The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘million-people’

In their January 2010 State of the Mobile Web report, Opera Software looked at social networking on the mobile Web and concluded that Facebook dominated that aspect by a margin throughout 2009, while Twitter was the fastest-growing.

This month, the company looked at Mobile Web search in the United States, and claims Google is – perhaps unsurprisingly – leading the pack.

According to Opera’s report, Google Search accounts for more than 9% of all page views on the mobile Web in the United States, outpacing rivals Yahoo! and Bing, who respectively command 4.3% and 0.03% of all page views.

Opera, as usual, also provided some numbers about the growth of its own mobile browser Opera Mini, and general page view stats.

The company says that in January 2010, 50 million people used Opera Mini, a 7.4% increase from December 2009 and up 149% compared to January 2009. Collectively, Opera Mini users viewed more than 23.3 billion pages last month, up 12.7% since December 2009 and an increase of 208% since the same period last year.

Opera’s servers processed more than 3 petabytes of data, Opera Software co-founder Jon von Tetzchner writes. That’s a gigantic amount of data, and he puts that in perspective as follows:

This means, each month, our servers crunch an amount of data equivalent to the entire repository of the Internet Archive, with a full-size copy of Avatar thrown in for good measure.

Do you use Opera Mini on your phone?

What do you use for searching the Web from your mobile?

RetailMeNot.com, “a top consumer destination for coupons, discounts and promotional codes for merchandise, groceries, travel and services”, shared some interesting statistics about consumer coupon use for the first month of 2010. New Jersey loves printing off coupons for use in brick-and-mortar stores, while New York prefers online coupon codes. Almost 15 million people visited RetailMeNot.com in January and saved over eight million dollars with online and printed coupons.

Popular location-based social network Brightkite has simultaneously released mobile apps for some Nokia as well as Palm smartphones.

The release of the apps follows earlier launches of Android, BlackBerry and iPhone applications.

The Nokia app can be downloaded from the Ovi Store already and should run fine on all Symbian S60 5th Edition phones, including the Nokia N97 and the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic.

Brightkite curiously doesn’t use its own brand name for the Palm app, which was baptized Parafoil instead. The application was custom-developed for Palm’s WebOS platform and is compatible with the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi devices.

I’m told the reason that it isn’t named Brightkite, is because the program was actually developed by two Brightkite users, John Barker and Kyle Johnson, based on the startup’s open API.

As you can tell from the third screenshot embedded below, Brighkite has adopted the ‘check-in’ moniker to let people update their friends on their current locations and what they’re up to.

Brightkite says the United States remains its biggest market, but that international markets are growing in importance, which prompts the company to expand its range of handset support. The company adds that it currently sees about 2 million people using Brightkite on a monthly basis, across all platforms (though the vast majority uses it on a phone).

Alternatives to Brightkite include Foursquare, Loopt, Gowalla, aka-aki networks and Rummble.

Like bad beer, cracker jacks, and drunken fans getting hammered in the parking lot, smack-talking and sports-betting are staples of American sports. And that’s why Bema Studios created Smackdaddy, a free iPhone app [iTunes link] that allows you to both bet on games (currently just NFL, NHL and NBA) and tell your friends they smell.

I got a chance to play with Smackdaddy this Sunday and loved it – it is easy to use, intuitive, and addictive

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

VoIP services juggernaut Skype has seen its share of international calling minutes jump to 12% in 2009, a 50% increase compared to the year before. And as you can tell from the pie chart below, 54 billion minutes out of 406 billion in total were accumulated by users calling each other Skype-to-Skype last year. Are you listening, carriers?

The numbers hail from a report published by TeleGeography, a benchmark research service for the international long-distance telephony industry.

TeleGeography says international call volume from telephones has grown at an annual rate of 15 percent over the past 25 years, but that growth has been slowing for the past few years. In the past two years, specifically, international telephone traffic annual growth has reportedly slowed to a mere 8 percent, growing from 376 billion minutes in 2008 to an estimated 406 billion minutes last year.

Skype’s traffic, however, has soared. The service’s on-net international traffic (between Skype users) grew 51 percent in 2008, and is projected to grow 63 percent in 2009, to 54 billion minutes.

TeleGeography analyst Stephan Beckert refers to Skype’s estimated volume of traffic as “tremendous” and goes on to say that Skype is now by far the largest provider of cross-border communications in the world.

Just yesterday, Skype Journal reported that the service has seen an all-time record number of concurrent logged on users: 22 million people signed in to Skype at the same time.

Or what the disruption of an industry looks like in figures and charts.

Tomorrow, eBay is set to release its latest quarter earnings, which means we’ll be able to match these traffic growth numbers with reported revenue figures. In October 2009, we reported on Skype hitting 521 million users and $185 million in quarterly revenue.

