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According to recent data analysis from mobile analytics firm Localytics, iPhone application usage peaks in the evenings and on weekends and is much lower during the hours of a typical business day. From this, the firm concludes that the iPhone is still primarily a personal gadget as opposed to one that's used for business purposes.

But is app usage the true measure of the device's success at making corporate inroads? Or does it just show that people don't play with their iPhone apps while at work?

Twitter launched lists in October 2009 and this feature has quickly become an essential part of the Twitter ecosystem. The power of lists isn't just in their ability to organize your followers, they also provide an an insight into how other users use Twitter. The number of followers an account has might show its popularity, but the number of lists called, for instance, "most influential" or "essential", that it appears on reveals just how important that account is.

Today, we're using lists to unscientifically analyze what we think are some of the some of the most influential Twitter accounts. We used a variety of lists to identify 485 accounts and then ran those names through Tableau's data visualization tools.

Cloud computing means many things, but almost all definitions include some key value propositions: scalable on-demand resources, a metered pay-per-use model, access over the Internet, and infrastructure management and optimization that is better than most data centers.

At a more conceptual level, cloud computing abstracts away all the undifferentiated IT tasks. Most businesses don't add any value to their customers or create any competitive advantage for themselves when they buy, build, configure, and manage servers and storage. This is doubly true for disaster recovery equipment and data centers.

...and other interesting smartphone statistics.

When compared with some of the other smartphones on the market, owners of phones running Google's Android mobile operating system are predominantly male. This finding comes from analytics firm AdMod's latest Mobile Metrics Report, which revealed that 73% of Android users are male. Meanwhile, on the iPhone, iPod Touch and Palm platforms, the ratio of male-to-female owners was more even. However, males were still in the majority even on those devices, accounting for 54% to 58% of the users.

This was only one of the findings from the firm's January report, which also examined ages of smartphone owners, propensity to download and pay for mobile applications and interest in purchasing the upcoming Apple iPad.

It was a few years ago that the World Internet Project stated that "broadband changes everything." The next evolution of the Web no doubt is largely being driven by the amazing user experience and functionality delivered by the iPhone and other smartphones. iPhone applications are no longer just toys for techies! This week we looked at examples of health and fitness iPhone apps, and 2010 Winter Olympics iPhone apps. Today we check out what's being delivered by government.

Are people who they really say they are online? Conventional wisdom tells us that social networking sites, blogs and other social media outlets have allowed people to carefully craft online "personas" - essentially idealized versions of who they are in real life. Are you wittier online? More outgoing? More social? Friendlier? For those hiding behind the keyboard and computer screen, personality traits like these are easier to fake. Or are they?

According to a recent research study, maybe not. Psychologists found that "faking it" online is tougher than previously imagined. In fact, the results of the study show that people are much more likely to reveal their true personalities online and not the idealized image of who they want to be.

There's a fine line between what is considered a knowledge database and an invasion of privacy, and that line is likely to be determined by marketing. This week we wrote an article about Please Rob Me - a service that identifies Foursquare and Gowalla check-ins on Twitter and lets others know that a person is not home. While location-based services are often touted for their social and recommendation-based benefits, the realization that they can be used negatively have many questioning the responsibility of those groups that collect the data.

An initial public offering, or IPO, is when a company opts to trade its shares publicly on the stock market - a decision that can be a risky investment. At times, unprofitable startups go public in hopes of reversing their situation, but most of the time IPOs come from the profitable startups looking to expand their value. Based on some fascinating new data visualization tools released today from Tableau Software (see note below), an intriguing trend has emerged among profitable and unprofitable IPOs.

In only four short years, the worldwide mobile data traffic will reach 40 exabytes per year. This is according to new research from Cisco which sees the traffic jumping from 0.09 exabytes per month in 2009 to 3.6 exabytes per month by 2014. And in case you don't know what an exabyte is, it's 1 billion gigabytes. That's one quintillion bytes.

It appears that not only does the mobile web have a future, the mobile web is the future.

Youth social networking researcher danah boyd has observed that many people presume the way they use social networks is the way everyone uses them. "I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men," she says. "I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it's often hard to see beyond that."

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

Today is the 3rd annual international Data Privacy Day and a whole bunch of companies are listed on the organization's website as participants. Google, Microsoft, even Walmart. Facebook is not listed as a participant and has stirred up a lot of controversy with changes to its privacy policy lately.

