Data Blog - datablog.net - Data + Analytics Blog Analysis (post at www.datablog.com)

"Anonymous" hackers share 90,000 military email addresses

Hacked from a server belonging to military consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton

25% of car accidents are because of gadgets

study by the Governors Highway Safety Association

Across the board, consumers are using their smartphone while in a store:

US-82%, UK-68%, France-82%, Germany-65%, Japan-75%

Not only are smartphone users using their mobile phones while shopping, they are also making purchases on their mobile device:
US-29%, UK-28%, France-17%, Germany-28%, Japan-45%

40 percent of those who accessed the Internet via mobile phones or tablet computers in the U.S. were using mobile banking services.

That compared with 25 percent in Britain

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) announced April sales figures for the publishing industry

Category / Sales / % Change

E-books $72.8 million 157.5%

Downloadable audio $7 million 22.3%

University press paper $2.5 million 10.8%

Religious books $48.5 million 2.5%

Children’s/YA hardcover $41.2 million 1.5%

Children’s/YA paper $36.8 million -7.2%

Univ. press hardcover $3.2 million -19.1%

Audiobooks $8.6 million -21.6%

Adult hardcover $111.4 million -22.7%

Adult paperback $95.9 million -25.4%

Adult mass market $28.5 million -41.6%

“This should never have happened,” Dropbox co-founder and CTO Arash Ferdowsi said

Dropbox confirmed this afternoon that a programmer’s error caused a temporary security breach that allowed any password to be used to access any user account. Access without passwords was possible between 1:54pm PT and 5:46pm PT yesterday.

The hard part in technology is not figuring out what’s going to happen, the hardest part is finding out when it’s going to happen

Chance that an American who earned a bachelor’s degree in 2008 will be paying off student loans in 2028: 1 in 3

Harper’s Index

I have no use whatsoever for projections and forecasts. They create an illusion of apparent precision.

The more meticulous they are, the more concerned you should be...
- Warren Buffett on projections

No professional market has more residents born out of state than Arizona (72 percent).

By comparison, only 27.4 percent of Massachusetts residents were born elsewhere and only 18.8 percent of New York residents were born outside the Big Apple.

A huge majority of us assume search engines are unbiased. But that may be just because they’re increasingly biased to share our own views

Google would use 57 signals – everything from where you were logging in from to what browser you were using to what you had searched for before – to make guesses about who you were and what kinds of sites you'd like. Even if you were logged out, it would customise its results, showing you the pages it predicted you were most likely to click on.

Most of us assume that when we google a term, we all see the same results – the ones that the company's famous Page Rank algorithm suggests are the most authoritative based on other pages' links. But since December 2009, this is no longer true. Now you get the result that Google's algorithm suggests is best for you in particular – and someone else may see something entirely different. In other words, there is no standard Google any more.
[ guardian ]

According to a new report from Forrester, 62% of information workers in North America and Europe work remotely.

The report says that many clients are approaching the firm for insight on creating best practices for remote, mobile workplaces assuming these changes are part of the remote future when in reality the change is already well underway.

Globally, print publications fetched $1 per hour of reader attention. TV got a quarter for a viewer hour. Online fetched “less than a dime.”

Why is online advertising such a poor stepchild? … The endless supply of online content means an endless supply of places where ads could go, which by definition depresses demand and, with it, price. Period.
The second problem is more basic still. Ever click on a banner ad? Have you? Ever? Of course not, because why would you leave what you’re doing—especially socializing—to go listen to a sales pitch? The click-through rate, industry-wide, is less than 1 percent.
— The Revolution Will Not Be Monetized - IEEE Spectrum

Analyzing large data sets—so called big data—will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth...

...innovation, and consumer surplus as long as the right policies and enablers are in place.
[ PDF ] [ mckinsey ]

APPLE: WWDC 2011

_App Store is now the #1 retail channel for PC software over Best Buy and Wal-mart.
_Mac sales rose 28 percent year over year during Apple’s last quarter, while PC sales declined 1 percent.
_54 million active Mac users around the world.
_200 million iOS devices to date, which accounts for more than 44 percent of the mobile market.
_25 million iPads were sold in the device’s 14 months of availability.
_15 billion songs have been sold from the iTunes store…
_#1 music retailer in the world.
_130 million books have been downloaded from iBooks.
_425,000 apps in the app store.
_90,000 of them are designed specifically for the iPad.
_14 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store in less than 3 years.
_$2.5 billion paid to developers building apps for the app store.
_225 million iTunes Store accounts, all of them with associated credit cards and 1-click purchasing.
_50 million Game Center users. XBox Live, which has been around for a lot longer, only has about 30 million.
_100 billion push notifications have been sent to iOS devices.
_iPhone 4′s camera is the second most used camera on Flickr.
_OS X Lion boasts 250+ new features and 3,000 APIs.
_IOS 5 has 200+ new features and 1,500 APIs.

