Skype announced that its share of international calling minutes has jumped by 50% year-over-year. This data comes from a new report released by research firm TeleGeography.

According to this report, Skype’s share of international calling minutes jumped to 12% from last year’s figure of 8%. Telegeography says that the volume of traffic routed via Skype is growing at an "astonishing" pace. The following graph shows the net increase in international phone and Skype traffic from 2005 to 2009.

A recent study came out this week from the Human Capital Institute and Saba about government organizations’ use of social networking and collaboration tools. The study looked at the effectiveness of social networking in conducting government work, how agency type affects the use, and perception of social networking, and the future expectations and barriers for its use.

Symantec has put together its "State of the Data Center" report, which is the product of a survey of 573 businesses in 26 countries.

Before 2009 came to a close, Google provided a look (as always) at the most searched for terms of the year. It showed the top ten fastest rising and fastest falling terms on both a global scale, and in the U.S. Globally, "Michael Jackson" was the fastest rising, while "Beijing 2008" was the fastest falling. In the U.S., "Twitter" was the fastest rising (just above "Michael Jackson", and "John McCain" was the fastest falling (just over the Olympics).

WebProNews recently covered a study from Chitika, which found that Facebook was the most valuable social media tool for driving repeat readers to content sites. The study was based on 33 million unique users across Chitika’s publisher network in September. It compared the number of visitors coming from major traffic sources Digg, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter, to the number of times those visitors came back to the referred site.

A study from a couple of NYU Stern professors has found that organic search engine results can play a direct role in whether or not a paid listing is clicked. Basically, if this research is any indication, if your business has both a paid result and an organic result appear at the same time, you have a better chance of your paid result getting clicked than if the organic result had not appeared.

Nielsen has shared some interesting findings from its research on how Internet users discover content. The research mainly focused on how content is found through search, portals, and through social media.

Google recently partnered with BabyCenter on a joint research study looking at how moms use search. Google says they arrived at four truths about moms and search:

Opera is reporting that usage of its Opera Mini mobile browser has jumped 11% in just a month, around the world. In addition, they say data transfers have gained 16%.

Mercatus released the results from an interesting survey about the mobile offerings of banks. According to the firm’s findings, banks that offer mobile financial services can increase their new customers acquisitions by as much as sixty percent.

Advertise.com and the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) have shared some interesting findings from a survey about online ad technology. The two organizations found that there is a lot of untapped opportunity for retargeting in online advertising.

comScore released findings this week from a study of the online habits of Portuguese Internet users. Interestingly, they found that the Portuguese Internet audience grew to nearly 4 Million users in September.

Over 3.8 million people age 15 and older accessed the Internet from a home or work location in Portugal in September, viewing an average 1,843 pages and spending an average 1.9 hours online per person during the month.

Yahoo conducted a survey of small business online retailers to find out how they think they’ll perform this upcoming holiday season compared to previous years.

"Surprisingly, based on the current economic landscape, the results show an optimistic outlook, with over 60 percent of the Yahoo! merchants surveyed expecting sales to be the same as most years or even stronger," a representative for Yahoo tells WebProNews.

Compete has shared some findings from a new study on consumer holiday shopping behavior. According to the firm, active online buyers (consumers who intend to spend over 30% of their holiday budgets online) have bigger budgets than other shoppers. Furthermore, they are more likely to spend that money on Black Friday.

Euro RSCG released some interesting findings from a study exploring the different ways Americans are using social media to "redefine their lives." The study looked at 1,228 social media users in the United States.

Razorfish has released a wealth of interesting data about consumer online behavior, and a good deal has to do with social media and brand interaction. For those struggling to find the right use of social networks for their business, the data is worth paying attention to.

The data is based on a survey of 1,000 consumers in the US, about half male and half female. They cover four major age groups and 10 major cities.

This week Google released some findings from a test Google Netherlands conducted with Metrixlab, Heineken, and Heineken’s agency Twist. They set out to find what effects paid search ads had on branding, and were quite pleased with the results.

Research from AT Internet Institute indicates that Microsoft is losing European market share in the web browser sector with Internet Explorer. The firm says IE is being seriously shaken up by rival browsers across the continent.

According to AdMob, which claims it is the world’s largest mobile advertising platform, mobile web and application use has doubled over the past two years. In September, the firm received over 100 million ad requests from 14 countries, and over 10 million ad requests from 64 countries.

AdMob released its Mobile Metrics report for September, which highlights the rapid growth in usage of mobile web sites and apps on new devices in the past year.

The Participatory Marketing Network (PMN) and Pace University’s Lubin School of Business have shared some interesting findings from a study that found Generation Y (commonly considered the "Net Generation") would abandon social networks before abandoning email or texting.

TurnHere has shared the results of an interesting survey on current and future trends in online video among brands and marketing agencies. The survey found that online video has and will continue to have a prominent place in the arsenal of marketers. It should be noted that TurnHere is an online video company.