data

Apple data

“Mac sales rose 28 percent year-over-year during Apple’s last quarter, while PC sales declined 1 percent

There are now 54 million active Mac users around the world.

Mac sales have outpaced the broader PC market for 5 years, 22 straight quarters

Apple has sold 200 million IOS devices to date …

… which accounts for more than 44 percent of the mobile market

25 million iPads were sold in the device’s 14 months of availability

15 billion songs have been sold from the iTunes store …

… making Apple the #1 music retailer in the world

130 million books have been downloaded from iBooks

There are 425,000 apps in the app store

90,000 of them are designed specifically for the iPad

14 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store in less than 3 years

Apple has paid some $2.5 billion to developers building apps for the app store

There are 225 million iTunes Store accounts, all of them with associated credit cards and 1-click purchasing

There are 50 million Game Center users. XBox Live, which has been around for a lot longer, only has about 30 million

IOS users send more than 1 billion Tweets a week

To date, about 100 billion push notifications have been sent to iOS devices

The iPhone 4′s camera is the second most used camera on Flickr”

via Warsystems, via Digital Stats.

Posted on by mklang

The beauty of open data

Some news is tweetworthy and some is bloggable but the Live train map for the London Underground is definitely both!

Its a map that shows all trains on the London Underground network in approximately real time. How does it work

Live departure data is fetched from the TfL API, and then it does a bit of maths and magic. It’s surprisingly okay given this was done in only a few hours at Science Hackday and the many naming/location issues encountered, some unresolved. A small number of stations are misplaced or missing; occasional trains behave oddly; some H&C stations are missing in the TfL feed.

This is a beautiful example of the strength of open data. Its created by Matthew Somerville (with helpful hinderances from Frances Berriman and James Aylett). The Source code is available.

This is a static shot. But look at it live. Its a work of art… hypnotic!

Posted on by mklang

Open Flight data

An interesting site collecting and displaying flight plans is up and runningm the site OpenFlights is a site for “flight logging, mapping, stats and sharing”. They have also decided to release their data under the Open Database License (ODbL):

One of OpenFlights‘ most popular features is our dynamic airport and airline route mapping, and today, we’re proud to release the underlying data in an easy-to-use form, up to date for October 2009. Behold 56749 routes between 3310 airports on 669 airlines spanning the globe.

The data can be downloaded from our Data page and is free to use under the Open Database License.

Posted on by mklang

Growth of license use

On his blog Rasmus has a very cool motto that warns the reader not to be too impressed with large numbers:

Multiplication can produce powerful numbers.

But it is a difficult motto to follow since we live in a world where measurability is all important. We want to know, we need to know what is bigger, smaller, cheaper, richer, higher, etc so we measure stuff – constantly. To measure also implies that we compare. Are we getting bigger, better or not?

So every now and then someone asks the inevitable question: but how big is Creative Commons? and I am reminded of the motto above. One of the problems is that we need to measure, we want to measure and yet large numbers lose their meaning and become vague: in Swedish their is a wonderful word for this vagueness ogreppbar which translates as ungripable.

Anyway for those of use that still want to see the numbers Creative Commons has a page on Metrics which attempts to present the data. For example as the first bar chart shows there are now clearly over 130 million copyrighted objects licensed under Creative Commons licenses (personally I think this figure is a bit low…)

The next natural question (for me) is who are these people? That is tricky. But we may gain som insights by looking at the jurisdictional spread of Creative Commons licenses. Keep in mind that their is no limitation for a Frenchman to choose to use a Swedish license while residing in Thailand. Also – the web doesn’t really care about physical geography.

Lager image here

The numbers are fun and interesting. They are indicative of something but remember “Multiplication can produce powerful numbers” you cannot find absolut truth in numbers.

Posted on by mklang

Data retention is pointless violation

Not only is data retention a potential violation of civil liberties but it now may turn out to be pointless according to the Max-Planck-Institute for Criminal Law. (via Gisle Hannemyr)

A report (PDF) from Max-Planck-Instituts für Strafrecht about data rentention was recently featured in Heise.de and the online edition of Der Spiegel. Below is a summary in English.

According to the study, the logging and retention of certain telecomminications traffic data for six months that was made compulsory in Germany in January 2008 will only have mariginal effect and traffic data will be of use in as little as 0.002 % of the total number of criminal cases. This is within the marigin of statistical error and the annual variation in criminal cases solved is one hundered times greater.

This finding corresponds to estimates from Bundeskriminalamts, who in a separate study from the summer of 2007 says that data retention will incease the percentage of solved crimes “from 55 percent today to, at most, 55.006 percent.”

The Max-Planck study also shows an exponential increase in use of traffic data by law enforcement, from 5000 queries in year 2000 to about 41000 in the year 2005 (see summary and figures on pages 77, 90, and 402 in the report). In Bayern traffic data queries increased by 60 percent from 2006 to 2007 according to this report.

With respect to types of crime, 50 percent of IP-address queries concerns fraud and 25 percent concerns copyright violations. The argument that traffic data are needed to prevent terrorism is not supported by the statistics.

The study also warns about dangers from abuse due to unauthorized access to the stored data by inside or outside agents at well as the potential to use such data for “strategic surveillance” of large segments of the population.

Posted on by mklang