A leaked list of search terms which the Chinese government is ordering the country’s microblogging services to block has surfaced showing the regime’s fear of protests following those in Wall Street. The list, obtained by China Digital Times, shows the Chinese government’s keenness to restrict the possible viral spread of any civil protests by blocking key hashtag keywords from appearing in search results and as trending … [Read more...]
It is a metric that is well used across the world in research, analysis and reporting but it is time that the technology world stopped leaning so heavily on Internet penetration. The statistic is one of a number that are at a risk of becoming out-dated in today’s multi-platform Internet. Internet penetration rate denotes the percentage of a (usually) national population that has access to the Internet in their home. The figure is … [Read more...]
Amazon has begun early delivery of Walter Isaacson’s much anticipated Steve Job’ biography to Kindle users. As the screenshot below from @davidj, editor of Tmonews, shows, users of the Amazon reading device are getting their pre-ordered copies of the book before the official release date tomorrow, October 24. Updated below. While here is confirmation that the title is a new addition to the catalogue. Despite the early deliveries, … [Read more...]
Larry Page, CEO at Google, has just passed Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, as the most circled person on Google+. At the time of this posting, Page has reached over 598,865 “followers” on the budding social network, while Zuckerberg is off by a hair at 598,861. The competition between the two has been neck and neck since Google+’s launch in July. Our very own data-information site, Social Statistics, has managed to keep track … [Read more...]
Apple has released a video of the event it staged to celebrate the life of its founder Steve Jobs who passed away earlier this month. “Celebrating Steve” is an 80 minute long video shot when Apple closed its store on Wednesday October 19th to stage the tribute event at its campus in Cupertino, California. The event began with Apple CEO Tim Cook – who announced had previously invited all Apple employees to attend – paying … [Read more...]
Local transactions by Kenya’s mobile money service, M-Pesa currently exceed transactions made by Western Union globally, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reports. According to the IMF, “M-Pesa now processes more transactions domestically within Kenya than Western Union does globally, and provides mobile banking facilities to more than 70 per cent of the country’s adult population.” Launched in March 2007 by Kenyan telecoms … [Read more...]