And Windows Phone could jump into second place quicker than you think.

While they’re not Android or iOS-style numbers, Windows Phone sold 7 million units in the first quarter of 2013 for 3.2 percent market share, according to the latest IDC report. Meanwhile, BlackBerry sold 6.3 million units, down a third from the previous year, for 2.9 percent market share — less than half of its share just a year ago. Market leader Android took its customary massive 75 percent of the market, and Apple’s iPhone slipped from 23 percent global market share in 2012 to 17.3 percent share.

“Windows Phone claiming the third spot is a first and helps validate the direction taken by Microsoft and key partner Nokia,” the IDC’s Kevin Restivo said in a statement. “Given the relatively low volume generated, the Windows Phone camp will need to show further gains to solidify its status as an alterative to Android or iOS.”

Those further gains are possible over the next year or two as Microsoft’s primary phone parter, Nokia, transitions to an all-smartphone lineup.

Part of Apple’s quarterly weakness was the company’s lack of any new hardware or significant new announcements. That made Apple slip to its lowest global smartphone market share in years, now less than a quarter of Android’s size, with only 37.4 million iPhones sold to Android’s 162.1 million. But systemically, Apple is falling out of the race for smartphone supremacy. And that puts Apple at risk of being in Microsoft’s sights for the number two position in the global smartphone market share battle.

How?

Nokia is going all in on Windows Phone — mostly by necessity — and now accounts for 79 percent of all Windows Phone sales. The Finnish company has sold over 20 million Windows Phones to date, which is not bad, considering the challenges of Android, iOS, and Microsoft’s stutter-stepping from Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8.

Source: IDC

Global smartphone market share, Q1 2013

But the real opportunity for both Microsoft and Nokia will come as Nokia continues its transition from feature phone sales over to Windows Phone. The company still sold something like 55 million feature phones in the first quarter of 2013, and while those cheap phones are going largely to developing nations, they will transition at some point to Windows Phone.

Those feature phones sales are decreasing, and the transition from cheap feature phone to somewhat more expensive Windows-based smartphones will decrease them still more, but they will be higher-value sales.

And, they might just be high enough, depending on what Apple does in the region of a cheaper iPhone, to catapult Microsoft to number two.

Image credit: Microsoft

Facebook has seen its rapid assimilation of Earth’s population start to cool in recent years. The areas where it’s still exploding are, interestingly enough, some of the areas with the least access to technology: Africa, the Middle East, and India.

One measure of technological modernity is the smartphone. In the Western world, smartphone penetration hovers around 50 to 60 percent for most countries. However, in Africa, that number is much lower, around 17 to 19 percent across the continent. In India, smartphone penetration is just 9 percent. In the Middle East, a handful of countries’ smartphone adoption rates are at parity with their Western peers, but some, like Egypt, lag around 5 percent.

Even when you take away the smartphone aspect and look just at Internet access, you get a similar picture: a sharp divide between the digital haves and have-nots around the world.

So it’s especially interesting that Facebook is making these less-connected populations a focus of its ongoing growth, seeing the lack of access as an opportunity to be addressed rather than an insurmountable hurdle.

In a report released today by marketing intelligence firm eMarketer, we learn that while Facebook’s growth has slowed or is quickly slowing to the single digits in the most highly developed areas around the world, it’s still seeing continued momentum in parts of Asia-Pacific, Africa, and the Middle East. Check out these numbers for 2013 and projected figures for 2017:

In some of these areas, especially Africa, Internet access via a traditional desktop or laptop computer is less common than access via a mobile phone. This is one reason Facebook has put emphasis on its mobile-only users, those users who never use a “regular” computer to log onto Facebook.com. That group swelled to nearly 200 million users this year.

The company’s quarterly earnings report this month also emphasized the growing need for a global scope in order for Facebook to continue its planned world domination.

Image credit: Flickr user axel rouvin

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google says it’s passionate about speed: the web getting faster. That’s very appropriate for a company that to this day, in spite of its minimalist design, still tells web searchers how long their query took for every single search.

But it’s hard to make the web  faster when web pages are growing in size: 75 percent bigger for e-commerce sites.

So Google checks, periodically, to see if the web is getting faster as our web browsers get better, mobile carriers continue LTE roll-outs, and mobile devices get more powerful. And apparently, in spite of the fact that e-commerce sites are perhaps over-indulging in images and complex Javascript and overall page size across the entire web is up 56 percent over the past year, the web is actually getting faster.

Especially on mobile. And especially in the U.S.

Desktop access is up only marginally, at average load time of just over six seconds per page, compared to almost seven seconds per page last year. Mobile access, however, is 30 percent faster than last year, with an average page load time of just over seven seconds, up from over 10 seconds last year.

That phenomenon is visible all over the globe, Google says, from countries with poor mobile internet infrastructure such as Nigeria, Egypt, India, and Brazil, to those countries with the fastest mobile internet, such as Japan, Sweden, Poland, the U.S., and Germany. In spite of the fact that page load times in Nigeria, for example, are over 10 seconds, they’re faster than last year’s. And Japan’s speedy three-second page loads this year are faster than its 3.5 second page loads last year.

Interestingly, the U.S. seems to be getting better, faster than the rest of the world.

