Friday, April 24. 2009
Apple has announced that there have now been more than one billion apps downloaded for iPhone. The milestones comes just over three months after the company surpassed 500 million downloads, and about nine months since launching.
While it’s certainly an enormous milestone, how does it compare to some other massive numbers that various Web companies have reached recently? Here’s a look at a few huge stats:
Facebook now has 200 million members. It reached that mark just 8 months after hitting 100 million members, and has become the world’s biggest social network by a significant margin.
In November, Twitter passed one billion tweets. That number has since swelled to close to 1.6 billion, according to GigaTweet.
YouTube now reaches 100 million viewers in the US every month. The site has better than 40 percent marketshare of all videos watched online.
Which milestone do you think is most impressive? Share your thoughts in the comments.
-----
Via Mashable
Personal comment:
Des chiffres, des chiffres et encore des chiffres. Ceux-ci sont impressionnants, surtout pour l'accélération de l'adhésion aux médias en ligne à la culture qui s'y rattache qu'on y découvre.
M-novels (standing for Mobile-novels), M-soap (Mobile-soap, etc.) operas and a musician who goes on world tour from his living room - Kirsty Allison reports from Tokyo in this special CR film on Japan’s mobile culture
More on what Kirsty saw:
M-FILM: the Pocket Films Festival
“These screens are portable, digital and easy to edit and distribute from. It’s culture in your pocket,” says Professor Masaki Fujihata of the Tokyo University of Arts, and director of the Tokyo Pocket Films Festival. He sees the medium as the message, with M-films currently serving as sketchpads for ideas where an ideal duration is under five minutes, although he predicts that future M-films “will go on to win Oscars”.
M-SOAP OPERAS: Voltage
Production company Voltage specialises in M-games and M-soap operas. Shooting for half an hour a week, Voltage breaks weekly stories down to five-minute chunks which get downloaded by young girls largely in search of romantic titillation. It claims hits of up to 10K per episode. CEO Tsuya Yuuzi likens the current era to the early gaming industry.
M-STREET ART: HP France Gallery
Shibuya’s hub of hip is this basement gallery where street artists such as Sense, Baku, Kanosue Shunsuke and Takeru Nakabayashi meet with software developers to design comedy mobile interfaces that add a little more wasabi heat to regular mobile menus. These collaborations lead to animations such as sushi belts which speed up and slow down according to levels of mobile reception. Mao Sakaguchi, curator of HP France began customising screensavers with artists several years ago, 3 is the first British company to adopt similar tactics to reach the social networking, data-loving generation, and has recently commissioned artists to create screensavers for its INQ handset.
M-LIVE: Merce Death
The name for this one man band derives from the Japanese pronunciation of Mercedes. Art director and home lover, Shingo Oono goes on world tour from his living room studio in the suburbs of Tokyo, thanks to the wonders of modern technology (mainly streaming site, Ustream.com); he layers guitars with bass and drums, broadcasting direct from home. Watch online, on phone, or join in with the World Online Jam.
M-BOOKS: M-Novelists
The Keitai Shousetsu phenomenon is particularly popular with the young, and is encouraging them to get back into books. Written and delivered on mobiles (authors Honjo Sae and Tadashi Izumi, above), with associated paperbacks, merchandise, anime and TV, this is true cross-platform culture. M-books follow viral patterns, with initial chapters often being free. Bestselling Tokyo Real has 32m hits, and paperback sales of 3m plus.
Kirsty Allison travelled to Tokyo as part of the 3snapshots.com project
-----
Via Creative Review
Personal comment:
On sait depuis longtemps que le Japon est presque passé tout de suite (peu après l'avènement d'Internet) dans une culture des contenus mobiles, sans vraiment passer par un stade "wired/desktop" du fait qu'ils possédaient la technologie et le réseau cellulaire (Docomo) adéquat et que les gens était surtout équipés de cette façon. Ils ont donc développés prioritairement cette culture, contrairement à l'Europe ou les Etats-Unis qui possèdent une double culture du desktop et de la mobilité, avec une approche de complémentarité. La portion "mobile" étant actuellement en train de se développer, sans toutefois s'imposer clairement (téléchargements, applications, jeux, gps, podcasts et vodcasts plutôt que web).
