Phone as PVR - learn from the kids

The industry is pushing the TV experience out to the phones, and in general there is an interest in this us case. However, the next generation consumers are already defining how they will embrace TV and moving images on the phone.

I found my son watching the Simpsons, and at the same time recording it for later viewing. On his mobile phone.

As his phone usage budget is low, he and his friends doesn't use the mobile network that much. Yes - some phone calls and SMS's, but not connecting to the Internet. Mostly using the phone as a gaming platform, and also for various media consumption and creation.

In this case he uses the phone as a PVR, instead of a VCR or other more stationary solutions. By capturing the Simpsons episode the "analogue"way he solves the hazzle of later transfering the file to the phone. And he will be able to enjoy past episodes whenever and wherever he likes.

Oh yes, a bit cumbersome perhaps. But it definately solve the needs of my son. And with a 4 GB memory on he phone he can store a lot of shows...

The quality? Surprisingly good I'd say. And as long as he can keep his sieblings and parents quiet and out of the way the audio is acceptable also.

So - keep an eye on the kids, they define the future. Now.

What are your kids up to? Any stories to share?

Nokia and some "swiss army knife" applications for phones

More and more functionality is moving into mobile phones. You make calls, SMS and browse the web. Phones are also your MP3 player and your camera. Not to forget your address book and your calendar. You name it...

I just noticed another functionality from Nokia Betalabs. Phones as your magnifying glass. Perhaps an obvious application, but I haven't heard of it before. Simple and potentially useful. When the cameras gets better and better, as well as the screens, this is yet another addition to the swiss-army-knife set of functionality. Have a look at the video:



When I browsed through the Nokia Accessability site I also noticed the text-to-speech (TTS) application. Neat.

The obvious (?) combination of these two applications would be to have the phone reading out text you view through the phone's camera. Just add a bit of OCR. Shouldn't take long before this application appears, or is it already available somewhere?

Two million Facebook users in Sweden - here's the demographics

Sweden now has over two million Facebook users. That's a lot.

It took Sweden around 16 months to go from one million users to two million users. This means that the overall penetration of Facebook currently is 22% in Sweden.
As you can see from the chart below the growth rate started to increase in August last year, and doesn't seem to decline yet.

Just a week before Sweden broke the one million mark that I looked into the demographics of the Swedish Facebook users. So - let's have another look at the demographics and see what have changed.

Age of Swedish facebook users
This is the age distribution from Facebook:

If you combine this with the population in Sweden for each age group you get a similiar curve indicating the relative number of users within each age span:

You can notice a very high penetration (over 80%) among the population between 19 and 24.

From the chart below you can see that the media age is around 25 years, you find the first 25% of the users below 20 years of age and 75% of the users below 32 years of age:


Gender of Swedish Facebook users
When we look at the gender distribution we see that there is more women than men on Facebook in Sweden:

The female users are in majority across all age groups:


Also, when you compare the similiar graph from 2007 you notice that the "undefined" gender group has gone down. I believe Facebook no longer allow the users not to state gender?

And while we are comparing with the numbers from 2007, let's have a look at the penetration per age group side by side:

You can note that the population age 35 and over still has room for growth, but percentage wise has grown more than the 20-24 age group since 2007.

That's enough of graphs for now. Let's wait for the 3 millionth user in Sweden for some more graphs...

As a last note - when Facebook hit one million users in Sweden I noted that Facebook was the second most visited site in Sweden according to Alexa. Now, when the number of Swedish users has doubled the same Alexa lookup only put Facebook as number 5:

Twixdagen and some Twitter videos

It seems like the microblogging site Twitter has started to get some momentum in Sweden. Still not a mainstream usage, it will be interesting how far microblogging will spread in Sweden.

Twixdagen
In Sweden most political parties, and quite a few individual politicians, have started to use Twitter. No doubt they are influenced by Barrack Obama's Twitter account.

In the overall mashup tradition a site, Twixdagen.se, has created a feed of all Tweets from Swedish parties and politicians. I find this rather neat and interesting, as it definately increases the visibility and transparancy of the daily work inside politics (disclaimer - I haven't valued the quality and information value of the resulting strean ;-).

