Ng: April 1 and the tech industry

LAST week, I read two controversial articles that came out in InfoWorld. One reported how Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, was resigning and that Bill Gates was coming back to head the company. This, the website said, is in light of the challenges of Microsoft and the loss of confidence in Ballmer for, among other things, losing to competitors like Google and Apple in the smartphones and gadgets business.

Then on another article, it quoted that Microsoft was going to be releasing a Linux product called Winux, that will be the company’s flagship product instead of the Windows Server. It said that the company will continue to provide support for Windows until 2020, but that they believe that Linux had better technologies that they wanted to take advantage of.

Well, I was almost taken in, but I checked the date and saw that these were published on April 1. April 1, of course, is April Fool’s Day and the ICT industry has been one of the most active players in perpetrating false news on this day, so at least I was forewarned. In my opinion, that did not fit the profile of a good hoax - a good hoax is something that’s not so outrageous that people would check twice before believing it.

Anyhow, last week, I attended a couple of industry seminars, and as a keen note-taker, I would like to share some quotes and facts that I jotted down.

One statistic says that there was more content created in 2010 alone than in all the years of humanity up to 2005. Isn’t that something? Every month, over two billion photos are uploaded to Facebook and there are several hours of video submitted almost every minute in YouTube. One estimate puts it that there are now over 500 million videos in YouTube alone. That is not surprising, considering that almost every phone and camera can now take videos. Of course, there are over 600 million members in Facebook alone, making it the third most populous country in the world, if it were a country.

There are also close to 1.5 billion SMS sent every day in the Philippines alone. However, Indonesia has the most number of members in Facebook, beating the Philippines in Asia. Indonesia, of course, has more than twice our population.

The prediction for 2011, is that over a billion cell phones will be sold this year, and of that, over 25 percent will be smartphones. It is expected that smartphones will sell half-a-billion units every year by 2013. It also predicted that about 65 million tablets will be sold -- that is up from less than a million two years ago.

(www.ngkhai.net/bizdrivenlife)