Forrester, a research outfit, reckons that the global market for cloud services could grow from $41 billion last year to $241 billion by 2020. One reason for this is that the savings that can be won by shifting computing to the cloud remain compelling; another is that Amazon-style snafus have been rare.
Read more at The Economist
Friday, May 6
Break-ins and Breakdowns
Sony admitted this week that hackers had stolen personal information, possibly including credit-card details, of many of the 77m-plus users of its online-gaming and entertainment networks. Amazon, an American online retailer and provider of “cloud computing” services, has suffered a lengthy breakdown at one of the giant server farms whose storage and processing facilities it rents to other companies.
The two lapses, though unconnected and different in nature, have raised the question of whether customers can really trust the basic idea behind the cloud—that you can buy computing services from the internet, just like gas or water from a utility.
Read more at The Economist
The two lapses, though unconnected and different in nature, have raised the question of whether customers can really trust the basic idea behind the cloud—that you can buy computing services from the internet, just like gas or water from a utility.
Read more at The Economist
Thursday, May 5
Turning to Social Networks for News
Just as CNN once challenged newspapers and evening newscasts with a constant stream of images from the Persian Gulf war, Twitter and Facebook have become early warning systems for breaking news — albeit not always reliable ones.
Read more at the New York Times
Read more at the New York Times
Tuesday, May 3
Newspaper Circs Slip
Daily circulation at most American newspapers declined again between the six-month period ending March 2010 and the six-month period ending March 2011, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. A MediaPost analysis of 80 of the largest newspapers in the U.S. showed total daily circulation declining 2.6% from 19 million in 2010 to 18.5 million in 2011.
The number of newspapers posting gains in total circulation -- even including digital editions and branded editions under new ABC rules -- remained small, and the overall picture remained one of decline. The new ABC figures seem unlikely to do much for print ad revenues, which have declined precipitously over the last couple of years. According to the Newspaper Association of America, total print ad revenues have fallen 52% from $47.8 billion in 2005 to $22.8 billion in 2010.
Read more here
The number of newspapers posting gains in total circulation -- even including digital editions and branded editions under new ABC rules -- remained small, and the overall picture remained one of decline. The new ABC figures seem unlikely to do much for print ad revenues, which have declined precipitously over the last couple of years. According to the Newspaper Association of America, total print ad revenues have fallen 52% from $47.8 billion in 2005 to $22.8 billion in 2010.
Read more here
Monday, May 2
Billboard Boom
MagnaGlobal, a media researcher, predicts that worldwide spending on out-of-home advertising will expand by 8.3% in 2011 to about $26.4 billion, faster growth than that seen for other non-internet forms of advertising (see chart). Spending on digital billboards and posters is expected to double in the next five years, to $5.2 billion.
Then there is “gladvertising” and “sadvertising”, a rather sinister-sounding idea in which billboards with embedded cameras, linked to face-tracking software, detect the mood of each consumer who passes by, and change the advertising on display to suit it.
Read more at The Economist
Then there is “gladvertising” and “sadvertising”, a rather sinister-sounding idea in which billboards with embedded cameras, linked to face-tracking software, detect the mood of each consumer who passes by, and change the advertising on display to suit it.
Read more at The Economist
Sunday, May 1
Trouble @Twitter
Just two years ago Twitter was the hottest thing on the web. But in the past year U.S. traffic at Twitter.com, the site users visit to read and broadcast 140-character messages, has leveled off. Nearly half the people who have Twitter accounts are no longer active on the network, according to an ExactTarget report from January 2011.
Just how popular is Twitter? Tracking its growth is complicated in part because many people tweet via dashboards such as TweetDeck (making it hard for Twitter to aggregate the mass viewership that many advertisers covet). The company says it has more than 200 million registered accounts (Facebook has 600 million subscribers), but users are allowed multiple accounts. The company also trumpets that the service had 155 million tweets daily by the end of the first quarter, a jump of 41% over the prior quarter, but many tweets -- news headlines, for example -- are often churned out by computers, not humans visiting Twitter.com. One key measurement of Twitter's popularity, Twitter.com's traffic, indicates a disturbing trend: ComScore shows that growth of U.S. visitors to the site has leveled off more than a year after its massive spike upward in 2009.
Read more at Fortune Magazine.
Just how popular is Twitter? Tracking its growth is complicated in part because many people tweet via dashboards such as TweetDeck (making it hard for Twitter to aggregate the mass viewership that many advertisers covet). The company says it has more than 200 million registered accounts (Facebook has 600 million subscribers), but users are allowed multiple accounts. The company also trumpets that the service had 155 million tweets daily by the end of the first quarter, a jump of 41% over the prior quarter, but many tweets -- news headlines, for example -- are often churned out by computers, not humans visiting Twitter.com. One key measurement of Twitter's popularity, Twitter.com's traffic, indicates a disturbing trend: ComScore shows that growth of U.S. visitors to the site has leveled off more than a year after its massive spike upward in 2009.
Read more at Fortune Magazine.
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