According to the research firm, global smartphone shipments will hit 937 million units this year. That will just outpace global feature phone shipments – which will top out at 889 million. Looking forward, NPD says that global smartphone shipments will break 1.4 billion by 2016. That’s an annual growth rate of 26%, starting back in 2011.

”The global smartphone market is expected to continue growing rapidly over the next two years,” said Shawn Lee, research director at NPD DisplaySearch. “With larger, higher-resolution displays, faster processors, and higher-capacity cellular systems being built, the smartphone is not only becoming a must-have device, but is satisfying many needs that formerly required other computing and consumer electronics devices.”

Here are the projections:

NPD points to emerging markets, like China for instance, for the growth in smartphone shipments. In fact, China accounts for 55% of entry-level smartphone shipments. The whole Asia-Pacific region will account for half of all global smartphone shipments in 2013.

The availability of cheaper ($200 or less) smartphones, plus the spread of 3G and 4G data has led to this increase in smartphone shipments.

“To increase revenue share and gain margin in the smartphone market, a variety of new handsets, as well as new products launched by service and content providers, will enter the market,” Lee said. “As smartphone specifications and features become more advanced, and as device replacement rates increase, we can expect further investment in the industry by manufacturers, carriers, and governments.”

This news leaves Newt Gingrich absolutely perplexed.

Lucky sort is a two-year-old data analytics service that “makes huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize and visualize.” According to a post on their website, Lucky Sort says that several team members will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter’s revenue engineering department. It appears that Lucky Sort will be shutting down.

“We’ll be helping current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter,” says Lucky Sort CEO Noah Pepper

Welcome aboard, @luckysort! luckysort.com

— Twitter (@twitter) May 13, 2013

“Two years ago I started Lucky Sort with several friends. Our goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize and visualize by building elegant and user friendly tools for text analysis…in building Lucky Sort we had an enormous amount of support from friends, employees, advisors and investors. It has been uplifting to have so many people help us and it highlighted just how much business is a social endeavour,” says Pepper.

The data center will be built with the same Open Compute Project server designs and outdoor-air cooling system of Facebook’s other data centers, but the company says that improvements to the building design and networking architecture will make Altoona’s center stand out in the crowd.

“We’re excited to have found a new home in Iowa, which has an abundance of wind-generated power and is home to a great talent pool that will help build and operate the facility. We plan to break ground this summer and expect to begin serving user traffic in 2014,” says Facebook’s Jay Parikh. “We’re especially appreciative of all the partners who helped make this project happen. Facebook’s mission is to connect the world. Thanks to Iowa, we’re building the global infrastructure to bring the next billion people online. We can’t wait to get started.”

Facebook says that they will break ground this summer and they hope the center will be ready to go in 2014.

Reports of the new data center first hit the web last weekend, with the Des Moines Register saying that the social media giant was behind “the most technologically advanced data center in the world.” That reports suggests that the facility will cost upwards of $1.5 billion.

Altoona, Iowa rests inside the West Des Moines Metropolitan area, and at last census had a population of just shy of 16,000 people. The Altoona data center will be Facebook’s 4th, and 3rd in the United States. Facebook currently has data centers in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina; and Luleå, Sweden.

“Our goal is not just to deliver you a fast, reliable experience on Facebook every day – we also want to help make connectivity a universal opportunity. Our data centers are essential for making that happen,” says Parikh.

For instance this year, Foursquare gave small businesses an incentive to offer specials today. They offered to feature any and all businesses who participated in the search results on foursquare.com.

“From checking in, to uploading tips, photos, and addresses, to telling friends about the app, the 33 million people on Foursquare have brought us to where we are today. Four years and over 3.5 billion check-ins since we launched, our community-created map of the world is more complete than ever,” says Foursquare.

In celebration of the 4th Foursquare Day, Foursquare has created a new interactive visualization that lets you look at your past year of check-ins in a few interesting ways.

First, you can organize them linearly by time, and then you can randomize them.

But the coolest ways to look at the past year of data is by category (food, nightlife, professional, shops, travel, etc):

And by connections, which will show you an awesome map of how you traveled between your check-ins:

You can check out your own visualization here.

It’s been a big year for Foursquare, complete with a bunch of core changes to the service that put more emphasis on search and recommendations than the app has ever done before. No bigger, though, than the recent update to version 6.0. Foursquare also announced $41 million in funding.

Also, remember to check-in today to receive your special 4sqDay 2013 badge. Foursuare may not be putting as much of an emphasis on the gamification aspect of the service, but that doesn’t mean that users still don’t love their badges.

And and automatic link to the relevant Facebook page, which is the key aspect of this new feature.

Starting today, Facebook is rolling out the new sharing option to U.S. users. The rollout will take a couple of weeks, according to the company. What you’ll find is the inline ability to share action verb statuses – “feeling,” “watching,” or “drinking,” for instance.

“Josh Wolford is watching Jurassic Park,” maybe. Alongside the statues will we a little icon specific to the action (for watching, a little movie cut scene board. The object of the action will also get its own link in your status – leading users to its Facebook page.

