Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation managed to raise more than $8 million in its yearly fundraiser. On Monday morning, the non-profit behind Wikipedia is announcing that it aims to raise $16 million this year "so that Wikipedia and its sister projects can remain freely available to people around the world."
Keeping Wikipedia free is no small feat, however, and the foundation has released a few stats about the world's fifth most popular Web property that help illustrate the challenges it faces.
With the holiday season just gearing up and sales of eBooks and eBook readers likely to go into overdrive, analyst firm Forrester is predicting that 2010 will finish with just under $1 billion in eBooks sales.
According to Forrester's five-year forecast for eBooks in the U.S., 2010 will end with a total of $966 million in eBook sales. Furthermore, the eBook market is ready to triple itself, with $3 billion in sales by 2015.
Apple's App Store now features over 300,000 apps, up from just under 200,000 in April. Out of these, almost 38,000 are iPad apps according to a new report from app store analytics firm Distimo. Developers released an average of 5,452 iPad apps and 12,218 iPhone apps per month since April. About 7% of all iOS apps are currently universal apps for both the iPhone and iPad.
A look at more than 1.5 million tweets shows that Bit.ly has remained the dominant URL shortener and tweeted domain on Twitter, with Bit.ly appearing more than its nine closest competitors combined.
Julien Sobrier, an engineer at cloud security firm Zscaler, analyzed more than 1.5 million tweets over the last three months and shared his findings.
According to a new report from International Data Corporation (IDC), Apple has just passed RIM, makers of the Blackberry smartphone, to become the fourth largest mobile vendor in the world.
Prior to this quarter (Q3 2010), RIM held the number four spot. It's now at number five. Apple's move up the charts also ousted Sony Ericsson, which has now exited the top five altogether.
Web-traffic analysis site Compete has come out with a ranking of the top 50 sites for September that gives a quick look at the ever-changing online landscape.
While there may be arguments about the accuracy of any given traffic analysis, if the bias is retained across the board, then we can look at the change, which is where the real interesting numbers come out.
I have to admit, I read with fascination this morning the latest Techmeme headline from Techcrunch: "Yep, Apple Killed the CD Today." Of course, a headline like that is meant to cause a reaction - and it did, by the number of tweets, Diggs and comments. In my gut, I agree with the general trend (as it applies to computers) - the optical drive is becoming passé in favor of smaller portable storage options like USB flash drives and even file-sharing via Web-based tools.
However, optical media itself is not dead yet - far from it, mostly thanks to Blu-ray. So perhaps the headline should have read "optical drives in computers are not really all that important anymore, but Blu-ray is doing well." But that wouldn't have been as catchy.
Every quarter, content delivery network Akamai delivers a State of the Internet report looking at the Internet in terms of traffic, speed and connectivity. The latest report shows that the rest of the world is continuing to outpace the U.S. in terms of speed, while the U.S. becomes the leading source of "attack traffic" worldwide.
We've all seen it and we've all done it - you're at a friends house with your laptop, and they don't have wireless, so you take a look and sign on to the nearest unsecured wireless network. No biggie, but certainly you wouldn't rely on this open network for all your Internet needs, right?
A report by analyst firm Mintel released this week claims that "Wi-Fi pirating" could be a main reason for the slow growth of broadband adoption over recent years.
Sometimes, I read a piece of news and I wonder to myself if I'm on the bleeding edge of what's coming next or if I'm running miles behind the pack. Reading an article by eMarketer this morning that says that email still wins out over Facebook for "keeping in touch" has me wondering yet again where I stand.
According a survey conducted by Chadwick Martin Bailey, 86% of people use email to "share content", while just 49% said they use Facebook. As you might imagine, however, this is a stat that's strongly split between age groups.