The U.S. had a massive 40 percent mobile speed bump between April 2012 and April 2013, trailed by Finland with a 37.97 percent jump, and Germany, with a 36.17 percent increase. That’s impressive — apparently all the LTE roll-outs in the U.S. are having an impact. And it’s a major role-reversal, as we’re very used to hearing about how expensive and slow U.S. wired networks are in comparison to countries like Japan and South Korea.

Fastest-improving countries in terms of mobile browsing:

1. U.S. – 40%
2. Finland – 37.97%
3. Germany – 36.17%
4. Hungary – 33.96%
5. China – 33.93%
6. Mexico – 33.82%
7. New Zealand – 32.69%
8. Canada – 31.48%
9. Philippines - 28.74%
10. Argentina – 21.51%

All of those improvements add up to faster pages, a faster web, and — hopefully — less impatient mobile surfers.

Good luck with that one.

photo credit: Marxchivist via photopin cc

Me neither.

That hasn’t stopped the BBC from claiming ”Global Internet slows after biggest attack in history,” or the UK’s Independent from saying that “Internet services across the world have been disrupted” with “millions of web users” not able to access service like Netflix.

According to the Internet Traffic Report, everything’s fairly copacetic. Response time has been pretty steady for the past 30 days, with no discernible dip in the past week, and packet loss globally has remained steady at almost zero:

Source: Internet Traffic Report

Internet traffic doesn’t seem very disrupted in the past month or week …

A quick check of InternetPulse shows that the U.S. Internet is all healthy, with sub-90-second latency in response times across the board today:

It’s not until we check Akamai’s global real-time web monitor that we see what the problem is: congestion is up in two general areas. Those would be the UK — where the BBC lives — and Germany/Netherlands, where a local fight is on between a controversial hosting provider, Cyberbunker, and a spam-fighting filter service, Spamhaus.

Essentially, it appears that Spamhaus blacklisted Cyberbunker for allegedly distributing spam, and friends of Cyberbunker then attacked Spamhaus’ servers with up to 300 gigabytes/second of data. That’s an enormous amount of data, and it constitutes the biggest-ever DDOS attack. It’s clogging the interweb’s tubes in at least a few places but not, apparently, all over the world.

Little hint to the BBC and others: Western Europe is not the world.

Both Twilio and 500 Startups are dedicated to growing and connecting the international startup community. Twilio’s technology simplifies building global communication networks, and 500 Startups nurtures entrepreneurs from around the world. When their powers combine, they will provide financing and mentorship to applicant companies that make “creative use of the Twilio API.”

Twilio provides telephony infrastructure via the cloud. Using the technology, developers can add call, text, and VoIP capabilities to their web and mobile apps. The service is active on six continents (penguins don’t have much need for VoIP) and can power communication in 150 countries. Historically, setting up cross-border communication systems was not something the average startup could do. Twilio’s API helps make telephony services globally accessible.

“At Twilio, we think SMS and voice should work the same way,” said Twilio product manager Patrick Malatack in a statement last year. “There are no geopolitical boundaries for the web, and we want to ensure developers can work with the telecom network like they do other Internet services.”

500 Startups is a global seed fund and accelerator program founded by the colorful Dave McClure. McClure has been an extremely vocal advocate for startups in emerging markets and makes a significant number of investments in companies operating in Asia, Latin America, and Europe.

“I’m being Captain Obvious to say that that there is incredible innovation happening in Europe,” McClure said in a statement. “Entrepreneurs in those countries often have limited access to venture capital. We’re already investing actively all around the world, Europe included. So we’re pumped to be continuing with Twilio Fund Europe.”

Twilio Fund 2013 will provide seed funding as well as free Twilio credits. Applicants must be building or about to launch a service powered by Twilio’s web service APIs, privately held, less than five years old, and have received less than in funding.

The microfund was first formed with 500 Startups back in 2010. Over a dozen startups have received funding to date. The 2012 finalists were announced yesterday –  Babelverse, Call Loop, Healthsouk, Sessions, and Wedgies. The deadline for applying for the 2013 fund is May 1.

Photo credit: C.P.G.Grey/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

By the end of this current year, 1.4 billion smartphones will be in use: 798 million of them will run Android, 294 million will run Apple’s iOS, and 45 million will run Windows Phone, according to a new study by ABI Research.

The ABI study factors in an annual smartphone growth rate of 44 percent for 2013, which is just ever-so-slightly down from 2012′s 45 percent but is still a torrid pace. ABI also predicts that 20 million BlackBerry 10 phones will be in active use at year-end.

The result of that growth — and a push for share by Windows Phone and BlackBerry 10 — is a global customer market share of 57 percent for Android, 21 percent of iOS, and 3 percent for Windows Phone. Which sounds big for Android, but is actually significantly down from its third-quarter 2012 performance, in which Android captured almost 70 percent global market share.

It’s also a significant divergence in the global numbers from U.S-specific sales, which show Apple leading the market with over 50 percent share in the last quarter thanks largely to both new users and older models of iPhones.

But perhaps the most startling prediction? The bit players will start to become serious contenders again, ABI says.

“2013 should be seen as relative success for both Microsoft and BlackBerry,” analyst Aapo Markkanen said in a statement. “For the end of the year, we expect there to be 45 million Windows Phone handsets in use, with BlackBerry 10 holding an installed base of close to 20 million. Microsoft will also have 5.5 million Windows-powered tablets to show for it.”