46% of publishers of daily newspapers under 25,000 circulation now require payment for at least some of their online content.

Among newspapers with greater than 25,000 circulation, 24% now charge.

In the first quarter of 2011, 15.8 million people had purchased a Groupon for one of 57,000 merchants.

IPO Filing

The browser share for the iPad is 53 times that of its closest competitor

According to the latest usage share numbers from Net Applications, the iPad now accounts for 0.92% of the browser market. That might not sound like a lot until you consider that its nearest tablet competitor, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, ekes out only 0.018%. In the words of Net Applications, the usage share for the iPad is 53 times that of its closest competitor.

On privacy, 50% of Americans more concerned about business than government

A new survey from the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California found that almost half of Americans over 16 who use the Internet are worried about businesses watching their online activities. Only 38% worried about the Government doing so. The poll found also limited enthusiasm for online voting.
[ PDF ] [ digitalcenter.org ]

NYC MTA Annual subway ridership - by station

Can you really trust a service with a .info domain? [ mta.info ]

USA has record $61.6 TRILLION in unfunded obligations; $534,000 per household

“When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.”

It’s hard to imagine a Senator making a blunter statement than Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) made in the heat of the Patriot Act reauthorization fight last month: “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act,” he said, “they will be stunned and they will be angry.” Wyden is in a position to know. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he receives classified briefings from the executive branch. And in recent years, three other current and former members of the Senate—Mark Udall (D-CO), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Russ Feingold (D-WI)—have made similar comments.

These statements are puzzling because the explicit powers Congress has given to the government are already quite broad. For example, we’ve extensively covered the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 and the rapid increase in the use of National Security Letters since the enactment of the Patriot Act. Apparently, the government has such an appetite for information about Americans that it has felt the need to push even these quite generous boundaries.

The government’s activities are shrouded in secrecy, so we can’t be sure what the senators are referring to. But the evidence suggests that the Obama administration is using Section 215 of the Patriot Act—a provision that gives the government access to “business records”—as the legal basis for the large-scale collection of cell phone location records.

Google Maps for mobile has now surpassed 200 million installs. And those are active users of the product.

Perhaps even more amazing is that mobile constitutes over 40 percent of all Maps usage. And in June, Mayer says that she expects mobile will surpass the desktop version of Maps for good. She also noted that some 20 percent of the searches now seen on Google are for local information. And on mobile, that number is more like 40 percent.

Chrome has rocketed through eleven versions in two and a half years.

There are at least 61 publications currently active on Tumblr, including big names such as GQ, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly, and The Economist.

Vogue, the most followed magazine, racked up thousands of devotees in mere hours when it launched. Many brands see their posts reblogged by dozens and liked by hundreds. When magazines fail to utilize the platform, it’s generally because they do not interact with the larger community. People’s initial Tumblr attempt was simply an RSS feed, which did not encourage interaction, and they have since stopped tumbling.

Editors say that while it is hard to gauge direct impact in terms of subscriptions and revenues, a successful Tumblr targets a community that might not be familiar with the print publication or its website.

60% of all respondents indicated that they expect to have an email response to a support incident within 4 business hours

- Respond to email inquiries within four hours.
- Respond to online chat inquiries within 30 seconds, 60 seconds at the latest.
- Instead of using vague terms such as "faster," specify your standard response times online. Commit publicly to average response times (barring natural disasters and outages, of course).
[ PDF ] [ Survey of Consumers' Online Support Expectations ]

Apple sells 7% of all mobile phones, but makes 57% of all mobile phone profits

In 2011, 58.5% of British music buyers only buy CDs

"Taken as a whole, 58.5 percent of music buyers bought physical formats only in 2010, down from 65.8 percent in 2009," the BPI shared. Looks like the CD is a slow-leaking balloon. But on the flip side, 17.2 percent only purchased digital formats, up from12.4 percent in 2009. And, 24.3 percent of buyers mixed-and-matched their formats."

In its Q1 2011 Video Monetization Report, the vast majority of video views that occur on mobile devices happen on Apple’s iPhone (30%), iPad (20%) and iPod (30%). (Android 20%)

It took about 10 months from its public launch for Square to reach $1 million a day in payments going through its mobile app.

Getting to $2 million a day only took about two months. And now, less than a month later, it is passing $3 million.