Numbers, Volume 9

While we self-admititly “don’t do numbers” here at RedMonk, I come across many interesting numbers each week. Below are a selection of them:

Internet Done Right

Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world – its Internet penetration rate has risen from 70.2 percent in 2004 to 77.1 percent in 2008, according to the National Statistical Office. Its online shopping penetration rate has also grown, according to the National Internet Development Agency of Korea.

I’m in Seoul this week to give a talk at the Free Open Source Software License Insight Conference. The internet here is fantastically fast, and the people are lusciously nice and kind. Fast internet, friendly people, beef, and kimchi galore: I gotta get back here!

First Rule of Business: Don’t Be Dumb

But they do sell $10 cables… “on sale” for $100. (But they’re premium!) And $200 DVD players that play… DVDs (not even AVIs). And washing machines — I swear to God, over half the space in this brand spanking new store-in-a-box was devoted to refrigerators and washing machines — ranging from $1200 to $1700. Payment plans available. I asked a salesperson about the difference between a $1200 washing machine and a $1700 washing machine. He glanced furtively at the information card and mumbled, “More bells and whistles.” Recession-busting pro tip: buy your $10 cables for $10 at Monoprice, buy your electronics at NewEgg, and don’t buy a $1700 washing machine from anyone.

VC Doe-flow

In dollar terms, the total raised was $4.3 billion, down 39 percent from the year before (1Q08), but up 23 percent from the fourth quarter when it dipped to a low of $3.5 billion. At least the sequential comparisons are up. The largest capital raising was for August Capital’s $650 million fund. Bain Capital raised a $475 million fund, and Charles River Ventures raised a new $320 million fund.

How Much Does a Cloud Cost, Email Edition

Previously, more than a dozen physical servers with direct-attached storage supported production storage requirements and backups for Microsoft Exchange. Student, faculty and institutional data was distributed across personal clients all over the campus and at remote locations.

…

“Instead of being fixed into parameters of a physical server with X amount of RAM and disk space, we have a pool of resources that we can split up at a moment’s notice or power up and down as the school’s needs change,” Temaat said.

The private cloud costs about $300,000 a year to run, which was in line with the college’s budget for a new SAN. But it also met the majority of the IT objectives, including high availability, disaster recovery and business continuity, by including off-site replication and backup and recovery, hosted at a BlueLock site. The off-site replication probably would not have been approved as a single budget line item, Temaat said.

What are you Tap Taping?

Of those iPhone users surveyed, 39 percent stated that a weather application was one of their three most-used apps on their device. This was far ahead of any of the number two cited app, Facebook, which 25 percent of those surveyed named. By far the most popular category in the App Store when it comes to actual downloads is games, but in this survey, that category only managed third place with 20 percent. Compare that to numbers from ComScore last week which reported that a crazy 32 percent of all iPhone and iPod touches have a version of the game Tap Tap Revenge installed.

The Cost of Change

The [Thai] government has launched a $143 million drive to boost its tourism industry, which lost an estimated $8.3 billion dollars after the December blockade of Bangkok’s airports. In the wake of the violent protests, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Russia and Singapore have issued advisories warning about travel to Thailand

….

The tourism industry should be benefiting from the weak baht by bringing more international tourists, said Pornthip Hirunkate, secretary general of the Tourism Council of Thailand. Instead, the council estimates the current crisis will cost $5.6 billion in lost revenue.

Of interest as my lovely wife and I are off to Thailand next month for a long vacation.

“Look. These artifacts are called books. I know you’re not used to seeing them.”

Approximately 300,000 of the Kindle 2s have been shipped to date, suggesting Amazon has made over $100 million in revenue from sales of the $359 device alone this year.

See also Bruce Sterling’s talk at SXSW 2009.

ITDatabase.com: What Discussion 2.0 is Complete Without a Twitter Reference?

For the 7 day period ending April 6, 2009, ITDatabase found 510 stories about Twitter — that represents a decline of 20.4% on a week over week basis. It’s actually also a marginal decline from our first week of tracking (7 days ending March 30th) in which 525 articles included Twitter.

Total number of source publications: 215 (-16.3% on weekly basis)
Total number of Authors: 292 (-16.3 % on a weekly basis)

Yeah, I don’t think that decline will last long. See “calm before the storm.”

Disclosure: ITDatabase.com is a client