Asia Continues to be Facebook's Strongest Growth Region

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 1

With Facebook topping 330 million active users over the past week, the company's strongest growth region continues to be Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook added close to 17M active users in Asia alone. Since my previous post, the share of active users from Asia grew by 2% (to 13.5% of all users), and roughly 1 in 7 users now come from the region. With a market penetration under 2%, Facebook is poised to add many more users in Asia (and Africa).

Compared to the U.S., the proportion of Facebook users in their teens (13-17) or in the 18-25 age group are much higher in Asia:

As was the case in other parts of the world, expect the share of users 45 and older to climb as Facebook becomes more mainstream in Asia. Growth was strong across all age groups in Asia over the last 12 weeks, particularly among teens (+90%) and the 18-25 age group (+60%).

In other regions, notably North America, Europe, the Middle East, and South America, growth in the 18-25 age bracket, lagged behind users 45 and older.

In closing I want to highlight countries (within several regions) where Facebook has been growing rapidly:

(continue reading)

There are Over a Million People Actively Using Facebook Right Now

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 7

A little over a week ago Facebook reached a major milestone: 300 million active users. The fastest-growth region continues to be Asia, but growth in other overseas regions such as the Americas and Africa have also been strong. Currently reaching only 1% of potential users in Asia and Africa, Facebook has barely scratched the surface in both regions:

Growth in the U.S. remains fastest among those age 45 and older, and the share of those users is higher in the U.S. than overseas. In other regions recent growth tended to be more evenly divided among age groups. One notable exception has been the teen group in Asia, which grew over 80% in the last 12 weeks.

Of the 300 million users, how many are actively using Facebook right now? (For the rest of this post active means not just logged in, but actually engaged.) By treating the previous question as a Fermi problem^†, I can probably derive a decent estimate. First, I assume that the average fraction of people actively using Facebook at any moment, equals the fraction of time an average Facebook user is active on the site^††. Without access to any usage stats, I'll throw out the following guesstimate: a typical Facebook user spends 4 hours per month (or 48 per year) actively using the site.

Depending on how accurate you want to be, there are 1.6 to 6 million people actively using Facebook right now. If the average Facebook user spends considerably more than 4 hours per month (actively) using the site, the estimate would be much higher than a 1.6 million. I do have an escape clause: in classic Fermi problems, being within a factor of 10 is considered acceptable.

(†) Increasingly popular in the business world, Fermi problems have long been staples in Physics (and Math) departments.
(††) In other words, if the average Facebook user spends 1% of her time actively using the site, on average 1% of all Facebook users are actively using the site at any given moment.

Facebook Adds Million of Users in Asia

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 1

Since my previous post on Facebook users by country, the company has grown rapidly in Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook grew 90% in Asia going from 11.4 to 21.7 million active users. With a Market Penetration of only 0.6% in Asia, Facebook has barely scratched the surface in the region.

The company also gained 11.3M users in Europe (up 19%) and 14.7M users in North America (up 21%) over the last 12 weeks. On a year-over-year basis, Facebook grew 194% (adding close to 150 million active users worldwide) from Jun/2008 to Jun/2009.

For more details, you can view regional numbers below:

Active Facebook Users By Country & Region: June 2007

View more Microsoft Word documents from oreillymedia.

Being a Suggested User Leads to Thousands of Twitter Followers

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 4

Ever since Twitter started suggesting accounts to new users, it was clear that those on the suggested users list were gaining thousands of followers. Setting aside the fact that number of followers is a poor gauge of influence (see our Twitter report for details), I wanted to know how many followers a suggested account gains by appearing on the list.

I took the set of accounts that were added to the suggested users list during the last two months, recorded their number of followers the day before they made the list (Initial # of followers), and tracked what happened a week, 2 weeks, and a month later. From an initial set of just over a hundred accounts, I was able to gather sufficient data (using Twitterholic and Twittercounter) on 80+ suggested users.

(continue reading)

Active Facebook Users By Country

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 27

Since I last posted numbers on Facebook's user base six week ago, the company has added close to 20 million active users.

I've had a few requests for detailed numbers by country so I quickly assembled an update for each of the regions shown above.

(continue reading)

Facebook is Growing Fast in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 13

With Facebook recently passing 175 million users, I decided to update my analysis of its user base. The weekly growth in number of users has remained steady, with the last 5 weeks being exceptionally strong: Facebook added over 25 million users since early February. The share of U.S. users inched up slightly from 30% to 31%.

