Numbers, Volume 8

A Cloud of 40 million

Engage will be followed with an online e-mail service based on technology IBM acquired when it bought Outblaze earlier this year. Outblaze brings along 40 million users…. Engage is priced between $15 and $55 per month per user depending on which services are used.

Big Red

“We spend $3 billion a year on R&D.”
–Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect, Oracle at The Linux Foundation Collabotation Summit, 2009

Virtual Victory

IDC projects within 18m x86 VMs will outnumber physical machines.

(From IDC’s Al Gillen at talk at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit.)

The Return of Paying for Software

On its first day, iShoot sold enough copies at $4.99 each to net him $1,000. He and Nicole were practically “dancing in the street,” he said. In January, he released a free version of the game with fewer features, hoping to spark sales of the paid version. It worked: iShoot Lite has been downloaded more than 2 million times, and many people have upgraded to the paid version, which now costs $2.99. On its peak day — Jan. 11 — iShoot sold nearly 17,000 copies, which meant a $35,000 day’s take for Mr. Nicholas.

The Return of Paying For Software, Part 2

But the phone industry has had a micropayment system for decades. Ever since the local telephone company charged a customer an extra 35 cents to hear a recorded weather forecast, the phone industry has been charging for content.

Couple that pervasive billing culture with the ability of consumers to get what they want, whenever and wherever they want it (playing Tetris while waiting in line at Starbucks, for example) and you have a powerful alchemy. Piper Jaffray, a market research firm, published a report recently saying it expected consumers to spend $13 billion on downloads to their phones in 2012, up from $2.8 billion this year. The report called Apple’s popular iPhone application store “a tipping point in consumer consumption” over phones.

iPhone Traffic

Yelp’s existing iPhone app is less than a year old and it already accounts for 5% of Yelp’s overall traffic, which adds up to be around roughly 1 million monthly visitors…. Google Analytics says Yelp has had 20.5 million unique visits in the past 30 days. Comscore’s estimate for February was a little more conservative, at around 7 million unique visits for Yelp.com.

Meanwhile, the Skype iPhone App was downloaded 1 million times in it’s first day.

More so that previous phones, the iPhone is really about the “i” part: the Internet, you, the “I” holding the phone. It’s a connection to your online life and information sources. The phone part is just a red-headed step-child to having the internet in your pocket. Man, the phone part is really crappy in Casa de Coté, I tell ya what. Can a brother get an SLA?

ITDatabase.com: Acer’s Uptike

This week, Travis Van of ITDatabase.com sends over the following:

One number that might be worth calling out is the astounding number of product announcements and attention that Acer has gotten today.

The above file shows that Acer was the #9 spot on tech vendors most discussed in the last 24 hours of news. The list of vendors that occupy those top 15 “most discussed” spaces is almost invariably the same over the last 6-months. And you can guess who they are: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Intel, Amazon, Nokia, HP, etc. They may change positions on that list, but they are generally all on there all the time. So it’s no small feat to crack that top 15 list, and for Acer to hit the #9 spot today was sort of out of the blue.

The graphic above (click for a larger version) shows some of the recent headlines of content that Acer was in. And you can see that there was a flurry of announcements out of that company today (are their PR folks getting any sleep?). New notebook models, new quarterly earnings announcements, Acer for mobile phones … and the list goes on and on.

“Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.”

Netflix announced today that it has delivered its 2 billionth movie by mail — a huge number for a service that launched a decade ago…. Netflix has some 10 million subscribers, and is shipping two million movies a day.

Voicemail is for Wizened People

“Once upon a time, voice mail was useful,” said Yen Cheong, 32, a book publicist in New York who has transitioned almost entirely to e-mail and text messaging. According to her calculation, it takes 7 to 10 steps to check a voice mail message versus zero to 3 for an e-mail.

…

91 percent of people under 30 respond to text messages within an hour, and they are four times more likely to respond to texts than to voice messages within minutes, according to a 2008 study for Sprint conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation. Even adults 30 and older [are there any children who are “30 and older?] are twice as likely to respond within minutes to a text than to a voice message, the study found.

When I got my new office phone line, I didn’t sign up for voicemail. Or maybe I did and just never went and configured it. I loathe voicemail myself, but people seem to like using it, so I check in on it. Also, now that I have the magic voice mail transcription of Google Voice, it’s actually pretty nice…cause it’s email and txt instead of voice.

More on those damn Old People

Reuters reporter Alexei Oreskovic recently authored an interesting blog post about the demographics of Twitter users. What he discovered was that 18-24 year olds, the traditional social media early adopters, are actually 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter (Index of 88). It is the 25-54 year old crowd that is actually driving this trend. More specifically, 45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group, followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30 percent more likely.

As Bruce Sterling marginalia’s: “It implies that Twitter (supposedly a silly social toy) is being pioneered by people in power rather than young people with time on their hands.”

US Unemployment

US unemployment hit 8.5 per cent, its highest level since 1983, as the recession continues to savage the labour force.

Non-farm payrolls shed 663,000 jobs, in line with economists’ expectations, bringing the losses since the recession began in December 2007 to 5.1m. Almost two thirds of the decrease happened in the last five months.

I’ll try to cut back on The Crater news here. But, I mean, it just keeps coming.

Is that an extra 6 megs in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

This Sounds Important, Doesn’t It?

With financial markets firms investing an average of $1.8 billion annually on data center space, power and cooling — sell-side firms and execution venues alone spend nearly 75% of that total — power, location, connectivity, flexibility and security are critical elements in the creation and selection of financial data centers. According to research from Tabb Group in a new report published today, “Financial Services Data Centers: Power, Proximity and Profit,” 66% of the current US equity trading volume is driven by fewer than 1% of the firms deploying ultra low latency strategies that physically require being located within feet of an execution venue matching engine.

Disclosure: IBM, Sun, Microsoft, and ITDatabase.com are clients.