economist

Twitter hits 400 million tweets per day, mostly mobile

SAN FRANCISCO--Twitter has become an increasingly deep reservoir of personal data, with more than 400 million tweets per day -- up from 340 million just a month ago -- and associated metadata pouring daily into its servers.

In an interview at the Economist's Ideas Economy: Information 2012 conference, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said that the majority of Twitter users are mobile and more active than their desktop counterparts.

In response to interviewer Tom Standage, the Economist's digital editor, Costolo said, "because tweets are 140 characters, and born of mobile and constrained … Read more

Tablet owners still won't pay to read the news

More than half of all tablet users consume the news on a daily basis, but most are still unwilling to pay for it.

A study commissioned by Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Economist Group found that around 77 percent of tablet owners use their devices each day, spending an average of around 90 minutes in total.

Reading the daily news turned out to be the third-most popular use of tablets; 53 percent of those polled said they read the news daily. The only more popular activities were browsing the Web (which 67 percent do … Read more

Lithuanians love their cell phones

It's that time of year again when the Economist delivers a deluge of facts with its annual "Pocket World in Figures." For data and statistics lovers it's a treasure chest of factoids on everything from the GDP of Bolivia to the country with the greatest number of drinkers (Czech Republic, in case you were wondering).

One of my favorite sections details countries with the highest ownership of cell phones. The lucky country in the 2008 edition was the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, but this year the honor falls to the Republic of Lithuania.

According to the … Read more

'The Economist': Open source a bright spot in 2009

While things look bleak right now for the global economy, The Economist offers some compelling reasons for optimism in the technology industry, and particularly for open source:

In many ways, the previous IT downturn marked the industry's coming of age. In its wake, the industry was no longer mainly about "hot" new technologies that made maximal use of Moore's law....Firms have since started to opt more for good-enough "cold" wares, which save them money and allow for more flexibility: commodity hardware, open-source software such as the Linux operating system and programs accessed over … Read more

Open or not - innovation remains a fuzzy concept

The Economist has a special report on innovation in this week's issue, and it's good to see the magazine recognizing "open innovation" as the perhaps most important current trend in this space: "Rapid and disruptive change is now happening across new and old businesses. Innovation ... is becoming both more accessible and more global. This is good news because its democratization releases the untapped ingenuity of people everywhere and that could help solve some of the world's weightiest problems."

The report is an expansive tour de force through the entire innovation landscape, covering a … Read more

Security woes put mobile adoption on hold

More than 60 percent of companies worldwide are holding off on wireless and remote computing because of security concerns, according to a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit published on Tuesday.

The survey of about 240 executives was sponsored by Symantec, which just happens to sell products that could relief such security concerns.

The researchers also asked how many companies actually use software to secure mobile data. In Western Europe 55 percent said they did, compared to 44 percent in Asia-Pacific and just 36 percent in North America, according to the survey.

Nearly half of all respondents said security products … Read more