For tablets, Markkanen is predicting continued hyper-growth: 125 percent, which will result in 268 million tablets in use. Sixty-two percent will iOS, he says, and 28 percent will run Android.

Image credit: Etsy

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Global phone shipments hit 1.6 billion units in 2012, according to a new report from Strategy Analytics, with Samsung shipping a massive 396.5 million phones last year.

“Fuelled by robust demand for its popular Galaxy models, Samsung was the star performer, shipping a record 396.5 million mobile phones worldwide and capturing 25 percent market share to solidify its first-place lead,” Neil Shah, a senior analyst at Strategy Analytics, said in a statement.

While 1.6 billion units is a huge number, it’s only a modest two percent growth, as demand slowed in mature markets like Europe and North America, and mobile operators made it more difficult for consumers to upgrade.

Key Samsung competitor Apple shipped 135.8 million phones worldwide last year, which translates to 46 percent annual growth. That’s a record high number for Apple, and Samsung’s 396.5 million is a record for that company as well.

Meanwhile, Nokia retained a 21.3 percent global market share, proving that while it’s down, it’s not yet out. The Finnish company shipped 335.6 million phones in 2012, down from 417.1 million in 2011.

“Nokia’s dual-SIM feature phones, Asha touchphones, and Lumia handsets have been performing well, but this was not enough to offset a slump in demand for the company’s aging Symbian smartphone platform last year,” said Neil Mawston, Strategy Analytics’ executive director.

The top four mobile phone vendors by market share are now:

1. Samsung: 396.5 million units
2. Nokia: 335.6 million units
3. Apple: 135.8 million units
4. ZTE: 71.7 million units

photo credit: juicyrai via photopin cc

Both in the U.S and globally, people are accessing the web more frequently and for longer periods, using smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and smart TVs. We’re still using PCs as well, but personal computer usage of social media is just about the only category that’s down: 4 percent fewer Americans connected to the Internet via a PC in 2012, while 82 percent more connected via the mobile web and 85 percent more connected via a mobile app.

Source: Nielsen

Mobile app and mobile web use were both up — way up.

Overall, total time on the Internet in 2012 is up 21 percent to 520 minutes a month. A staggering 17 percent of that is spent on one service: Facebook.

And it’s social networks that are seeing huge growth, with 85.5 million accessing social networks via a smartphone or tablet app in July 2012 versus 44.8 million in July 2011, and 81.1 million using the mobile web in July 2012 compared to 43 million in July 2011. PC use is still the largest, with 171.8 million Americans using a laptop or desktop machine to get social online, but that’s just slightly up from 163.6 million in 2011.

Interestingly, while Facebook’s PC’s audience declined by 4 percent in 2012, Twitter’s grew 13 percent. Google+ grew 80 percent, and Pinterest grew 1,047 percent, but that has a lot more to do with the growth cycles of those two sites than transformative change in how users are accessing them. Facebook’s app audience increased by 88 percent, and its mobile web audience increased by 85 percent, more than offsetting the slight PC decline, and underscoring Facebook’s recent efforts to monetize its mobile services.

Another insight from Nielsen: Pinterest’s growth flattened — and even disappeared in early 2012. It had grown from an audience of perhaps 2.5 million in July 2011 to almost 25 million in February 2012, but it plateaued at that level for three months, and then actually decreased in May before taking off again in June.

Still, Pinterest is a massive force online, especially among women, who make up 70 percent of its web audience, 84 percent of its app users, and 72 percent of its mobile web audience — and spent about 2.1 billion minutes on the site in 2012.

The second-screen phenomenon is on the increase as well, as TV viewers continue to use Twitter as a way to sound off, comment on, and chat with others about what they are watching:

Almost a quarter of 18- to 34-year-olds comment on social media sites about their TV shows while they’re watching, and the numbers are growing through 2012.

That’s a low percentage, globally, with 47 percent of people in Asia-Pacific countries using a second screen while watching TV, and a staggering 63 percent of people in the Middle East and Africa chatting online while watching.

The surveyors talked to 1998 U.S, adults, but the global component of Nielsen’s report surveyed 28,000 people in 51 countries.

The full report is available from Nielsen.

photo credit: ocean.flynn via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Telecommunications giant Ericson has released a massive report on the state of the mobile world. And clearly, unless you live in the almost-fully-penetrated European and North American markets, everything is up and to the right.

China, the rest of Asia, and Africa together accounted for 75 percent of new mobile subscriptions in the third quarter of 2012, with 38 million in China, 31 million in the rest of Asia, and 25 million in Africa. That contrasts rather sharply with only one million new subscriptions in western Europe and two million in North America.

With 6.4 billion global cellular subscriptions and a world population just shy of seven billion, it would seem that almost everyone has a mobile phone or other mobile device connected to the internet. However, Ericsson, says, those 6.4 billion subscriptions are spread over only 4.3 billion people, meaning that many people have more than one plan … for example, a phone and a tablet, both with a cellular connection.

Which leads to a penetration percentage of well over 100 percent in some areas:

Source: Ericsson

Mobile subscriptions penetration globally

40 percent of all phones sold in the third quarter, Ericsson says, were smartphones, but only 15 percent of the global installed base of phones is smartphones … so there is still a long runway for growth. In fact Ericsson is predicting smartphone subscriptions alone will reach 3.3 billion in 2018.

