ReadWriteWeb

When it comes to predicting the future, we don't need a crystal ball anymore. These days, we just need to look at how people act online - what they share with their friends on Facebook and Twitter - to predict things like box office success or the stock market.

With that in mind, we're here to see if some social media statistics and science can help us call some Oscar winners a couple days early.

"If Engineering at Etsy has a religion, it's the Church of Graphs," Ian Malpass writes on the Etsy Code as Craft blog. And how is Etsy fulfilling its religious obligations? With a Node.js daemon called StatsD, which the company has made available on GitHub. StatsD listens for messages on a UDP port, conducts its counting or timing, and then sends the info off to graphite for graphing.

It's based on a Perl daemon of the same name created by Cal Henderson for Flickr.

As 2010 draws to a close we're taking a look at a few cloud startups that show promise and that we haven't covered on ReadWriteCloud.

Netuitive is an automated, cloud-based IT monitoring system for both traditional and virtualized IT environments. It applies predictive analytics to IT management by using algorithms to determine the "normal" state of various systems and then issuing alerts whenever a system deviates from the norm. For example, if your ERP system suddenly starts processing more transactions than usual, Netuitive can notify the appropriate admin. The idea is to catch problems before an outage occurs.

Here's another contest, but this one has a larger prize and greater purpose: The Heritage Provider Network is offering $3 million for an algorithm that will predict hospitalizations by using a pre-defined set of patient data sources. The Heritage Health Prize site claims that over $30 billion was spent on unnecessary hospital admissions in 2006. If patients that are at risk for hospitalization can be identified in advance, health care providers could develop new care plans to prevent hospitalization. The contest will be open for registration early next year.

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."

According to a number of analysts, the cumulative mobile advertising revenues in Europe's five largest economies (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K.) will top $1 billion in 2015. On its way to this, as a new whitepaper from mobile ad optimization and advertising firm Smaato points out, Europe faces a number of unique challenges. As the report's author, mobileSQUARED's chief analyst Nick Lane notes, the upcoming 2012 London Olympics will be a catalyst for driving total mobile advertising revenues in these countries beyond the $1 billion mark.

For many, the launch of FaceTime, Apple's video calling service for the iPhone and iPod touch, seemed like a gimmick with little practical usage. According to a new survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, however, 19% of American adults have now tried video calling, video chats or teleconferences using services like Skype, Google Talk and Apple's iChat. Looking at the number of total Internet users in the U.S., this means that almost a quarter of them have now tried video calling.

Google's social network Orkut never quite caught on in most countries, but it remains the most popular social network in Brazil. According to new data from comScore, Orkut remains safely ahead of Facebook there, with 36 million unique visitors last month. Facebook is only the third most popular social networking site in Brazil, but it is growing rapidly, and the site now attracts about 9 million visitors per month - up from just about 1.5 million a year ago. The second largest social networking site in Brazil is Windows Live, which reaches about 12.5 million visitors.

Adult cell phone users who use apps are younger, more educated and more affluent than other adults. Over the last few weeks, the Pew Internet & American Life Project has  been looking at how adults use technology, and a new report released today focuses on app usage among this age group. According to this report, apps are not indispensable for most adults. While about 35% of U.S. adults now have apps on their cell phones, only 24% of adults actually use them. About a tenth of all U.S. adults doesn't even know if their phones can run apps.

Logging statistics is a two-stage process. First, you need to collect the information and store it. Next, you need to expose this information to end users.

It's quite simple to display a table of stats for users to look at, and this is a good option if you need to provide a detailed breakdown. But for analysing large datasets or simply providing an overview of recent activity on a site, a graph may be a better approach.