Half Billion Fixed Line Broadband Netizens

A visual representation of the internet

A half a billion users will have their own fixed broadband subscriptions this year.

"Overall the number of net new fixed-broadband subscriptions grew in 2009 to over 480 million, largely as a result of accelerating growth in emerging markets and we expect this number to reach 500 million this year. China, Russia, Mexico, India and Vietnam were among the countries that recorded the greatest leaps in fixed-broadband subscription numbers last year,"

- comments Rob Gallagher, Principal Analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media and Lead Author of the Next 100 Million report.

Note that this does not include all the mobile net subscriptions that are poliferating or just dial-up accounts, so actual number of net users would be even greater.

Country-wise figures for fixed-broadband subscriptions at end-September 2009 are:

Rank	Country	Subscriptions
1	China	91,348,000
2	US	82,846,600
3	Japan	31,240,000
4	Germany	25,114,300
5	France	19,306,400
6	UK	18,033,300
7	Korea	16,238,262
8	Russia	12,356,100
9	Italy	12,116,350
10	Brazil	10,951,600
11	Spain	9,681,520
12	Canada	9,562,000
13	Mexico	8,771,100
14	India	7,653,460
15	Netherlands	6,274,000
16	Turkey	6,166,800
17	Australia	5,968,000
18	Poland	5,654,100
19	Taiwan	5,549,440
20	Argentina	3,543,800

Thinking up Trademe

A very interesting presentation by Trademe co-founder Rowan Simpson. Rowan has been presenting TradeMe's story in several conferences, I had seen him at Webstock 2006. Trademe is acknowledged as New Zealand's most popular website. Like eBay it is a place where people auction and bid for goods. I've found many a good deal myself, such as this laptop I'm writing on. On to the Trademe Keynote presentation at Microsoft TechEd2006 ..



Rowan has come comments on this presentation on his blog.

Printing Wikipedia

Everybody who has studied in school and university would have seen, touched and interacted with the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It consists of over 30 hard bound volumes of printed text, illustrations and images, probably as shown below.



What happened if we were to print out a copy of the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, in a similar format? For the August 2007 edition of the English language Wikipedia, the result is below



The creator of this images describes it as

Using volumes 25cm high and 5cm thick (some 400 pages), each page having two columns, each columns having 80 rows, and each row having 50 characters, ˜ 6MB per volume. As English Wikipedia has around 7.5GB of text (August 2007, length of wikitext counted by myself) ˜ 1250 volumes. Note that this is a conservative estimate, as it doesn't include images, tables etc. which take up more surface than the text which describes them.

Family Net

The New York Times featured a very amusing story illustrating how the Internet is rapidly becoming a basic essential of life. It tells the story of the effect on the dynamics of a family gathering.

That was my first inkling of how the vastly expanded electronic and informational needs of houseguests would flavor our time together. Soon guests were positioning themselves to get dibs on one of the three computers in our Long Island house the way they would otherwise line up to jump in the shower.

...

Oy! Couldn’t we all stop the keying/ringing/texting/e-mailing and just talk? Mea culpa, on that score. My own escape from an overstuffed house was to sneak away to my office, where I pecked away at the mounting e-mail and checked Yankees scores. But my solace didn’t last long.

“I hate to bother you,” came a small voice from behind me. “The downstairs printer is jammed up. If I send you an attachment as a Zip file, can you unstuff it and print it up here?”

A somewhat much milder version of this happens in our family as well. In the last 3 years, our very geographically extended family got together twice, after a long time, for a couple of weddings (including mine). At some of the venues where we stayed, there was obviously no internet. Those of us who have become habitually connected into the online world, felt very fidgety about being unplugged. There was an element of restlessness and feeling helpless. One's eyes inevitably seek some sort of monitor, fingers itch for buttons to press. And wherever there's a computer, usually it's only one without Wi-Fi, everybody takes turns checking their emails, making sure all is well with their online world. People upload their digital photographs and everybody gathers around to see them again and again. Conversations drift towards discussing latest software, hardware and digital exploits. Yes, I did load some old movies & photos and show them off to relatives - to various reactions of embarrasment and laughter.

There were other aspects - everybody carried cellphones (and their chargers), everybody carried digital cameras (and their chargers, memory cards etc. ). Some moments in our wedding felt like walking into a field of paparazzi - there were so many continous flash bulbs from so many digital cameras.

