Technology convergence – the statistics

I came across an interesting video on the “The Future of Learning” web site.  The sources are all referenced, and look reputable.  Although the statistics are largely USA centric, they make interesting reading nonetheless.

• In excess of 1 000 000 000 books are published each year, a Google book search scanner can digitize 1 000 pages an hour
• Americans have access to 1 000 000 000 000 web pages, 65 000 iPhone apps, 10 500 radio stations, 5 500 magazines, 200+ cable TV channels (near identical to the UK, apart from the radio channels, if you exclude web radio channels)
• Newspaper circulation in the USA is down by 7 million in the last 25 years, but in the last 5 years unique readers of online newspapers are up by 30 million
• In the last 2 months more video was uploaded to YouTube than if all the major US broadcasters had been broadcasting 24hrs a day, 365 days a week, since 1948
• The same broadcasters get 10 million visitors a month to their websites.  In that period FaceBook, YouTube and MySpace receive 250 million (none of these sites existed 6 years ago).
• 95% of all the music downloaded last year was not paid for.
• Wikipedia launched in 2001, has 13 million articles, in 200 languages and worldwide employs just 12 full-time staff (no, that was not a typo).
• Cisco’s Nexus 7000 data switch could move all of Wikipedia in just 0.001 of a second
• The average American teenager sends 2 272 text messages a month, one of  my daughters regularly sends 4 000 a month
• Nokia is manufacturing 13 mobile phones every second
• 93% of Americans own a mobile phone.
• 1/3 of mobile phone users feel it is unsafe to use them to make purchases.  So much for the ‘digital wallet’.
• In 2007 Dell claim to have earned $3 million from Twitter posts
• In February 2008 John McCain attended fund raising events for his presidential campaign and raised $11 million.  In the same period Barack Obama attended no such events.  Instead his campaign team used social networks to raise $55 million in 29 days.
• 90% of the 200 billion emails sent each year are spam
• By 2020 the mobile device will be the primary device for accessing the Web
• The computer embedded in your mobile phone is a million times cheaper, a thousand times more powerful and a hundred thousand times smaller than the single mainframe owned by MIT in 1965
• The computer that once filled a building now fits in your pocket, and in 25 years from now will be small enough to fit in a blood cell.

The link to the original video is in the bottom right of this page.