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Numbers, Volume 45

Old Phone, in Atlanta Admirals Club

$2M for Evernote, Netflix growth, Flash poaching, virtual goods, cloud in the SMB.

While we “don’t do numbers” at RedMonk, I come across many interesting ones each week. Here are some:

$2,655,000 a year for note taking app

The key stat for Evernote’s business is how many people it can convert to its premium service, which costs $45 a year for more storage and features. There are now 59,000 paying Evernote subscribers [out of 3 million users], up from 35,000 when there were two million total users.

I’ve use Evernote daily, mostly for work, for over a year now. It’s fantastic. The one thing I’d like is tight integration with Google Apps: I’m not sure why it doesn’t just do that – is the API lacking?

Streaming movies across platforms

Nintendo of America COO Reggie Fils-Aime just said on CNBC that almost 1 million Wii users have “participated” in the Netflix streaming system so far, which Netflix debuted this spring.

We’re not sure how he’s defining “participated” — whether these people simply ordered their free disc to activate Netflix streaming, or whether they’ve actually watched movies.

It took about 3 months for 1 million Xbox 360 users to try the Netflix app for that console, but that required an Xbox Live subscription.

Bigger picture, Netflix said last month that 55% of its 14 million subscribers, or about 7.7 million people, used Netflix streaming for more than 15 minute last quarter. That’s up from 36% of its subscribers during the same period last year.

Also, see the recent news that Netflix is using Amazon’s cloud for much of it’s infrastructure.

Mobile Dining

As of today, OpenTable has now seated 3 million diners, generating $150m in revenues for its restaurant partners (based on a $50 bill per diner).

The question is how can every business start benefiting from customers having the Internet in their pocket, a smart phone.

Sprint loosing less

Over the past quarter, Sprint lost a mere 75,000 wireless subscribers, representing the company’s best news on wireless customer numbers since it lost 60,000 wireless subscribers in the third quarter of 2007. The company hasn’t had a net positive wireless subscriber addition since the second quarter of 2007, when it added 373,000 wireless subscribers.

Android Deployments

Google says it’s pleased with demand for phones with its software. More than 60,000 Android phones are being sold and activated a day, Senior Vice President Jeff Huber said during Google’s first-quarter earnings call this month.

That’s the one bring spot in this larger piece about fragmentation in the Android space.

Switching from Flash to HTML 5

Scribd – the document sharing site that boasts 50 million unique users a month – has told the world that after three years and “multi-millions” of dollars of development on Flash, it’s ditching the beleaguered platform in favor of the fledgling HTML5 standard.

Friedman and crew have already moved 200,000 documents from Flash to HTML5, and eventually, the company will transfer all documents stored on the site, which number in the tens of millions.

See a demo of their HTML 5 stuff.

Hadoop for everything

Yahoo! started using Hadoop initially in 2006 as a science project to process and analyze massive data sets. They developed a prototype on 20 nodes. Today, Yahoo! manages more than 25,000 nodes for data processing and analytics.

Yahoo! found that product development could be done in a fraction of the time. They found they could just throw machines at a project to do the processing. What once took 29 days could be accomplished in less than one.

The location boys get out their rulers

At the stationary store

While Foursquare may have just crossed 1 million users, and MyTown now has 2 million, Lee revealed today that Latitude, Google’s location-based service, has 3 million active users — and some 8 million have signed up since the service launched.

The first week of iPad use according to Yahoo!

[W]e identified a male skew in the 35-44 age group among these early users. In fact, among all users, men outnumber women 2:1. Given the economy, people with higher earning power were probably the first to buy the iPad. The first Yahoo! iPad users were 94% more likely to be affluent consumers with solid wealth and strong incomes than typical U.S. Yahoo! users.

Paying for nothing

It’s estimated that virtual goods will generate $1.6 billion in the U.S. in 2010. Some predict that sales of digital goods will account for 20 percent of gaming revenue by 2011.

Over beers in the suburbs of Atlanta this week, I heard the best explanation for why people spend money on “virtual goods.” People like buying things, John Willis said, it doesn’t really matter what: we’re consumers. I think that’s about it.

Making money with open source BI

Over the 3 years that commercial offerings based on BIRT have been available, Actuate has generated over $45 million in BIRT-based business, making Actuate the leading open source BI vendor. BIRT adopters consist of over 450 paying customers, including some of the world’s most recognized brand names including HSBC Bank and Fujitsu.

IBM integrating more data

The acquisition [of Cast Iron Systmes on May 3rd, 2010] expands IBM’s industry-leading business process and integration software portfolio, which grew more than 20 percent in the first quarter of 2010.

Cloud in the S of SMB

While plans to utilize cloud computing remain relatively low for the first half of 2010, companies with less than 20 employees will be a driving force behind the adoption and growth of this service. Cloud usage over the first 6 months of 2010 will be 38% among companies with less than 20 employees. This is significantly higher than companies with 20 or more employees, where only 20% are using cloud today or plan to start using the cloud within the first 6 months of 2010.

Virtualization Money

[VMWare] [r]evenue for the quarter, ended March 31, was US$634 million, up from $470 million for the same period last year. Net income before one-time charges was $133 million, or $0.32 per share, up from $100 million, or $0.25 per share, in last year’s first quarter, VMware said…. Software license revenue for the quarter was $312 million, up 21 percent from the first quarter last year. Services revenue, comprised mainly of fees for software maintenance, increased 51 percent to $322 million.

The IT Bread-line

How to lift out your new printer

Google says it’s pleased with demand for phones with its software. More than 60,000 Android phones are being sold and activated a day, Senior Vice President Jeff Huber said during Google’s first-quarter earnings call this month.

But tech, even in a downturn, remained one of the better occupations. Although the overall unemployment rate was about 9.3 percent last year, for computer programmers it was 5.2 percent and for computer scientists, 6.1 percent.

Disclosure: IBM, Spiceworks, and Adobe are clients.

Categories: Cloud, Numbers, Systems Management.