Source: Ericsson

Global total traffic in mobile networks. Yellow is voice; red is data

Global data traffic is skyrocketing as well — doubling between Q3 2011 and Q3 2012 — while voice traffic is only growing slowly. From perhaps 10 petabytes of monthly mobile data traffic in the first part of 2007, the world’s use of mobile data has exploded to about 900 petabytes, per month, today.

In the same period, voice traffic has only grown from perhaps 80 petabytes to about 190.

By 2018, Ericsson expects mobile traffic to grow 14 times to over 13,000 petabytes of global monthly data, as mobile PCs will gobble up over 10 GB each per month, and smartphones about 2 GB.

Speeds will increase to handle that influx of data traffic, rising to a current global median of 1.3 megabits/second as LTE networks continue to roll out. LTE can already offer download speeds in the 100 Mbps range, on supported devices, and an more-advanced version known as LTE-Advanced will offer peak

data speeds higher than 1 gigabit/second. Only about 100 LTE networks are currently in operation, covering 455 million people. By 2017, Ericsson expects LTE to be available to about half the world’s population.

Interestingly, Ericsson measured the network impact of free versus paid apps as part of the study. Free apps, which are generally, ad-supported, use much more data than premium apps — connecting with the network 30 times more frequently and use over 100 times more data … presumably for ad downloads.

Tethering is also a massive data consumer, especially iPhone and Android users who use data services on their smartphones to get network access on their laptops and tablets. Users who tether use 20 times as much data as non-tethering mobile subscribers.

The full report is available at Ericsson’s website.

Image credits: Ericsson

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

A report surfaced Tuesday that suggests we will soon pass the one billion smartphone mark on Ye Olde Planet Earth.

In other breathlessly breaking news, Facebook will top two billion users, probably three years from now. Google’s website index will reach a trillion webpages, about two decades from now. And the sun will likely go nova, if we’re still here in a few billion years.

Well, OK, it is kind of a big deal.

One billion smartphones means one in seven people on the globe have a mobile device that can access the Internet, use apps, communicate with others, and generally act as a small, mobile computer. That’s cool. That’s big. And, yes, it is a massive milestone.

But — without quibbling about what, exactly qualifies as a smartphone — it hasn’t precisely happened just yet. As the story says:

“Research firm Strategy Analytics has boldly stated that the smartphone market has burgeoned enough in the past two years to reach the 1 billion milestone mark during the current third quarter.”

And:

“In the current quarter, the research firm believes that figure could rise to 1 billion.”

“Boldly stated” is bang-on. Note the creative use of time: Has stated (past), has burgeoned (past), past two years (past), to reach (present), (in the current quarter (present), during the current third quarter (mostly future), and could rise (future).

In other words, this is a pre-announcement. Hold on to your hats. Stay seated. It is going to happen, and it is a big deal. But not quite yet. According to the facts in the story, the most recent historical number is 959 million, which the market reached last quarter after 16 years of smartphones sold.

That’s already pretty momentous … and suspiciously close in time, if not space, to Facebook’s big billion-user announcement.

The next billion smartphone sales, the firm estimates, will only take three years.

photo credit: reflexer via photopin cc

In his new book The Fine Print, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston tell us, among other things, what’s wrong with the Internet in America. The answer is fairly depressing: It’s too slow, too expensive, and … too controlled by a duopoly of AT&T and Verizon.

Japan has fiberoptic Internet available to many homes with speeds of 100 or 200 megabits per second, and, believe it or not, an available 1 gigabit per second service. (At least one place in the U.S, Chattanooga, Tenn., can get an equivalent speed.) South Korea is still the king of Internet speeds, however, with an average 17.5 megabits per second to all homes.

Average speed in the U.S., meanwhile is a measly 5.8 megabits per second — actually a decrease from U.S speeds of 2011, according to Royal Pingdom. It’s the barely visible blue line in the chart below:

Source: Royal Pingdom

Average global internet connection speeds.

That slower speed comes, unfortunately, at a higher cost than many other countries.

Hong Kong gets 500 megabits per second for $37 a month. Other major international cities, such as Paris and Berlin, get 100 megabits per second for $40. But the same speed in Washington, DC, comes at $105, courtesy of Comcast, and Verizon’s 150 megabits per second service sets New Yorkers back $159.95.

Typically, service providers point to the vast distances of North America as the reason why speeds are slower here. VentureBeat contacted both Verizon and AT&T for comment, but neither have responded (yet).

The question remains for cities as densely packed as New York: Why such high cost for such comparably slow service?

Johnston’s answer is that Americans were better off with Ma Bell’s monopoly. Adjusting for inflation, he says, phone service is 230 percent more expensive than in 1984.

That’s a future even Orwell didn’t anticipate.

photo credit: Maryam (one bored chica) via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Yesterday, Google Research pulled the shroud off Spanner, Google’s “scalable, multiversion, globally distributed, and synchronously replicated database,” claiming to have created “the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally consistent distributed transactions.”

The only problem?

TransLattice has been deploying a globally available, geographically distributed multinode database for almost two years.

