Category Archive

BT Openreach is looking for around 1000 buildings to take part in a pilot scheme to deliver the company’s fastest available broadband speeds to apartments within their building.

Participants will gain access to Openreach’s Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) technology which delivers super-fast broadband speeds. End users will initially have access to downstream speeds of up to 100Mb/s but these will rise to give users the option of up to 300Mb/s in the spring of this year (2012), the fastest commercially available download and upload speeds in the UK for residential connections.

Building owners can register their interest here and
users can register their interest here.

More details can be found in the BT press release.

Interactive Advertising Bureau and Pricewaterhouse Coopers are reporting Internet ad revenues rose 23.2 percent—to a record $14.9 billion in the first half of 2011. The rate of growth more than doubled year on year, as 2010′s first-half year ad revenues of $12.1 billion had represented an 11.3 percent increase over 2009.

The IAB report shows the incredible growth in internet advertising since 1996 together with a table which breaks out where the 2011 ad spend is concentrated. 

Internet Ad spend since 1996

HY 11 … $14,941,000,000
HY 10 … $12,127,000,000 
HY 09 … $10,900,000,000 
HY 08 … $11,510,000,000 
HY 07 … $9,993,000,000
HY 06 … $7,909,000,000
HY 05 … $5,787,000,000 
HY 04 … $4,599,000,000 
HY 03 … $3,292,000,000 
HY 02 … $2,978,000,000 
HY 01 … $3,720,000,000
HY 00 … $4,013,000,000
HY 99 … $1,627,000,000 
HY 98 … $774,000,000 
HY 97 … $344,000,000 
HY 96 … $82,000,000   

2011 Internet Ad spend by category

Search 49%
Banner ads 23%
Classifieds 8%
Digital Video 6%
Rich Media 5%
Referrals/ Lead Generation 5% 
Sponsorship 3%
Email 1%

The UK Government’s Office for National Statistics has just  released their Internet Access – Households and Individuals, 2011 report (.pdf)

Key findings:

77 per cent of households now have Internet access

45 per cent of Internet users used a mobile phone to connect to the Internet

6 million people accessed the Internet over their mobile phone for the first time in the last year

The use of wireless hotspots almost doubled in the last 12 months to 4.9 million users

Google has announced a partnership with the British Library to digitise 250,000 out of copyright books dating from 1700 – 1780 from the Library’s collection.

Once digitised, these unique books will be available for full text search, download and reading through Google Books, as well as being searchable through the Library’s website and stored in perpetuity within the Library’s digital archive. It is also planned to make the works available via Europeana, the European Digital Library.

Researchers, students and other users of the Library will be able to view historical items from anywhere in the world as well as copy, share and manipulate text for non-commercial purposes.

Recently, the Library announced a partnership with brightsolid to digitise up to 40 million pages of its newspaper collections and previously the Library partnered with Microsoft to digitise 65,000 19th century books, some of which are now available as an App on Apple’s iPad.

The top 10 advertisers ranked by search advertising spend* Oct-Dec 2010 which represented a $3.4 billion market during the fourth quarter of 2010 in the U.S were

  1    $51.0 million    Amazon
  2    $27.0 million    AT&T
  3    $26.0 million    Capital One
  4    $25.0 million    Target Department Store
  5    $23.0 million    Expedia
  6    $22.0 million    Ebay
  7    $19.0 million    Progressive
  8    $17.0 million    Sprint
  9    $16.5 million    Geico
 10   $16.2 million    State Farm

* Paid search advertising estimates for Google U.S.  activity

Kantar Media hes more

The internet now accounts for a quarter of all advertising spend in the UK after growing by 12.8% in 2010 and exceeding £4.1 billion ($6.5 billion)

Guy Phillipson, head of the IAB, said the market was “almost back in its pre-recession heyday” and online spending was “higher than I expected”. “In 2009, brands really began to understand how to use the internet. That has improved in 2010 – a year when budgets have also grown,” he said. The total advertising market grew by 7.2 per cent, with 77 of the top 100 advertisers increasing their spending last year, according to the research group Nielsen. Consumer goods and retail companies raised their online budgets to become two of the four largest spenders on display advertisements. However, the financial sector spent the most in 2010, overtaking entertainment and media, with a 15.2 per cent share, the report said

The UK Independent Newspaper has more

Google’s Street View is from today available in all seven continents as the Google mapping service has just gone live in 3 new places Antarctica Brazil and Ireland.  This map view shows just how much of the world Google as already mapped. Whlist the area of Antarctica mapped is very small, running the Man Icon over Antarctica shows some stunning photos from all over Antarctica.

IMS Research say sometime this month the 5 billionth device will plug into the Internet and are forcasting over 22 billion connected deivices by 2020.

Today over 1 billion computers worldwide are regularly connected to the Internet and this number is steadily growing.

The second wave of growth has and is being driven by the mobile phone industry, and the global number of Internet connected phones has now surpassed the number of connected computers. The number of phones is still growing at a much faster rate.

The study adds in emerging Internet connected device sectors such as tablets, netbooks, eBook readers, Internet TVs, digital picture frames, cameras, etc., and reaches 5 billion connected devices.

Pingdom had some interesting statistics in a report on the size of the Internet last year.

ComScore have just released a very interesting white paper “Women on the Web – How Women are Shaping the Internet”. The paper provides insights into the differnet ways men and women inteteract with the web.

Areas covered include

• The Gender Divide
• Women and the Social Web
• Women and Retail
• Content for Women
• Search Activity
• Entertaining Women
• Mobile Women

Once connected women embrace the Internet, however globally women are still sligtly in the minorty with 46% of the global Internet population being female.  The white paper breaks down these differences further

“Singapore, the U.S., New Zealand, Russia and Canada have the highest proportion of adult female Web users – all with 50 percent or more. Countries with the lowest proportion of female Web users include two countries where Internet penetration is still extremely low – India and Indonesia, with 28 and 35 percent, respectively.”

The ComScore White Paper is a available here
Women on the Web How women are shaping the Internet 
(Registration required.)