According to StatCounter.com, mobile internet usage has sky-rocketed up to 8 1/2 percent this year; way up from only 4.3 percent last year comparatively. The graph below shows what it looks like compared to desktop use.

CEO of StatCounter.com, Aodhan Cullen had this to say:

“While global internet usage through mobiles is still under 10%, the pace of growth is remarkable.”

Cullen went on to say:

“Following repeated requests, we’ve decided to make our new mobile vendor stats publicly available. As the mobile space is constantly evolving, we keep our detection under constant review.”

The website has been gathering and compiling data for some time now to present this information. Nokia is a front runner due to its popularity in India, they say. Globally speaking, Apple is in second place, but they remain on top in US and UK markets.

The telephone market is dominated by Slim Telefonos de Mexico A.K.A. Telemex which provides nearly 80 percent of the services, while billionaire Carlos Slim controls around 70 percent of the cellphone market with America Movil.

Dionisio Perez-Jacome, minister of Communications and Transport had this to say, according to one source:

“This is a critical study…that exposes the weakness of the telecommunications sector in Mexico.”

In the year 2008, Telemex had a profit margin of nearly 50 percent, while countries like Canada and the UK only had close to 30 percent. Mexican Government is, in the mean time, trying to increase broadband speeds in mexico, which apparently they feel will soften the blow of thee high prices. Evidently in their opinion broadband speed trumps ridiculous price.

In your opinion, does speed outweigh price or do steep prices steer you elsewhere? Should speed and price equal each other? With this economy who can afford expensive internet anyway? Leave your opinions in the comments section

Can the post office survive the digital age? Tell us what you think.

A report from the New York Times is all but predicting the U.S. Postal Service’s demise. “The agency is so low on cash that it will not be able to make a $5.5 billion payment due this month and may have to shut down entirely this winter unless Congress takes emergency action to stabilize its finances,” the report says.

“If Congress doesn’t act, we will default,” Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe is quoted as saying.

Whew we discussed the subject before, Bloomberg BusinessWeek had put out a lengthy report looking at the decline of the USPS and its contributing factors. While touching on email, it looked more at comparison of USPS performance versus that of FedEx, UPS and DHL, as well as their international counterparts.

Despite talk that social media might one day kill email, email has proven time and time again that it is still a vital part of the Internet. A report from Pew Internet recently found that email (along with search) is the top activity online adults engage in on the web – way more than social media (though that’s growing significantly).

Unfortunately for the USPS, that conversation is irrelevant, because social media and email go hand in hand when it comes to less communication by “snail mail” – a phrase that the post office no doubt despises.

One can only imagine how mobile has contributed to even more communication by web over mail. Now the Internet is in your pocket at all times, not to mention the phone – another classic non-mail form of communication. Last week, Nielsen put out a report finding that 40% of mobile users in the U.S. use smartphones.

Of course email isn’t the only part of the web that is hurting the post office. Online bill pay is a big contributor as well – also now handily available from your pocket.

It’s just easier, cheaper and more efficient to communicate digitally.

Total mail volume decreased by 20% from 2006 to 2010, according to that Bloomberg report. The numbers can only be getting worse for the post office.

There will always be packages, but the digital age certainly continues to leave its mark on those as well. Movies, music and books are all digital now. Earlier this year, Amazon announced that Kindle books were outselling print books. Tablet (namely iPad) sales are on fire. The USPS also has to compete with those other parcel services too.

The Postal Service’s payment is due on September 30. From the sound of it, consumers wouldn’t likely feel the effects so much until early next year. At least the post office should remain open for the holidays.

Is the USPS in serious trouble or is this just a temporary set-back? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Berners-Lee’s words concerning web access raised a couple of eyebrows, and definitely raised the interest of this writer.

“Access to the Web is now a human right” he continues, “It’s possible to live without the Web. It’s not possible to live without water. But if you’ve got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger.”

