When it comes to statistics, it seems that you can find anyone to back whatever opinion you might have. Just yesterday, Android was named the number one smartphone platform worldwide...when you look at shipments. Today, however, we've come across a stat that is equally good and bad for everyone involved, because everyone is the same.
According to Nielsen, "the competition between smartphone operating systems is a heated one" with a three-way tie between Blackberry, Android and iOS.
If you're looking for a new Internet Service Provider, why rely on anecdotal accounts from Yelp or Reddit? When it comes to how fast data moves from one point to another, there's perception, and then there's numbers...and Netflix has the numbers.
"We find ourselves in the unique position," wrote Ken Florance, director of content delivery at Netflix, "of having insight into the performance of hundreds of millions of long duration, high-definition video streams delivered over the Internet."
More and more, both TV networks and app developers are relying on the fact that watching TV is no longer a passive act to which we apply our undivided attention. From check-in apps like Miso and Get Glue to TV shows like Glee and Community, they want to assure that we watch our TV with our smartphone or tablet in hand, a-tweeting and a-checking in all the while.
According to a recent study by Yahoo's advertising division, the TV watching crowd is ripe for this type of prime time interactivity, with 86% of mobile Internet users fondling their mobile device while watching the old boob tube.
When Facebook recently added Clicker - the TV guide for Internet video - to its Instant Personalization program, we wrote that it was a "smart next step for the program" because now you could find out what your friends were watching and, in Facebook's words, "spend less time channel surfing and more time socializing."
According to SideReel, an online service similar to Clicker that helps you find content and TV shows online, that isn't necessarily what users want. The company surveyed 1,800 users and found that TV wasn't as social an experience for its users as it used to be, among interesting findings.
The time we used to spend sitting on the train on our way to work in the morning, reading the trusty local rag, has changed. Now, we whip out the iPhone, Android or iPad and catch up on all the blogs and online articles we found but didn't have time to read the day before. On the way home, we do the same for those bits we found at work.
According to Read It Later, the app that lets users tag content on their computer to be, well, read later, mobile devices are helping people avoid the constant barrage of information and relegate reading back to the most comfortable time slots and locations of the day.
You may not have noticed, but more and more of your friends and family are getting smartphones. The mobile Internet has been slowly creeping into your life and this year, it's about to get even bigger. According to global telecom equipment provider Ericsson, the number of mobile broadband subscribers reached a remarkable 500 million in 2010 and that number is about to double in 2011, bring the total to an even billion.
While sitting around with a group of friends the other day, I took a quick, informal poll and asked "Hey, do any of you use Twitter?" These were friends I'd grown up with hacking code together, running BBSes and generally geeking out with. While all of them had accounts, they hadn't used them since they created them and they couldn't figure out why they would.
It was a bit of an eye-opener, as is the latest data from Pew Research finds that only 8% of online American adults use Twitter.
Ever since the iPad was launched last January, we've wondered about the impact it would have on e-Readers like the Kindle. Would it beat it out for reading news? How about as an e-book reader?
According to the latest numbers, the iPad is quickly gaining ground on the dedicated e-Reader and the "market has essentially become a two horse race."
Mobile browser maker Opera has released its latest report on the mobile Web and this time it's come to a conclusion you'll arrive at soon enough as the family gathers for the holidays and everyone under 30 has their nose buried in a mobile phone - "Generation Y chooses the mobile Web".
In fact, most 18-27 year-olds surveyed in the report user their mobile phones to browse the Web more often than a desktop or laptop. The report offers a number of telling statistics on where the world is headed and it all boils down to one word - mobile.
The Wikimedia Foundation announced earlier this week that it would need to raise $16 million to keep Wikipedia ad free, double the amount that it raised last year. That sounds like quite the challenge, right?
Well, according to the real-time statistics on its fundraising effort, Wikimedia has managed to raise in a week what took a month last year and it has a few guesses as to why.