The company added users in all regions but compared to my analysis in early December, growth accelerated in Asia and North America. Note that the number of users in Asia remains small compared to other social networks in the region. The number of users from Canada still exceeds the total in all of Asia (still under 10 million). Within Asia, the fastest-growing countries over the last 12 weeks were Indonesia (up 169%) and the Philippines (up 119%). (For reasons as to how Facebook has expanded in specific countries, I encourage Radar readers to share their thoughts in the comments.)

Europe and South America both experienced double-digit growth rates over the last 12 weeks, but compared to last December, Facebook grew much slower in both regions. A third of all users (33%) now come from Europe. Among the smaller countries in Europe, Facebook grew fastest in the Czech Republic (up 144%) and Slovakia (up 137%). Among the larger European countries, growth was fastest in Italy (up 71%), Spain (up 66%), and Germany (up 48%).

With such a large user base, the company continues to attract application developers to its platform. The number of active Facebook apps continues to grow but at a much slower rate, roughly 2% per week over the last 12 weeks. (For this analysis, I define a Facebook app to be active if it had at least 100 active users.) The graph below compares the relative size of the Facebook, Myspace, and iPhone application platforms:

(continue reading)

Facebook Growth Regions and Gender Split

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 23

Since we began tracking Facebook demographics in late May, weekly growth has held steady, usually in the low single-digits on a percentage basis. More importantly, it's fair to say that the company has successfully expanded overseas. With close to 128M users, the share of U.S. users is down to around 30% from 35% in late May:

Over the last three months, Facebook has added members across all regions, with the strongest growth coming from Europe, South America, and the Middle East/North Africa:

In Europe, growth has been especially impressive in Italy and Spain. I'm not sure when the Italian translation of Facebook launched, but soon after, Italians started signing up in droves. The (crowdsourced) Spanish translation was completed within a month and launched in early 2008. I've read reports that users in Spain have used the site to connect with long lost relatives in Latin America. Venezuela, Argentina, and Uruguay were Facebook's fastest-growth countries in South America. In late May, some Radar readers were highlighting Facebook's growing popularity in Venezuela, Argentina, and Chile.

I don't have any particular insight into how Facebook is growing in the Middle East and North Africa, but the company has added lots of users in Tunisia, Morocco, and Turkey. (I encourage Radar readers from the region to share their thoughts in the comments.)

Having grown up in Southeast Asia, I've been detecting more interest in Facebook among friends in the region. But for now Facebook still lags Friendster and Multiply. In fact Facebook has far less users in all of Asia than users from Canada! Similarly, the U.K. has more than twice the number of Facebook users than all of Asia. Facebook has to contend with homegrown social networks and slightly different online habits: Asian internet users spend more time on gaming and instant messaging. But even with their relatively small user base and amidst a competitive environment, Facebook is growing in Asia (they added 1.5M users from the region in the last 12 weeks).

Another interesting tidbit about Facebook's recent growth, is that the fast-growing regions discussed above are adding teens (13-17) and college-age (18-25) users at a faster rate than North America.

With a commanding share of college-age users in its home country, U.S. growth has been strongest among working age users (26-59). I was expecting stronger growth in the teen market (13-17), but teens remain the slowest growing group in the U.S.

The Gender split has persisted: Females now outnumber Males, 51% to 44%. In late May the Female to Male split was 41% to 34%. The share of users who decline to state their gender dropped from 24% in late May to 5% in early December.

That Females so outnumber Males may surprise people. While the Female/Male distribution has persisted over time, there is quite a bit of variation across regions. The Middle East/North Africa and Africa are the only regions where Male Facebook users outnumber Females.

Numbers for Digital's Rise

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 7

I talk a lot to people who don't quite understand the scale of the media shift from atoms to bits (update: corrected), so I always have my eyes open for numbers and anecdotes that illustrate the point. The latest I found are from an article on Apple's threat to shut the iTunes store if it has to pay more to songwriters:

Digital downloads grew 38 per cent from 2006 to 2007 to become a $1.26 billion business, making up 23 per cent of the market for recorded music, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Sales of physical music media such as CDs, cassettes and DVDs declined 19.1 per cent to $7.5 billion in the same one-year period.

I'm still looking for convincing numbers on film and TV movement to digital. For example, does anyone have numbers on how well Dr Horrible's Singalong Blog (the web-only offering from Buffy creator Joss Wedon) did?