(Via Skype blog)

So much for zipping through airport security for people willing to pay $199 per year and have their fingerprints and iris images scanned to be pre-approved.

Clear, the largest company to leverage the Registered Traveler program in the U.S., has “ceased operation” as of 11 pm PST today and their parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc., is in the deadpool. They were “unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations.” Users were notified this evening by email.

The service was popular - it was used 250,000 times at Washington, DC airports alone. Overall, the company said, over 2.5 million people were processed using Clear. It operated security lanes at 20 U.S. airports: Albany, Atlanta, Boston’s Logan, Cincinnati, Denver, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, LaGuardia, Little Rock, New York JFK, Newark, Oakland, Orlando, Reno, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, San Jose, Washington, D.C.’s Reagan and Dulles, and Westchester.

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Next week I’ll be interviewing antitrust expert Gary Reback on his new book Free the Market!: Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive (buy it here). This is a HBSTech event being held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

This is the guy that represented Netscape in its epic legal battle with Microsoft in the nineties, and he was instrumental in convincing the U.S. government and a number of state attorneys general to sue Microsoft for antitrust violations.

In general he’s a proponent of ripping monopolies apart to keep competition strong. I’m generally less eager to kill off the companies that have won. It will definitely be a lively debate, and Google will be brought up more than once.

If you’d like to attend the event is free but has limited seating - register here. We should have archived video available after the event as well.

By the way, the book is an excellent read. It chronicles the big companies in silicon valley and reads more like a recent historical novel than a legal text. He can write.

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Imagini has launched the private beta version of its VisualDNA Shops widget to help monetise blogs and websites through a unique take on affiliate sales. The widget adds personalised product recommendations to any site, and immediately starts generating detailed demographic, psychographic and behavioural analytics of its visitors.

It does this using the company’s VisualDNA concept; working out people’s personality types based on the pictures they choose. Imagini draws the data from its consumer facing personality test site, Youniverse, which has profiled more than 15 million people since 2006. VisualDNA Shop presents visitors with a few visual questions, and delivers real-time product recommendations from Amazon.com based on their responses. Imagini secured $13.5m in funding in February this year, a chunk of which no doubt went on getting actor Stephen Fry to explain the VisualDNA concept in the video after the jump.

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Mochi Media, a well-financed San Francisco startup that operates a decentralized network of Flash-based online games and gaming websites and offers developers a way to distribute, monetize and get statistical information about their games, sure has done a good job growing its network to a significant size since it debuted its public beta product back in October 2007.

Sometime next week, the company is going to announce that in its first month of inclusion in comScore’s measurement system, it has taken the lead over one-stop shop gaming destinations in traffic by a margin. Combined with the company’s claim that the so-called ‘extended network’ is growing its delivered impressions by 5 to 10% month-over-month, Mochi Media should be attracting over 100 million visitors on a monthly basis right about now.

Looking at worldwide traffic, comScore pegs the Mochi Media network to have received a little over 91 million unique visitors last April, or roughly 8.2 per cent of the total traffic measured in the ‘Online Gaming’ category for that month. These are impressive numbers: the second ranked online gaming destination is Spil Games, and the total amount of traffic that network receives on a global scale per month is close to that of Mochi Media Action, a subset of Mochi’s network made up of only one genre (adventure games). Familiar brands you’d expect to rank higher, such as Yahoo! Games, MSN Games, EA Online and Nickelodeon, all obtain less than half Mochi Media’s reach worldwide.

It’s worth noting, however, that most of this traffic is coming from countries outside the U.S.: from those 91+ million visitors per month worldwide, only about 16 million visitors or roughly 17% originates from the Unites States. The company tells me a lot of visitors come from other English speaking nations like Canada and the U.K. but also from China and a good number of European countries.

I also got some numbers regarding its current network size: Mochi Media currently includes more than 14,000 games played across 30,000 websites, which the company claims translates to 1 billion game plays a month worldwide. A company representative declined to share any details about its revenue - the company provides technology for game developers to integrate advertising units powered and distributed by Mochi Media - but did say sales of pre-roll video advertising units are going particularly well, with CPM rates “in the low to mid-teens” for the U.S. and the UK.

Mochi Media is backed by $14 million in venture capital from Accel Partners and Shasta Ventures. Its most recent financing round was a $10 million Series B round from both investors back in June 2008. Meanwhile, the startup has convinced both a former MySpace (Carol Werner) as a Yahoo exec (Eric Boyd) to join its ranks and spurred small startups like the recently seed-funded HeyZap to do similar things.

Keep your eyes on this one, folks.

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