It will also be added to the appropriate box in your Timeline (Movies box, in this case).

As we touched on back in January when Facebook first began to test these action-based statuses, this is clearly not just Facebook bringing back emoticons for the hell of it.

At the time, Facebook said:

“It’s just a new way for people to visually represent what they’re doing and how they’re feeling through their Facebook posts. It will only be available to small set of people. This isn’t integrated into Graph Search. It’s just a small test to see if people are interested in sharing their actions in a more visual way.”

But you have to imagine that this sort of data could be integrated into Graph Search. Using an action status already automatically adds the direct object of the actions (whether it be a movie, food, book, musical artist, etc) to your Timeline.

“These updates, and the stories added to your timeline, respect the privacy settings you choose for your post,” says Facebook. So as long as you have your privacy settings tooled correctly, these action statuses shouldn’t open you up any more than a regular status update or “liking” the product in question would.

But this structured status update makes it much easier for Facebook to collect data on your activities, the same way they do with Open Graph actions. And more information means that Facebook knows which pages to suggest to you, and which ads to target you in both the news feed and otherwise. It’s also another format for Facebook to use in Sponsored Stories. If you post one of these action statuses that says you were drinking coffee at Starbucks, you know that at some point, your friends will be shown that status as a sponsored post in their news feed. It’s simply Facebook taking the page-tagging out of your hands, and doing it for you.

Is it a data grab? Sure. But as Facebook says, it’s also a fun new way to more visually express your activities. Use it or not, it’s up to you. Which is the great thing about all social media, really. You give up just as much data as you want to give up.

The data comes from Piper Jaffray’s 25th bi-annual “Taking Stock with Teens” survey that looks at everything from online shopping and fashion, to tech, social, and gaming.

The survey looked at which social networks are the “most important” for teens. It found that Facebook still holds the top spot – but barely. And it’s been declining over the past year.

Facebook is the most important social network for 33% of the teens surveyed, which is down 9% from 42% back in the Fall of 2012 (the last time this survey was published).

Twitter, on the other hand, saw an increase from 27% to 30% in teens claiming it as the most important social site in their lives. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook but has stayed independent, grew in popularity from 12% to 17%.

Watch out Facebook, Twitter is nearly as important to teens as you.

The only other significant change in social media loyalty among teens in the past few months is in the “other” category. Piper Jaffray notes that the top 5 “write-in” picks for most important social media service were Wanelo, Snapchat, 4chan, Kik, and Twitter’s just-launched six-second video app Vine.

Another interesting find from Piper Jaffray’s survey: Teens still love their iPhones. Nearly half (48%) of those surveyed said that they already own an iPhone (up from 40% in the Fall) and 62% said that they plan on buying the iPhone as their next device. Compare that with Android, which had 23% of teens expressing future desire.

[Image via toodlepip, Flickr]

And that’s exactly what has happened today. Starting today, Pakistan’s largest provider of cellular services has announced that its prepaid customers can tweet away – for free.

“Data charges for accessing Twitter have been made ZERO for all Mobilink prepaid subscribers. Subscribers don’t require to subscribe to this offer since it is available for all prepaid subscribers by default,” says Mobilink.

That means that users can tweet and retweet all they want without incurring any data charges. This removes one of the impediments from Pakistani Twitter users, who have faced state censorship of Twitter in the past.

#Mobilink prepaid customers can now access #Twitter for free! For details visit goo.gl/HRY15

— Simply Mobilink (@SimplyMobilink) April 2, 2013

Back in May of 2012, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority shut off Twitter access for the entire country for approximately 8 hours following the circulation of content deemed blasphemous on the network. Some speculated that the move had less to do with the specific content and more to do with a simple test as to whether a state-wide blockage was feasible.

As far as the rest of the internet goes, the Pakistani government has a history of censorship in the areas of so-called blasphemy and pornography. Recently, that censorship has moved to content that falls in the realm of political speech. In a country with this track record, free access to Twitter is a significant opportunity for its people – considering access remains open.

There are some caveats to the deal. Mainly, tweets must be sent via mobile.twitter.com – not Twitter’s native apps.

Also:

“[G]oing on external links will result in data charging. Whenever a subscriber clicks on an external link, he will be shown a notification indicating that standard data charges apply to view the link. External link will be opened after subscriber’s consent only.”

But for the purposes of simply communicating (being that all-important amateur reporter), this is a great thing for Pakistani tweeters.

The image was shared by the Human Rights Campaign’s Facebook page, who repurposed their normal blue and yellow logo to show support for same-sex marriage as the U.S. Supreme Court began to hear arguments in two relevant cases.

Facebook’s data science team has analyzed the campaign, and has provided us with a neat little map of all the counties in the U.S. The redder the county, the more profile pic changes its Facebook users made on that day.

Look, we’re not saying that there are no marriage equality supporters in the south, or that everyone in California or Michigan supports same-sex marriage. We’re just saying that the look of this map leaves nobody around here surprised.

