Business Insider always runs a good line in infographics and one from earlier this week caught our attention. Sourced from MBA Online, it provides a boggling array of "A Day in the Internet" stats — certainly enough to keep your average marketing manager in PowerPoint rapture for months to come.
Here's just a few for you: “In one day, enough information is consumed by internet traffic to fill 168 million DVDs.”
If you think the spam monster has been put back in the box, then think again. Each day 294 billion emails are sent — the chart helpfully noted that it would take two years to process that much snail mail in the US.
And across the top social media sites each day, 172 million users visit Facebook, 40 million visit Twitter and 22 million visit LinkedIn. There’s more of course, most of it very entertaining. But of course, it would be hardly fair blogging to copy it all so instead if you have a few minutes to kill, or perhaps a PowerPoint presentation due for the board by 5pm tonight, point your browser here .
Apple goes Microsoft on Android, yep you read that right
Business Insider also has a slightly more serious piece sourced this time from Dow Jones Newswires (isn't it great how we all get paid for pointing to each other’s stories). It suggests that Apple has adopted a strategy right out of the Microsoft playbook.
According to the story, “(Apple) found some patents, accused Android of infringing them, and then approached Android resellers for license fees. A lot of Android resellers, including Samsung and HTC, paid up. Microsoft filed lawsuits against companies that refused, like Barnes & Noble and Motorola which is soon becoming part of Google.”
Writer Matt Rosoff said the point of the exercise is not so much revenue generation but value destruction. The goal apparently is simply to make the Androids more expensive for resellers.
Or as the original DJNW story puts it, “Android has proliferated so widely that shutting the software out of the market using injunctions is no longer practical, one of the people said. Licensing is an alternative that could add cost to Android development and make it less appealing for manufacturers.”
There can be only one
When you're a verb, you don't spend a lot of time worrying about your brand. Which is why Google’s move to rebrand the Android App Store, Google Music and Google eBookstore (a genuinely awful name) as Google Play is kind of interesting.
According to <i>Mashable</i>, “The change is more in name than in functionality. In short, it’s an attempt by Google to break down the walls surrounding each of its content offerings. While users may have known that Google sells Android apps, some may have had less knowledge of its video or book offerings.”
The article said that Google is also integrating social sharing into Google Play.
What will be of longer term interest to Grok is what Google does around the branding of the output from Motorola Mobile unit that it stumped up several gazillion dollars for last year, and exactly what it will mean for all those other Android manufacturers. But that’s for another day.
There can be only two
The latest comScore data for the US for mobile phones was released yesterday and covered by <i>Techcrunch</i> . The number of smartphone users finally cracked the 100 million mark last month, up 13 per cent since October last year. But perhaps what is more interesting is how much petrol is left in the tank. comScore estimates there are still another 134 million older units in the US, meaning the upgrade cycle has a long, long way to run. That’s good news for IOS and Android. Android dominates the smartphone market share at 48.6 per cent, with IOS second at 29.5 per cent. Both operating systems grew in market share during the period covered.
Andrew Birmingham is the CEO of Silicon Gully Investment.
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