Estimated worldwide online population 2011 - 2.2 Billion
Estimated worldwide online population 2010 - 1.9 Billion
Estimated worldwide online population 2009 - 1.73 Billion
Estimated worldwide online population 2008 - 1.59 Billion
Estimated worldwide online population 2007 - 1.35 Billion
Estimated worldwide online population 2006 - 1.21 Billion
Estimated worldwide online population 2005 - 1.07 Billion
Estimated worldwide online population 2004 - 934 Million
Source: Computer Industry Almanac / Internet World Stats

Estimated Number of Active Websites Worldwide
December 2011 - 555,482,744
December 2010 - 255,287,546
December 2009 - 233,848,493
December 2008 - 186,727,854
December 2007 - 155,230,051
December 2006 - 105,244,649
December 2005 - 74,353,258
December 2004 - 56,923,737
December 2003 - 45,980,112
December 2002 - 35,543,105
December 2001 - 36,276,252
December 2000 - 25,675,581
December 1999 - 9,560,866
December 1998 - 3,689,227
December 1997 - 1,681,868
December 1996 - 603,367
August 1995 - 18,957
Source: Netcraft

WorldWideWeb - Current Data And Future Predictions

Technology market researchers Radicati see the number of email accounts worldwide growing from 3.1 billion in 2011 to nearly 4.1 billion by 2015.
Source: BBC November 2011

According to the the Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast, apart from a massive boom in the number of connected devices, global internet traffic will quadruple between 2010 and 2015. The Company predicted that in 2015, global internet traffic will be at 966 exabytes. One exabyte is equal to over one million terabytes. Cisco said that between 2014 and 2015, internet traffic will increase by 200 exabytes. Cisco estimates that there will be 15 billion connected devices on earth in 2015, breaking down to more than 2 devices per person worldwide. In the US, the average person will own around 7 connected devices in 2015. Suraj Shetty, Cisco's vice president of global service provider marketing, said that the boom in online traffic will be primarily due to online video and tablet PC devices. Cisco predicted that 1 million video minutes will cross the internet every second in 2015.
Source: ITProPortal June 2011

Global annual data traffic volume is likely to surpass the 60,000 petabytes figure in the next five years alone. The figure, if the report is to be believed, will be seven times as large as what it is expected to be in 2011 at over 8,000 petabytes.
Source: ITProPortal May 2011

Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until  2003, according to (Eric Schmidt - Google CEO). That’s something like five exabytes of data, he says. Let me repeat that: we create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003. “The real issue is user-generated content,” Schmidt said. He noted that pictures, instant messages, and tweets all add to this.
Source: TechCrunch August 2010

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a non-profit Washington DC-based research organisation, the number of US adults accessing the web from a phone or laptop has risen from 51 per cent in April last year, to 64 per cent in 2010. The report shows that 47 per cent of adults accessing the internet from mobile devices use laptops, while 40 per cent use their mobile phones.
Source: Washington Post July 2010

Top ten languages used in the web: English is No 1 with 27% of total internet users, while Chinese is No 2 with 22% of users (and is growing very fast). No 3 is Spanish with 7.8%, No 4 is Japanese with 5% and No 5 is Portuguese with 4.2%.
Source: Internet World Stats June 2010

An IDC analyst has warned that upcoming estimates of the explosion in data traffic are hugely underestimated. IDC analyst Frank Gens warned at the Citrix Synergy 2010 event that the current increase in data loads is just the start, and that predictions of how heavy it will get are unreliable. The analyst firm's research suggests that the global data load will rise from 0.8 zettabytes in 2009 to 35 zettabytes in 2020, but that even this might understate the case. A zettabyte is equal to one billion terabytes. "These figures are wrong in my opinion. They are too low," he said.
Source: CRN May 2010

Estimated online population in September 2009 is 1.73 Billion. The highest regional population is 738 million in Asia but that is only 19% of the total Asian population. Next largest is Europe with 418 million, that's 52% of the population. Then North America with 252 million, that's 74% of the population.
Source: Internet World Stats February 2010

25% of the World's populations are internet users.
58% of Americans have a mobile phone with Web connectivity.
There are more mobile phones than computers connected to the internet.
Six-times as many non-PC devices as PCs to be connected to networks by 2012.
Source: IBM January 2010

Defying the unfavourable economic conditions, the global take up of broadband and IPTV continued to showcase an impressive growth, according to a recent study by industry consortium Broadband Forum.The study revealed that as many as 16.5 million new broadband lines were added globally in the first quarter of the year, with the total count of lines reaching a whopping 429.2 million worldwide.... The figures notified that China is leading in terms of installed broadband lines, with the total line count for the country rose to 88 million from 71 million, and the US is at the second spot with 84 million installed broadband lines. However, UK managed to snare the sixth rank, with the country's broadband population stood at 17.7 million at the quarter's end, up from 16.3 million for the same time a year ago.
Source: ITProPortal June 2009

