Why Google Needs China?

Playing with the AdMob data on iPhone and Android devices—which is a bit old now, the U.S., a much bigger iPhone/Android market than the rest of the world, reflects the worldwide distribution of iPhone vs Android devices (the blue is iPhone): The pattern seems to be mirrored elsewhere, but not evenly. In Australia, particularly, there … Read more

Facebook’s Asian Growth: Not Everywhere is North

I’ve seen some posts recently suggesting that Facebook is not doing well in Asia-Pacific. This, for example, from Forrester’s Reineke Reitsma: For example, Facebook is struggling to gain ground in Asia Pacific: With 58% of online adults accessing it, Orkut is the leading social platform in metropolitan India, while 27% of Japanese online adults use … Read more

Facebook in Asia: A Limit to Growth?

Here are the latest figures for Facebook populations in Asia-Pacific: Country Users Australia    7,395,200 New Zealand  1,279,260 Indonesia    15,254,060  Singapore    1,763,340 Malaysia    4,155,880 Philippines    8,667,880 Thailand    2,000,320 Hong Kong 2,565,440 China    60,440 India 5,459,440 While there’s no doubt that Facebook is the premier social networking site in most Asia-Pacific countries, with subscription growing by about … Read more

Driver Phishing II, Or Who Is Trentin Lagrange?

I’m fully awake now, and doing some digging on who is behind the Driver Robot “driver phish.” The digging has introduced me to a whole level to the software scam industry. The company that sells it is Victoria, BC, Canada-based Blitware (“or Blitware Technology Inc.,  to be precise,” as its website urges us). Nothing gives … Read more

Google’s Suicide Watch

I don’t really know what to make of this, but I occasionally trawl Google Search Trends/Insights to see what people are looking for, and whether they’re changing much over the past few years. This seems to me to be as good an indicator of things as anything else. I did it back in 2005 with … Read more