Why are these corporations singing out loud about protecting our personal privacy? According to the website, "Data Privacy Day is an international celebration of the dignity of the individual expressed through personal information." More than dignity, this is about building trust with consumers so that these companies can do things with our personal data. Some of those are things we might like, a lot. Aggregate data analysis and personal recommendation could be the foundation of the next step of the internet. Unfortunately, Facebook's recent privacy policy changes put that future at risk by burning the trust of hundreds of millions of mainstream users.

The Guardian, ostensibly a UK newspaper, but also a major proponent for opening data held by governments to use by outside software developers, has launched some software of its own: a search engine that unearths datasets and pathways to data sets provided by governments around the world. World Government Data Search is now live.

Yesterday the UK government released its new data site, data.gov.uk, to rave reviews (including ours). The new Guardian search engine searches across the UK, US, New Zealand and Australian governments' data sites. The company also offered up a gallery of the 10 best visualizations and mash-ups built on top of government data like this.

Smartphone users are becoming increasingly comfortable with using their phones to shop online. According to new data from Compete, about 37% of smartphone users have purchased something with their handset in the last six months. Among the most popular items that these users bought were music, books, DVDs, video games and movie tickets. At the same time, though, Compete also found that smartphone users are very likely to abandon shopping sites that haven't been optimized for mobile usage. Almost 8% of smartphone owners who tried to buy something from their phone were simply unable to do so.

Facebook used to be dominated by white and Asian users, but tonight the company announced results of a demographic study of its users concluding that the percentages of black and Hispanic users of the site are now approaching their percentages of the population in the general U.S. public. Hear that? Facebook scientists have looked at the data and everything is OK now.

For months, we've been calling on Facebook to open up user data in an appropriate way for the public at large to study.

Consumer watchdog group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has initiated a lawsuit against multiple U.S. government agencies for failing to disclose their policies regarding the use of social media for surveillance. According to the filing, the government has been making use of social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter to aid in various investigations where the alleged crimes range from the relatively minor infringement of underage drinking, to more serious endeavors, such as the coordination of protesters during the G-20 summit. However, when requests were made under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for details about governmental policies, several agencies failed to respond with information regarding what data is collected, under what circumstances and who has access to it.

Dominic Pouzin is a worldly, smart guy. After doing school and internships in France, the UK, South Korea and India, he moved to Atlanta where he took a job in the NBC (Nuclear, Bacteriological, Chemical) protection field. "I designed statistical models, programmed robots, and implemented access control stations for nuclear plants," Pouzin says on LinkedIn.

He left that field to become a software engineer at Microsoft and this week launches his own startup company with a collection of former Microsoft co-workers. The new company is called Data Applied and offers very affordable "data mining in the cloud" - it applies automated algorithms to large sets of data in order to extract patterns, preconditions and outliers.

The social media data company Rapleaf has just released the final parts of their 3-part study involving the demographics and online behavior of webmail users. In the first part of the study, gender and age data was examined and revealed some interesting findings...like the fact that Gmail has more female users than male, for example. In the final sections of the study, the company has turned its attention to social networking data to discover more details about webmail users' social media profiles, memberships and network preferences.

In the last two posts in this series, we discussed the Web of data, which makes structured interlinked data sets machine-accessible, and the Web of identities, which makes data about people machine-accessible while addressing privacy and data volatility.

This time, we'll focus on the Web of services, which makes services accessible to and processable for machines. These Webs all have a semantic architecture in common and follow basic Web principles, such as being decentralized, modular, simple, addressable via URIs, and built for machines.

Invite code available at bottom of the article!

Although the data repository Infochimps has been open for a year or so now, the company is making a big announcement at the DEMOfall 09 conference today. Now, in addition to simply being one of the best sources for finding raw data online, you're able to share your data - or even list it for sale - through new site features which the company hopes will encourage businesses to open up their commercial datasets to the world.

We started tracking VC funding in October 2008, as the financial markets were melting. What caught our eye in those dark and gloomy days was True Ventures' announcement of its Series A investment in Syncplicity. The more we looked, the more we found that the headlines were wrong. It was not all doom and gloom, not in our corner of the universe: early-stage Web tech ventures. So we figured that getting (and passing on to you) good reliable data on a timely basis would be a good idea. Searching for that turned out to be harder than we thought, and herein lies a tale.