Berners-Lee’s quote certainly adds an interesting thought to how we perceive the world wide web. Has the web manifested to such a point that we believe it to be a need in our society? This led me to think of my life, and where I would be without access to the internet. It was a pretty scary exercise.

His quote also brings to mind the net neutrality debate. It strikes to the very heart of the matter, exposing the debate between the opposing sides. If web access is a right, then should providers be allowed to control it as they see fit, or should regulation be put into to place to allow our right to remain unfettered?

Along with his comparisons to water, Berners-Lee stated how ISPs should have less control over how users access the web. He also warned of mobile apps, and how they should be “web apps” which are accessed, allowing the open web to stay relevant.

After the initial report, the news spread fast throughout the internet. Of Twitter’s nine natural trending topics, four are in relation to Elizabeth Taylor.

Richard Burton was Taylor’s husband from 1964-1976; their relationship is known as one of the most famous in Hollywood history. Most of the tweets are in relation to the Vanity Fair article – “A Love Too Big To Last”

National Velvet is believed to be Taylor’s initial breakout success; she was only 12 at the time. White Diamonds is a fragrance from Taylor’s line of perfumes, which at its height brought in $200 million in annual sales.

If you’d like to learn more about Elizabeth Taylor, or would like to discuss her iconic career, visit FamousDeadDB.com.

Internet Evolution has narrowed down the list into 10 different categories, which include the most innovative and influential people in each category:
Social Networking
Enterprise & Cloud Computing
News/Media
Greentech
Wireless & Gadgets
E-Commerce
Search
Security
Digital Entertainment
Most Over-Rated

I am particularly interested in the Search category, where Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Founders of Google, were named first. Stefan Weitz of Microsoft and Carol Bartz of Yahoo were also named, and Jason Calacanis was also named in the Search category.

Here is the list of the top 10 most innovative and influential people in search:

1. Larry Page, Founder, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)
2. Stefan Weitz, Director of Search, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)
3. Carol Bartz, CEO, Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO)
4. Jason Calacanis, Founder, Mahalo.com Inc.
5. Robin Li, originator of Baidu Inc. (Nasdaq: BIDU) search technology
6. Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
7. Vipul Ved Prakash, Founder, Topsy.com
8. Jack Ma, Founder, Alibaba.com Hong Kong Ltd.
9. Alan Emtage, creator of pre-Web search engine Archie
10. Suranga Chandratillake, CEO, blinkx

Being in the search industry, I’m not sure if I totally agree with this list, as there are some websites that are in the list that I don’t necessarily think are really “search engines”. I would also name a few individuals like Danny Sullivan to the search category before I named Jason Calacanis to the search category. I agree that Calacanis should be named somewhere, but not in the search category.

Here is the list of the top 100 most innovative and influential people in the Web 2.0 World:

1) Social Networking

1. Mark Zuckerberg, Founder, Facebook
2. Kevin Rose, Founder, Digg
3. Jonathan Miller, Chief Digital Officer, News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) (MySpace )
4. Philip Rosedale, Founder, Second Life
5. Jeff Weiner, CEO, LinkedIn Corp.
6. Caterina Fake, Founder, Flickr
7. Adam Christensen, Social Media Communications Manager, IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM)
8. Jonathan Abrams, Founder, Friendster
9. Mark Goldston, CEO, United Online Inc.
10. Jason Rosenthal, CEO, Ning.com

2) Enterprise & Cloud Computing

1. Padmasree Warrior, CTO, Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO)
2. Bradley Horowitz, VP, Product Management, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Apps
3. Andy Stanford-Clark, IBM Distinguished Engineer, IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM)
4. Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN)
5. Amitabh Srivastava, SVP, Server & Cloud Division, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)
6. Marc Benioff, Chairman & CEO, Salesforce.com Inc.
7. Simon Crosby, CTO, Citrix Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS)
8. Randi Levin, CTO, City of Los Angeles
9. Andrew Brown, Managing Director, Bank of America
10. Manesh Patel, CIO, Sanmina-SCI Corp. (Nasdaq: SANM)

