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.

A recent study suggests that the fluoride mystery is actually pretty simple – the mineral reduces the ability of bacteria to stick to teeth. This makes it so that the bacteria that causes cavities and other nasty mouth problems are easily removed with brushing.

Scientists used artificial teeth to study the effects of fluoride, but stumbled upon some problems. The main issue was that tooth composition can vary wildly so the effect of fluoride can change dramatically on a tooth-by-tooth basis. Still, they found that the artificial teeth, when subjected to fluoride, repelled negatively charged bacteria by negatively charging the tooth itself.

The study is inconclusive, however, and the fluoride mystery will continue to spur controversy. The most controversial, of course, is that fluoride is added to drinking water to prevent tooth decay. Scientists say that the fluoride in water is a controlled amount that poses no risk to humans who drink it, but some people still refuse to drink fluoridated water for fear that it may pose health risks.

Regardless, much research must still be conducted before scientists can fully understand the fluoride mystery. The next step is to see if fluoride can actually weaken bacteria, thus disabling its ability to build up “fortresses” on teeth.

[h/t: LiveScience]

According to the firm, 52% of these blogs are using WordPress, up from 48% a year ago.

To come up with the top blogs, Pingdom looked to Technorati, which is famous for its annual State of the Blogosphere report, which has transformed into the “Digital Influence Report“. It’s worth noting that Pingdom was only able to identify the platform in use by 94 out of 100 sites.

As you can see, the next largest piece of the pie comes from custom systems, followed by Drupal, N/A, Gawker, BlogSmith, Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger, Ceros, Joomla, and Tumblr.

Considering Tumblr’s rising popularity in recent months, it’s interesting to see it carry such a small percentage here (1 site).

TypePad has increased from two sites to four sites, while Movable Type decreased from seven to four. Drupal dropped by one site. Google’s Blogger gained one site, reaching three.

Here’s the list of blogs, and which platform each uses:

Do you think it’s more important for marketers to optimize for different search engines around the world than it used to be? Share your thoughts in the comments.

A recent report from BrightEdge indicates that the majority of search marketers think that it is becoming more important for sites to rank in global search engines. According to the firm’s survey, six out of ten believe it will become either “more” or “much more” important this year, compared to last year. 36% said “more,” while 27% said “much more.”

“SEO marketers at global companies aspire to reach customers worldwide, and drive leads, revenue and traf!c through global SEO initiatives,” says BrightEdge in the report. “Looking beyond a single country also helps them demonstrate a greater ROI on marketing investments. Not only does this boost marketing ROI but also maintains global brand consistency while accommodating local nuances. A global concerted approach to SEO marketing addresses these needs.”

Respondents were specifically asked about Chinese search giant Baidu, with 31% saying it would be much more important to rank in Baidu in 2013, and 10% saying “much more important”.

“With roughly 540 million internet users, 900 million mobile users and 388 million mobile internet users, China is the world’s largest internet market,” says BrightEdge. “Baidu, China’s dominant search engine, is one of the most valuable gateways to this large internet user base.”

You can download the report in its entirety here. It deals with numerous topics, far beyond the topic of global SEO.

Another recent report (via MarketingCharts) from Covario found that Baidu generated three times more global paid search clicks than Yahoo/Bing in Q1.

“I no longer believe it makes sense for any company to roll out an international SEO programme to multiple countries without also having a PPC campaign in place,” writes WebCertain CEO Andy Atkins-Krüger in a post for Search Engine Land about multinational SEO. “In some cases, we would recommend leading with PPC and landing pages first, rather than full blown (and relatively expensive) international SEO.”

He adds, “There are a number of reasons why we recommend this, but one is that user satisfaction on your site can be measured much more quickly with PPC than with SEO. Behavior really matters — so if you can study it first and quickly with PPC, your SEO efforts later will work out to be much more successful. I do worry that the association of search engine warnings with SEO being ‘bad’ are beginning to stick with people who are newer to the industry, and therefore, SEO is having a health warning attached.”

Dave Davies has a great article on international SEO considerations at Search Engine Watch, in which he concludes, “While expanding one’s market is generally a good thing, what people often forget is that you still have to maintain what you have, so make sure you have the resources. Many wars have been lost simply by trying to fight them on too many fronts.”

“If you have just enough resources to dedicate to a successful SEO strategy in your own country, it doesn’t make sense to expand in that you’ll be drawing resources away from the strategy that’s keeping the lights on,” he adds. “You need to make sure it’s the right decision for your business and if it is, make sure that you’re picking the right strategies to maximize your odds of success in the shortest period of time.”