More than half the world's population now pay to use a mobile phone and nearly a quarter use the internet, as developing countries rapidly adopt new communications technologies. By the end of last year there were an estimated 4.1bn mobile subscriptions, up from 1bn in 2002, according to a report published today by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an agency of the UN. That represents six-in-ten of the world's population, with developing countries accounting for about two-thirds of the mobile phones in use, compared with less than half of subscriptions in 2002. Over the same period, fixed-line subscriptions rose more modestly, from 1bn to 1.27bn, indicating that many people in the developing world are bypassing the older technology altogether. "There has been a clear shift to mobile cellular telephony," the ITU said.
Source: Guardian Newspaper March 2009

An 'exabyte' is 1.074 billion gigabytes. Two exabytes equal the total volume of information generated in 1999. The internet currently handles one exabyte of data every hour.
Source: Internet Innovation Alliance April 2008

It took two centuries to fill the shelves of the Library of Congress with more than 57 million manuscripts, 29 million books and periodicals, 12 million photographs, and more. Now, the world generates an equivalent amount of digital information nearly 100 times each day.
Source: Internet Innovation Alliance April 2008

In July 2008 Google claimed to have indexed over 1 trillion web pages.
In November 2005 Google claimed to have indexed over 8 billion web pages.
In May 2004 Google claimed to have indexed over 4 billion web pages.
In November 2002 Google claimed to have indexed over 3 billion web pages.
When it first began in 1998 Google indexed 28 million web pages, however by the end of 2000 it claimed to have indexed over 1 billion web pages.
Source: Research Buzz / Google

Five years ago Google had 8,000 servers in their farm - its now estimated that they have 500,000 servers. Google are now building a new farm site which is the size of two football pitches.
Source: IBM August 2006

Social Software

Facebook now controls a thin majority of online sharing, according to data released by AddThis. The social giant makes up 52.1 percent of all sharing on the web for the year 2011 to date, up from 44 percent last year and 33 percent the year before.
Source: ClickZ December 2011

A recent report revealed that YouTube is responsible for about 21 billion videos viewed during a month. In the month of October, the Google-owned YouTube again topped the list of destinations for online video consumption outnumbering the rest combined by a "factor of four" as per the latest comScore data. After YouTube, Facebook is where users watched 346 million videos followed by Vevo with around 827 million videos, then Microsoft with 661 million, Viacom with 540 million, and Yahoo with 551 million.
Source: ITProPortal November 2011

YouTube celebrated its sixth birthday with the stunning announcement that it moved past the 3 billion views-per-day mark last weekend. That's a 50 percent increase over the previous year. Put another way: it's equal to "nearly half the world's population watching a YouTube video each day, or every U.S. resident watching at least nine videos a day," the company pointed out on its corporate blog. Another tidbit offered up by YouTube: More than two days' worth of video gets uploaded to the site each minute.
Source CNet May 2011

Facebook processes 10 terabytes of data every day, Twitter processes 7 terabytes of data every day. 2 billion internet users by 2011.
Source: IBM ParterWorld Leadership Conference February 2011

More than 200 million people accessed Facebook via a mobile device in 2010, according to its own figures - up from 65 million in the previous year.
Source: BBC News February 2011

Twitter has reached nearly 200 million users registered accounts who post 110 million tweets per day as of the January 1, 2011, Twitter spokesperson Carolyn Penner tells me.
Source: Oliver Chiang Forbes January 2011

Blogging has reached its peak, but e-mailing continues to grow across all generations,a new study released by Pew Internet has revealed. The study found that the use of blogging has remained constant across all the six types of generations surveyed by the research firm. At one point of time, blogging was on the rise but the advent of social networking platforms and micro-blogging platforms stunted its growth to a point from which it can only decline and not rise, the study found.
Source: ITProPortal December 2010

Twitter is set to have over 200 million users by 2011 after having added 30 million new users in the last two months…..The company said that Twitter now has 175 million registered users, 30 million more than the 145 million reported in September. The micro blogging platform, which allows users to send 140 characters long messages, only had 58 million users last year and 503,000 users three years ago.
Source:ITProPortal November 2010

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner just dropped some numbers on the LinkedIn social platform’s measurement of user engagement, revealing that the social network now boasts 85 million members and is adding a member each second. “That’s the fastest ever,” Weiner said revealing that it took the site 477 days to get the first million and 9 days for last million.
Source: TechCrunch November 2010

