The Good NET Guide

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Not an easy thing to conceptualize indeed, but according to eMarketer there will be more mobile Internet users in China than the entire population of the US by the end of this year.

For your reference, the 2010 estimate of the size of the United States population stands at roughly 310 million people according to Wikipedia, so that’s a shitload of people browsing the Web from their phones right there.

The report, which you can purchase here, also says the number of mobile Internet users in China will grow fast to reach a staggering 957 million, and that the country will count approximately 1.3 billion mobile subscribers by 2014.

eMarketer points out that those mobile Internet users do not currently monetize as well as smaller mobile audiences in, say, the States, which means that mobile advertising spending levels in China are still low relative to the size of the mobile Web user base. Also, the company highlights another key trend in China, which is that mobile subscriber growth is actually slowing while mobile Internet user growth is accelerating.

More in this blog post (via Twitter).

(Photo credit: Flickr / lime*monkey / CC BY 2.0)

PayPal has seen the future, and apparently it lies out East. The eBay company has just announced plans to double its presence in the Asian-Pacific region by the end of 2010, and made a couple of other, separate announcements to underscore its focus on Asia.

At PayPal’s new international headquarters in Suntec City, Singapore’s technology hub in the middle of the nation’s central business district, the company said that it plans to double the number of employees in Asia Pacific from 1,000 currently to more than 2,000 by the end of the year. The company plans to add more than 100 new jobs at its international headquarters in Singapore alone, as it represents all of the company’s business outside of the United States.

New jobs will be located at all seven offices in the region including Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan. For its Singapore business headquarters and development center, PayPal will be recruiting Singapore-based professionals with expertise in technology, product development, infrastructure design, risk and engineering.

PayPal says it has processed more than $6 billion of total payment volume (at spot rate) in Asia Pacific in 2009, an increase of 38 percent from 2008. Since its establishment in the region in 2006, the company has struck dozens of partnerships with Asian companies including this morning’s announcements today with DBS, Singapore’s largest bank, and China UnionPay, China’s bankcard association.

As part of PayPal’s plans to help grow the e-commerce ecosystem across Asia Pacific, the company also announced that the PayPal mobile payment software development kit (SDK) will be made available to developers in the region. That way, developers can add a checkout button to accept mobile payments without the need to collect financial information from customers with just a few lines of code.

The mobile SDK, which will initially support iPhone app development, will be available in the second quarter of 2010 to developers in the region.

Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, two of Chicago’s best-known tech entrepreneurs, plan to invest as much as $10 million annually in early-stage technology companies through a new fund dubbed Lightbank.

The goal is to provide early-stage startups with seed financing, ranging from 100k to $1 million and fund companies with up to $10 million on an annual basis for the next 10 years. In addition to investing capital, Lightbank intends to take an active role in guiding and nurturing companies through all stages of growth.

With the new fund, the entrepreneurs want to help establish Chicago as a technology hub and support the heaps of “untapped entrepreneurial talent” they claim the city is filled with. If you think that applies to you, find out how to apply here.

Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell met at the University of Michigan. In 2001, Lefkofsky founded InnerWorkings, a print and procurement company that was taken public in 2006. In 2005, Lefkofsky and Keywell started Echo Global Logistics, a transportation and logistics management company that went public in 2009. In 2006, the pair co-founded MediaBank, a data-driven media-buying platform that they claim now processes nearly 20 percent of the media purchased annually in the United States.

In 2007, they seeded and co-founded Groupon, a collective buying site that now operates in over 40 cities, has more than three million subscribers and has raised close to $36 million from New Enterprise Associates and Accel Partners.

Between the two of them, Lefkofsky and Keywell claim to have raised over $150 million in capital for their ventures, and generated more than $1.5 billion in investor returns.

We’re looking forward to tracking which investments their new fund will be used for.

This year’s Winter Olympic games have come to a close, and while we may have hated the way its broadcast was handled by NBC, that didn’t stop Americans (or people around the world) from turning to their computers to check out the latest news. Google has just posted some search trends it saw during the games, offering some insight into which events captivated each country the most. Google writes that percentage-wise, Canadians searched for Olympics-related queries twice as much as everyone else (no surprise there). The United States came in second. And, rounding out the top three was the Netherlands, even though they had fewer medals that many of the other countries at the Games.

Perhaps more interesting are the events that grabbed the most attention in each country. In the United States, by far the most searches were driven by the tragic death of luger Nodar Kumaritashvili. Other popular events in the States included the men’s hockey finals and the men’s free skate. Korea’s graph, on the other hand, is absolutely dominated by women’s figure skating, driven by the success of national sensation Kim Yu-Na.  You can find graphs from more countries in the Google blog post.

Late last month, Apple made the abrupt decision to remove any applications it deemed to be ’sexy’ from the App Store, citing complaints from parents. But the process of removing applications was clearly imperfect, as Apple pulled down some applications only to restore them a few days later. And apparently they missed a few: we’ve gotten word from one app publisher that had a ‘boob’ application called Tubes! earn nearly $10,000 in the week following Apple’s sex ban. Not because it was an especially good application, but because it was one of the only ones left.

