“It is reading season at the Tufts University admissions office, time to plow through thousands of essays and transcripts and recommendations — and this year, for the first time, short YouTube videos that students could post to supplement their application. About 1,000 of the 15,000 applicants submitted videos. Some have gotten thousands of hits on YouTube.”
—Applicants to Tufts University Turn to YouTube - NYTimes.com
February 2010
“Ever heard of Shay Carl or Ray William Johnson? They’re amateur comedians that each average more views (on YouTube) than all the videos uploaded by CBS”
—How YouTube Morphed Into a Movie-Marketing Darling - Advertising Age - Special Report: Digital A-List 2010
“YouTube’s home page … was sold out in the fourth quarter (2009), and is the subject of bidding wars among movie studios on Thursdays and Fridays to promote weekend openings.”
—How YouTube Morphed Into a Movie-Marketing Darling - Advertising Age - Special Report: Digital A-List 2010
“TV executives have noticed big spikes in viewership of the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the Grammys and other special events that some of them trace to the effect of social networking sites. When potential viewers are alerted by their friends that something interesting is happening on a particular program, they rush to their televisions and turn them on, it appears. …. Nielsen noticed this month that one in seven people who were watching the Super Bowl and the Olympics opening ceremony were surfing the Web at the same time.”
—The Internet Turns Out to Be Television’s Friend - Media Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com
“In 2007 and 2008, southern Africa, the Great Lakes region of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, and even the drought-stricken Horn of Africa had GDP growth rates on par with China and India”
—Africa Is Becoming the New China and India - Newsweek.com
“More than 25% of UK’s population – some 16 million people – accessed the Internet from mobile phones in December…. Facebook had 2.6bn page impressions - nearly three times as many as Google, and more than a third of the 6.7bn total. Nearly half the total minutes online in December were spent at Facebook Mobile - 2.2bn minutes out of 4.8bn, with Google on 400m in a very distant second place.”
—Facebook leads rise in mobile web use | Media | guardian.co.uk
“Apple’s iTunes Store hit a landmark on Wednesday with the download of its 10 billionth song… A counter on the company’s home page hit the 10 billion mark at 9:43 p.m. GMT — approximately 6 years and 10 months since the store first opened in the U.S”
—Apple’s iTunes Store Serves up 10 Billionth Song - PCWorld Business Center
“how do you track cash-for-work in a place like Helmand, where fighting still rages? John Stephens, who manages programs in Afghanistan for the U.S. charity Mercy Corps, came up with one solution: Use cameras with GPS to verify aid projects in insecure places where expatriate staff can’t oversee projects in person.”
—Using Google Earth and GPS to Track Afghanistan Cash | Danger Room | Wired.com
“The data people generate when they search — what results they click on, what words they replace in the query when they’re unsatisfied, how their queries match with their physical locations — turns out to be an invaluable resource in discovering new signals and improving the relevance of results”
—Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web | Magazine
“Even the Bingers confess that, when it comes to the simple task of taking a search term and returning relevant results, Google is still miles ahead. But they also think that if they can come up with a few areas where Bing excels, people will get used to tapping a different search engine for some kinds of queries. “The algorithm is extremely important in search, but it’s not the only thing,”
—Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web | Magazine
“
An investigation is underway after it was discovered that town planners and architects in the Midlands are playing a massive game of Scrabble by constructing letter-shaped buildings to spell out words that can then be identified on Google Earth
(NB: THIS IS A SPOOF ARTICLE)
” —Town Planners playing Scrabble using Google Earth | NewsBiscuit
“A recently published report from IDC shows that the worldwide mobile phone market went up by 11.3 percent in the fourth quarter of the last year, with a number of 325.3 million units shipped during the time frame when compared to 292.4 million units shipped in the same period a year ago. According to IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, Q4 2009 ended five consecutive quarters of retrenchment, and brought the total shipment volume to 1.13 billion units in 2009”
—Mobile Phone Shipments Registered Double-Digit Growth in Q4 - According to an IDC report - Softpedia
Play
“The European Commission has notified us that it has received complaints from three companies: a UK price comparison site, Foundem, a French legal search engine called ejustice.fr, and Microsoft’s Ciao! from Bing. While we will be providing feedback and additional information on these complaints, we are confident that our business operates in the interests of users and partners, as well as in line with European competition law.”
—European Public Policy Blog: Committed to competing fairly
“more than 60,000 devices running Google’s Android mobile operating are being shipped every day”
—Google now a ‘mobile-first’ company - Telegraph
“According to ThinkEquity, administrative processes eat up 28 percent of the costs in Web advertising versus 2 percent in TV”
—Beefing Up Banner Ads
“20 per cent of tweets – or roughly 83 messages per second – contain a reference to a product or brand”
—Twitter users send 50 million tweets per day - Telegraph
“In 2007, around 5,000 tweets were sent per day, with that increasing to 300,000 messages per day in 2008. The number of tweets sent last year grew by 1,400 per cent, to around 35 million per day, and that figure now stands at 50 million tweets sent per day.”
—Twitter users send 50 million tweets per day - Telegraph