Flickr now has 5 billion photos online.
Source: Flickr Blog September 2010

Twitter has revealed that it has served its 10 billionth tweet last night at 1am GMT,.… Gigatweet, a service whose sole purpose is to count Twitter messages, calculated Twitter will produce its 20 billionth twitter by October 2010 and is currently growing at the rate of roughly 66 million per tweet per day. Twitter said last month that back in 2007, there were 5000 tweets a day, the year later, that reached 300,000 and in 2009, that number reached 2.5 million a day. Now this has reached more than 760 tweets a second.
Source: ITProPortal March 2010

“A lot has happened in a year within the social software and collaboration space. The growing use of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook by business users has resulted in serious enterprise dialogue about procuring social software platforms for the business,” said Mark R. Gilbert, research vice president at Gartner and co-chair of the Portals, Content and Collaboration (PCC) Summit. “Success in social software and collaboration will be characterized by a concerted and collaborative effort between IT and the business.”
Source: Gartner February 2010

By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users. Greater availability of social networking services both inside and outside the firewall, coupled with changing demographics and work styles will lead 20 percent of users to make a social network the hub of their business communications. During the next several years, most companies will be building out internal social networks and/or allowing business use of personal social network accounts. Social networking will prove to be more effective than e-mail for certain business activities such as status updates and expertise location.
Source: Gartner February 2010

Video mammoth Youtube has announced that it has managed to reach one billion videos streamed a day, a fantastic achievement for a company that's less than five years old.
Source: ITProPortal October 2009

24% of Tweets are created by automated bots, not humans, according to a recent study. Meanwhile, it was found that 5% of Twitter accounts generate 75% of Tweets.
Source: Mashable August 2009

Twitter’s website attracted a total of 44.5 million unique visitors worldwide in June, 2009, according to comScore. Twitter’s worldwide audience grew a healthy 19 percent from May 2009 (and an even healthier 1,460 percent from June, 2008, when its worldwide audience was just 2.9 million). With 20 million of its visitors coming from the U.S., Twitter’s audience is now 55 percent international. ComScore now counts it as the No. 52 largest site in the world (bigger than ESPN, just shy of the BBC and Craigslist).
Source: TechCrunch August 2009

Facebook grew from 100 million to 200 million users in just 8 months. Now, the company has announced that it has gone from 200 million to 250 million in just over 3 months. In other words, despite its already massive size, Facebook’s growth actually appears to still be accelerating. More important than the raw user count though is what users are actually doing on the site. And earlier this week, we reported that Facebook is also number one in terms of the amount of time users spend on the site, beating out the likes of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft with each user spending an average of 4 hours, 39 minutes on the social network in June.
Source: Mashable July 2009

(UK) Figures from the metrics firm comScore - and echoed by Nielsen and Hitwise - show that Facebook secured its dominance over MySpace in the UK early last year, since when MySpace's user base has declined regularly. By comScore's estimates, unique users have fallen 18%, from 8.5 million in April 2008 to 7 million one year later, while Facebook has seen 63% growth to 23.5 million unique users. Twitter, while starting from a small user base, has seen traffic rise nearly 4,000% to 2.5 million unique users a month - and that excludes traffic through third-party applications, which are estimated to make up a substantial amount, between one-third and two-thirds, of the service's traffic, which means it has far more impact.Bebo, usually considered to have a younger user profile - principally, school-age children - has also lost out: unique users dropped 24% year on year to 9 million in April. Kate Burns, vice-president and managing director of Bebo Europe, acknowledged the economic climate, but said social networking is trend driven; 2006 was MySpace's year, 2007 Bebo, 2008 Facebook and 2009 Twitter.
Source: Guardian Newspaper June 2009

Social networking website Facebook has reached another important milestone this year, signing in its 200 millionth user, three months after hitting 150 million members landmark. All this of course is happening during the firm's fifth birthday and while questions are being asked about its very ability to raise revenue (ed: nobody questions its ability to burn capital though). Over the same roughly the period, Myspace grew to 130 million members worldwide and Linkedin to 38 million users.
Source: ITProPortal April 2009

Figures disclosed by internet research company comScore shows that social networking website Facebook is more popular than ever, eclipsing the likes of Myspace and Bebo globally. By some accounts, Facebook is growing at the breathtaking speed of one million users per day. In January 2009, Myspace attracted 124 million unique visitors while Facebook recorded 276 million uniques, a 123 percent difference. What makes those figures even more dizzying is the fact that Facebook traffic actually grew by nearly 17 percent while Myspace unique visitors number shrunk by 2 percent over that period.
Source: ITProPortal April 2009

