad apps. The web changed completely between 2008 and 2012, enabling a more social Olympics who’s coverage can be found way beyond the TV screen. Here are details on the NBC Olympics digital success.
The results are in for NBC’s digital footprint for the Olympics. Here are the main stats:
75 Million Total Videos Streamed, Up 182% vs. Beijing in 2008
34 Million Live Streams, Up 333% vs. Beijing
744 Million Page Views, Up 160 Million from Beijing
NBC Olympics Live Extra & NBC Olympics apps Peaked at No. 1 & 2 as Top Free Apps for iPhone & iPad on App Store
6.2 Million Devices Verified by Cable, Satellite and Telco Customers
Regarding NBCOlympics.com’s mobile website, the total unique viewers for the 2008 games were 2.8 million and for London 2012 there have already been 5.2 million, proving smartphone penetration. The NBC Live app has already had 7 million unique users and the NBC Olympics app has had 2.7 million."

Source:  LostRemote, 5th August 2012
Earlier - Live streams of the Beijing opening ceremony were 10x higher than for the Athens ceremony

'As many as' 10,000 phones are stolen each month in London

"As many as 10,000 mobile phones are stolen every month. Two thirds of the victims are aged between 13 and 16. Many phones are also stolen from unattended cars. Here are some practical measures you can take to keep your mobile phone safe."

Source:  Metropolitan Police site, retrieved 10th August 2012

Facebook produces six times as much code per day as in 2008

"When I wrote about Facebook's release process earlier this year, I stressed how fast we build things here and described how we push new code to facebook.com every day. In fact, I closed with the advice to "ship early and ship often.” Last week, in conjunction with the opening of our engineering office in London, we decided to double the release speed of facebook.com and indeed "ship often."
We will roll facebook.com onto new code twice a day now, with a push driven by a recently-hired release engineer in our New York office in addition to our standing daily push managed by our California release engineering team. The New York-based push will give much more power to our engineers who aren’t based on the west coast of the U.S. and will ensure they're able to move and ship as quickly as any other engineer in the company. It will also give California engineers two chances to get code shipped and features launched each day.
When I came to Facebook in 2008, I was the only release engineer, supporting around 100 developers in one location. Now that we’ve added more people and offices around the world, my small team in California (and now New York) is supporting hundreds more developers who are producing 6 times the amount of code per week. We’re making this change to keep our release process as quick and efficient at 1000 engineers as it was at 100."

Source:  Facebook Developers blog, 3rd August 2012

Apple has spent over $1 billion on advertising for the iPhone and iPad

"Are Apple products truly superior to the competition? Or are they just marketed a lot better? Either way, there’s no denying that Apple can build hype around a product like no other tech company on the planet, but all that superb marketing ain’t cheap.
Testifying during the Apple vs Samsung trial today, Phil Schiller revealed that Apple has spent over $1 billion marketing the iPad and iPhone since their respective launches.
Covering the trial in-person for Wired, Christina Bonnington tweeted -
Apple has spent over $647M for iPhone advertising expenditures since its launch. $457M for iPad.
All Things D breaks down the spending by fiscal year to give a better picture of how Apple’s marketing has ramped up each year:
In fiscal 2008, the company spent $97.5 million on iPhone ads in the U.S. alone. That figure climbed to $149.6 million in 2009 and reached $173.3 million for all of fiscal 2010. On the iPad, the company spent $173.3 million in 2010."

Source:  Cult of Mac, 3rd August 2012

Facebook makes 84% of its revenues from advertising

"Facebook posted it first quarterly earnings statement post-IPO yesterday and one number pops out: 84%. That is the percentage of revenue the company made from advertising, representing $992 million of the total $1.18 billion it brought in during Q2. To maintain stable growth, Facebook must diversify its revenue stream and become less reliant on advertising - a goal that has plagued competitors like Google for years."

Source:  Read Write Web, 27th July 2012

Olympic sponsorship and advertising has driven adidas' sales in the UK

"Olympic sponsor Adidas has hailed its biggest ever UK marketing campaign ‘Take the Stage’ for lifting sales of London 2012-related merchandise to around around £100m.
It means that the sports manufacturer has already recouped its £100m investment in sponsoring the Games, with further sales expected.
The ‘Take the Stage’ campaign launched earlier this year and has featured British athletes and celebrities including heptathlete Jessica Ennis, footballer David Beckham and comedian Keith Lemmon."

Source:  Marketing Week, 3rd August 2012

Starbucks processes more than 1 million mobile payments a week

"Starbucks already processes more than 1 million mobile purchases a week in the U.S. through its smartphone app, and has logged more than 60 million since its introduction, Mr. Schultz said."

Source:  AdAge, 8th August, 2012

Earlier - $42m in total processed by April 2012

Usain Bolt's 100m final generated 1,233 Tweets per Second

New peak in #Olympics conversation: 74k TPM about @usainbolt winning the 100m yesterday.
— Twitter Comms (@twittercomms) August 6, 2012

Note - this works out at approx 1,233 Tweets per Second (tps), far below the 15,358 tps for the final goal of Euro 2012

Update - slightly higher for the 200m final:

Record alert! @usainbolt sets a new Olympic Games conversation record with over 80,000 TPM for his 200m victory. #Olympics
— Twitter (@twitter) August 9, 2012

Google & Apple passed on payments of $5.4bn to developers in 2011

"The total revenue paid to app developers by Apple and Google in 2011 was $5.4bn (£3.5bn), slightly more than the GDP of Guinea or Liechtenstein, according to statistics from Flurry. The company forecasts the figure to rise by over 60 per cent to $8.7bn in 2012.
The figures reveal that in-app advertising accounted for $980m, or 18 per cent of revenues in 2011. This figure is forecast to increase by more than 100 per cent to $2bn in 2012, equating to 23 per cent of total 2012 revenues."

Source:  Mobile Marketing, 6th August 2012

Shazam users have tagged 5 billion songs

"Shazam®, the world’s leading media engagement company, today announced it has reached a major milestone – fans around the world have used the service to identify songs and experience more with TV shows and ads over five billion times.  P!nk’s new song “Blow Me One Last Kiss” marked the five billionth tag.  In addition to its leadership in music discovery, Shazam’s rapid expansion into television has given people new opportunities to use the app to engage with their favourite shows and ads for additional content and exclusive offers."

Source:  Shazam Blog, 7th August 2012

Fifty Shades of Grey reached 35 million people more quickly than Instagram did

Earlier today I saw a stat quoted (with no source) on Quora:
"50 Shades of Grey grew to 35 million 'users' more quickly than Instagram did."

I looked in vain for a single source myself, so I decided to try to verify it myself:

Instagram:

The Next Web has detailed the growth of Instagram from it's start, taking Instagram's own reported numbers, since it's launch in October 2010.

"Oct 13 2010: 100,000

Oct 20 2010: 200,000

Oct 28 2010: 300,000

Dec 21 2010: 1 million

Feb 01 2011: 1.75 million

Feb 15 2011: 2 million

May 03 2011: 3.6 million

May 26 2011: 4.4 million

Oct 31 2011: 12 million

Dec 5 2011: 14 million

Jan 24 2012: 15 million

Mar 11 2012: 27 million

May 1 2012: 50 million"

Fifty Shades of Grey:

Yahoo! quotes a figure of 'nearly 40m sold' on 7th August, while the publisher reported 12m sales in the UK alone.  Since it was originally published on 20th June 2011 (Wikipedia), this means that this has happened in less than 14 months.

14 months for Instagram was at December 2011, so at the same point since launch Instagram had only 14m-15m 'sales' (it's a free app).

So yes, Fifty Shades did hit 35m people a lot quicker than Instagram.

Except that...  The 50 Shades figure is for 3 books, and I'd expect a lot of people have more than one of the trilogy, so it might have reached fewer than 20m people...