Interesting slideshare presentation from cisco that covers what it belives the ten technology trends of the next ten years will be.

A recent study by google which looked into the effect of the internet on conversations involving a mention of a brand, showed how important online channels, particularly search, are to inspiring and informing these conversations.

Please watch our short video to find out more.  The full study is also available for download

Internet advertising revenues hit $7.3 billion in the first quarter, setting a new record, the Interactive Advertising Bureau reports.The figure is a 23% jump over Q1 2010, which had been a first-quarter record as well.

In April, the IAB reported that online revenues for 2010 were $26 billion, a 15% jump over 2009, which had seen a 3.4% drop during the recession. The big category movers for the year included sponsorships, which grew 88%. Classified advertising also rose 15% over 2009. The lion’s share of digital advertising revenues continue to come from search, which accounted for 46% of such revenues last year. first published via Mashable.com

UK internet users have embraced the web and its possibilities like never before, although some demographic groups remain offline. eMarketer estimates more than 44 million people are online in the UK in 2010 and nearly 70% of all households have broadband access.

“The cultural divide between web users and non-users is widening,” said Karin von Abrams, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report “UK Internet Users and Usage: Top 2010 Trends.” “For the majority of marketers, though, this is not a problem; their audiences are online in ever-greater numbers. Moreover, internet users of all ages are increasingly adept at multitasking, connecting with brands on multiple platforms and responding directly to campaigns, promotions and other offers online or via mobile.”  Via www.emarketer.com

Interesting artcile from the Economist about how the mobile internet will transform the BRICI countries. It talks about a user Ranvir Singh who suggests that buying a mobile phone was the wisest $20 he’d ever spent.

Mr Singh, a farmer in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, used to make appointments in person, in advance, to deliver fresh buffalo milk to his 40-odd neighbours. Now his customers just call when they want some.Mr Singh’s income has risen by 25%, to 7,000 rupees ($149) a month. And he hears rumours of an even more bountiful technology. He has heard that “something on mobile phones” can tell him the current market price of his wheat. Mr Singh does not know that that “something” is the internet, because, like most Indians, he has never seen or used it. But the phone in his calloused hand hints at how hundreds of millions of people in emerging markets—perhaps even billions—will one day log on.

Only 81m Indians (7% of the population) regularly use the internet. But brutal price wars mean that 507m own mobile phones. Calls cost as little as $0.006 per minute. Indian operators such as Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications sign up 20m new subscribers a month.

In other developing countries, too, there are many more mobile phones than internet connections. In Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia (the so-called BRICI countries), there are 610m regular internet users but a staggering 1.8 billion mobile-phone connections, according to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In a report called “The Internet’s New Billion”, BCG predicts that by 2015 there will be 1.2 billion internet users in these countries—dwarfing the total in America and Japan (see chart).

These new internet users will mostly log on via their mobile phones. This tends to be cheaper and easier than any other option. In Brazil, fixed-line broadband is often prohibitively expensive; in Russia, where it can be much cheaper, it is often unavailable. In India, where infrastructure is always a headache, it is hard to get a good basic landline, let alone broadband.

Poor people seldom have personal computers. In the BRICI countries, whose combined population is more than 3 billion, there are only 440m PCs. Many people use internet cafés, but these are inaccessible to rural folk. A connection in your pocket is far more convenient.

Hordes of Indians will start using their mobiles to access the internet early next year when third-generation (3G) services, which allow subscribers to access the web, arrive. Kunal Bajaj, India director of Analysys Mason, a British consultancy, expects the take-up to be as fast—and as revolutionary—as it has been for mobile phones. “The telecoms companies have seen what happens when they drop prices. They’ve already tasted blood. The price wars will be just as aggressive,” he says.

The stakes are high. In developing countries, every 10 percentage-point increase in mobile-phone penetration yields an extra 0.81 percentage points of annual economic growth, according to a 2009 World Bank study. The mobile internet could be even more powerful. The unemployed will search for jobs online. Farmers in remote areas will find customised advice on crop planting.

The drawback of the internet is that you have to be literate to use it. That is a huge problem in India, where the literacy rate is only 60% (in China and Russia, it is over 90%). Mr Singh, the farmer, cannot read, so he cannot send text messages. He says he often needs help dialling numbers correctly, too.

Great visual about the history of the internet that shows the progressive changes that  have happened to the technology that now shapes the majority of our lives and how we spend most of our time.

Individual stats like Facebook passing the 400 million user mark, Twitter hitting 50 million tweets per day, and YouTube viewers watching 1 billion videos per day are impressive on their own, but what if we looked at Internet-related stats collectively? Jesse Thomas did just that in his video State of the Internet.

The video — created and animated by Thomas with data from multiple sources — highlights some remarkable figures and visually depicts the Internet as we know it today. It’s a must-watch video for anyone trying to wrap their minds around just how immersed web technologies have become in our everyday lives.

(Via Mashable.)

Here’s a short video that show’s that you may not be so special, as there as so many  other things going on in the world that you didn’t know

Launched just last week, Google’s Internet Bus aims to educate Indian people about what the Internet is and how it can benefit them in multiple ways.

The moment when the Internet passed 1 million users is veiled in history.  The truth is, whenever it happened, no one was counting—or even had the means to do so. But according to the “Internet Growth Survey” from MIT, there were 1 million hosts (defined as either a computer or IP address) in 1995.  Read full article here.