As the number of people engaged in social media increases, people are more likely to be involved in communicating than seeking out entertaining activities online such as viewing Web sites for fun. That's according to "Media Shifts to Social," a Netpop Research report.
Source: ClickZ March 2009

Handhelds, Smartphones & Mobilisation

The number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the world's population in 2012.
Source: Cisco February 2012

Last year's mobile data traffic was eight times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000. Global mobile data traffic in 2011 (597 petabytes per month) was over eight times greater than the total global Internet traffic in 2000 (75 petabytes per month).
Source: Cisco February 2012

Smartphones represent only 12 percent of total global handsets in use today, but they represent over 82 percent of total global handset traffic. In 2011, the typical smartphone generated 35 times more mobile data traffic (150 MB per month) than the typical basic-feature cell phone (which generated only 4.3 MB per month of mobile data traffic).
Source: Cisco February 2012

Two-thirds of the world's mobile data traffic will be video by 2016. Mobile video will increase 25-fold between 2011 and 2016, accounting for over 70 percent of total mobile data traffic by the end of the forecast period.
Source: Cisco February 2012

Figures show that almost half of the population in UK owns a smartphone with Android, Google's smartphone operating system, running on half of them, RIM's BlackBerry handsets second with 22.5 percent while Apple's iOS platform comes third with 18.5 percent of the market.
Source: ITProPortal November 2011

The sale of internet enabled consumer electronics devices is expected to surpass that of personal computers over the next few years. According to the Consumer Platforms Report released by market research company IHS iSuppli, the sale of connected consumer electronics devices, which include TVs, set-top boxes, gaming consoles, Blu-Ray players and tablet devices, will reach 503.6 million units in 2013, up from 161 million units in 2010.
Source: ITProPortal August 2011

The number of internet connected devices is set to explode in the next four years to over 15 billion - twice the world's population by 2015. Technology giant Cisco predicts the proliferation of tablets, mobile phones, connected appliances and other smart machines will drive this growth. The company said consumer video will continue to dominate internet traffic. It predicts that by 2015, one million minutes of video will be watched online every second.
Source: Cisco June 2011

40 percent of all Google Maps usage is from mobile devices, while on Christmas and New Years day mobile usage surpassed desktop usage for the first time (a first for Google products).
Source: TechSpot March 2011

There are 5.3 billion mobile subscribers (that's 77 percent of the world population). Growth is led by China and India....Mobile devices sales rose in 2010, while smartphone sales showed the strongest growth…..Half a billion people accessed mobile Internet worldwide in 2009. Usage is expected to double within five years as mobile overtakes the PC as the most popular way to get on the Web…..Many mobile Web users are mobile-only, i.e. they do not, or very rarely use a desktop, laptop or tablet to access the Web. Mobile-only in Egypt is 70 percent, India 59 percent, even in the US it’s 25 percent of subscribers.....By 2011, over 85 percent of new handsets will be able to access the mobile Web. Today in US and W. Europe, 90 percent of mobile subscribers have an Internet-ready phone.
Source: mobiThinking February 2011

Gartner estimates that by the end of 2011, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing an ideal environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web.
Source: LotusUserGroup January 2011

More than 70 per cent people in the world subscribe to a mobile connection, according to data recently released by telecommunications company Ericsson. The company said that the global mobile phone market totalled five billion users, and was growing at the rate of two million new users every day. The figure of 70 per cent is calculated from data released by the United Nations and US census bureau, which estimates that there are 6.8 billion people on earth. The company reports that the there were just 720 million mobile subscribers just ten years ago. If the market were to continue growing at the current rate and the global population remained unchanged, everyone in the world would become a mobile subscriber within two and a half years.
Source: ITProPortal July 2010

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a non-profit Washington DC-based research organisation, the number of US adults accessing the web from a phone or laptop has risen from 51 per cent in April last year, to 64 per cent in 2010. The report shows that 47 per cent of adults accessing the internet from mobile devices use laptops, while 40 per cent use their mobile phones.
Source: Washington Post July 2010

According to a recent report (Predicts 2010: 'Social Software Is an Enterprise Reality' December 3, 2009) Gartner expects to see steep growth rates for sales of premises- and cloud-based social networking services.  As the industry moves toward three billion phones worldwide with the purpose of providing communications and collaboration anytime and anywhere, Gartner expects more people to spend significant time using collaborative tools on these devices.
Source: IBM January 2010

The mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.
Source: Morgan Stanley December 2009

