Friday, July 25, 2008

Globalization: Some Numbers

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/AVc/~3/341359645/globalization-s.html

I've been thinking a lot about the global internet lately.

Here are the May comScore numbers for total Internet audience

Worldwide - 853mm (up 10% from 772mm last year)

North America - 185mm (up 4% from 178mm last year)

Europe - 240mm (up 8% from 223mm last year)

Asia - 323mm (up 14% from 283mm last year)

Latin America - 63mm (up 19% from 53mm last year)

Middle East/Africa - 43mm (up 23% from 35mm last year)

As is typically the case, the smallest markets are growing the fastest. But a couple other things stand out to me. Asia added 40mm Internet users in the past year. Europe added 17mm. Latin America added 10mm. Africa and the Middle East added more than North America.

It's as Fareed Zakaria says "the US isn't declining, but the rest of the world is rising".

And I'll end this brief post with a link to Pascal Zachary's article in the New York Times about technology in Nairobi, Kenya. If you, like me, are thinking about the global reach of technology and the Internet, then you should read it. This paragraph is telling:

Still, Nairobi is home to a digital brew that invites optimism about its chances for creating unusual innovations. The city has relatively few wired phone lines or networked personal computers, so mobile phones are the essential digital tool. Four times as many people have them as have bank accounts. Text messages are far more popular than e-mail. Safaricom, the dominant mobile provider, offers a service called M-pesa that lets customers send money with text messages. Nokia sells brand-new phones here for as little as $33.

The numbers at the top of this post are for computers (PCs) connected to the Internet. They would look very different if they were total internet connected devices (PCs + mobile phones).

When we went out to raise a second fund at the start of this year, we told our investors that the Internet was getting more global, more mobile, more social, more intelligent, and more playful.

Those are all big trends, but the first two are tightly linked and very powerful as Pascal's article points out.

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Drinking From A Drop

Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/yankodesign/~3/343737692/

DROPPA is a carafe designed to bridge the gap between form, function, and space. It expands the feeling of liquidity out of an object that looks like a water droplet frozen just at the moment of impact. It’s organic and extremely architectural. The top of the drop is actually the cup by where you invert the stem to pour water into. 

Designer: Ozgur Onal

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'Improve' Great Works of Art by Adding in Gadgets [Photoshop Contest]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/344826225/improve-great-works-of-art-by-adding-in-gadgets

For this week's Photoshop Contest, I want you to insert gadgets or modern technology into famous works of art, be they paintings, drawings or photographs. A pretty straightforward challenge, but I'm looking for some real quality this time around. Don't just slap a photo of a Bluetooth headset on the Mona Lisa. Make it look like it's part of the painting. Come on, I know you've got the chops.

When you have your work of art perfected, send it to me at contests@gizmodo.com with gadget art in the subject line. Only JPGs and PNGs, please. Name your file FirstnameLastname.jpg using whatever name you want credited on the site. I'll post the winners in the Gallery of Champions next Tuesday. Get to it!


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Cowon P5 Portable Media Player Has 5-inch Touchscreen, Haptics, Usual Cowon Goodness [PMP]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/345065376/cowon-p5-portable-media-player-has-5+inch-touchscreen-haptics-usual-cowon-goodness

Cowon's upcoming P5 will improve on their A3 and Q5W portable media players (which we've both reviewed) with the addition of a haptics touch-feedback feature. The rest is fairly similar: a 800x480 screen, FM radio, stereo Bluetooth, TV-out, stereo speakers, USB, extreme codec support and 40GB-80GB sizes. There will still be Wi-Fi, but you'll have to get it tacked on after the fact with a dongle. The Korean price is $430ish by the end of the month. No US info yet as far as we know. Maybe we can trade them an early sneak peek at Starcraft 3 for this? [Cowon via CNET]


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NASA's First Solar-Sail Powered Craft Set to Ride on a Stream of Photons Next Week [Come Sail Away]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/345065372/nasas-first-solar+sail-powered-craft-set-to-ride-on-a-stream-of-photons-next-week

NASA's getting set to launch the NanoSail-D next week, its first solar-sail powered spacecraft which catches photons like wind on a 10 square-meter sail made of a thin metallic polymer. The craft uses a crazy Rube Goldberg-like method to deploy the sail that involves burning fishing line at critical moments to release the spring-loaded sail, which is getting shown off in the video here.


It is hoped that sails many times larger (we're talking football fields) will eventually propel long-range missions into deep space, with the help of lasers here on Earth firing light into their sails. The NanoSail-D is sticking in near-Earth orbit to perform its tests, which will inform later uses of the tech.

One caveat is that the launch is scheduled for July 29 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket, which like to go ka-boom and have yet to deliver a payload into orbit successfully. Our fingers are crossed for the little sailor. [Technology Review]


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