Twitter videos
Also recently, two videos with Evan Williams has surfaced.

The first video is from TED. Evan tells the story behind Twitter. I kind of like the statement "I learned to kind of follow hunches, even though you can't necessarily justify them or know where they're gonna go". Also, what takes place after Evans talk is a great example of the backchannel concept.


The second video is from the television show Charlie Rose. (The Twitter part starts a approx. 33 min 40 sec.)

So, what are you waiting for? If you are not on Twitter, join today. You'll find me at twitter.com/johan.

The past, present and future of Internet

Time flies. It's almost two weeks into 2009. And it has been a while since I posted here.

I will not start of by summing up the past year of this blog, as I did last year. Instead let's have a look at the past, present and future of the Internet (OK, perhaps not that much of the present, but anyway...).

When I scanned my overloaded feedbox in Google Reader I found a post on the CommonCraft blog, highlighting a video about the history of connected computers up to the birth of Internet (or the Web as we know it today).

This reminded me about a video from TED, where Kevin Kelly reminds us that the Internet as we now take for granted is only 5000 days old (I haven't done the calculation, but you should add a few hundred days to that number by now). In the video Kevin Kelly goes on and looks into the next 5000 days. Some of the predictions feels very much "yes, that's what's happening now".

So, here are the two videos. A nice way to spend the next half hour of 2009:

First video: History of the Internet:


Second video: Predicting the next 5000 days of the web:


(And it's funny how you come across things multiple times when you look around. While thinking about this post I went into Jaiku for another reason, stumbled over a Jaiky-thread on .SE domains which lead me to Binero. Once there I looked at the Binero blog, and found two posts containing the same two videos...)

Rock´n´roll in Excel, or excel in rock´n´roll

Although I think Excel shall be used with care, and though AC/DC might not be my favourite music, the combination somehow rocks.

AC/DC has released a music video. As an Excel file. You will find the details and download here. There is also a Youtube-video of this:

Even if I don't know the demographics of the AC/DC fan community it seems to make sense. AC/DC have been around for a while, and I suspect that a part of their original fans now are white-collar office workers, using Excel daily.

Anyone who are able to see how they achieved this in Excel?

I also notice that AC/DC both have a MySpace page and a Facebook page. And an RSS-feed. They are also promoting an AC/DC game for Playstation, Wii and Xbox. Didn't find them om Twitter though (twitter.com/acdc does not seem to be them...). But still, overall quite a good social media marketing approach.

Hello Turkey

Last week I was approach via Facebook by Erdem from Turkey. He is about to write his master thesis on "public relations and promotion" and needed some statistics on Facebook usage in Turkey.

So Erdem, here is some numbers and further pointers. Always happy to be able to help out, and it will be nice to look at your thesis - even if you write in Turkish perhaps Google translate can help me understand...

The numbers
I created a spreadsheet with all usage statistics I have for Turkey. Enjoy.

The discussion
So, what does the numbers reflect? There's two sets of data - one is from the Facebook ad utility and one is from the Turkey network.

• Facebook ad utility (see further down for more on how to use)
  Although it is not fully clear what exactly is reflected in these numbers, a guess is that:
  a) The country you belong to is fetched from your account settings. However, when I just checked this setting seems no longer available, so it might be that Facebook are rather using eg IP mapped to country? Any guesses?
  b) The number indicates the number of user from the country logged in over the last 30 days (for an earlier discussion on this, please see this post, scroll down to the heading "What do we measure?")


• Network
  The implementation of country networks has changed a bit lately. Since mid September no numbers are available.
  The country network membership is something you choose yourself. The numbers most likely indicates how many Facebook profiles (users) that are registered for a specific country network, regardless off last login.
  As this is a separate action to register, it is fair to believe not all users will hook up to a regional network.

The nest step
If you are looking further into a specific country (as I did with Sweden here), the Facebook ad utility is a great tool for demographic breakdown. Just go here, create an ad and then select the target group.

Here you can dig into the demographics in detail. (As for the gender part, please note that a portion of the profiles does not have a gender specified!)

So, Erdem, good luck with your thesis. Hope this helped.

And if anyone is interested in a coordinated effort to map the detailed, global, demographics let me know...