Numbers, Volume 17

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

“Hi, I’m Kenny, I’m 14 years old, and I love playing those damn video games.”

According to both Neilsen and the Pew Internet Life Project, Echo [a kid who clocked in 14,000 of those damn text messages] is an outlier, a user of texting at prodigious levels beyond her peers. A Neilsen study from the second quarter of 2008, for example, says that mobile phone users age 13-17 send or receive an average of 1742 texts per month, which would only require 7.25 hours [to produce] by my reckoning. So Echo is an outlier, but on the other hand her data is fresher and texting IS rising at a rapid pace.

The Kids Are All Right…to sell to!

According to Nielsen, teenagers are far from abandoning TV for so-called new media. In fact, television viewing rates among U.S. teens have actually gone up 6% in the last five years. Sure, they browse the Web a lot, but far less than you do. The average time spent browsing for an adult person in the United States comes down to about 29 hours and 15 minutes per month. While I reach that average almost on a daily basis, teens are said to browse the Web a lot less than that: 11 hours and 32 minutes per month on average. I honestly thought the average teen would spend that much time on the Web a week, at least.

Shipping Eclipse

Also, the target platform break-down:

Mac accounts for five per cent of Eclipse downloads while Windows has slipped from 90 per cent to 80 per cent. Linux, meanwhile, is on 14 per cent of downloads.

Ruby Growing, but Still Small

According to a new study from Evans Data, Ruby use is on the rise in North America. On a year-over-year basis, Ruby usage has increased by 40 percent so far in 2009.

But, even with the big increase, Ruby is still far from being pervasive. Evans’ study found that only 14 percent of developers in North America use Ruby some of the time. They are currently forecasting the number to rise to 20 percent for 2010.

Oracle Revenue

Oracle saw a seven per cent drop in revenue for the fourth quarter ending May 31 to $1.8bn (£1.1bn) on revenue that fell five per cent to $6.8bn (£4.1bn)….

Sales of software licenses and overall software revenue – that includes support and updates – were also down 13 per cent and three per cent respectively to $2.7bn (£1.6bn) and $5.7bn (£3.5bn).

For the year, Oracle saw a one per cent bump in net income – effectively flat – to $5.6bn (£3.4bn) on revenue that grew four per cent to $23.5bn (£14.3bn)…. but overall software revenue grew six per cent to $18.8bn (£11.4bn).

A Solution Looking for a Buyer, or, “Really?”

Major takeaway from today at the Gartner IOM event is that less than 5% of the fortune 2000 have an active CMDB installed!!!

For follow-up, see the discussion over at the IT Skeptic.

When Seconds Matter

Bing found that 1 sec. slowdown == 2.8% revenue loss; 2 sec. slowdown == 4.3% revenue loss (via @souders) #velocityconf

Hadoop Racks up the Numbers

PC Sales Down

Shipments [of PCs] for the quarter totaled 66.5 million units, down from 72.3 million in the same quarter the year before. Desktop shipments dropped 23 percent, compared with a 10 percent gain for notebook computers.

On the other hand, see Ashlee Vance’s write-up of the rise/rebirth of Acer.

iPhone Sells 1M in a Weekend

Apple has announced that over 1m iPhone 3G S units have been sold since the handset was launched last week.

…

Roughly 6m iPhone owners have also already downloaded that latest version of iPhone firmware – version 3.0 – since 17 June, Apple added.

Twitter

Twitter had an estimated 18 million users in May and has grown into the third-largest social-networking site, according to research firm ComScore Inc. Facebook Inc. is the largest, with 307.1 million users in April, followed by MySpace with 126.9 million. Stone, 35, shot down talks of a buyout by Microsoft Corp. or Google Inc.

“We’re not having those acquisition discussions, we’re not engaging in them,” he said in during the 56th annual Cannes Lions Advertising Festival, which takes place this week.

…

Twitter has held four rounds of venture funding since its start in 2007 and isn’t currently seeking more funds, Stone said. Media reports have put the total funding figure at $57 million, which Stone didn’t dispute.

Disclosure: The Eclipse Foundation and Cloudera are clients.