Internet stats: Asia is the future!

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Budi Putra in Statistics

In 2011, there are 922.2 million of Internet users in Asia — out of 2.1 billion of Internet users worldwide. It means, according to the latest statistic released by Pingdom, 44% of Internet users on this planet are coming from Asia!

No wonder that the business and IT world believe that Asia is the future.

Checkout another useful 2011 Internet stats provided by Pingdom:

• 3.146 billion – Number of email accounts worldwide.
• 555 million – Number of websites (December 2011).
• 95.5 million – Number of .com domain names at the end of 2011.
• 800+ million – Number of users on Facebook by the end of 2011.
• 225 million – Number of Twitter accounts.
• 39 million – The number of Tumblr blogs by the end of 2011.
• 70 million – Total number of WordPress blogs by the end of 2011.
• 2.4 billion – Social networking accounts worldwide.
• 1.2 billion – The number of active mobile broadband subscriptions worldwide in 2011.
• 5.9 billion – The estimated number of mobile subscriptions worldwide in 2011.
• 1 trillion – The number of video playbacks on YouTube.
• 14 million – Number of Instagram accounts created during 2011.
• 51 million – Total number of registered users on Flickr.

Using BlackBerry in Bangkok

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Budi Putra in Tech, Travel

Besides Indonesia, Thailand is another Southeast Asian country which has potential market for BlackBerry smart-phones and services. BlackBerry has even dominated Thai smartphone market so far.

Why is BlackBerry so popular in Thailand? As quoted by Bangkok Post, Gregory Wade, Managing Director of Research in Motion, South East Asia explained that:

First was social media. Thailand has 13 million people using social media of which 2 million are using Facebook. Sixty percent of mobile Facebook access is done through a mobile device.
Second is localisation. The BlackBerry has a localised product set, not just the phone, complete with applications that are Thai enabled.
Third is the aspiration of Thais who love their celebrities and want to emulate them, using the same phones as these social influencers.

There are three local operators offer BlackBerry services: AIS, DTAC and TrueMove. Those operators also offer prepaid BlackBerry services. Of course this is also a good news for BlackBerry users who are traveling in Thailand.

My wife has bought a prepaid DTAC BlackBerry card yesterday at MBK Center, Bangkok, for 199 Baht (around USD7). That’s an unlimited BlackBerry access for chat and social network! This is really a good price and solutions for our current trip in Bangkok :-)

Watch out, Silicon Valley: China and India’s maneuver!

Posted on December 30, 2010 by Budi Putra in Business, Education, Featured, Science

The Foreign Policy piece tells us how China and India will shake the world. They focused on educations and research & development first. China has built world-class universities, while India has $10 billion R&D industry.

The first generations of Indian startups focused on selling IT services, and the Chinese developed copycat web technologies such as Baidu, China’s Google rival, and Sina, its Twitter clone. But they are going beyond that now. They are gaining the knowledge — and developing the confidence — to create innovative products, not only for domestic markets, but also for global ones.

Social media in Asia differ from U.S., Europe

Posted on October 23, 2010 by Budi Putra in Tech

How to win in Asia? Any online player should learn every market in the region very closely. There is no single winning factor here. According to a recent study, Asia Pacific has even some of the earliest and successful locally developed social media sites.

“The Asia Pacific social media market is highly diverse and in many places evolving rapidly,” said Nick Ingelbrecht, research director at Gartner. “While global sites fare better in more westernized Asian markets such as Australia, some of Asia’s biggest markets have evolved their own unique social network services distinct from those of Europe and North America.”

In China, Japan and South Korea, the growth of social networking has been driven by strong consumer interest in online games, while India’s social networking market has been spurred by demand for online dating and matchmaking sites.

How about Indonesia? Why did Facebook win here?

[via IBTimes]

Asia, the tweeting continent

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Budi Putra in Tech

Asian tweeps just outpaced the US users in term of numbers, according to a research company.

“Twitter users in Asia, mainly located in Japan, Indonesia and South Korea, account for 37 percent of tweets,” said Semiocast, which studied 2.9 million tweets over 24 hours on June 22.

Read also: How Indonesian politicians and state officials tweeted.

Twitter’s role in Bangkok conflict

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Budi Putra in Politics

Never before has a social media website played such a central role in a conflict, informing even as it amplified the hate on both sides.

[via The Globe and Mail]

Dalai Lama officially joins Twitter

Posted on February 23, 2010 by Budi Putra in People

Looking forward to see His Holiness’ upcoming tweets…

This Dalai Lama is verified by Twitter, though — it is the real deal. Currently, the account is pulling albums and blog posts from his website and tweeting them via twitterfeed, though we bet you’ll see real engagement later on.

[via Mashable]

Uncensoring China

Posted on January 14, 2010 by Budi Putra in Politics

Google has announced that it will cease censorship of its Chinese language, Google.cn website, and even will be leaving the country, following its detection of malicious attacks on the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.  But in China itself, as usual, the news was heavily censored.

Should Google left the country immediately and let all its search results about China remains uncensored? Or just cooling-down, narrow-down the case and stay? Tell me what you think.

Former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid dies

Posted on December 30, 2009 by Budi Putra in People