Internet Explorer claws back a bit of market share at the expense of Chrome and Firefox

ICS reaches 2.9 percent of active Android devices, 63.7 percent still on Gingerbread

IDC: Android tablets will overtake iPad by 2015

Nielsen report finds 56 percent of US households have a modern game console

A few other tidbits: 65 percent of consoles are located in the living room, online shopping for games is up while other channels continue to decline, and streaming video continues to be a growing secondary use for game consoles (particularly on the Wii, where it accounts for 33 percent of console usage, compared to roughly 15 percent on both the Xbox 360 and PS3).

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US subscriber count reaches 100 million, Android and iOS continues to climb

The latest ComScore report, which details the three-month period ending in January, shows an increase in Google’s mobile OS of 2.3 percent while Apple jumped 1.4; conversely, RIM dropped 2 percent while Microsoft (which likely encompasses WinMo and Windows Phone) went down a percentage point. Individual OEM market share is even more lackluster: LG and Motorola dipped ever so slightly, while Apple jumped up a couple percentage points. Possibly the most noteworthy item in the report, however, is the fact that the total number of US smartphone subscribers has finally exceeded 100 million. That count appears to be growing at an incredible pace, too, so it may not be terribly long before the coveted 200 million milestone is within reach.

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Line has reached 20 million just 8 months after it first launched, charting some notable figures along the way. NHN built and first marketed the application in Japan — which was the first overseas market it ever expanded into — and it has revealed that Line is seeing one million new downloads worldwide each week, and February alone saw it add an impressive 5 million. 

As recently as 2010, growth in US Facebook usage was well into the double digits, at 38.6%, eMarketer estimates. But with 116.8 million US internet users already logging on to the site at least once monthly that year, growth rates were bound to plateau.

By 2011 Facebook user growth rose a comparatively small 13.4%, and this year will be the first when growth rates drop to the single digits. Rates of change in the US will continue to decline throughout eMarketer’s forecast period.

On Twitter, by contrast, growth is stronger. Last year’s 31.9% increase in users outpaced that of 2010, when growth was at 23.5%. Similar to Facebook’s trajectory, Twitter’s growth rate will also fall in the coming years, but still remain nearly four times higher than Facebook’s growth rate in 2014.

Twitter’s size, which is fairly small, is one factor that makes such growth rates possible. Facebook already reached an enormous audience of nearly 133 million US internet users at the end of 2011, a figure that will surpass 150 million by 2014. Twitter, in comparison, had a US user base of less than 24 million at the end of last year. Still, between 2010 and 2014, eMarketer predicts, Twitter will about double its US user base, reaching 37.6 million microbloggers by the period’s end.

Google’s mobile internet browser has grabbed around 23 percent of all users, up from just over 14 percent back in February 2011.

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Vancouver sees a 40% reduction in printing and a cost savings of $336 per year per device with switch to tablets.

Paperless cost savings:

• The City pays approximately $71 monthly per blackberry for access fees - we now pay about $43 per month per an iPad in monthly charges for unlimited data plans and less for the limited plans. The City saves $336 per year per device for those employees that turn in their blackberries for iPads.
• Staff time is more efficient - meeting time is no longer “out of the office” time.
• There is already a substantial reduction in amount of paper printed- even during this year’s test phase. With paperless iPad use in the first three City Council meetings this year, the City has already saved 40% of pages printed. With large multi-page documents and color copies being common for Council meetings, these costs can add up significantly.
  • In the first three meetings of 2012, the printed pages went from 5,371 to 3,182 with the iPad test phase partially implemented. In 2011, the City Council office printed 126,076 pages of documents for Council meetings- if we kept pace with a 40 percent page reduction, we would print 75,646 pages this year, saving more than 50,000 sheets of paper, additional hours of staff time spent printing and collating.  
  • The cost to print 10 copies of a 10 page, full color, double sided and stapled packet is $21.10 – roughly the amount spent on each topic at meetings for Council members – there are typically eight to ten agenda items per Council meeting.
  • If we projected these kinds of savings to more departments, we think we can make an incredible impact, demonstrating good stewardship of resources.

Apple breaks the 514,000 jobs down into two categories: 304,000 jobs directly tied to Apple and its business partners and another 210,000 jobs that are part of the “iOS app economy”. The first category includes 47,000 Apple employees and another estimated 257,000 employees at companies such as Samsung, Corning, FedEx, and UPS who are part of Apple’s supply chain and other businesses. Rather than a direct count of employees at other companies, that latter figure is calculated based on “employment multipliers” published the U.S. government and applied to Apple’s domestic expenditures. 

Apple further addresses its in-house efforts, noting that 47,000 of its 70,000 employees are located in the United States, with 7,800 U.S. jobs having been added in 2011. Over 27,000 of its U.S. employees are part of the company’s network of 246 retail stores, with Apple reporting that the majority of these employees are full-time workers. On the support side, Apple employees 7,700 AppleCare Advisors in the United States, acknowledging that it could save 50% on call center costs by outsourcing to other countries such as India but that it opts to keep the jobs in the United States in order to maintain its highly-regarded customer service standards. 

On the App Economy side, Apple notes that it has paid out over $4 billion to developers since the App Store was launched less than four years ago, creating an entirely new industry that has seen 210,000 new jobs added to the U.S. economy. With 248,000 registered iOS developers in the U.S. and over 5,000 iOS developer jobs listed on Indeed.com, Apple clearly believes that the industry will continue to see strong growth.

Smartphones spread out: Pew says 46 percent of US adults now own one

When Facebook filed for its IPO earlier this month, it revealed that it has 425 million mobile users. That massive presence on phones and tablets has translated into success for many others, the social network says, since Facebook’s mobile platform sends more than 60 million people to third-party apps every month.

In a post on the company’s developer blog, Facebook’s head of mobile developer relations, James Pearce, says that since Facebook revamped its mobile platform in October last year (which included the launch of its iPad app), it’s resulted in a big uptick of users interacting with apps and games outside of Facebook proper. The 60 million people who visit apps from Facebook create more than 320 million “visits” on those apps.

While many of those visits are to popular games such as those made by Zynga, Pearce cites the social app Foodspotting as an example of an app success story. By letting users sign in with their Facebook login and creating an app that integrate’s with Facebook’s Open Graph, Pearce says Foodspotting has seen the number of visits and activities shared via the social network increase by a factor of three.

As a more recent example, Yahoo built Open Graph into its desktop and mobile web apps, so visitors could see on Facebook which Yahoo News articles their friends had been reading. Since Feb. 14 — not even two weeks ago — traffic to the mobile Yahoo News web app has gone up by 3.5x.

The post comes right before Facebook appeared at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. There, Facebook Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor said the company is working to help create standards to make developing web apps easier. That would help fuel Facebook’s mobile influence even more, since developers wouldn’t need to create separate apps for every platform (iOS, Android, etc.) and just integrate Open Graph with a web app to reach Facebook’s huge audience.

Of course, the one thing Facebook hasn’t yet revealed is how it’s going to tie advertising to its mobile platform. In Facebook’s IPO filing, the company said it didn’t serve ads through any of its mobile products — yet.