I wrote about TransLattice almost two months ago when the company finally went public. The company’s core product is “TED,” TransLattice Elastic Database, and it enables a live, functional, operational database with multiple nodes all over the world, without simply syncing, replicating, or cloning.

Spanner, which appears to be in use at Google, maintains global consistency with the assistance of atomic clocks and GPS. The database automatically places data closest to where it’s frequently needed, replicates elsewhere for redundancy and backup, and can scale impressively: up to “millions of machines across hundreds of datacenters and trillions of database rows.”

That sounds like greater scalability than TransLattice, which two months ago was running on up to 12 nodes and was working on capability for 20 or more nodes.

But TransLattice believes it was first, saying that Google’s system, while interesting, is much more a key-value store than a true relational database, which while enabling huge scale, would not work for enterprise applications.

In other words: It’s built for exactly what Google does every day.

In addition, however, TransLattice co-founder and chief technical officer Mike Lyle called Google’s claim to be first into question.

“Most dubious is Spanner’s claim to be the first system with these properties. TransLattice has been delivering to customers true SQL conformance and geographically distributed relational databases with all of the ACID guarantees for nearly two years.”

I talked to a Google representative about Spanner and TransLattice, and while she did not have a specific quote, she said that Spanner is a Google Research project, not a specific product.

Any specific claims in the paper are not claims Google per se is making, and while Spanner is deployed right now, she could not comment on how long it has been operational.

Reading through the Google Research paper (OK, skimming it) it appears that Spanner has been built for a different use-case than TED. And both, to be completely frank, are incredible achievements.

No matter which one happened to be first.

photo credit: IronRodArt – Royce Bair (NightScapes on Thursdays) via photo pin cc

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s market-leading iPad has great penetration globally at 68 percent market share. But it’s even bigger in China, where Analysys International says that iPad has almost 73 percent of the tablet market.

IDC’s latest numbers show that Apple owns the global tablet scene — 17 million shipped just in the second quarter of 2012. And selling almost seven out of 10 tablets sold worldwide is impressive.

But selling more than seven out of 10 in a market where even the cheapest retina iPad costs easily 10 percent of an average worker’s annual salary is unbelievable.

Source: Apple

iPad2 and new iPad sales rising in China

In fact, that’s a 20 percent increase from the first quarter, most likely due to price cuts on earlier models. But going down from 10 percent of an average salary to 7 percent or 8 percent is not terribly significant.

The Chinese iPad numbers contrast with home-grown Lenovo, which mustered up only just over 8 percent of tablet market share, and near-neighbor Samsung, which actually lost market share in China this quarter, coming down to 3.59 percent.

Perhaps the numbers should not be that shocking. With a middle class already as large as 250 million people, there will soon be almost as many well-off Chinese as there are Americans in total.

And the 33 percent of global iPads sales that are currently recognized in the U.S. could soon be 20 percent or fewer.

Image credit: Aleksandar Mijatovic/ShutterStock

User numbers hit a new high, with 955 million worldwide visiting the site at least once a month. And earning are slightly above estimates, coming in at $1.18 billion in revenue and 32 percent year-over-year growth. Over half a billion are coming from mobile devices.

One of the most interesting slides in the company’s quarterly earnings release, however, is this one:

Just two years ago, the United States and Canada made up 30 percent of Facebook’s users. Fast-forward to today, and the percentage is a little bit different: under 20.

Not only has the percentage changed, but the growth rate is almost negligible: only about 35 percent user growth over 24 months for the world’s social utility. That compares to 170 percent growth in Facebook’s “rest-of-the-world” category, which includes Africa, and 165 percent growth in Asia.

Even stodgy old Europe has 63 percent growth.

On the one hand, this is expected and normal. North America has a limited population, about 350 million, of which Facebook has about a 53 percent penetration rate. That’s slightly up from about 50 percent at the end of 2011.

On the other hand … why are those missing 164 million people not on Facebook? It’s a question the company should ponder … particularly because US and European internet users are worth more to advertisers than any others. Internet users are valued at perhaps $1,200 to advertisers, with Facebook making about an annualized $5 as of the first quarter of this year, and Google collecting $20 per user per year.

But not all internet users.

Zambia’s average annual income is $1,600. In the Phillipines, a college professor might make $500 dollars a month. I don’t think Barney’s New York is banging down their doors to sell $5,000 Gucci bags. Not too many iPhones being sold in Cambodia.

The point?

As Facebook’s growth has transitioned largely to the developing world: Asia, Africa, Oceania … the average value to advertisers per user is going down. Just check another slide from the Facebook deck:

The biggest chunk of Facebook users — “rest of world,” at 268 million — accounts for the smallest slice of Facebook’s revenue, $113 million. In fact, if you do that math, you can find the average value to Facebook, per quarter, of each user:

• US/Canada: $3.20
• Europe: $1.43
• Asia: $0.55
• Rest of world: $0.44

The good news is, if this quarter is any indication, Facebook could be bringing in about $12 per US and Canadian user per year. But there’s also bad news … and that’s everywhere else.

Europe can probably be fixed with more time and attention than the US-centric Facebook has given it so far. Starting an office in London may help with that. But Asia? And the rest of the world? Those per-capita incomes aren’t coming up to U.S. standards any time real soon.

And that’s one of the reasons Facebook’s stock is getting hammered.