Our family is still safe - there are not that many confirmed techies among us. We are still able to talk to each other in person. Our recent gatherings turned out to be a lot of fun (after the digital withdrawal symptoms had dissipated) and there were many lively conversations and sharing of experiences.

Nevertheless, I feel more connected to those who are online. Those I cannot email, seem to be living in an unreachable place. I can't tell whether this is the new 'normal' or the digitally obsessive.

The New York times story is here.

You can also try the quiz below (thanks, Praz), to see how geeky you are

80% Geek

Facebook v MySpace - defining a 'cool' site

Facebook, MySpace and their ilk are websites where you can put up your profile, details, blog and invite friends. These days with the denizens of the world in greater transience, people keep moving all over the place. These are useful tools to keep in touch, promote your interests etc.

MySpace is a very configurable platform - you can turn your web page into almost any form. There's been a flurry of activity recently from Facebook too - to make it's web page more malleable by releasing the Facebook Platform. However, there continues to be a difference in the culture of these two online communities. See below:

Video from CNET

Note-starts with an advertisement


Cartoon from BLaugh



At this stage MySpace is the leader by far, but this market can swing unpredictably.

Other interesting links
Feature Comparison between MySpace and Facebook
Tipping Point for Facebook
Related BBC Article, passed on to me by a colleague

Mindmeister - Mind Maps try to go Web2.0

Just a few years ago, many computer technology gurus thought that delivering Rich Interface applications, such as Office applications online was not worthwhile. That the interaction would be very limited and the online application would not provide a satisfactory response time. Now with broadband, tecnologies such as AJAX and applications such as Google Documents that door was been thrown wide open. One of the latest, an online mind mapping service, Mindmeister, has just been launched. I had been involved in testing the beta version and recieved the following email on May 2nd, 2007:

" We are very proud to announce that after a thorough private beta phase MindMeister finally went live last night at 11pm CEST!"

The free basic account lets you create upto 6 mind maps, to get unlimited you'll have to go premium. Mindmeister includes a Web2.0 component by allowing you to share your mind maps with others and work collaboratively.



The premium account also additionally allows the user to export the mind map in formats such as FreeMind and Mindjet Mindmanager, the user can include the map in blogs and websites, kill the advertising, and provides full SSL encryption.

The limit of this application to just 6 mind maps for free is against the spirit of the times. It severely limits any true usability for most users and will hamper the success of this endeavour. Perhaps sometime in the future, the boys with the big cash - Google or its equivalent - will buy this company out, set the application free with unlimited storage and unleash its true potential.

Google Earth - New Zealand Tourism Layer

Google Earth - the wonderful service that brought Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to the common user level - is now focusing a bit on New Zealand. It helps that Dr Craig Nevill-Manning, Google’s Head of Engineering in New York, is a New Zealander. Tourism New Zealand has tied up with Google Earth to create a specialized information layer on the service.


(Image Courtesy Tourism New Zealand)

For those of you that haven't seen this service yet, Google Earth presents a 3-D interface displaying the Earth's globe, which the user can move in any direction desired. Users can zoom down from space to the street level. One can choose to see the default photographic representation using satellite photo's, or choose a map, and even the contours of terrain. Essentially, the software maps images, features and properties to each longitude and latitude coordinates on the earth model. By selecting different check boxes (representing "layers") you can choose what information is to be displayed on the model - click "Roads" and you will be shown all the road names, click "Accommodation" and you will be shown all the hotel locations etc. Now the new plan is to create a check box that shows detailed authoritative information about New Zealand Tourist locations.


(Image Courtesy Tourism New Zealand)

More news here.

Librarians in the New World

Why use the library at all, with everything available for free on the internet and easily searchable? Wrong. Despite the formidable illusion, everything is not available on the internet. Consider the latest published journals and books, they are still under copyright and not available. Consider all the great works that haven't been converted to online media or e-books yet. Check whether the information you are getting from the net is reliable. Libraries enjoy the advantage of having authoritative information that you can quote on, and it's available for a very low membership cost, if not free. Yet all is not well in library world, librarians are wondering if they have a role in the future of information and knowledge services. An excellent article available here gives 33 reasons why librarians are still important. So, next time you visit a library, don't feel shy to consult a librarian about anything you need. Don't compare them to shop assistants trying to sell you something, they are just experts at finding the information you need.