Number, Volume 1

What is this?

I see a lot of numbers all week, every day. As we like to say at RedMonk, “we don’t do numbers.” That said, it does seem like content I’m missing out on. To that end, I’m starting up a new little series here on the blog, simply titled “Numbers.”

As my notebook fills up with numbers, I’ll periodically post them here, occasionally with some commentary.

Tell me what you think.

Mobile browsing

Apple handheld browser share, rated by ad requests: 18.4%, top of the list with iPhone and iPod Touch combined. Followed by RAZR with 3%, then Nokia’s N70 with 2.5%.

What’s amazing here is how quickly Apple has been climbing to the top of these types of charts. It’s also interesting to note how small of a base even the top runner has: the mobile web market is far from winner takes all. Compare to IE/FireFox/Safari/Opera splits, where IE still dominates, compared to this kind of break-out. Also, as a former RAZR user, those RAZR people have to be hurting.

Adobe Flash Lite Mo’

• According to Strategy Analytics (Jan ‘09 Report), more than 1 billion devices shipped with Flash Lite by the end of Q1 ’09 – one year ahead of schedule. Additional 1.5 billion expected to ship within next 2 years.
• According to Strategy Analytics (Jan ‘09 Report), close to 40% of all new mobile phones and devices worldwide shipped with Flash Lite in ‘08. Also, Flash Lite shipments experienced a 100% year-over-year growth.

Moonlight, already useful?

Moonlight has already proven useful to tens of thousands of Linux users. A pre-release of Moonlight was delivered on January 19, 2009 to allow Linux users to stream Barack Obama’s Inauguration. More than 20,000 Linux users downloaded Moonlight to watch the Silverlight broadcast.

Ryan and I talked about this a bit on the previous episode of RIA Weekly. What we’re most curious to see is what the Moonlight RIA community will do as there haven’t been that much interaction with RIA technologies from the traditional open source communities.

Virtualization Potential

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced a milestone [over the life of the product] of nearly 2.5 million systems discovered as candidates for virtualization using VMware Capacity Planner, the most proven tool for optimizing virtualization deployments.

GroundWork & Ubuntu

GroundWork Open Source says nearly one-third of its newest customers are deploying its network management software on Ubuntu. Here are the early details. (More over on Matt Asay’s blog and from BitRock as well.)

RedMonk recently worked on a survey with Canonical about Ubuntu usage. There seems to be a lot of it out there.

Black Duck Mo’

• Closed 2008 with year-over-year gain of 42% in bookings
• Added 28 new customers in Q4 2008, ending year with total of 620 customers
• Subscription and services business grew by 65% in 2008
• Significant customer growth in mobile and telecom sectors

Disclosure: Microsoft, Adobe, and Groundwork are clients.