Where Does Facebook Grow From Here

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 17

Facebook publishes demographic data through its advertising platform. Potential advertisers can obtain estimates for the number of Facebook users by age group, gender, education, country, and even relationship status! While the estimates most likely rely on user supplied data, they provide the best publicly available numbers on the Facebook user base.

Facebook currently has about 75M users spread across more than 80 countries. The good news is that the top three countries (US,UK,Canada) now account for only about 61% of all users:

A few large (as in population) countries immediately jump out including Turkey, Colombia, and France. Facebook is the top social network in these countries yet the number of Facebook users is small relative to the population. The challenge is that there are more countries on the list where Facebook is up against other more widely used social networks.

According to Alexa, Facebook overtook Myspace as the #1 social networking site on the web. Worldwide numbers are interesting but everyone knows that social networks are best compared on a regional basis. Compare Alexa's recent numbers to the map of regional Social Network Market Share that Tim posted about a month ago. Regional market leaders (Friendster in Southeast Asia, Hi5/Orkut in South Asia and Latin America, Bebo/LiveJournal in parts of Europe) have significant numbers of users and dislodging each of them won't be easy.

What to do in countries with strong incumbent social networks? Incumbency relies on average users aversion to recreating "friendships" and profiles.The ideal come-from-behind strategy is to embrace Data Portability. Or more precisely, as Tim stated last November:

Set the data free! Allow social data mashups. That's what will be the trump card in building the winning social networking platform.

The "our walled garden is better than their walled garden" blueprint works best when you are already one of the established market leaders. The same Data Portability strategy that makes sense for an upstart could be what defines the dominant global social networking platform. Facebook's tussle with Google over Friend Connect shows that they are struggling with this issue. (Also see David Recordon's recent post on Myspace as well.)

Actually, the more probable scenario is that (closed) social networks become less important over the long term. With more web applications incorporating social features, users will gradually "leave" closed social networks altogether. Already, I know less and less people who use Facebook regularly. Most people I know log in only when they receive a "friend" request - sadly hugs, gifts, zombies and pokes are losing their allure.

One other demographic tidbit. Just like the US, the Facebook overseas user base is young, with most users less than 34 years old. Given its roots as a US college social network, Facebook has more college-age (18-25) users in the US. [UPDATE: I also keep hearing that more high schoolers are using Facebook. In the US, the 13-17 age group now account for 1 in 6 users.]

Worldwide Social Network Market Share

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 28

Via Azeem Azaar's twitter feed, a great visualization of worldwide social network market share, from Le Monde:

Disks have become tapes

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 3

Via Michal Migurski's delicious feed, I found Disks Have Become Tapes, a fascinating set of observations about why MapReduce is so successful. In short (as observed by Doug Cutting at OSCON last year), MapReduce hits the sweet spot by operating at the transfer rate of disks (growing at 20%/year) rather than seek rate (growing at 5%/year) as relational databases do. It also mentions the growing field of column databases, which we're watching at Radar (e.g., Michael Stonebraker's appearance at MoneyTech) as driven by capacity growing faster than transfer and seek. Absolutely fascinating stuff.

Trendalyzer view of the banking crisis

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 3

The team at "And Still I Persist" has created their own version of Hans Rosling's "Trendalyzer" (see: Radar post) to visualize the current US banking crisis.

"First lets look at the top 8 banks and their mortgages that are 90+ days late. Below is a flash charting system, feel free to use the controls and experiment. We chart the total assets of the bank along the horizontal axis, the value of loans that go 90+ days late on the vertical, and the size of the circles represent the total loan portfolio for that bank. You can set the charts in motion by hitting the “Play” button and stop them at any time. Hovering over a circle will show you the value for that data point.

Our charts step forward in time for Q1-2002 one quarter at a time, reading directly from the bank’s own FDIC reports. "
Bank Portfolios - 90+ Days Late

See the original article for more about this visualization and the team that created it.

Update: Bruce Henderson invites anybody interested in working with a larger data set to take a look at the OSG Boomerang tool.

Steve Souders asks: "How green is your web page?"

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 4

Steve Souders, my Velocity conference Co-Chair and author of High Performance Websites, gave me permission to repost this great analysis:

How green is your web page?

Writing faster web pages is great for your users, which in turn is great for you and your company. But it’s better for everyone else on the planet, too.