3) News/Media

1. Rupert Murdoch, CEO, News Corp. (NYSE: NWS)
2. Fiona Spruill, Editor, Web Newsroom, The New York Times
3. Arianna Huffington, Founder, Huffington Post
4. Jim Walton, President, CNN Worldwide (including CNN.com)
5. Matt Drudge, Founder, Drudge Report
6. Michael Arrington, Founder, TechCrunch
7. Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief, Wired
8. Julian Assange, Co-Founder, WikiLeaks
9. Chris Tolles, CEO, Topix
10. Cory Doctorow, Editor, Boing Boing

4) Greentech

1. Steven Chu, US Secretary of Energy, DOE
2. Hal La Flash, Director of Emerging Clean Energy Technologies, PG&E
3. Guido Bartels, Managing Director, IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM); Chairman, GridWise Alliance Inc.
4. Elon Musk, Co-Founder, Chairman & CEO, Tesla Motors
5. Chuck Powers, IT strategist, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
6. Paul Maritz, CEO, VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW)
7. Joel Selanikio, software developer
8. Lisa Wood, Executive Director, Institute for Electric Efficiency
9. Andres Carvallo, EVP, Chief Strategy Officer, Grid Net
10. KR Sridhar, Co-Founder & CEO, Bloom Energy Corp.

5) Wireless & Gadgets

1. Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL)
2. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, CEO, Nokia Corp. (NYSE: NOK)
3. Kevin Dallas, General Manager, Windows Embedded Business Unit, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)
4. David Yach, CTO, Software, Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM) (Nasdaq: RIMM; Toronto: RIM)
5. Ivan Seidenberg, Chairman & CEO, Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ)
6. Greg Brown, Sanjay Jha, Co-CEOs, Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT)
7. Min Kao, Chairman & CEO, Garmin Ltd. (Nasdaq: GRMN)
8. Jeff Hawkins, Palm Inc.
9. Don Eigler, IBM Fellow, IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM)

6) E-Commerce

1. Jeff Bezos, CEO & Chairman, Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN)
2. Pierre Omidyar, Chairman, eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY)
3. Craig Newmark, Founder, craigslist
4. Barry Diller, Chairman, Expedia
5. Scott Thompson, President, PayPal
6. Michael Dell, CEO, Dell Inc. (Nasdaq: DELL)
7. Raul Vazquez, President & CEO, WalMart.com
8. Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO, Yelp Inc.
9. Greg Blatt, CEO, Match.com
10. Joey Levin, CEO, MyFunCards.com (Mindspark Interactive Network)

7) Search

1. Larry Page, Founder, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)
2. Stefan Weitz, Director of Search, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)
3. Carol Bartz, CEO, Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO)
4. Jason Calacanis, Founder, Mahalo.com Inc.
5. Robin Li, originator of Baidu Inc. (Nasdaq: BIDU) search technology
6. Jimmy Wales, Founder, Wikipedia
7. Vipul Ved Prakash, Founder, Topsy.com
8. Jack Ma, Founder, Alibaba.com Hong Kong Ltd.
9. Alan Emtage, creator of pre-Web search engine Archie
10. Suranga Chandratillake, CEO, blinkx

Security

1. Robert S. Mueller III, Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
2. Scott Charney, Corporate VP, Trustworthy Computing, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)
3. Al Zollar, General Manager, IBM Tivoli
4. Whitfield Diffie, cryptography expert
5. Art Coviello, President, RSA Security Inc. (Nasdaq: EMC)
6. Dave Cullinane, Chairman, Cloud Security Alliance; CISO, eBay Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY)
7. Richard Clarke, Chairman, Good Harbor Consulting
8. Jeff Moss, Founder, Black Hat Inc.
9. Jeremiah Grossman, Founder & CTO, WhiteHat Security
10. Bruce Schneier, Blogger