Small business owners have been advised that more than 10m Britons are using their phone to surf the internet, according to figures released by Nielsen. The data means that around 20% of those with a mobile use it to access websites and that all small businesses must have a site that is compatible with mobile technology. There are now 6.2m smartphone users in the UK after 600,000 people bought one of the latest technology phones since last summer.
Source: NewBusinessUK November 2009

Universal access to collaboration technology on any device will redefine what it means to be "at work" in an increasingly mobile and globally distributed workforce. Improved applications for mobile devices will offer enterprise office levels of security, flexibility and ease-of-use
Source: Bob Picciano, General Manager IBM Lotus Software - CIO May 2009

In the next decade many Internet users will be supplementing PC Internet usage with Smartphone, mobile phone and mobile device Internet usage. In developing countries many new Internet users will come from cell phone and Smartphone Internet usage.
Source: Computer Industry Almanac May 2009

Speaking in Geneva about the creation of the WWW, (Tim) Berners-Lee said that the future of the web, as we know it, will lie in mobile phones. Not the current ones but the new breed of smartphones that is currently taking the world by storm. A recent report by Informa Telecoms and Media concluded that nearly 40 percent of mobile phones sold in 2013 will be smartphones, growing by a third each year on average. Unlike the current crop of mobile phones, smartphones will be built from ground up to access the internet. And as Tim Berners-lee rightly points out, smartphones are the only way that the overwhelming majority of the world will actually see the internet at all. The trend towards cheaper smartphones was highlighted at CeBIT and the Mobile World Congress with models starting from around £44.
Source: ITProPortal March 2009

More than half the world's population now pay to use a mobile phone and nearly a quarter use the internet, as developing countries rapidly adopt new communications technologies. By the end of last year there were an estimated 4.1bn mobile subscriptions, up from 1bn in 2002, according to a report published today by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an agency of the UN. That represents six-in-ten of the world's population, with developing countries accounting for about two-thirds of the mobile phones in use, compared with less than half of subscriptions in 2002. Over the same period, fixed-line subscriptions rose more modestly, from 1bn to 1.27bn, indicating that many people in the developing world are bypassing the older technology altogether. "There has been a clear shift to mobile cellular telephony," the ITU said.
Source: Guardian Newspaper March 2009

IBM's Institute for Business Value predicts one billion mobile Web users by 2011 and a significant shift in the way the majority of people will interact with the Web over the next decade.
Source: IBM Lotus January 2009

In the future, mobile will become the more dominant means to connect to information, and advertising will evolve to other models. That's according to "Future of the Internet III," a report released by Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University, with insight from Internet activists, builders, and commentators.
Source: ClickZStats December 2008

Blogs On The Web

Blogging has reached its peak, but e-mailing continues to grow across all generations,a new study released by Pew Internet has revealed. The study found that the use of blogging has remained constant across all the six types of generations surveyed by the research firm. At one point of time, blogging was on the rise but the advent of social networking platforms and micro-blogging platforms stunted its growth to a point from which it can only decline and not rise, the study found.
Source: ITProPortal December 2010

Technorati has now indexed a total of 75.2 million weblogs worldwide. There are 1.5 million posts per day, that's 17 per second.
Source: Technorati April 2007

Messaging & Spam

Technology market researchers Radicati see the number of email accounts worldwide growing from 3.1 billion in 2011 to nearly 4.1 billion by 2015. A typical business user sends and receives 105 messages daily.
Source: BBC November 2011

The UK has been named as the fifth worst country for relayed spam messages, according to data published by Sophos. In its quarterly “Dirty Dozen” list, the security company named and shamed the worst countries in the world for spam relaying. The USA took first place, with 18 per cent of the worlds spam, and second through to fourth fell to India, Brazil and Russia. Britain is responsible for around 4 per cent of the worlds relayed spam, according to the list, and has managed to drop in the rankings, having been placed fourth last year. “In all, we counted spam being sent from an astonishing 232 countries around the world during the last quarter of 2010.
Source: Sophos January 2011

"While 2009 was certainly a tough year for companies, the integrated collaborative environments submarket remains one of the cornerstones of the collaborative applications market as well as one of its largest segments in terms of revenue," says Erin Traudt, research director of IDC's Enterprise Collaboration and Social Solutions program. "IDC believes that email will remain a core component of technology portfolios as it continues to evolve from a standalone application to an integrated communications environment that includes functionality such as email, IM, conferencing, voice, and presence as well as social content and community features."
Source: IDC June 2010

An estimated worldwide total of 62 trillion spam emails were sent in 2008…..which accounts for 80 percent of all emails.
Source: McAfee 2009