Intrigued by an article on Radar about co2stats.com, I looked at my web performance best practices from the perspective of power consumption and CO2 emissions. YSlow grades web pages according to how well they follow these best practices. What if it could convert those grades into kilowatt-hours and pounds of CO2?

Let’s look at one performance rule on one site. Wikipedia is one of the top ten sites in the world (#9 according to Alexa). I love Wikipedia. I use it almost every day. Unfortunately, it has thirteen images in the front page that don’t have a far future Expires header (Rule 3). Every time someone revisits this page the browser has to make thirteen HTTP requests to the Wikipedia server to check if these images are still usable, even though these images haven’t changed in over seven months on average. A better way to handle this would be for Wikipedia to put a version number in the image’s URL and change the version number whenever the image changes. Doing this would allow them to tell the browser to cache the image for a year or more (using a far future Expires or Cache-Control header). Not only would this make the page load faster, it would also help the environment. Let’s try to estimate how much.

• Let’s assume Wikipedia does 100 million page views/day. (I’ve seen estimates that are over 200 million/day.)
• Assume 80% of those page views are done with a primed cache (based on Yahoo!’s browser cache statistics). We’re down to 80M page views/day.
• Assume 10%, no, 5% of those are for the home page. We’re down to 4M page views/day for the home page with a primed cache. Each of those contains 13 HTTP requests to validate the images, for a total of 52M image validation requests/day.
• Assume one web server can handle 100 of these requests/second, or 8.6M requests/day. That’s six web servers running full tilt year-round to handle this traffic.
• Assume a fully loaded server uses 100W. Six servers, year-round, consume 5,000 kilowatt-hours per year or approximately 500-1000 pounds of CO2 emissions.

I think this is a conservative estimate, but there are a lot of assumptions above. And six servers doesn’t sound like a lot. 5,000 kilowatt-hours is a drop in the bucket if you look at data center power consumption. But this was just one rule on one page on one site. Think about the impact of not gzipping, not minifying JavaScript, wasteful redirects, and bloated images. If we extrapolate this across all the performance rules across all sites the numbers are much bigger.

Make your pages faster. It’s good for your users, good for you, and good for Mother Earth.

-Steve

Steve has a SXSW Bookreading on Saturday @11 AM, and will be at the O'Reilly booth on Sunday from 3:30-4:30. Stop by and say hello!

State of the Computer Book Market, Part 4 - The Languages

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 24

Note: An inadvertent draft of this post went out in our RSS feed and was posted for about an hour on Tuesday. It was cloned from Q1 '07 and most of the data and information was wrong.

In this fourth post (one, two and three are found here) on the State of the Computer Book Market, we will look at programming languages and drill in a little on each language area.

Overall the 2007 market for programming languages was down (1.67%) in 2007 when compared with 2006. There were 1,809,695 units sold in 2006 versus 1,779,523 units sold in 2007 which is (30,172) fewer units in 2007. So the modest 1% growth in the Overall Computer Book Market must have been fueled by non-programming oriented books. You don't need a programming language to learn to use MacOsX, Vista or Office and that is where the growth was in 2007.

(continue reading)

State of the Computer Book Market, part 3 -- The Publishers

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 5

In this third installment, (part one, part two and part four later this week), we will look at how Publishers fared in 2007 when compared to 2006. The chart below shows our dashboard view of the Large publishers' results for 2007. The most notable change is that Wiley has assumed the leading spot as the largest publisher, with 29% market share of units sold. (We'll look at revenue share later in the analysis.)

2006 Pub Share	2007 Pub Share

(continue reading)

State of the Computer Book Market, Part 2: The Technologies

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 9

In this second installment (the first post is found here), we look at computer book sales in specific technology categories. Remember that we've organized the data into six "Category Families" -- Systems and Programming, Web Design and Development, Business Applications, Digital Media Applications, Consumer Operating Systems and Devices, and Other. Within each Family are category group, super-category, category, and atomic category, in a five-level hierarchy. For example, Systems and Programming includes programming languages, databases, software engineering, general programming, security, and so on. In the rest of this post, we will contrast Q4 2006 with Q4 2007 and the whole year of 2006 with 2007.

As a refresher, here is a new view of the Category Families with their sub areas for Q4 2007 compared to Q4 2006. In this view, we've changed the thickness of the borders to highlight the category hierarchy.

