State of the Internet 2010

Here’s a comprehensive set of numbers that illustrate the state of the internet at the end of 2010. Source: Pingdom

Email

• 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
• 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 480 million – New email users since the year before.
• 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
• 262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
• 2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
• 25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.

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Popularity: unranked

Foursquare for Beer

A few years back I was involved in launching a new brewery and it’s initial beer brands. I had dozens of ambitious ideas about how to do something cool and original but after a while we realised the client had become risk averse and budget deficient. Most of the ideas just fermented, but never bubbled over into reality.

Today, I’ve come across a beer campaign that I wish I was part of. Its great and utilises all of the elements I’d love to have included in our efforts.

Sydney agency Droga5 recently launched a multi-platform strategic rebranding campaign for Cascade Brewery. It includes a quirky TV ad, slightly reminiscent of the one’s I have long admired in the USA for the New Belgium Brewery, an excellent new website and, best of all, an amazingly useful iPhone app.

Cascade Brewer’s Nose, is the quintessential beer-lovers free iPhone app, featuring tasting notes on over 500 Australian and international brews compiled by Tasmanian chef Rodney Dunn of the Agrarian Kitchen.

The application uses GPS technology to help beer-lovers search for their favourite stores, pubs and bars that stock Cascade as well as helping you keep tally of the brews that you’ve tried to date.

It’s like Foursquare for beer. Friends with the app can check out each others beer tallies on Facebook.

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Popularity: unranked

A few years ago we all arrived at the office to discover it had been ransacked. Windows smashed and half the computers stolen. Fortunately all our work had been backed up and insurance covered the theft, but it was a major disruption to the business all the same. We had to order new equipment, reinstall programs and get back up to speed on the projects that were in play at the time. All-in-all I reckon we lost at least a week’s productivity.

One thing business owners must constantly ask themselves is “what would happen if…?”

What would happen if a key person left?

What would happen if a key client left?

What would happen if the office was broken into / burnt down / flooded?

At least these days I feel we have the last questions solved. Office disruption would be greatly reduced at Sticky due to the fact that we predominantly use applications and systems in the cloud.

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Popularity: unranked

Australia needs to join the high speed broadband revolution

As usual, the current Australian government has done a poor job at explaining the benefits of one of their major initiatives and as a consequence it is being largely ignored and risks being totally abandoned if they lose power. I’m talking about the National Broadband Network.

Unfortunately, the cost of the Australian government’s planned $43 billion National Broadband Network has become the issue rather than the benefits of high speed broadband for the country. The Opposition has focused on the cost, perhaps with good reason, and claim that the project is a White Elephant, yet they haven’t offered any viable alternatives.

Meanwhile the Government has failed to sell the real benefits of the NBN to the public and potentially negate the argument against.

I’m no infrastructure expert and I don’t pretend to know the best way to deliver high speed broadband to the nation but I do believe we as a country must have a high speed broadband network as soon as possible.

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Popularity: unranked

Get noticed in the web industry

I just came across a great piece in Smashing Magazine by Christian Heilman titled Making your mark on the web is easier than you think. There is some excellent advice in here for people looking to get noticed, make a start in the industry or win a job. In fact it has some parallels with my thoughts on getting a job in the media and marketing industry.

Here are the main points, but please check out the full article for more details.

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Popularity: 9%

Start me up

I have become increasingly fascinated by technology start-ups and the business of launching an online business. With this post I am looking to start an occasional dialogue on the trials and tribulations of starting a new business in the digital economy. We’ll see how it evolves.

In early April 2009, five Australian guys met in a funky bar in San Francisco to compare notes on their respective business ideas. There were three different technology start-ups involved in the conversation, all excellent ideas with bucket-loads of potential, and all three have taken very different paths to realization.

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Popularity: 2%

NLYZR website analysis tool

I’m very proud to announce that the latest, fully-automated version of our NLYZR website analysis tool is now live.

The team at Sticky launched the original NLYZR 12 months ago and in the ensuing year we tested and reported on over 3000 websites from around the world. Using that experience, we have been able to fine tune and improve our NLYZR reporting to the stage that the Free Web NLYZR is now a fully-fledged web application.

Free Web NLYZR provides a detailed report in around 30 seconds. The report is more SEO focussed than the previous version, covering your site’s on and off site optimisation plus factoring in your results for a nominated keyword search. Basically it tells you how well optimised your website is.

The Free Web NLYZR is just one part of our overall NLYZR Suite. Clients use the full range of tools to receive detailed website reporting and advice such as:

• Keyword selection and ratings

• On-site analysis and recommendations

• Off-site analysis and recommendations

• Rank reporting

• Competitor analysis

We use these tools to assist clients to significantly improve their search rankings, build website traffic and convert traffic into sales, leads and inquiries.

Please feel free to use NLYZR to test your site any time and if you have any questions or feedback we’d love to hear it. The more sites we test, the more feedback we gain, the better the system becomes.

Popularity: 1%

How does your website look on an iPad?

Here’s a little test to do when considering an agency for your digital marketing.

Grab an iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone and enter the agency’s URL in the browser. If the agency understands web marketing then their website will display seamlessly.

Unfortunately many agency websites will not display seamlessly, in fact they may not display at all. That’s because they have built their websites in Flash and Apple products are not Flash enabled.

We tested a bunch of agency sites on our new iPad yesterday and the results were alarming. Here in Newcastle 4 of the leading agency websites couldn’t be viewed at all while another 2 had serious formatting issues.

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Popularity: 1%

Marketers must start thinking about apps

The mobile phone apps market is booming and is expected to go into overdrive when Apple’s new iPad device launches next month. For most corporate marketers apps are probably nothing more than a curiosity or a convenience if they have app-friendly devices.

But maybe businesses should start thinking about apps a little more strategically as part of their internet marketing strategy.

Research firm Gartner expects that cellphones will be the most common device used for browsing the web by 2013. They predict the number of browser-equipped phones to exceed 1.83 billion, compared to 1.78 billion old fashioned computers in use within 3 years.

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Popularity: 1%

Apps are another important media touch-point

We recently announced (rather excitedly) that our Inbound Marketing site GetSticky was now available as an iPhone app. A week later I was happy to inform you that MediaHunter had also become available through the iTunes Store as an app.

So what you ask? Good question.

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Popularity: 4%