"It is worse than ever," says Richard Cox of Spamhaus, which tracks the world's worst spammers and runs blacklists to help block them. "The fact that it's growing, I don't think anyone can exactly miss out on" .....The totality of spam is hard to gauge, but Cisco produced an estimate late last year of around 200bn junk emails a day. That number is growing rapidly, with Symantec suggesting incidence of spam has almost trebled in the past year. This year will break records for spam sent, even though growth has slowed.
Source: Guardian November 2009

Spam and phishing attacks make up 97% of the email that is sent, according to an information security report from Microsoft. The figure is a three percent rise on the previous year. Microsoft said that 97% of the email sent around the world was blocked as being spam, phishing attacks or carriers of malicious software in the second half of 2008. In the same period of 2007 94% of email was blocked on that basis, its report from the previous year said. "More than 97 percent of e-mail messages sent over the internet are unwanted: they have malicious attachments or are phishing attacks or spam," said Microsoft's Security Intelligence Report for July to December 2008.
Source: Radicati Group April 2009

Worldwide spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet.
Source: New York Times December 2006

Spamhaus has published a revised list of the world's 10 worst spammers. According to the anti-spam organisation, 200 professional spam gangs are responsible for 80 per of the high volume of junk mail pumped onto the internet every day.Public enemy number one is a Ukrainian known variously as Alex or Alexey, a prolific user of botnets, networks of PCs compromised with malware, to send out junk mail in association with a Russian spam gang called Pavka/Artofit.
Source: The Register November 2006

Some 12 trillion e-mail messages are estimated to be sent around the globe every year — and that figure alone grows by the day.
Source: ServerWatch January 2005

According to research from Forrester Consulting, 44 per cent of large corporations in the US now pay someone to monitor and snoop on what's in the company's outgoing mail, with 48 per cent actually regularly auditing email content.
Source: Silicon.Com July 2004

Instant Messaging

Mobile instant messaging remains the fastest growing segment of the instant messaging market. The spread of smartphones and unlimited data plans will help organizations project communications costs and only encourage the spread of mobile instant messaging.
Source: Osterman Research September 2008

IM accounts will grow from 1.8 billion in 2008, to over 3.7 billion by 2012.
Source: Radicati January 2008

In the past year, Instant Messaging vendors have seen a significant shift from enterprises using Public IM to purchasing and deploying Enterprise IM networks with enhanced security and robust administrative control functions.
Source: Radicati January 2008

Gartner predicts that by the end of 2011, IM will be the de facto tool for voice, video and text chat with 95 percent of workers in leading global organisations using it as their primary interface for real-time communications by 2013.
Source: Gartner June 2007

According to Radicati Group the number of IM accounts worldwide will increase from 944 million in 2006 to more than 1.4 billion by 2010. IDC estimates that almost 12 billion instant messages are currently sent every day.
Source: Computing November 2006

IBM Sametime how has amost 16 million users, including 8 out of the top 10 banks and 8 out of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies. And in its next version Sametime is to be linked to public IM networks such as AIM, Yahoo and Google Talk - bridging the gap between secure corporate IM and public IM.
Source: IBM Lotusphere January 2006

General Internet, IT & Comms

The number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the world's population in 2012.
Source: Cisco February 2012

The sale of internet enabled consumer electronics devices is expected to surpass that of personal computers over the next few years. According to the Consumer Platforms Report released by market research company IHS iSuppli, the sale of connected consumer electronics devices, which include TVs, set-top boxes, gaming consoles, Blu-Ray players and tablet devices, will reach 503.6 million units in 2013, up from 161 million units in 2010.
Source: ITProPortal August 2011

The number of internet connected devices is set to explode in the next four years to over 15 billion - twice the world's population by 2015. Technology giant Cisco predicts the proliferation of tablets, mobile phones, connected appliances and other smart machines will drive this growth. The company said consumer video will continue to dominate internet traffic. It predicts that by 2015, one million minutes of video will be watched online every second.
Source: Cisco June 2011

Companies will account for over one quarter of the 50 million tablets set to ship this year, Deloitte has predicted. According to Deloitte’s annual report, tablet sales will top 10 million in 2011, with the healthcare and retail sectors accounting for some 5 million tablets this year alone. Deloitte believes that long battery life, ease of use and the ability to quickly install and run apps on the go will fuel enterprise interest in tablets. “Although some commentators view tablets as underpowered media-consumption toys suitable only for consumers... in 2011, more than 25 percent of all tablet computers will be bought by enterprises and that figure is likely to rise in 2012 and beyond," Deloitte said.
Source: ITProPortal January 2011