Recapping the big picture from the last post, what you didn't see is that the fast growth of Windows Vista was aided by the addition of 63 new titles [title count] that made the Bookscan data-set in 2007. (The data set consists of the top 10,000 computer books. So more titles in a given category typically means that new titles in that category have pushed titles from other categories off the bottom of the list. Shrinkage in the title count in a category doesn't necessarily mean that titles are unavailable, just that they are no longer selling enough copies to make the list.)

There were 15 Vista titles in the 2006 data and on 12/31/07 there were 78 or an 420% increase in count, while XP declined at a slower rate going from 125 titles in 2006 to 97 in 2007 for a -22.4% decrease in count. Combined, that netted 35 more titles in 2007 than in 2006 for XP and Vista. This is a distinct (isbn) count as well, so if a title makes it in the top 10,000 report for more than one week, it is counted only once. We wanted to see how many titles made up the category, not how often a title makes the report. But there is more to this category than is visibly apparent and we will cover that in more detail later in this post.

In the table immediately below, you can see how the cat_family groupings have performed (total units) both by quarter and yearly results. The only noticeable change is that the Consumer Operating Systems has swapped positions with Digital Media at the number 4 & 5 ranks.

Cat_Family	Qtr Growth	YoY Growth	06Rank	07Rank	06Share	07Share
business applications	11.78%	4.79%	2	2	15.85%	16.63%
computer topics / other	-3.09%	-2.74%	6	6	1.94%	1.99%
consumer operating systems	39.43%	25.47%	5	4	8.32%	11.15%
digital media	-13.79%	-19.35%	4	5	10.72%	8.97%
systems and programming	-6.76%	-5.48%	1	1	29.03%	27.48%
web design and development	-3.33%	-2.34%	3	3	14.38%	14.04%

Technorati Tags: Analysis, Books, Data, Markets, O'Reilly Media, Publishing, Trends

(continue reading)

State of the Computer Book Market, Part 1: The Market

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 5

As described in the post Computer Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator, and our other posts on the State of the Computer Book Market we have an updated series of posts that show the whole market's final 2007 numbers. Remember this data is from Bookscan's weekly top 3,000 titles sold. Bookscan measures actual cash register sales in bookstores. In other words, if you buy a book it gets recorded in this data. Retailers such as Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon make up the lion's share of these sales.

Book Market Performance

Here's the year-on-year trend for the entire computer book market since 2003, when we first obtained the data from Bookscan. Please remember the data is for all publishers and NOT just O'Reilly. The slightly-thicker red line represents the 2007 data.

Click on the image to get a larger view.

As you can see, the clear seasonal pattern we've pointed out before still exists. The trend line for each year closely mirrors the year before, with remarkably consistent weekly ups and downs. (The computer book market cratered in 2001, shrinking twenty percent a year for three years until it stabilized in 2004 at about half the size that it was in 2000. We only have data going back to 2003.)

So what's was news in 2007? The year got off to slow start and by mid-year it looked like results were going end below the prior years. But around the middle of July, which is typically a slow time in computer books, the market climbed above the most recent years. Not only did the market climb above of the prior years, but it did not dip below any of the prior years until the third week in December [Christmas week]. That being said, the market ended up at 1%, or 4,089 units above 2006 - on a base of over 7.4 million units. That is truly a small increase but mostly realized in the second half of the year.

Another way to look at the market is with our Treemap visualization tool. This tool helps us pick up on trends quickly, even when looking at thousands of books. It works like this.

The size of a square shows the market share and relative-size of a category, while the color shows the rate of change. Red is down, and green is up, with the intensity of the color representing the magnitude of the change. The following screenshot of our treemap shows gains and losses by category, comparing the fourth quarter of 2007 with the fourth quarter of 2006.

Technorati Tags: Analysis, Books, Data, Markets, O'Reilly Media, Publishing, Trends

(continue reading)

ETech: Tutorials

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 3

Every once in a while Brady sends around the ETech tutorial signup numbers and we scratch our heads at the vagaries of human desire. For example, who'd have thought that iPhone development would outsell Kathy Sierra by 2:1? As of the last report on the 20th, we only had three spaces left in Brian JepsonTom Igoe's Making Things Talk tutorial, which was size-limited because of the hardware. And in the Marc-vs-marc category, debugging is winning over food hacking. This suits me, because (sorry Marc!) I plan to be learning about amateur molecular gastronomy on Monday afternoon. I figure I can always hire someone who knows how to run DTrace on my EC2 box, but if I don't learn how to make green tea-vodka-lime foam with liquid nitrogren then nobody in my village will! (I justify my food-hacking interest by saying that it's an example of how the trickle-down of scientific equipment and skills brings biological hacks within every person's grasp, although it's also a good way to fill my belly and please my palate)