Image credit: Sergej Khakimullin/ShutterStock

E.ventures has dedicated funds in the US, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Brazil, with local investment teams on the ground all over the world. The firm focuses on early-stage startups. With the unification, portfolio companies will be able to access financial and technological resources from all over the world, as well as see increased opportunities for international growth.

“The world has really become flat when it comes to entrepreneurship,” said cofounder Mathias Schilling in an interview with VentureBeat. “Before, China, Brazil, and Russia were standalone markets. With our global platform, it brings incredible synergies and benefits for the funds as well as the entrepreneurs. We can bring our companies to a global scale overnight and effect multi-city partnerships.”

While each market is different, these differences can be leveraged to complement each other. For example, a Russian engineering company may be able to implement its product faster in Brazil’s booming e-commerce scene, or a Chinese gaming company could generate greater revenue by distributing in Japan, where monetization is stronger.

BV Capital has invested in companies such as Groupon, Angie’s List, Shopping.com, and Sonos. Since 1997, it has invested nine funds totaling over $750 million in capital. It is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Berlin, Hamburg, Beijing, Tokyo, and most recently, Sao Paulo. Read more on VentureBeat.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Bonjour, Amazon App Store! The e-commerce company announced today that developers will soon be able to sell their apps in the UK, France, Spain, Italy, and Germany.

The Amazon App Store, which currently serves both the company’s own Kindle Fire tablet as well as the overall Android market, will open the store internationally this summer, and is already supplying tools to prepare developers for international expansion. Existing Android users abroad will be able to use the marketplace as soon as it opens, but the expansion hints at an international version of the Kindle Fire. Amazon reported net sales of $13.18 billion in the first quarter of 2012 but didn’t give many details on the Fire. That is, other than saying it is the company’s “bestselling, most gifted, and most wished” for product.

Developers should sign into the Mobile App Distribution Portal to prepare for the global move. Those already in Amazon’s developer program will by default have their apps available for sale in these new countries. Apps do not have to be sold in all six countries, however. Using the localized tools, you can choose which countries you’d like your app to appear in, as well as set prices for that country and other specifics.

Given Amazon’s recent move to in-app purchases, the company is also changing its revenue share terms. Developers with paid apps in any country will be paid 70 percent of the app’s list price. Prior to now, paid-app developers were given either 70 percent of the sales from that app or 20 percent of the list price, whichever raked in more cash. This change will begin July 1.

Amazon plans to make the marketplace available to more countries in the near future.

Kindle Fire image via Courtbean/Flickr

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Countries in Asia and the Indian subcontinent are far outpacing the U.S. and Europe when it comes to tech adoption, according to stats published today by analyst demigod Mary Meeker.

The report shows massive growth, both in data-capable cell phones and Internet adoption, in countries like Japan, China, the Philippines, India, and Korea. While the U.S. is still leading in the total number of 3G mobile subscribers and the total number of Internet users for a single country, it’s clear that other regions are gearing up to swipe those titles, and fast.

Meeker’s research also shows a disturbing trend, however: Very slow mobile and Internet growth in the developing world. Throughout Africa and South America, in some of the areas that most need better access to life-changing information, Internet adoption has lagged.

For example, Nigeria is the only country from both of those continents to make the top-10 list for Internet adoption, access, and population penetration. Today, only about one third of Nigeria’s citizens have Internet access.

And only four countries from these two regions (Nigeria again, South Africa, Mexico, and Brazil) are in the top-30 list of countries for 3G mobile penetration, and percentage penetration ranges from six to 21 percent in these countries.

Here’s a visual breakdown of Meeker’s spredsheets, courtesy of your friendly spreadsheet jockeys at VentureBeat:

Graphics by Jolie O’Dell. Top image courtesy of Supri Suharjoto, Shutterstock

Unlike innovators in Silicon Valley, who have the luxury of rolling out new ideas with no real plan for making money, Greek entrepreneurs are laser-focused on launching businesses that will put them in the black – fast. And they’re coming up with unique business models to do it — outside of Greece. Greek entrepreneurs are making money by taking their start-ups to the rest of the world.

Dealingers.com is one such example. An e-commerce site founded by Jacko Carasso and Ilias Pantelakis, Dealingers is sort of a reverse eBay. The items it carries are exclusively brand-new, high-end and luxury goods, such as iPhones, iPads and Louis Vuitton apparel. Unlike the popular auction site that markets products at the lowest possible price that then go up as people compete on bids, items on Dealingers start out at full retail. That’s where the “falling price race” begins.

Customers on Dealingers compete to get an item at the lowest possible price, which is in some cases zero, by purchasing clicks. Each click is valued at €1. The minimum packet of clicks a user can buy is €10. The cost of a given item goes down with each click by fifty cents. (The other fifty cents keeps Carasso and Pantelakis in operation.)

“Even if a user is checking the price, they automatically reduce the product’s actual price,” Pantelakis says. They are also contributing to Dealingers’s gross margin.

While Dealingers offers users to compete to get items for free, it also provides the option to purchase an item once it hits half-off. “That’s for the people that don’t want to gamble too much,” Pantelakis says.

