While we “don’t do numbers” at RedMonk, I come across many interesting numbers each week. Here are some:
Throwing Cold Water on All Them Tigers
Asia is nowhere near closing its economic and military gap with the West. The region produces roughly 30 percent of global economic output, but because of its huge population, its per capita gdp is only $5,800, compared with $48,000 in the United States. Asian countries are furiously upgrading their militaries, but their combined military spending in 2008 was still only a third that of the United States. Even at current torrid rates of growth, it will take the average Asian 77 years to reach the income of the average American. The Chinese need 47 years. For Indians, the figure is 123 years. And Asia’s combined military budget won’t equal that of the United States for 72 years.
Just Under Half a Million
Private companies cut 473,000 jobs from their payrolls in June, according to a survey by ADP employer services on Wednesday. The figure was slightly lower than the revised 485,000 jobs slashed in May, but was worse than economists expected and raised fears that the unemployment rate would continue to climb.
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Employment in the goods-producing sector was hit the hardest, where 250,000 jobs were shed. Manufacturers, which have shed workers for 40 months in a row, culled 146,000 jobs in June, and construction employment fell by 97,000 as builders continue to cut back. In the services sector 223,00 jobs were lost.
Yeah, maybe it’s not a case of “Asia” catching-up, but us catching-down.
VirtualBox Mo’
All told, Sun saw over 1 million downloads in both April and May of this year, hitting 14.5 million downloads in total since VirtualBox was launched in October 2007 by German software company Innotek (acquired by Sun in February 2008). Product registrations have crested above 4 million. “The rate of downloads is actually accelerating, and so is the rate of registrations,” says Hall, adding that the conversion rate is quite high. “We’re really pleased by the snowballing effect.”
Sun has not talked about the conversion that perhaps matters most: how many people have opted to pay the piddling $30 per year that Sun charges for tech support on VirtualBox.
Firefox Downloads
Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times. Earlier in June, Apple released Safari 4. In March, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8, and Google came out with a speedier beta of its Chrome browser.
Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter, it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers.
Also, Firefox 3.5 had 5M downloads in the first day.
Bluray Far From a Fast Cash-cow
Although nearly half of Americans now own a high definition television, the overwhelming majority show little interest in owning a Blu-Ray player, according to Harris Interactive survey released Friday.
Out of 2,401 US adults polled online in April, about 93 per cent said they are unlikely to buy a Blu-ray player within the next year. That’s up from 91 per cent who said they were unlikely to buy Blu-Ray within a year back in 2008. (Taking into account that people who purchased a player last year no longer have a reason to buy a second one, we’d call that figure a draw).
The Blu-Ray response is still wildly out of whack with Harris’ count of US HD television adoption. The pollster says 47 per cent of American consumers report having a high definition television, up from 35 per cent last year.
The cynics (among us) would say that consumers are finally getting wise to repaying for the same content over again. The “upgrade” business model doesn’t seem to be working so well in video. Then again, DVD sales were a fantastic cash-cow under the same model. Perhaps DVDs are too good and priced just right that people could give a damn about “better” quality and more interactive content, despite how cool it seems.
How Much Does a Cloud Cost, OSS Support Edition
Canonical is offering annual contracts with either standard (9×5 business hours) or advanced (24×7) coverage. An entry-level cloud support contract includes support for five physical machines and up to 25 virtual machines for $4,750 per year; a 24×7 contract costs $17,500 for the same setup. (The pricing is scaling proportionately with the number of hours in the week covered, which is fair enough.) Each additional physical server can get a support pack that can have up to ten virtual machines for $1,250 for standard support and $3,000 for advanced support.
If customers are set about building a big Ubuntu-based, EC2-compatible cloud, they can go all the way and get a site support contact, with unlimited servers and virtual machines – good for one physical location, not spanning multiple locations – for $90,000 per year for standard support for $150,000 for full-on support.
The Intuit Cloud
- 4 million companies on QuickBooks
- 25 million employees within that 4 million companies.
- 80,000 developers on our Intuit Developer Network
- 20 apps (5 of which are federated apps)
Above via email. See the Intuit Partner Platform for more.
APAC Developers & The Cloud
From the Evans Data APAC Developer Survey.
Greenovation
Venture capital investment in green technology worldwide jumped 43 percent in three months to $1.2 billion in the second quarter, Greentech reported Tuesday.
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Solar was followed by auto and transport at $202 million with eight deals, biofuels, gasification and cleaner coal at $195 million with 12 deals and batteries at $181 million with 10 deals.
Disclosure: Intuit, Sun, Microsoft, and Canonical are clients.
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