The worldwide mobile worker population is set to increase from 919.4 million in 2008, accounting for 29% of the worldwide workforce, to 1.19 billion in 2013, accounting for 34.9% of the workforce.
Source IDC August 2010

Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until  2003, according to (Eric Schmidt - Google CEO). That’s something like five exabytes of data, he says. Let me repeat that: we create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003. “The real issue is user-generated content,” Schmidt said. He noted that pictures, instant messages, and tweets all add to this.
Source: TechCrunch August 2010

More than 70 per cent people in the world subscribe to a mobile connection, according to data recently released by telecommunications company Ericsson. The company said that the global mobile phone market totalled five billion users, and was growing at the rate of two million new users every day. The figure of 70 per cent is calculated from data released by the United Nations and US census bureau, which estimates that there are 6.8 billion people on earth. The company reports that the there were just 720 million mobile subscribers just ten years ago. If the market were to continue growing at the current rate and the global population remained unchanged, everyone in the world would become a mobile subscriber within two and a half years.
Source: ITProPortal July 2010

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a non-profit Washington DC-based research organisation, the number of US adults accessing the web from a phone or laptop has risen from 51 per cent in April last year, to 64 per cent in 2010. The report shows that 47 per cent of adults accessing the internet from mobile devices use laptops, while 40 per cent use their mobile phones.
Source: Washington Post July 2010

The mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and we believe more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.
Source: Morgan Stanley December 2009

IBM's Institute for Business Value predicts one billion mobile Web users by 2011 and a significant shift in the way the majority of people will interact with the Web over the next decade.
Source: IBM Lotus January 2009

A survey conducted by research firm Gartner found out that more than 85 percent of firms have adopted open source software with the rest to follow suit by next year. The report was conducted across end-user companies in Asia/Pacific, Europe and North American markets back in May and June, before the full force of the current economic turmoil was fully felt.
Source: ITProPortal November 2008

By the end of 2008 there will be 4 billion mobile phone users worldwide. Mobile subscriptions have grown an average 24 percent year-over-year between 2000 and 2008. In 2000 mobile penetration represented 12 percent globally. By early 2008 mobile penetration surpassed the 50 percent mark, and is estimated to reach 61 percent by year end.
Source: ClickZ October 2008

PCs in use will hit 2 Billion by 2014.
Source: Gartner July 2008

PC's in use nearly hit 1 Billion in 2006. The US had the largest percentage of PCs with 24%.
Source: Computer Industry Almanac September 2007

The worldwide number of Internet users surpassed 1 billion in 2005—up from only 45M in 1995 and 420M in 2000. The 2 billion Internet users milestone is expected in 2011. Much of current and future Internet user growth is coming from populous countries such as China, India, Brazil, Russia and Indonesia.
Source: Computer Industry Almanac January 2006

Security

UK businesses are expected to spend more than £3 billion on IT security, a new report released by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) claims. The company said that businesses were concerned over the security shortcomings of cloud computing, the use of mobile phones at work places and the increase in cyber-attacks and were increasing their spending for protecting themselves against these threats.
Source: ITProPortal December 2011

It seems that the number of zombie systems on the internet is growing with each passing day as the security firm McAfee alone, since January has been able to detect nearly twelve million computers systems which were hijacked by cyber-criminals.McAfee also mentions that a staggering 50 percent increase in the number of detected zombie computers has been noticed since 2008 and such a large increase in botnets can pose a serious security hazard in future.
Source: ITProPortal May 2009

According to the latest security report published by Symantec, a leading provider of computer security solutions, the frequency of malware attacks in 2008 increased by a striking 200 percent.In its report titled “Symantec Internet Security Report for 2008”, the security firm claims to have logged over 1.6 million new threats signatures which nearly account for 60 percent of all signatures that it has created till date.
Source: ITProPortal April 2009

Research found that 35 per cent of companies do not monitor employees' use of the internet, so would have no idea whether or not they were using social media sites and would not be able to trace the source of any leak on those sites. "It is clear that organisations don't equate employee use of social media sites with potential security breaches, which is a worrying sign," said Clearswift chief executive Jon Lee. "Research has shown that employees, particularly younger employees, are using these Web 2.0 technologies heavily at work, and the risk for potential loss of confidential information via these sites is very real. Organisations need to reassess their security policies and precautions in light of the growing popularity and business use of Web 2.0 technologies," he said. Earlier research by the company unveiled the scale of the use of collaborative websites by workers. A quarter of young office workers in the UK spent more than three hours a week on sites such as YouTube, MySpace or Bebo. It found that 42 per cent of those people discussed work on those sites.
Source: The Register April 2007