Gambling is precisely what the two 25-year old childhood friends are hoping will make Dealingers a hit. Though the platform feeds off of the popularity of on-line shopping and discount sites such as Gilt Groupe and Groupon, it evolves around the success social gaming and gambling have had on the Web. And that has been one of its challenges.

“The legal barriers to this type of a model are really high,” Carasso says. Lottery and gaming licensing is expensive and takes months. Not every country will register this type of a platform.

Carasso and Pantelakis aren’t willing to roll it out in every country. They’re beta testing Dealingers in Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. They’re working on bringing their platform, registered in Malta, to the United States later this year. But as for their home country? Not even on the radar at this point.

“We’re not considering Greece,” the two Greek founders say. Not only is the market too small (11 million), but “Greeks aren’t big Internet users and are scared of buying online,” Carasso says. The two entrepreneurs are targeting scale. “If we do this right we plan to break even by 2013,” he says.

Scale is what StartersFund is also focused on. An equity-based crowdfunding platform, it is another Greek start-up with a unique business model that is already generating revenue. Like Dealingers, StartersFund also uses a credit system to invest in start-ups or start-up ideas from all over the world. Users buy credits, each also valued at €1, then “vote” for listed projects. “Supporters can vote for as many ideas they like or provide multiple votes for a single idea,” says co-founder Paulius Uza, a Lithuanian national. His partner is Greek lawyer Constantinos Parissis.

“When an idea has received the targeted number of votes, the votes are converted into shares,” Uza says. StartersFund, not the individual, then invests those shares, avoiding the legal and regulatory landmine that plagued equity-based crowdfunding site Profounder, which is now shutting down. StartersFund bears the liability. It does not, however, reap the profits. The company only takes a percentage of funds generated by credit purchases. It gains nothing from any investment, guaranteeing that users are the beneficiaries.

Though it is not, as the company claims, the “first service in the industry that leaves the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) model,” (UK-based Crowdcube is already doing this) it is does act as a pseudo-venture capital firm. StartersFund helps start-ups with legal challenges, accounting and hiring talent. “We follow through on what happens after the funding,” Uza says, in order to ensure a startup’s success. “We aim to be the Swiss Army Knife in the crowdfunding business,” he says, hoping to carve out a mass following that people are confident in. They’ve rolled it out in Greece and are looking to take it to Europe. “We’re watching the U.S. as well, hoping to apply our model once the (crowdfunding) law is passed,” Uza says.

Startersfund will be competing with many other crowdfunding platforms eager to break into the U.S. market, where there is no lack of investors to begin with. How it and its highly human capital-intensive model will fare under such circumstances remains to be seen. What is clear is that it, along with Dealingers and a number of other Greek start-ups, is not wasting any time on launching and iterating as it goes along.

As the European Union drags its feet on releasing a bailout package that would prevent the Greek economy from going bankrupt while also requiring the Greek government to implement steep austerity measures, time is against Greek techies. Their government has already cut key loan guarantees and grants that have marginally helped the fledgling start-up scene. Banks are no longer lending.

“If you look at the total revenues of the Greek stock market, we’re really aren’t in a bull period; there isn’t a lot of money flying around here,” says Georgios Kasselakis, a partner at the Open Fund, a seed investment fund based in Athens. He says if his country’s entrepreneurs are to succeed, they have no choice but to drive revenues from the beginning and think globally.

“They have to come up with business models that generate money immediately because there is no investment community that will give them the slack. No investor in Greece would say, ‘Here’s a million, do your R&D for a couple of years and we’ll talk again,’” Kasselakis says.

In today’s Greece, there is little time for talking. The country is racing in a game of survival.

Elmira Bayrasli writes about global entrepreneurship and innovation in her weekly blog, Entreventures, on Forbes. She is writing a book about the obstacles to global entrepreneurship. You can follow her on Twitter @endeavoringE.

Top photo: The Acropolis, by Stefanos Kofopoulos/Flickr

Some call this a “brain drain” others say it is “brain circulation.” It is without doubt, good for these countries and it is good for the world. But this is America’s loss: innovation that would otherwise be happening here is going abroad. Without realizing it, we are exporting our prosperity and strengthening our competitors.

There are no hard data available on how many skilled immigrants have already left the U.S. My estimate is that 150,000 have returned to India and China, each, over the past two decades. The trend has accelerated dramatically over the past five years; tens of thousands are now returning home every year. Most authorities agree with these estimates. For example, the Chinese Ministry of Education estimates that the number of overseas Chinese who returned to China in 2009 having received a foreign education reached 108,000: a sharp increase of 56.2% over the previous year. In 2010, this number reached an all-time high of 134,800 (a significant proportion studied in the U.S.).

Why is this important? Because, as research conducted by my team at Duke, UC-Berkeley, Harvard, and New York University has shown, 52.4% of all startups in Silicon Valley, from 1995 to 2005, were founded by immigrants. With all these immigrants leaving, and the next generation of foreign-born entrepreneurs trapped in “immigration limbo,” we won’t have as many immigrant founded startups in the future. The xenophobes who are lobbying against skilled immigration will cheer; but there won’t be more jobs for Americans; just less startups in the U.S. and more abroad. The U.S. pie will be smaller.

My team researched the backgrounds of immigrant founders, and the U.S. immigration backlog. We learned that the majority came to the U.S. as students; 74% held graduate or post graduate degrees, of which 75% were in science, engineering, technology, or mathematics. On average, immigrants started their ventures 13 years after entering the U.S.

