I.co.uk the smallest short .uk domain
Nomophobia – The fear of being out of mobile phone contact (abbreviation of no-mobile-phone-phobia)Our provisional word is hugsie!
Both Strategy Analytics and Canalys released this week their 4th Quarter estimates which are not far apart and only influence our average table marginally.
Canalys combine their shipment figures with PC’s so we’ve done some figuring to come up with our total. figures.
By vendor they show Apple leading at 26.0 million with 34.1 % of the market followed by Samsung at 14.5 million (19.1% market share).
The Samsung numbers are remarkably close to Strategy Analytics’s estimates.
It clearly is a mature market if so far 75% have 76 million as their leading number!
In other t’internet news BuzzFeed have published their style guide for us all to use. Impressive but is styleguide with or without a hypen and one word or two? hmmmmmm
The question is what do the following Internet/Twitter/SMS etc abbreviations/acronyms stand for (in alphabetical order):
The answer and examples are contained in the word cloud courtesy of WordleTM. and we note with interest that “something” takes pride of place – whatever!
If you got more than 50% right well done.
If not here with the words rearranged in a more comprehensible form are the answers!
In acronym mode here’s a useful list of 100+ commonly used digital marketing ones from Econsultancy.
The ITU have just produced their comprehensively impressive 2013 edition of Measuring the Information Society. It runs (without appendices) to an impressive 254 pages.
We certainly cannot do it justice in our very limited commentary and refer you unequivocally to the coverage on their site.
On their main index which we commented on last year the UK is in the top 10 showing some overall improvement after what appears to be a restatement of 2011’s outcome where a published ranking of # 9 with a score of 7.75 was originally reported.
Interestingly they have for the first time attempted to quantify both world wide and by country Digital Natives.
Definition: A digital native (DN) is defined as a youth, aged 15-24 inclusive, with five years or more experience using the Internet.
We’ve got a table together of the countries with over 5 million DNs.
The ITU rank them basically by the percentage they represent of a countries total population. Worldwide they estimate there could be around 363 million DN’s so that’s circa 5.2% of the world population. They’ve looked at 180 countries and have Iceland on top with a % of 13.1% and Timor-Leste propping them all up at 0.1%.
Arguably from our table #1 could be China, Korea (Rep.) or Japan!
The UK it could be argued are 10th simply on DN size.
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Kaz-Type recently produced some UK research ranking the top 50 essential skills and the, sort of, top 20 inessential ones.
Unsurprisingly Technology & Internet skills (bold type in our header) dominated but we were interested in the wholly mobile constituents (red type). These come in at 14% and of course almost all of the remaining technology skills can be undertaken on either one’s smartphone or tablet! Additionally the non technical skills will often be learnt from or certainly with help from the internet! It will be interesting to see in 10 years time the proportion that will be mobile. We guess they will account for 33% or more including quite a few wearable skills! It will also be fascinating to see the the relegations.
The survey was of 2,000 people and we’re guessing was somewhat London/South East centric due to the appearance of #24!
For completeness we’ll leave you with the 20 most inessential skills.
Oxford University Press have just announced the latest quarterly update to Oxford Dictionaries Online (ODO), its free online dictionary of current English.
As part of this update they have highlighted a selection of 44 additional words which we have categorised, in particular, into Technology and Social Media usage. On the one hand, arguably many of the abbreviations are Social Media driven, and on the other hand, certain of our Technology classifications are also abbreviations, combinations, fashion etc etc.
We calculate that 30% (13) of their selected words are digitalia derived. (our definition of the d word is Digitalia n.: everything or anything involving or relating to the use of computer technology.)
Here are the ODO’s definition of the thirteen words with a little (hopefully helpful) addition for them in italics concerning MOOC:
So there you have it then – if you really must find out what twerk(ing) and the remaining thirty involve then simply dash on over to the ODO blog/press release!
For the mathematicians amongst you these are the prime factors of 2013!
So after much peering into the rather cloudy corporate crystal ball we think we can foresee:
Now for a very brief review of our 2012 predictions which might be summarised as consisting of some mini successes, many 10” failures and omissions a plenty!
With a bit of poetic licence and wearing our corporate rose tinted 3D glasses we reckon we had a success rate of around 33%. [Room for improvement here - ed.]
Mini successes were iPad 2 & 3 continuing to be sold alongside one another and .uk registrations being less than 2 million. We also reckon we were half right in three other cases!
Anyway onwards & upwards!
Collins online dictionary have been crowdsourcing new words and since July this year have received over 4,400 suggestions for inclusion in their online dictionary. They have just published both the results and also said that they are going to continue with this crowdsourcing activity in the future.
After receipt from their users all the suggested words “were vetted by Collins editors using the publishers normal rigorous review process.” They have adopted 86 (that’s about 2% of the total submissions) and added them to their excellent database.
So now “While other publishers are making annual or quarterly updates behind closed doors, Collins chose to capture changes to the English language in real time through public suggestions and comments. The result is an open, living dictionary that can keep up with the pace of social media and technology.”
Nice objective, fully supported here! We also sense a laudable element of pragmatism noticing that about 5 of the 86 words were “submitted by collinsdict”. Of the submitters “tikitaka” deserves special mention as, they have come up with nearly 10% of all the adopted words. Well done sir or madam!
“This is where you can submit any word that you think should be in the dictionary. Your word will then go through an editorial evaluation. If it’s accepted your word will be published on collinsdictionary.com within a few weeks, and your name will appear on the definition page where you will be recorded as the submitter of the word”.
