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This chart showing the share of time spent online by US social networkers is interesting in that Facebook’s usage-growth trajectory is consistent over quite a long period, three years or so.
The overall picture suggests that there are only two dominant players that matter – Google and Facebook. AOL looks in terminal decline with Microsoft not looking much better. The surprise could be Yahoo which is still up there just behind Google Sites (I’m not entirely sure what “Google Sites” are).
What’s perhaps more interesting is the bit that’s not there yet: all of Q3 2011 -> Q4 2011 and into 2012, to take into account Google+ which opened as an invite-only experiment in July with the doors thrown wide open just last week; and the new Facebook.
(Via AllThingsD)
Related: Google+ Reaches 50 Million User Mark in About 88 Days by Paul Allen on Google+.
[Later] Via ReadWriteWeb, news from Experian Hitwise showing that visits to Google+ increased by 1,269% last week – the first week since it opened to all.
RWW reports that the site received 15 million US visits, up from 1.1 million the week before. Google+ went from ranking 54th in Hitwise’s Social Networking and Forums category to ranking 8th in just one week, says RWW.
Hitwise has the visual evidence:
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QR codes may be turning up in more places than ever these days, but are people actually using them? According to market research firm Comscore, at least some of them are -- 14 million in June in the US alone, to be specific, or about 6.2 percent of all smartphone users. As for who makes up that slice of the smartphone market, Comscore says that just over 60 percent are male, 53 percent are between the ages of 18 and 34, and 36 percent have a household income of $100k or more. Folks are also apparently more likely to scan QR codes at home than at a retail store, and magazines and newspapers edge out websites or product packaging when it comes to the top source of the QR code being scanned. So, not exactly an explosion in use, but still fairly impressive for a weird-looking barcode that was rarely seen
outside of Japan until a few years ago.
Comscore finds 6.2 percent of smartphone users scan QR codes originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Aug 2011 07:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Ny mobilapplikasjon kan true SMS.
Tirsdag kveld varslet Facebook at de vil lansere en ny applikasjon til iPhone og Android under navnet Facebook Messenger.
Applikasjonen vil være selvstendig fra den eksisterende Facebook-applikasjonen, og vil gjøre det enklere for brukere av den populære nettjenesten å kommunisere med venner eller kontakter.
Hvordan man raskest får sendt en melding, enten det er en tekstmelding (SMS), en melding på Facebook eller som en e-post, er spørsmålet Facebook prøver å gjøre overflødig med tjenesten. Løsningen er en forlengelse av chat-funksjonen i Facebook, men applikasjonen bruker kontaktlisten i brukerens smarttelefon for å levere meldingen.
Det skal også være mye enklere å kommunisere med grupper.
Applikasjonen ble tilgjengelig for iPhone og Android brukere tirsdag, men den er i skrivende stund ikke tilgjengelig på Apples AppStore i Norge.
Spørsmålet er om applikasjonen kan true teleselskapenes inntjening på SMS. Teknologibloggen TechCrunch kommenterer at «SMS is more sc...
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Nucleus Research mener Google+ har brukervennligheten som Facebook mangler.
Analyseselskapet Nucleus Research er mest kjent for sine grundige sammenlikninger av hva ulike løsninger innen bedrifts-IT krever av investeringer, og hva slags inntjening de gir.
Innimellom kliner de til med et nyhetsbrev, «Tech Watch», med hardtslående synspunkter. I brevet som tikket inn i undertegnedes e-postkasse i går kveld heter det blant annet:
We’ll get right to it. Facebook is dead. After spending time with Google+ it’s not hard to see the ease of interaction and simplicity of design will make it the next spot for social interaction. Facebook feels like a clunky antique in comparison. What Facebook always missed was that its users would age and in doing so would add friends, minimize friends, graduate from school, get a job, and have kids. Google+ was designed from the beginning to be more livable. It will take a bit of time and there’s a lot of inertia with Facebook right now, but then MySpace was hot at one point as well. The real question is how wil...
Apple’s architects were just teasing us in June when they gave us a peek at the company’s new circular headquarters planned for Cupertino. Now, a group of idyllic renderings has surfaced, offering a more detailed look at what we call the AppleSaucer, officially called “Apple Campus 2.”
The 2.8 million-square-foot four-story workplace for 12,000 Apple employees will contain a 1,000-seat auditorium, 300,000 square feet of research facilities, a couple of levels of underground parking in the circular structure, as well as an external four-story parking structure. Best of all, it will run mostly off the grid, using its own “energy center” as its power source, using the conventional power grid as a backup.
The building will be enshrouded in huge pieces of curved glass. When originally presenting this to the City of Cupertino, Steve Jobs said, “We’ve used our experience making retail buildings all over the world now, and we know how to make the biggest pieces of glass in the world for architectural use.” Perhaps those enormous new pieces of glass Apple’s installing at its Fifth Avenue store will be a warm-up for this grand finale.
Beyond the renderings in the gallery below, Macrumors points us to PDFs (Intro, site plan/landscaping, floor plans, renderings) you can download from Cupertino.org that reveal even more details.
Steve Jobs says the groundbreaking for this magnificent flying-saucer-like edifice is planned for next year, with completion scheduled for 2015. Will this 360-degree circular behemoth be the new 1 Infinite Loop?