9) Digital Entertainment

1. Eddy Cue, VP, iTunes (Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL))
2. Mitch Bainwol, Chairman, RIAA
3. Jason Kilar, CEO, Hulu LLC
4. Chad Hurley, Founder and CEO, YouTube Inc.
5. Bram Cohen, Founder, BitTorrent Inc.
6. Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix Inc.
7. Rob Pardo, Executive VP, Blizzard Entertainment Inc.
8. Tim Westergren, Founder, Pandora Media Inc.
9. Cédric Tournay, CEO, Dailymotion
10. Leslie Moonves, CEO, CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS)/TV.com

10) Most Over-Rated

1. Evan Williams
2. Biz Stone
3. Sergey Brin
4. Larry Ellison
5. Howard Schmidt
6. Ashton Kutcher
7. Barack Obama
8. Tim Berners-Lee
9. Stephen Saunders
10. Robert Scoble

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 When the dot.com boom first started, it was driven by investors who saw the potential of the new frontier of the web. As companies started pouring money, other companies quickly followed suit in an attempt to stay even with their competitors. Unfortunately, as we all know, this didn’t work out the way many people envisioned which led to the dot.com crash. However, there were several companies that learned some valuable lessons and would become part of the framework ofweb 2.0

If someone were to analyze most of the successful sites that are on the internet today, there are a few factors that they all have in common. Chief among these factors is the fact that they are user driven; meaning that use of the website is the primary motivation for visitors not shopping. Even large shopping sites include a high amount of user interaction through forums, blogs, and reviews. By providing this usability these sites ensure sticky visitors, which is the holy grail of any successful internet business.

The second common factor that most successful sites have in common is some form of social media. While there are many sites devoted solely to social media, any site that expects to be successful provides some way for their visitors to engage in the social experience such as profiles, messaging systems and other common social media applications. By creating a sense of community and combining it with usability sticky customers almost become a certainty and that is the core of web 2.0.

In the end, the term web 2.0 simply represents a different way of doing business on the internet. However, while the concept is simple, its execution can be quite difficult. Yet if someone is serious about being competitive on the internet, the principles of web 2.0 must be learned and used effectively, or there is little chance of any real success.

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If they’re not breaking guitars, their pilots are missing airports, or they’re berating people that are trying to help them.

Well, we have one more reputation disaster to add to the list, courtesy of American Airlines.

You may recall the open letter web designer Dusting Curtis wrote to the airline. In it, Curtis suggested that AA was losing millions because of its poorly designed web site. He even went as far as suggesting a new design for the site.

Shortly after, one of AA’s designers took it upon himself to reply and explain the complexities of AA web site design decisions. His reply was open, honest…radically transparent.

American Airlines has allegedly fired him for it!

This may have happened back in May, but it’s only just come to light that the AA designer was apparently fired an hour after he wrote his reply.

AA searched their exchange database for the text I posted, found the guy, and fired Mr. X on the spot. From what I have learned, they also threatened him with legal action if he spoke to me again. Apparently he broke his non-disclosure agreement by discussing the design process at AA.

OK, so maybe he shouldn’t have broken his NDA with the airline. But, maybe AA shouldn’t have been so near-sighted and pedantic about its employee policies. Surely the airline is aware that it’s industry hardly has the best reputation for caring about its customers. Heck, even Jet Blue–the poster child of airline awesomeness–has screwed-up royally in the past.

In some ways, you can’t blame American Airlines. It is completely ignorant of how customers want to interact with the airline. We don’t want to hand flight attendants slips of paper that say “well done”–something AA encourages me to do as a frequent flier–we want to engage with the airline. We want it to do better, and we have ideas. Ideas about clean blankets, baggage fees, and yes, web site design. How does AA marry its apparent openness on Twitter, with this crackdown on a real employee that wants to help?