In your international optimization efforts, you may also want to keep in mind some recent changes Google has made to its indexing systems. They’re now treating some country-code TLDs differently in terms of geography vs. generic. The list will change over time, but right now, these are the ccTLDs Google is considering generic: .ad, .as, .bz, .cc, .cd, .co, .dj, .fm, .gg, .io, .la, .me, .ms, .nu, .sc, .sr, .su, .tv, .tk and .ws.

Are you increasing your focus on international SEO, or are you simply focusing on your own region? Let us know in the comments.

The breathalyzer. Anyone pulled over on suspicion of driving under the influence knows it all too well. Since the 1980s, police have used the tool, first developed in 1967, to detect alcohol content in the blood. Until now, breath samples have only really been accurate in terms of alcohol, but Swedish researchers have just published a study which touts the abilities of the new product, a breathalyzer for drugs.

The product and research comes from Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, who used their drug-detecting breathalyzer to detect the presence of a wide variety of illegal drugs – with accuracy. They were even able to detect a host of other drugs with a little less accuracy.

Researchers tapped 47 participants from the Stockholm Drug Emergency Clinic, collected blood and urine samples (for comparison), and had them blow into their device. Researchers say that they were able to accurately detect these substances: amphetamine, methamphetamine, morphine, heroin, THC, Diazepam, Oxazepam, cocaine, and benzoylecgonine.

And with less accuracy, these: Codiene, MDMA, Methadone, Nicotine, Continine, Zolpiden, and MDPV (bath salts)

Here’s how SensAbues describes the technology:

During normal breathing microparticles are formed from the airway liquid fluid by the closure and opening of bronchioles. These particles form a bioaserol that is carried out in the exhaled breath. These bioaerosol particles can be selectively collected by a unique filter technique developed at the Karolinska Institute. Collected particles can be used for drugs of abuse detection by analysis with high sensitivity technique, e.g. liquid chromatography – mass spectrometry.

“Until now, sampling for drug testing has been a complicated, lengthy or intrusive process: urine samples have to be collected under surveillance; blood tests that have to be taken by trained medical staff. SensAbues offers a sampling device for easy and rapid sampling on site, a sampling procedure difficult to adulterate, and analysis by mass spectrometry for legally defensible results,” says SensAbues.

It could be only a matter of time until police everywhere are able to quickly and easily breathalyze you for anything. Yeah, science?

[IOP Science via Digital Trends]

In a new study to be published in Current Biology, McGill University in Quebec found that playing Tetris for an hour a day for two weeks helped strengthen lazy eyes in adults far better than the traditional eye patch method. The game, with the help of special goggles, makes the patient’s eyes work together in unison to strengthen both.

The special goggles work together with Tetris to ensure that both eyes see separate things while playing the game. One eye will only see the falling blocks while the other will only see the blocks that have accumulated on the ground. This forces both eyes to work together to successfully clear rows of blocks.

After this test, the researchers had another group of adults with lazy eyes play Tetris while wearing the same goggles, but these participants had their good eye covered the whole time. They found that playing Tetris with only the lazy eye didn’t lead to any significant improvement. They did find, however, that this group saw significant improvement once they moved to the aforementioned method of having both eyes work together to play the game.

The researchers say that playing Tetris, or any other game that makes both eyes work together, could help cure lazy eyes in adults. The researchers now want to test the same treatment on children. It could prove to be a better alternative to the traditional eye patch that must be incredibly embarrassing to some children not lucky enough to get a pirate-themed eye patch.

[h/t: BBC]

For starters, the study’s makeup looks like this: 54% male, 80% of which own a smartphone and 94% who always carry that phone on them. 86% of the participants said they check Facebook more than once a day.

Researchers found that the Facebook activity that generated improved mood in the most people was looking back on old wall posts, followed closely by looking back at photos posted users’ walls (76% and 73%, respectively). 71% had improved mood from looking back at old photos they posted.

Compare this with the only 32% who said they had improved mood from playing games and the 58% who did from simply updating their status.

“[T]he results of the study do indicate that activities involving reminiscing have a positive impact upon wellbeing. Moreover, looking back on photos and wall posts was seen to provide a greater self soothing effect, when participants were feeling low in mood, than other Facebook activities. This is further supported in that a significant number of participants were not able to easily access “favorite‟ wall posts and photos, and yet would like to be able to do so. In addition, the activity of looking back on photos and wall posts was carried out more frequently by participants than other activities, such as playing games, updating status and using messenger. This suggests that the activity of looking back upon photos and wall posts is a popular activity, as well as having a positive impact upon emotional wellbeing,” said the researchers.

The study also looked at what users want from Facebook in terms of mechanisms for accessing their old photos and posts. 88% said that they would like to be able to access old photos, but 84% said it is not easy to do so. Graph Search should help with that, once Facebook completes its slow rollout.