Il est intéressant toutefois d'effectuer une "veille nipponne" relative aux usages, comportements sociaux et développements des contenus mobiles du fait de leur "avance" dans le domaine (mais tenant compte aussi de leur différence techno-culturelle). Ici l'émergence de ce terme "Mohemians".
Wednesday, April 22. 2009
[Image: The Cepheid Variable RS Pup].
Apparently, all those stars out there might be something more than mere heavenly bodies.
Indeed, "the galactic equivalent of the internet," if there is such a thing, might just take the form of manipulated stars. What kind of stars? Cepheid variables, or "stars that vary regularly in brightness."
This regular dimming and brightening could be used as a way both to encode and broadcast information.
From the article:
Crucially, these "Cepheid variables" are so luminous they can be seen as far away as 60 million light years. Jolting the star with a kick of energy – possibly by shooting it with a beam of high-energy particles called neutrinos – could advance the pulsation by causing its core to heat up and expand, [some scientists] say. That could shorten its brightness cycle – just as an electric stimulus to a human heart at the right time can advance a heartbeat. The normal and shortened cycles could be used to encode binary "0"s and "1"s.
The implication here is that hundreds of stars might already be "a galaxy-spanning internet" put into service by intelligent, nonhuman species.
The print version of the article differs a bit from the online, and I'm quoting the print version here: "There are over 500 cepheids in the Milky Way, and countless more in nearby galaxies, so data could be shuffled around as in a computer network."
Overlooking some of the more basic questions here – such as why on earth is this kind of cannabinoid speculation being printed in a science magazine? – the idea that information is being relayed back and forth, from star to star, as if inside some vast celestial harddrive, raised at least my eyebrows.
What messages, or fragments of messages, might we be witnessing every night?
And if there are no messages, yet we transcribe those flickering astral patterns nonetheless, what unexpected literatures of deep space might we think we've been translating?
-----
Via BLDBLOG
Personal comment:
Un réseau d'information littéralement inter-planétaires? Se servir de la lumière émise par certaines étoiles pour véhiculer de l'information?
Thursday, April 09. 2009
If you want to lose weight, move closer to your food:
A new study from the University of British Columbia shows people who live within a kilometre of a grocery store are half as likely to be overweight, compared to those living in neighbourhoods without grocery stores.
But the study's author, the esteemed Larry Frank, notes that grocery stores are only part of the story.
"It's a marker for other commercial uses, as well, so it's not just grocery stores that matter."
Frank's research has consistently shown that people who live close to a mix of stores and services tend to walk more. So the lesson here isn't to move closer to a grocery store. Instead, we should be looking to foster mixed-use neighborhoods, where more and more people can do some of their errands on foot, rather than being forced to drive for every trip.
This piece originally appeared on the Sightline Institute's blog,The Daily Score
-----
Via Worldchanging
Personal comment:
Un post un peu "gag", mais cqfd une fois de plus qu'il est positif à maints points de vue d'habiter un quartier, un morceau de ville où l'on peut se déplacer à pied pour réaliser la polupart de ses achats et/ou partie de ses occupations sociales.
Tuesday, April 07. 2009
If you, like me, are not one of those 3,250,789 or 1,140,917 (revised version) online viewers who already watched "Did You Know 3.0 - From Meeting in Rome this Year", you will probably enjoy its huge amount of worldwide facts and its use of minimal infographic animation.
Watch the most recent, revised version of the video HERE. Does anyone know if there exists a high-resolution version?
The video, or at least its original concept, seems to originate from Karl Fisch. You can learn more on his blog about Version 2.0 and Version 1.0, which have a different visual quality.
-----
Via Information Aesthetics
Personal comment:
En dehors du côté "information in motion", quelques données intéressantes à connaître sur l'évolution de notre environnement contemporain (mais discutables?)
|