"hard numbers" entries

Facebook Growth Regions and Gender Split

Since we began tracking Facebook demographics in late May, weekly growth has held steady, usually in the low single-digits on a percentage basis. More importantly, it's fair to say that the company has successfully expanded overseas. With close to 128M users, the share of U.S. users is down to around 30% from 35% in late May: Over the last three…

Numbers for Digital's Rise

I talk a lot to people who don't quite understand the scale of the media shift from atoms to bits (update: corrected), so I always have my eyes open for numbers and anecdotes that illustrate the point. The latest I found are from an article on Apple's threat to shut the iTunes store if it has to pay more to…

Where Does Facebook Grow From Here

Facebook publishes demographic data through its advertising platform. Potential advertisers can obtain estimates for the number of Facebook users by age group, gender, education, country, and even relationship status! While the estimates most likely rely on user supplied data, they provide the best publicly available numbers on the Facebook user base. Facebook currently has about 75M users spread across more…

Worldwide Social Network Market Share

Via Azeem Azaar's twitter feed, a great visualization of worldwide social network market share, from Le Monde:…

Disks have become tapes

Via Michal Migurski's delicious feed, I found Disks Have Become Tapes, a fascinating set of observations about why MapReduce is so successful. In short (as observed by Doug Cutting at OSCON last year), MapReduce hits the sweet spot by operating at the transfer rate of disks (growing at 20%/year) rather than seek rate (growing at 5%/year) as relational databases do….

Trendalyzer view of the banking crisis

The team at "And Still I Persist" has created their own version of Hans Rosling's "Trendalyzer" (see: Radar post) to visualize the current US banking crisis. "First lets look at the top 8 banks and their mortgages that are 90+ days late. Below is a flash charting system, feel free to use the controls and experiment. We chart the total…

Steve Souders asks: "How green is your web page?"

Steve Souders, my Velocity conference Co-Chair and author of High Performance Websites, gave me permission to repost this great analysis: How green is your web page? Writing faster web pages is great for your users, which in turn is great for you and your company. But it’s better for everyone else on the planet, too. Intrigued by an article on…

State of the Computer Book Market, Part 4 – The Languages

We will look at programming languages and drill in a little on each language area.

Overall the 2007 market for programming languages was down (1.67%) in 2007 when compared with 2006. There were 1,809,695 units sold in 2006 versus 1,779,523 units sold in 2007 which is (30,172) less units in 2007.

State of the Computer Book Market, part 3 — The Publishers

In this third installment we will look at how Publishers fared in 2007 when compared to 2006.

State of the Computer Book Market, Part 2: The Technologies

Recapping the big picture from the last post, you can see that the moderate-to-high growth of Consumer Operating Systems has not been visibly aided by the addition of 47 new Q1 '07 Vista titles, because there were no Vista titles in '06 — hence the black box for Vista. However, the whole Category Family (Consumer Operating Systems) benefits from 47 new titles with more than 86,000 Vista units sold in the first three months of this year.