[Looking back at Facebook content and the positive impact upon wellbeing via AllFacebook]

The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, which is part of the European Commission, has released a study called “Digital Music Consumption on the Internet: Evidence from Clickstream Data.” The study followed over 16,000 European Internet users and found some interesting browsing habits for those who frequently visit pirate sites.

It was found that a large portion of users who are interested in music were found to visit both “pirate” sites and online music stores. In fact, they found that clicks on online music stores would be down two percent were it not for the existence of these “pirate” sites.

The study also found that free, legal streaming options are becoming far more important to the overall music industry. The finding helps support a previous finding that said streaming services were actually helping the industry earn more revenue. Going even further, the Commission found that visits to online music stores were up seven percent as a result of streaming services.

In short, the researchers found that music piracy, and legal streaming services, have no negative impact on digital music sales:

“Taken at face value, our findings indicate that digital music piracy does not displace legal music purchases in digital format. This means that although there is trespassing of private property rights, there is unlikely to be much harm done on digital music revenues.”

Of course, it should be noted that this study doesn’t outright confirm that piracy leads to greater sales. The study only found that people were more likely to visit online music stores and click. We could assume that sales happened, but we just don’t know.

The general ambiguity of the study may be why the Commission isn’t ready to make any recommendations for new laws or relaxing of current laws yet. It’s a shame really as the music industry has been rather successful in having sites censored by local ISPs claiming that the sites negatively impact its business. Research like this, however, may convince judges that there’s more to take into account when issuing Web stie bans in the future.

You can check out the study in its entirety below:

JRC79605 by torrentfreak

[h/t: TorrentFreak]

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.

It’s called the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. Apple Chairman Art Levinson with chair the new foundation.

“Our society needs more heroes who are scientists, researchers and engineers. We need to celebrate and reward the people who cure diseases, expand our understanding of humanity and work to improve people’s lives. That’s why Priscilla and I are honored to partner with Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Art Levinson and Yuri Milner to create the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. At $3 million per prize, it’s the largest prize for this work in the world. I’m hopeful this serves as a blueprint for prizes and philanthropy in other fields as well,” said Zuckerberg in a Facebook post.

“Curing a disease should be worth more than a touchdown,” added Sergey Brin.

The inaugural winners have been announced as well, and here’s the full list:

Cornelia I. Bargmann

Torsten N. Wiesel Professor and Head of the Lulu and Anthony Wang Laboratory of Neural Circuits and Behavior at the Rockefeller University. Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
For the genetics of neural circuits and behavior, and synaptic guidepost molecules

David Botstein

Director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and the Anthony B. Evnin Professor of Genomics at Princeton University.
For linkage mapping of Mendelian disease in humans using DNA polymorphisms.

Lewis C. Cantley

Margaret and Herman Sokol Professor and Director of the Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medical College and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
For the discovery of PI 3-Kinase and its role in cancer metabolism.

Hans Clevers

Professor of Molecular Genetics at Hubrecht Institute.
For describing the role of Wnt signaling in tissue stem cells and cancer.

Titia de Lange

Leon Hess Professor, Head of the Laboratory of Cell Biology and Genetics, and Director of the Anderson Center for Cancer Research at the Rockefeller University.
For research on telomeres, illuminating how they protect chromosome ends and their role in genome instability in cancer.

Napoleone Ferrara

Distinguished Professor of Pathology and Senior Deputy Director for Basic Sciences at Moores Cancer Center at the University of California, San Diego.
For discoveries in the mechanisms of angiogenesis that led to therapies for cancer and eye diseases.

Eric S. Lander

President and Founding Director of the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Professor of Biology at MIT. Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School.
For the discovery of general principles for identifying human disease genes, and enabling their application to medicine through the creation and analysis of genetic, physical and sequence maps of the human genome.

Charles L. Sawyers

Chair, Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
For cancer genes and targeted therapy.

Bert Vogelstein

Director of the Ludwig Center and Clayton Professor of Oncology and Pathology at the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
For cancer genomics and tumor suppressor genes.

Robert A. Weinberg

Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research at MIT and Director of the MIT/Ludwig Center for Molecular Oncology. Member, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.
For characterization of human cancer genes.

Shinya Yamanaka

Director of Center for iPS Cell Research and Application, Kyoto University. Senior Investigator, Gladstone Institutes, San Francisco.
For induced pluripotent stem cells.

Although the inaugural winners total 11, there will only be 5 winners per year moving forward. Each winner receives a $3 million (U.S.) prize. Winners will be selected with the help of previous year’s winners. It will also be a transparent process, allowing for online nominations. There are no age restrictions when it comes to who can be nominated and ultimately win the prize.