Internet Globalization News

Some Mind-blowing Social Media Statistics Revisited

As we have done in the past, it is time to stop for a moment and check some impressive numbers related to usage of some internet services. The original report was published at the end of January/2010.

via econsultancy.com

• There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
• There are now 11m LinkedIn users across Europe.
• Towards the end of 2009, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
  
• The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
  
• More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
• Purpose-built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.
• 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati's new State of the Blogosphere.
• At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single year.
• About 70% of Facebook users are outside the USA.
• India is currently the fastest-growing country to use LinkedIn, with around 3m total users.
• More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.
• 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
• 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
• More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.

Astronomers have found a galaxy forming stars in a long tail behind it. The stars are being left behind as the galaxy plows through a galaxy cluster.

Mig33, Twitter And The Unrecognized Power of International Audience

Although it might sound like a bit of a poetic license to compare Mig33, with its email, IM and other communication applications, with Twitter, it is interesting to see how international comparisons start to be made. And how those comparisons actually make sense. Will the Twitter canary survive?

via techcrunch.com

Mig33’s users are now sending over 1 million virtual gifts a month, and posting approximately 100 million messages a day on its network, or 1,000 messages every second. Twitter, in comparison, just passed 50 million a day. Mig33 is eying the virtual gift economy as a revenue maker because of the model’s success for China’s similar application, Tencent QQ. According to Mig33, the Chinese mobile social application has nearly 8% of its over 500 million users in China paying about $2 per month in virtual gifts and goods. Mig33 is hoping to emulate that model in markets like Indonesia, India, South Africa, Bangladesh, Kenya, and Bosnia.

Girl with a dead canary, painting by Jean-Baptiste_Greuze

Cultural Customization: The Importance of International SEO

The importance of localizing your website for the target market can't be over-emphasized as there is a myriad of cultural and linguistic complexities that must be addressed - this applies to international SEO initiatives too.

via www.searchengineguide.com

Many small businesses could be missing a trick by limiting their SEO scope to domestic shores - the world is a big place and 75% of the earth's population speaks no English at all. Furthermore, whilst English may well be the most widely spoken 'second language' across the globe, people simply prefer to do business in their own tongue.

In Europe, there are over 200 indigenous languages, 23 of which are spoken in the 27 European Union (EU) member states (some of the languages are spoken in more than one country, hence the disparity).

Euro Startups: Ten Hard Lessons From 2009

Good article that analyzes ten European Startups during 2009, and takes lessons out of their experience. In short, Startups (and not only European ones), should focus of building a great, simple, lean, fast and well designed product that solves a need of a large group of people. Sounds easy, but it's actually very hard -- and even when you accomplish these simple steps, there's no guarantee that your product will be a success (or will be even used at all).

via eu.techcrunch.com

Suffice it to say that funding for startup tech companies remains tight. And when VCs are running out of LPs to go to, you really know it is. The VC model is still finding its feet in a market where exits are still not that clear. For many companies 2009 was a nightmare – especially the first half. But anecdotal evidence I’ve been picking up suggests that confidence in the European tech scene re-started tentatively after the summer. Hopefully, conversations that have been going on for the last few months will see the light of day in new announcements, launches and, I daresay, one or two exits in the new year.