OLPC and the Kindle

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 27

When I saw the One Laptop Per Child device, I just had to tinker around with it. So during an hour-long train ride home I explored the little OLPC and was quite impressed. I was impressed because it is a fully functional computer, with a screen size a tad larger than the Kindle from Amazon. I don't think these two devices will compete with each other for market position, but they both have some features that put them in a similar category. And they both cost $399, although the OLPC's price buys two devices -- one for a youngster somewhere in the world who will make good use of it, and one for you to help get more apps built for it.

Both the Kindle and OLPC can browse the Web. However, the Kindle was designed to browse Amazon's library of content to purchase. The OLPC has a Firefox browser and it truly operates like it was meant to browse. The Kindle uses Whispernet from Amazon, which is quite impressive in its coverage. It is not painfully slow either. I have read GMail with the Kindle and checked basketball scores on NBA.com. I did a quick bit of math. If you are paying roughly $49 a month for an internet service provider, you could buy a Kindle and use Whispernet for free. After about eight months, your Kindle would have paid for itself in the savings you were shelling out for an ISP. I am not going to do this myself, but it is possible for low-volume browsing and internet useage. I am hoping the browser delivered in the Experimental section of the Kindle improves with time. I believe Amazon has a good opportunity to make this a very compelling device, even more than it already is. I do like the reading quality of the Kindle. The reading experience is excellent if you keep your thumbs off the sides. I have well-trained/controlled thumbs now. I have a Sony Reader as well and, I am sorry to say, that it just does not compete well with the Kindle's intuitiveness and readability.

But the unexpected entrant is the OLPC. I know it is not intended to be an e-book reader solely, but it does that function very well. I logged into our Safari Books Online and -- voila. A nice experience. For a couple of weeks now, I have been trying to get my Kindle to get into Safari and have had no luck. The OLPC was a snap. I did have some DNS issues so I used the IP address of Safari [193.194.158.109] and that resolved things. The OLPC has another competitive advantage over the Kindle as far as reading e-content -- the OLPC can handle PDF documents just fine. This is a huge advantage. Open any PDF you like and it works. The Kindle requires that you send a document to Amazon for conversion if you want to get it on your device. If you navigate to a PDF with the Kindle browser, it just craps-out because it was not meant to read PDF. I do not understand why the Kindle does not read PDF [the Sony Reader reads PDF quite well] other than Amazon wants to force the proprietary mobi-format on publishers and consumers. This gets me steamed. We have Apple with its wonderfully loaded iPhone forcing buyers to use one cellular service. We have Amazon not accepting the standard PDF format of web documents. Whatever happened to innovators shooting for ubiquity rather than lock-in and lock-down? I just don't get these two cases.

That leaves me with the wonderfully crafted and delivered OLPC. What's not to like about it? Okay, my fingers are too fat for the keyboard, because it was designed for a younger and smaller person. But the keyboard is no more difficult to get use to than a Kindle, Blackberry, iPhone or other small device. And actually it has many function keys that take you directly to menus, scrolls, and page jumps. So one of the big wins is also the business of the OLPC. It is open. It is Linux underneath. It is not going to lock you in, down, or out.

This first picture is the Kindle and OLPC side-by-side. Click to see a larger shot.

The second shot is the OLPC reading Safari Books Online content, Javascript The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition

The bottom line: Both of these devices are going to be around for along time. I hope that Amazon sees the potential of their device and realizes that OPEN is going to get it more consumers laying down $399 than a closed proprietary device. It will also ensure that a publishing ecosystem will build around them. As for the OLPC: here's to you folks. Nicely done. A wonderfully crafted device, a noble vision, and an Open mindset. Brilliant!

Ignite Boston - Next Week

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 0

The second Ignite Boston will take place one week from today on Thursday, September 6, from 6 to 10pm at Hurricane O'Reillys.

If you plan to attend, please RSVP by emailing IgniteBoston at oreilly dot com. You'll be entered into our lottery for a chance to win $300 worth of O'Reilly books of your choosing. You must be present to win.

If you are interested in connecting with some of the folks who attended the first Ignite Boston, we have a social network set up for this purpose. You can reach our Crowdvine network here.

We hope to see you at Ignite Boston.