Facebook notes a not all that curious trend. Apparently, many of the top 25 counties in the country that showed the most love for HRC’s marriage equality campaign house colleges – Orange (University of North Carolina), Durham (Duke University), Monroe (Indiana University), Johnson (University of Iowa), Athens (Ohio University), Dane (University of Wisconsin), Boulder (University of Colorado), and Travis (University of Texas at Austin).

Apart from that, San Francisco County, San Mateo County, and Washington, D.C. also ranked high on the list for changed profile pics.

Facebook’s data team has some more interesting insights about HRC’s campaign. Here’s a couple:

• 120% more people across the network changed their profile picture on Tuesday compared to the previous Tuesday.
• Those closest to the age of 30 were the most likely users to update their profile picture.
• Females were slightly more likely (2.3%) to change their profile pic.

Facebook closes their study with this:

“For a long time, when people stood up for a cause and weren’t all physically standing shoulder to shoulder, the size of their impact wasn’t immediately apparent. But today, we can see the spread of an idea online in greater detail than ever before. That’s data well worth finding.”

Did you change you profile picture on Tuesday?

The study, which looked at the mobile habits of nearly 7,500 18-44-year-olds over the course of one week in March, found that just under half (49.4%) of the U.S. population is using smartphones – about 155.1 million people. And that Facebook is used by 70% of them. That’s #3 overall, just behind web browsing at 73% and email and 78%. Facebook usage beat out games, maps, photos, and video streaming.

Since the study was paid for by Facebook, there’s plenty of data on how Facebook is used on mobile devices in a typical week. First off, Facebook was found to account for 1 in ever 4 minutes spent on social and communication activities on smartphones. The average survey participant spent 32 minutes and 51 seconds on Facebook every day. Out of the 70% of people that use Facebook on their device, 61% said that they check it every day.

That roughly 33 minutes spent on Facebook every day breaks down like this: 16 minutes browsing the news feed, nearly 10 messaging, and just over 6 posting statuses and photos.

These Facebook sessions last, on average, about 2 minutes and 22 seconds and people check Facebook around 14 times a day, on average.

The study also looks at other aspect of mobile use apart from Facebook, and some fo the findings are interesting:

• 25% of those surveyed said that they can’t even recall the last time their smartphone wasn’t next to them. Another 24% said that they spend less that 30 minutes throughout the day without their device within ear shot.
• 34% said they feel “excited” when they post a photo on Instagram, and 27% feel excited while posting LinkedIn updates.
• Half of those surveyed said they tell Facebook when they go to the movies. 13% tweet about it.
• 79% of people reach for their smartphones within 15 minutes of waking up. 62% do so immediately after waking up. Those numbers only increase when you narrow it down to 18-24-year-olds.
• People are only using 16% of their communication time on their phones to make calls. All the other time is spent texting, emailing, and social networking.

For the complete study, head here. It’s a pretty interesting look at the current state of mobile connections in the U.S., if you can deal with a little bit of obvious bias toward making Facebook look like the all-consuming timelord. Come to think about it, who’s really going to argue with that notion?

In the aforementioned climate, just days after they released a long defense of their ranking algorithms and practices, Facebook has published a new study on “estimating audience size” on the site.

Spolier alert: Facebook says that people vastly underestimate how many people see their posts.

Facebook asked 1,131 users a simple question: How many of your friends do you think actually saw this (a single, specific) post?

Here are the results:

“By and large, people underestimated the size of their audience. When we asked users how many friends saw a particular post, the median user guessed 20 friends, while the actual median was 78.”

For the more visually oriented, Facebook has provided some graphical support. Every dot under the dotted line represents a user who underestimated the reach of their post:

Overall, Facebook says that the median user reaches 60% of their friends over the course of a month.

Facebook expanded their research and looked at 220,000 users and the connection between audience (how many saw the post) and both total number of friends and number of comments on the post. Spoiler alert: things vary quite a bit and neither is a very good predictor of eventual reach of any given post.

What the data does do is show that as you gain more friends, the percentage of them who will see your posts decreases. But, the high end of the audience reach is probably a bit higher than you thought.

Facebook has said in the past that overall, any post will be seen by somewhere around 16% of a user’s friends. This new data shows that the variations are pretty wild. For instance, a person with 400 friends can possibly have a reach of just a couple of percent, all the way up to nearly 40%.

Of course, plenty of things go into who sees your posts on Facebook. For instance: number of friends, what time of day you post it, how many shares it gets, competition in friends’ news feeds and yes, Facebook’s system of ranking algorithms that determine much of this.

After once again being accused of decreasing the visibility of users’ posts in order to promote their Promoted Posts product, Facebook defended themselves earlier this week.

“There have been recent claims suggesting that our News Feed algorithm suppresses organic distribution of posts in favor of paid posts in order to increase our revenue. This is not true,” they said.

Still, page owners continue to report that they are seeing less reach on their posts than they used to, and many blame Facebook for shady practices.

This new research from Facebook suggests that people have a tendency to underestimate the reach of their posts, and that using likes and comments on a post to judge how many people actually saw it is unreliable at best.

What an interesting time to publish such a message. Coincidence? I think not.