Yes, you should have guidelines in place, but those guidelines should be designed to encourage thoughtful customer interaction, not prevent it! If we hear that you’re firing employees because of their transparency, how are we supposed to take your official social networking efforts seriously? What, do we now assume that everything that is shared on Twitter or Facebook is nothing more than sterile, PR sanctioned, sound bites?

The airline industry may well be the very last to “get” the concept of Radically Transparent. When they do finally have that “aha!” moment, we’ll know that we’ve finally entered the age of open, honest, dialogs.

Andy Beal – AA Platinum Card Holder; Million Mile Flier.

(via)

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Original Article: Today Opera has released a product (as promised), which it claims reinvents the web. That may seem like an exaggerated statement, but it’s an interesting concept nonetheless.

The product is called Opera Unite, and it is available at labs.opera.com. What Opera Unite does, is basically turn your computer into both a client and a server. It eliminates the need for third-party servers.

"Today, we are opening the full potential of the Web for everyone," says Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner. "Technology moves in distinct cycles. PCs decentralized computing away from large mainframes. Opera Unite now decentralizes and democratizes the cloud. With server capability in the browser, Web developers can create Web applications with profound ease. Consumers have the flexibility to choose private and efficient ways of sharing information. We believe Opera Unite is one of our most significant innovations yet, because it changes forever the fundamental fabric of the Web."

Current Opera Unite services include file sharing, web server, media player, photo sharing, chat, and "the fridge," which allows users to post notes on their friends’ "virtual refrigerators." I’m thinking this is basically like Facebook’s "wall."

Here are some screenshots of what these services look like:

File Sharing

Web Server

Media Player

Photo Sharing

Chat

The Fridge

"What interests me about Opera Unite is how current technology and the social world are now interconnected," says Molly E. Holzschlag, Web evangelist for Opera. "Using open standards including HTML, CSS and JavaScript, developers and even enthusiasts with a little standards savvy can make their own Opera Unite service. Opera Unite allows people the ability to be imaginative with their skills and create a wide range of technical and social applications using the same open standards used today."

It seems that it is a little early for there to be any concrete opinions from users formed at this point. The Twitterverse appears to interested in the product, but a little unsure of what to expect (even those who have already downloaded it). Some have compared it to Google Wave, only with one being on the desktop, and the other on the web.

What are your initial thoughts on Opera Unite? Does this really "reinvent the web?" Tell us what you think.

Joking aside, it looks like a peanut butter/chocolate moment for the world of online audience measurement. The partnership will see comScore combine the data it gets from a 2 million person global panel with Omniture’s–raise pinky to side of mouth–1 trillion quarterly web site transactions. According to the announcement:

This strategic partner relationship blends these two methodologies in a highly automated way to create a unified approach for audience measurement designed to enable publishers to represent themselves in a more comprehensive manner to advertisers, and for advertisers to better optimize their media planning with the benefit of more extensive media reach data.

That’s a fancy way of saying the data is going to be a lot more accurate from here on out. As Josh James, Omniture CEO and co-founder puts it, "With this relationship, Omniture and comScore will enable publishers who have rich, highly targeted audience segments to reliably demonstrate their value to advertisers and also help advertisers find these attractive consumer segments. The combined offering will provide advertisers and publishers with a common currency to measure the value of online audiences across an ever-increasing number of digital channels."

So what does this mean for publishers and advertisers? I like how Scott McDonald, SVP Research, Conde Nast Publications explains how it will help (in theory):

"For more than a decade, we have fretted about – and sometimes quarreled about — the discrepancies between the audience estimates derived from third-party panels like comScore’s and those derived from web site analytics systems like Omniture’s. This collaboration represents the most significant effort to date to harmonize the two approaches and give the industry, at last, a common and convergent set of numbers."

It’s a real kumbaya moment for the measurement world. Now we just need to see if the two ingredients can combine to make something as tasty as a Reese’s cup!

What do you think of this partnership?

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