During the last twenty years, we admitted record numbers of international students and highly educated foreign workers on temporary visas. But we never expanded the number of permanent resident visas that allow them to stay permanently. The result is that we have a backlog of more than one million skilled workers—doctors, scientists, researchers, and engineers, who are trapped in immigration limbo. They are working for the same companies and doing the same jobs as when they filed their paperwork for gaining permanent residence; this may have been 10-15 years ago. A foreign student who graduates with a masters or PhD in engineering from Duke or Stanford and joins the queue today will have to wait 10-20 years, perhaps longer, to gain permanent residence. They can’t start companies or progress their careers during the most productive period in their lives. Why would anyone put up with that?

Indeed, a survey we conducted of 1,224 foreign nationals who were studying at U.S. universities in 2009, or who had just graduated, revealed that they believed that the U.S. was no longer the destination of choice for professional careers. Most did not want to stay for very long. Fifty eight percent of Indian, 54% of Chinese, and 40% of European students said that they would stay in the U.S. for at least a few years after graduation if given the chance, but only 6% of Indian, 10% of Chinese, and 15% of European students said they want to stay permanently. The largest group of respondents— 55% of Indian, 40% of Chinese, and 30% of European students—wanted to return home within five years. This is very different than what used to be the norm in previous decades: the vast majority of Indians and Chinese stayed permanently.

Our surveys, in 2008, of 1,203 Indian and Chinese immigrants who had worked in or received their education in the U.S. and returned to their home countries revealed that although restrictive immigration policies had caused some returnees to depart, the most significant factors in the decision to return home were career opportunities, family ties, and quality of life. The move home also served as a career catalyst. For example, only 10% of the Indian returnees held senior management positions in the U.S., but 44% found jobs at this level in India. Chinese returnees went from 9% in senior management in the U.S. to 36% in China. The vast majority thought that quality of life, professional advancement, and family ties were at least as good at home as in the U.S.

The majority of the people we surveyed said they planned to start a business within five years. When we published our research, many experts said that this is where returnees would face the greatest frustration—that the weak infrastructure in India; authoritarianism in China; and corruption and red tape and lack of funding in both countries would be a severe handicap. In other words, when it came to competition from startups in India and China, the U.S. had nothing to worry about.

So, last September, we initiated a project to learn how the entrepreneurship landscape in India and China compares to the U.S. We wanted to learn why these entrepreneurs returned, what their perceptions of the entrepreneurial climate in their home countries were, what the advantages and disadvantages of working in India and China were over working in the U.S., and what types of ties they maintained to the U.S.

We were really surprised at what we learned. In the next installment, I’ll discuss our findings.

Vivek Wadhwa  is a visiting scholar at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, director of research for the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University, and senior research associate for the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.

[Image via spierzchala/Flickr]

Twitter’s trending list tracks keywords within tweets and promotes topics that appear at a high frequency at any given moment. The list has given users a useful way to keep up with the pulse of the platform, but when specialized to countries and cities it can be even more useful, as it lets users gauge local trends in and specific to their area.

With today’s addition of 13 countries and 6 cities, the microblogging platform will be expanding its trending list to Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Turkey, Venezuela and to the cities of Detroit, Miami, Minneapolis, Rio De Janeiro, Sydney, Toronto.

Additionally, the company said it plans on integrating Google Translate within its details pane, showing an automated translation for tweets in other languages. The feature is currently in use by a small percentage of users but will be rolled out site-wide within the next few weeks.

Over the past year, Twitter has seen monumental growth internationally. Back in March, real-time analytics firm Semiocast found that only 30% of tweets originated in the United States, with English accounting for less than 44% percent — a decrease from 50% just two months prior.

Website monitoring firm Pingdom looked for growth regions in June and noticed steep curves originating from countries in Latin America and Asia, particularly from Argentina, India, Japan, and South Korea.

With an estimated 190 million users in its back pocket, the site has come a long way from being the talk-of-the-town at the SXSW Conference in 2007. As countries around the world continue to get hit by the Twitter plague, there’s no telling how high that number will climb.

OnRequest Images

OnRequest Images helps marketers and brands to take customized photos for campaigns. The company hosts a network of a couple hundred photographers, stylists and production crews around the world.  Many of those photographers can be seen right on the company’s website and range from 40-year-olds in Turin, Italy to 20-somethings in Sun Valley, California.

The company doesn’t just take photos and send them to their clients. Rather, it produces and stages what’s needed by the client anywhere in the world. Using an online production technology called OnPro, marketing managers or advertising directors can organize and stage photo shoots leveraging the company’s crew in near real-time. The service appears to be legit claiming around 58 clients, including top brands like Coca-Cola, Merck and Adobe.

Several companies could be considered competitors, including global agency Global Photo Associates, which hosts 350 photographers in 260 cities and 63 countries or stock photo marketplace Getty Images, which contains thousands of useable photos.

OnRequest Images, founded in 2002, previously raised several rounds of funding, including $9 million in 2007 as well as $8 million in 2008. The most recent round of funding was secured from Menlo Ventures. Previous investors Frazier Technology Ventures and Maveron did not participate.

We’ve emailed OnRequest to confirm the funding.