For our part we have conducted a further, far less stringent and wholly subjective, “evaluation” of the 86 inclusions and identified nearly 30% as being internet/technology/social network related (our definition of course)!
Here they are with links to the Collins online dictionary for meanings, derivations, submitters etc etc. We’ve included a couple that caught our eye (I) if you see what we mean.
(Meanings *derivations – per Collins)
bashtag – blend of bash and hashtag
captcha -*acronym for C(ompletely) A(utomated) P(ublic Turing Test to) T(ell) C(omputers and) H(umans) A(part)
FaceTime – ® an application for a mobile communications device that enables people to speak to each other while simultaneously observing each other on a video display
geekism -a preoccupation with subjects that are generally considered as unfashionable or boring
lolz -*a plural of LOL ‘laugh(ing) out loud’, an abbreviation commonly used in internet and text-message
SMS -*Short Message Service
superphone - a telephone with a high-speed processor that can perform many of the functions of a computer
thanx – (informal) thank you
touch-ready – (of software) ready to work on touch-screen computers and devices
We couldn’t finish without mentioning their inclusion of LOCOG.
Wordcloud via Wordle
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A fascinating piece of work by the Centre for Economic and Business Research Ltd (CEBR) at the behest of the TalkTalk group who have just published their first Digital Retail Price Index (DRPI). pdf Its calculated quarterly – the latest information is to March 2012.
The CEBR conclude that:”
TalkTalk’s Press release is headlined “Online inflation ten times lower than high street”
“TalkTalk launches Digital RPI quarterly index
Annual Retail Price Index (RPI) Inflation is currently running at around 3.5 per cent but if you do most of your shopping online it’s only around a tenth of that broadband firm TalkTalk has calculated. The annual Digital Rate of Inflation – (DRPI) the equivalent rate if you buy your household goods, food and clothing online rather than in-store – is just 0.3 per cent.”
Basically the Digital RPI is derived from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Internet Retail Sales volume & value information with a weighting of Food 39% Household goods 34% and clothing 27%. We’re not sure if the ONS statistics used are the new ones introduced with respect to March or not and the weighting apparently differs from those being used by the ONS mentioned earlier this week.
They then compare this with a derivative of the ONS’s RPI basically using the above weighting to give a like for like comparison that’s the rather unfortunately titled “In-store Price Comparator Index” ie ISPCI?
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There’s an online international retailers element included in their index which due to weak sterling in 2008/09 (or one might argue strong US $) caused some horrendous increases in the 25%-30% range which are reflected in the peak in the DRPI at 1.7%
We’ve done a comparison with the ONS’s RPI & CPI just to prove that they all show the same picture which of course they do.
It does give a loud and clear picture that Digital/Online Inflation is way less than the bricks & mortar variety AND they forecast that it could stay that way over the next year or so.
“We expect the DRPI to be lower than the In-store Price Comparator Index over the next twelve months as energy prices still remain elevated – disproportionately affecting high-street businesses with relatively higher overhead costs. Furthermore, Internationally-based internet retailers are expected to benefit from lower air freight costs whilst consumer goods prices in global markets are expected to remain broadly stable.”
Great work – we hope they continue to produce it or even better persuade the ONS to take it on – exactly the sort of useful statistical analysis required in a net-centric age.
blekko is a rapidly expanding allegedly “comparatively transparent” search engine that attempts to filter out content farmers / spam. It also enables you to uses slashtags ie /tags.
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Their website does “feel” transparent with the provision of investor and management details plus their bill of rights. Contact details are also readily available and comprehensive (always a good sign we reckon). They also have a fairly active blog.
Their recent growth is documented in some detail in a recent searchengineland article illustrated with internal traffic analytics from blekko showing a quadrupling of traffic from December last year which they confirmed with comScore.
The reasons given by blekko’s CEO (and founder) Rich Skrenta were fivefold ranging from, improved index quality through increased visibility at trade shows/conventions to dissatisfaction with Google, the disappearance of Yahoo’s site explorer and some commercial deals with eg Lavasoft.
Wiki as ever has info on blekko and its founder Rich Skrenta.
We couldn’t help wondering about the name which apart from having the same number of letters as Google, and being lowercase like amazon does have the advantage of an o ending so it can be extended ala blekkooooooooo if required!
We have to admit initially searching on the other search engine and finding an early (2008) Name inspector article that concludes its an “empty vessel” word with unpleasant connotations and should not be used!
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Well we’ve now used the “correct” source and found out the rather complex truth which (again from 2008) traces it back to the name of Rich Skarenta’s “loved” computer “pre dating the existence of the web” We rather like the name and also like to see competition in this market place so hope to see its name prominently appearing in NetMarketShare’s statistics in the near future.
We’ve added their search box for you to give it a try (top right) – it’s meant to have a b avatar on the left of the search box which for some, unknown to us, reason hasn’t appeared. We’ll possibly try & rectify this at some future point.
We’ve also added it to our I Search page. As with the other main search engines you can customise your browser to have it as your default search engine. There’s a mobile app and some Facebook “specials”. If you use Firefox you can add blekko to your list of drop down engines from here.
And here’s their video on, in particular usage of slashtags.
Any feedback gratefully received.
We have no commercial arrangements with blekko – yet!
Update 8pm BST Recent (April 17) interview with Rich Skrenta by PageOnePower
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