Before Monday, February 15, when the Apple sex ban started going into effect, Tubes was only pulling in around $30 a day. A day later, that number had more than doubled. As the days passed (and more sexy apps were removed), the application climbed up to a peak of nearly $1,600 a day. And then at 5:30 PM yesterday, Tubes! had its rise to glory cut short.

So how exactly did Tubes! slip through the cracks? The answer is pretty simple: it wasn’t available in the United States. The application was published by iPhone development house Mobile Simplicity, which generally builds more useful apps like CraigsMobileList (a mobile client for the popular classifieds site) and What’s Fresh (which tells you which fruits are in season). Mobile Simplicity built the Tubes! application at the request of a client, but under the condition that the application would not be sold in the United States, because the firm didn’t want the application to be listed alongside its more  respectable (ahem) apps.

Mobile Simplicity CEO Tony Lombardo says that application finally caught Apple’s attention when it started climbing up the top app charts (he thinks it got as high as #4 overall in Germany). Lombardo actually says he’s okay with the ban, but he does wish there was a way for Apple to allow these apps on the App Store under their own category rather than banning them outright.

It’s worth pointing out that in an entirely hypocritical move, Apple has allowed some larger companies like Sports Illustrated and Playboy to keep their sexy apps, which gives them a monopoly on bikinis and cleavage on the App Store. And, as we can see from the chart above, that can translate to quite a bit of money.

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?

Conde Nast has been working to fuse its fashion content with technology and social media. Lucky Magazine incorporated e-commerce into its online site and also partnered with Four Square. Today, Vogue Magazine is launching an innovative iPhone app that takes a page from social fashion startups like Polyvore and the Like.com’s Couturious.

The free app, called the Vogue Stylist, is meant to be used by women to do exactly what its name indicates: help style women’s wardrobes. Users can choose one of the trends highlighted by Vogue within the app and upload clothing they already own. Vogue Stylist will then produce stylish outfits from the pieces that reflect the current trend. The catch: Vogue will style outfits only with products from their advertisers.

March trends include The Trench, Floaty Dress, Tribal, Natural Shades, and Bright Lip. User can also their looks via a click to buy feature,and can locate the item in a nearby store. The app has a social element to allow users to save styled looks and publish to Facebook. The App will launch with 91 brands and over 600 articles of clothing and beauty products. Pilot brands include Gucci, Hudson Jeans, Kate Spade, Longchamp Paris, Nine West, Valentino, and Via Spiga. Within the app, Vogue will also offer special event invitations, and shopping discounts.

Conde Nast also has fashion-focused iPhone apps for Style.com, Lucky Magazine and Teen Vogue.

A few days ago, I noted that Seesmic Web had perfected the management of Twitter contacts. I was wrong. A new service has been brought to my attention that is much, much better. Actually, it’s a must-use.

While Seesmic Web is great for a number of things (it’s arguably the best Twitter web client out there), ManageTwitter is great at one thing: managing your Twitter followers. To use it, you simply link up your Twitter account (via OAuth) and it lets you know which of the Twitter users you follow aren’t following you back, who is inactive, who is talkative, and who is quiet. Each of these are great gauges for whether you should still be following them or not.

Personally, I was able to eliminate over 200 people I was following that I determined I shouldn’t be. Most of these were users I followed a couple years ago that either were simply not using the service any more, or were no longer that interesting to me.

Unfollowing users is as simple as selecting their name and clicking the “unfollow” button. You can also do this in bulk. And hovering over any users gives you more information about them including their average tweets per day. You can also sort the various ManageTwitter fields by ‘date followed,’ ‘username,’ ‘followers,’ or ‘timezone.’

While there are no shortage of services that recommend people you should follow, I’ve long needed one to suggest who I maybe shouldn’t be following. Of those, ManageTwitter is easily the best.

Created by the Australian company Melon Media, the site notes that it has unfollowed 17092 people for 381 users in the past 3 days.

Exciting news, friends. I’ve just come back from the future, and I have some news to share.

More:
Remeber that post about the wire shoe thing?

Social gaming behemoth Zynga is going international. The company is opening an office in India, in the hopes of capitalizing on the rapidly growing market. Zynga says that India has 81 million internet users, and is projected to become the third biggest online market by 2013 (behind the United States and China).

The new development house won’t be building games that are specific for the Indian market, nor will they be modifying existing games. Instead, it sounds like they’ll be building new games that Zynga will deploy worldwide (the company is also hoping a local presence will increase popularity of existing hits like FarmVille). The company plans to hire around 100 people for the new office by the end of the year.

Zynga, which recently raised another $180 million in funding, already has offices in San Francisco, LA, and Baltimore. Below is a mockup of what the new Zynga office will look like: