Posts from — March 2009

More and more households are dumping their landlines for only mobile phones. This was observed to be the highest in the Midwest and South USA. Here are the top five American states with the greatest incidence of mobile only households (in percent terms)

1. Oklahoma : 26.2%
2. Utah : 25.5%
3. Nebraska : 23.2%
4. Arkansas : 22.6%
5. Iowa : 22.2%

URL shortening services are essentially websites that provide you with a smaller URL that you may substitute for long URLs that are difficult to be passed in any email or other documents. Here is the market share of the various URL shortening services:

tinyurl.com : 75.49%
bit.ly : 13.02%
ff.im : 4.87%
is.gd : 4.36%
twurl.nl : 2.26%

Facebook videos are not as popular as Youtube, but the numbers are staggering and growing real fast. Many of them are home videos and shot with webcams!

Number of video uploads on Facebook : 260000 per day
Number of video uploads via webcam : 155000 per day (40%)
High quality videos on Facebook : 25% approx.
Only 3-4% of the videos uploaded are truly high definition

The fourth quarter of 2008 had 8 percent lesser ad spending on digital newspaper as compared to the ad spending in the fourth quarter of 2007.

Online Newspaper ad spending in Q4 2007 : $846 million
Online Newspaper ad spending in Q4 2008 : $778 million

Total ad spending on online newspapers in 2008 was $3.1 billion

Singapore internet users spend more than 50 percent of their online time on social and entertainment websites. Here is a list of the most popular website categories among Singpore Internet users in terms of time spent:

1. Instant Messengers
2. Entertainment
3. Social Networks
4. Email
5. Online Gaming
6. Search/Navigation
7. Blogs
8. Business Finance
9. Community
10. News and Information

Admob reports that the smartphone market share has grown from 26 percent to 33 percent. Here are the top five smartphones globally:

1. iPhone
2. Nokia N70
3. Blackberry 8300
4. Nokia N80
5. Nokia N73

For the US market, the statistics are slightly different:

1. iPhone
2. Blackberry Curve
3. Blackberry Pearl
4. Palm Centro
5. HTC Dream

Also read : Worldwide Smartphone market share

Skype is now the largest long distance phone company. Cross-border telephone traffic grew 12% in 2008.

Worldwide Cross border traffic in minutes : 384 billion
Skype Cross border traffic in minutes : 33 billion (41% growth)

Mobile broadband which comprises of 3G technologies like W-CDMA, HSPA, CDMA 2000 and EVDO is on the rise to popularity and the number of connections is bound to rise multifolds over the next half a decade.

Number of mobile broadband at the end of 2008 : 210.5 million
Revenues from mobile broadband in 2008 : $49.8 billion

Projected number of mobile broadband by 2013 : 1 billion

No surprise, but a recent research has just confirmed that the sale of music CDs is on the drop while the sale of digital music is on the rise in USA.

Digital Downloads
Number of digital downloads in 2008 : 36 million
Increase of 8 million over 2007 (29%)

Music CD Sales
Drop in Number of Music CDs purchased in 2008 : 17 million (19% drop)

Overall, there were 13 million fewer music buyers in 2008.

People are logging on to the mobile internet more frequently now than ever before. Here is the number of people logging on to the internet through their mobile phones in January 2009 and the percent change in this number since January 2008 in brackets.

Daily : 22.36 million (107%)
Weekly : 19.28 million (87%)
Monthly : 63.18 million (71%)