You know something’s hit the mainstream when Phillip Schofield mentions it on This Morning. But Twitter’s apparent overnight success took the best part of three years.

A prototype of the microblogging and social networking tool was built in two weeks in March 2006 and was launched publicly that August. A programmer called Jack Dorsey came up with the idea when he was writing software that provided realtime status updates for taxi companies. Twitter eventually became a company in May 2007. It’s estimated that over 1.78 million people are now signed up to the service, compared to just 100,000 a year ago. The company last year turned down a $500 million buyout offer from Facebook. more…

It’s estimated that the internet has around 1.5 billion users. It’s an impressive sounding statistic. Until you learn that, in December, the number of connections to mobile devices worldwide reached four billion, a figure that represents 60% of the world’s population.

Similar figures are borne out in the UK. An Ofcom report in November found that there are 26 broadband connections for every 100 people, compared to 121 mobile phones per 100 people. These are significant numbers for anyone who runs a website or blog. As mobile devices become more sophisticated and offer far better web browsing experiences, it becomes increasingly likely that users will be accessing web sites and applications from behind a mobile, not just a desktop or laptop computer.

Apple took the concept of mobile web browsing mainstream when it launched the touch-screen iPhone in the US in June 2007 (a belated UK release followed in November 2007). In the same way that it’s hard to conceive of pre-iPod MP3 players (they were chunky and user unfriendly, as a rule), mobile manufacturers were forced to respond to Apple’s sleek device.
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Microsoft recently announced that a ‘lightweight’ web version of Office, which will include programmes such as Word and Excel, is currently in the works. It’s a significant move by the software giant. In 2007, Office generated around $19 billion for the company, almost a third of its total revenue. But it’s just the latest example of a paradigm shift towards cloud computing.

Software and files are traditionally stored on a user’s own desktop or a local server. Cloud computing, also known as software as a service (SaaS), instead stores resources remotely and delivers them over the internet. Data and services can then be accessed from any computer, irrespective of location or even operating system. All you need is a web connection.

As Microsoft’s announcement demonstrates, the cloud will play an ever-increasing role in how we use computers. Dell even tried more…

When Firefox 3 was launched on 17 June, the free web browser generated 8,002,530 unique downloads in a day. It’s a hugely impressive figure that constituted a new Guinness world record, albeit in a category that didn’t previously exist.

For the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind Firefox, successfully encouraging so many users to download the new browser on day one was a canny way to grab headlines. But the release of Firefox 3 also more…

Recently I saw some 50 or 60 new Yellow Pages directories piled up in the reception area of a smart popular business centre. It would have made a great photo opportunity but before I could organise a camera they had been collected by the recycling truck. The moral of the story obviously, who needs a great big cumbersome book when you can go online and find what and who you want so easily?

Groceries? Who needs that Saturday morning hassle when you can answer the door to the delivery man, fill up the fridge and the larder and then do something really interesting for the day instead?

The UK government is obsessed with data based on legacy thinking, particularly consumer spending on the high street. When do they include commercial data from the internet as standard in the general economic reporting? more…