The number of malware detections in 2006 increased 172 per cent from 2005, according to research by vendor PandaLabs. Massive infections caused by a single virus have practically disappeared to be replaced by multiple variants now silently infect computers, says the firm's report. 'Users have a false sense of security, believing there are no dangerous threats. The truth is, however, that there is now more malware than ever. PandaLabs detected the same amount of malware last year as in the previous fifteen years combined,' said Luis Corrons, technical director at PandaLabs.
Source: Computing March 2007

Your security is as good as your weakest link,” says Vimal Solanki, a McAfee executive. And unfortunately, a company’s weakest leak is all too often its own employees. He points out that black hat malware writers get a lot of headlines. Companies work constantly to secure the perimeter, knowing that attempts to compromise the firewall are ceaseless. But the enemy is within, too. Employees – however innocently – often create the greatest security problems. Laptops are lost. Emails with sensitive data are accidentally sent. Confidential records walk out the door stored on that fortress-like security device, the iPod. The dangers of unintentional data loss have been understated, Solanki tells eSecurityPlanet. In fact, as much as half of all security issues may be the result of employees’ unintended data loss, he says.
Source: eSecurity Planet February 2007

Some Interesting Quotes

"While 2009 was certainly a tough year for companies, the integrated collaborative environments submarket remains one of the cornerstones of the collaborative applications market as well as one of its largest segments in terms of revenue," says Erin Traudt, research director of IDC's Enterprise Collaboration and Social Solutions program. "IDC believes that email will remain a core component of technology portfolios as it continues to evolve from a standalone application to an integrated communications environment that includes functionality such as email, IM, conferencing, voice, and presence as well as social content and community features."
Source: IDC June 2010

In case you haven’t noticed, IBM Lotus not only didn’t go away, it’s here with a vengeance. LotusLive.com claims 18 million users, the 8.5 release of Notes/Domino is a winner in storage savings, Lotus Connections beats other social software platforms on many dimensions, and Sametime’s pushing the envelope on real-time collaboration at a global scale.
Source: Forrester Research December 2009

E-Mail Becomes The Collaboration Console: The Future Of Email Is…Gasp….Lotus Notes?
Source: Gartner 2009 Portal & Collaboration Conference

IT analyst firm Gartner has ranked IBM as the worldwide market share leader in the Portal Products and User Interaction Tools enterprise software segment. The ranking was based on total worldwide software revenue for 2008.
Source: IBM June 2009

"Speaking in Geneva about the creation of the WWW, (Tim) Berners-Lee said that the future of the web, as we know it, will lie in mobile phones. Not the current ones but the new breed of smartphones that is currently taking the world by storm. A recent report by Informa Telecoms and Media concluded that nearly 40 percent of mobile phones sold in 2013 will be smartphones, growing by a third each year on average."
Source: ITProPortal March 2009

"If Lotus can tap into the web 2.0 zeitgeist and harness the present wave of collaboration tools visible on the internet in a way that can be rolled out to corporate customers then it will be the undisputed leader of the next wave of corporate technology. There is no question that companies will be building immense internal knowledge networks in the near future. The only question is how quickly attitudes will change so a corporate social network becomes as essential as email. It won't be long."
Source: Silicon.com January 2008

Design & Change
"…the design of the system is the design of the enterprise; and if the system can't change, the enterprise can't change!"
Source: John Zachman, Founder, Zachman Institute for Framework Advancement

Paranoia
The thing is about paranoids is that sometimes they are right....
Source: The founder of the CIA

Grid Computing
"The internet is moving beyond email, content and e-commerce. It is becoming a true platform, combining the qualities of service of enterprise computing with the ability to share distributed resources across the internet - applications, data, storage, servers and everything in-between."
Source: Irving Wladawsky- Berger IBM Server Group VP of Strategy and Technology

PC Milestone
"The one billionth PC was shipped in April according to Gartner Dataquest. It took 25 years for the milestone to be achieved. The analysts believe the two billionth machine will be shipped in 2008".
Source: Computing July 2002

Some Interesting IBM Collaboration Quotes

In case you haven’t noticed, IBM Lotus not only didn’t go away, it’s here with a vengeance. LotusLive.com claims 18 million users, the 8.5 release of Notes/Domino is a winner in storage savings, Lotus Connections beats other social software platforms on many dimensions, and Sametime’s pushing the envelope on real-time collaboration at a global scale.
Forrester Research December 2009

E-Mail Becomes The Collaboration Console: The Future Of Email Is…Gasp….Lotus Notes?
Source: Gartner 2009 Portal & Collaboration Conference