jatiN mahindrA doT coM

Most Businesses Still Only “Experiment” with Social Media

Social media use among businesses has grown significantly over the past year or two, but new research from E-Consultancy, in association with the Online Marketing Summit (where WebProNews is conducting exclusive interviews this week), indicates that most businesses are largely still in the experimental stage when it comes to their efforts. There are a great deal of interesting stats to pick through...

Consumers Getting More Comfortable with Mobile Shopping

As you know, smartphone usage is on the rise, and that means more opportunities for businesses to sell to customers via their mobile devices. We often hear about how important mobile is to the marketing strategy and especially future strategies, but how much are consumers really into shopping from their phones? Retrevo shared some findings with us, and concludes that consumers are increasingly warming...

As Companies Relax on Social Media, Threats Increase

Even as social media has grown to be a much more widely accepted form of communication among businesses over the years, there is still plenty of data out there depicting the flaws and setbacks that can occur when social networks are used in the business environment. Just as with email or web surfing in general, there are security concerns, and a new report (pdf) from security firm Sophos claims that...

Report Suggests More Revenue, but Less Advertisers for Google

AdGooroo, a competitive intelligence agency, has released a new report, which indicates that there as has been a decrease in active advertisers for Google, despite projected Q4 gains. "Google experienced a quality purge this quarter and banned what we believe to be more than 30,000 advertisers, accounting for about 5.3 percent of its active advertiser base," said AdGooroo Founder and CEO...

Consumers Expected to Spend $6.2 Billion on Mobile Apps in 2010

Gartner has released some research findings that indicate consumers will spend $6.2 billion in 2010 in mobile application stores. Meanwhile, advertising revenue is expected to generate $0.6 billion worldwide. According to Gartner, mobile app stores will exceed 4.5 billion downloads in 2010, eight out of ten of which will be free. Gartner also forecasts worldwide downloads in mobile application stores...

Skype Sees Big Jump in International Calls

Skype announced that its share of international calling minutes has jumped by 50% year-over-year. This data comes from a new report released by research firm TeleGeography. According to this report, Skype’s share of international calling minutes jumped to 12% from last year’s figure of 8%. Telegeography says that the volume of traffic routed via Skype is growing at an "astonishing"...

Enterprises Seeing Increased Complexity at Data Centers

Symantec has put together its "State of the Data Center" report, which is the product of a survey of 573 businesses in 26 countries. "Although mid-sized enterprises tend to evaluate and adopt new technologies at a faster rate than larger organizations, they still face similar data center complexities that are compounded by adopting new initiatives," says Deepak Mohan, senior vice...

Opera: Facebook Most Popular Mobile Site in Africa

According to Opera, Facebook is the most popular site on the mobile web in Africa. In addition, a report from the company shows a 5% jump in global mobile Internet users. Opera Mini has garnered more than 41.7 million users worldwide showing a 5.3 percent jump compared to the previous month, according to the report. The number of page views in November went up 9.5% and data consumption increased 8.3%...

40 Million Reasons You Need a Mobile Web Presence

Opera is reporting that usage of its Opera Mini mobile browser has jumped 11% in just a month, around the world. In addition, they say data transfers have gained 16%. About 40 million people used Opera Mini in October, according to the company. That’s an 11.3% increase from September 2009 and more than 155% compared to October 2008. page-views and data transfers increased at an even more impressive...

Walmart Wins Thanksgiving, Amazon Wins Black Friday

You may have read about the online price wars going on this holiday season between Walmart and Amazon. It looks like both companies are doing quite well as a result (not that that is much of a surprise). According to data from Hitwise, Walmart was the top retail site on Thanksgiving Day, and Amazon was the top retail site on Black Friday. Where did you spend your dollars on Thanksgiving/Black Friday? Share...

Online Ad Revenues On the Rise

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers released their latest Internet advertising numbers for the third quarter. According to the organizations, Internet advertising revenues reached nearly $5.5 billion for the quarter. That is an increase of 1.7% from the second quarter. The numbers are still significantly down from the same period last year, but any increase is a good...

Spam is Getting More Malicious

Symantec has released two new reports for the month of November – the State of Spam, and the State of Phishing (both PDFs). The reports highlight a dramatic increase in spam that contains malware. On top of that, junk and malicious email now accounts for close to 9 out of 10 email messages. The security firm says that a new generation of "Spam Princes" are rising, and that the Asia...

New Twitterers Down, Tweets Up in October

Last month we looked at Twitter’s numbers for user registrations and total tweets for the month of September. We saw a small decline in new user registrations, but tweeting appeared to be on the rise again following the previous month in which tweeting declined. The numbers for October follow a similar trend. The information was supplied by Matthew Daines, the lead developer of the Twitter app,...

Usage of Mobile Web and Apps Doubles in 2 Years

According to AdMob, which claims it is the world’s largest mobile advertising platform, mobile web and application use has doubled over the past two years. In September, the firm received over 100 million ad requests from 14 countries, and over 10 million ad requests from 64 countries. AdMob released its Mobile Metrics report for September, which highlights the rapid growth in usage of mobile...

Google and Bing Increase Share of Enterprise Search Traffic

iCrossing has shared the findings from its Enterprise Natural Search Share Index. This is a look at natural search traffic to enterprise level sites, based on a large sample of Fortune 1000 companies across all major verticals. Google’s share of natural search traffic to enterprise-level sites in September increased to 76.68%. That is up from 74.7% last year and 75.89% in August. Bing’s...