Approaching the AppleSaucer
Apple's Flying Saucer HQ
Apple's Flying Saucer HQ
Apple's Flying Saucer HQ
Apple's Flying Saucer HQ
Apple's Flying Saucer HQ
Apple's Flying Saucer HQ
Apple's Flying Saucer HQ
Apple's Flying Saucer HQ
the blue areas are offices, the white rectangles are air and light shafts, The pink areas are dining and amenities facilities, and the cream-colored areas are entrance cores.
Apple's Flying Saucer HQ
Apple's Flying Saucer HQ
More About: apple, Apple HQ, Applesaucer, Flying Saucer, trending
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Those quick-response (QR) codes you see spreading far and wide give smartphone users a painless way to go to a company’s website, get discounts or gather contact information. But some QR codes are scanned more than others. Why? Is it because those winning QR codes are so creatively designed?
Researchers at Lab42 wanted to know “what makes certain codes so scanworthy,” so they conducted an online survey via social networks of 500 Americans over 18, and found out that many people don’t even know what a QR code is.
For those who are hip to QR codes and what they can do, you might not be surprised at the one enticement most likely to get people to pull out that smartphone and scan a QR code:
Infographic courtesy Lab42
More About: infographic, MARKETING, QR Codes, research, scan, survey, trending
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Here’s something that might seem counter-intuitive. Free iPhone and iPod touch games generate more revenue than their paid counterparts on Apple’s
15 billion download-strong App Store.
The new finding comes from mobile analytics company Flurry. It analyzed the revenue generated by the top 100 grossing games on the App Store in January and June.
As it turns out, freemium, or free-to-play games generated 65% of all revenue from the top 100 grossing games in June. The majority stake represents a near complete flip-flop from January according to Flurry’s data, when 61% of revenue from the top 100 was coming in from premium, for-charge games.
It would seem that mobile application developers would be best served by adopting the freemium model, which hooks users with a free download and includes ads or in-app upgrades to generate revenue. Still, the data does not support a definitive conclusion on whether the revenue reversal represents a shift in consumer purchase preferences or a marked change in how developers are monetizing their applications.
Flurry tracks more than 90,000 apps on the App Store; it claims to be able to measure revenue generated per ranked position in the App Store top grossing category.
More About: apps, flurry, flurry analytics, games, iphone apps, Mobile 2.0
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When you research web browser statistics and trends, one thing soon becomes clear: Google Chrome is on a tear. It’s gaining users, fast. In less than three years, it has claimed more than 20% of the global web browser market and is without a doubt one of Google’s biggest success stories so far.
And the really amazing thing is that at the current rate, Chrome will overtake both Firefox and IE within a year and become the world’s most widely used web browser.
Yes, you read that right. We’ll soon explain how we got to that conclusion. (If you’re the impatient kind, scroll down to the second chart.)
The browser situation today
Today the web browser market share division worldwide looks like this:
Chrome is situated comfortably in third place. But what this chart doesn’t show is where things are heading, and that’s what we really want to investigate. Does it really stand a chance of passing Firefox and IE anytime soon?
Predicting the future of Chrome, IE and Firefox
Here below is what the past year looked like, plus the calculated, predicted growth of Chrome, Firefox and IE up to the end of 2012. We based the prediction on their average growth rate over the past six months.
Of course, reliable predictions are difficult to make for fast-moving technology like web browsers, but this is where things are currently headed. Chrome is growing like crazy while both Internet Explorer and Firefox are losing ground.
Based on the performance of the past six months:
- Chrome will pass Firefox by November 2011.
- Chrome will pass IE by June 2012.
- Chrome will have in excess of 50% market share by November 2012.
“But,” you might object, “is the trend for Chrome really that strong? I don’t really see it growing that fast.”
A closer look at the growth of Chrome so far
If you have any doubts that Chrome’s market share is not only growing, but doing so at an accelerating pace, take a look at this graph showing how Chrome has fared since its launch in 2008 until today.
The accelerating growth is clearly visible in the above graph (the increasingly sharp inclination of the curve).
Or you can just look at the numbers:
- It took 16 months for Chrome to get to 5%.
- Then half of that, eight months, for the next 5%.
- So, it took Chrome 24 months to get its first 10% market share.
- The next 10% took just 10 months.
That’s acceleration. Big time. No other web browser is showing anywhere near this kind of growth rate.
The Google advantage
If a different company than Google had released Chrome, would it have been as successful? Odds are it would at least have had a much more difficult time to get attention. Google has muscles, and above all, Google has visibility like no one else.
Online, Google of course has a huge marketing advantage over basically everyone else since it can recommend its Chrome browser on its web properties such as Google Search, YouTube, etc. Not even Facebook can compare with Google when it comes to sheer web presence, reaching over a billion users.
That said, Google has clearly built a very good and highly popular product. If people didn’t like Chrome, the browser wouldn’t be able to retain users to the extent it seems to be doing.
It will be extremely interesting to see if either Mozilla or Microsoft manages to do something to break the current trend and halt Google’s assault on the web browser market. Right now, though, things aren’t looking too good for them.
Data source: Web browser stats from StatCounter.
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