Technology and the Internet By the Numbers

FindLaw columnist Eric Sinrod writes regularly in this section on legal developments surrounding technology and the internet.

Back in the 1990s, there was talk of the coming "information superhighway." Now we are traveling at warp speed on that highway. Take a look at some of these jaw-dropping stats:

Facebook

• Facebook now boasts more than 800 million active users, with 350 million gaining access from mobile devices.
• Roughly 70 percent of Facebook users are located outside of the United States.
• Every month about 30 billion content links are shared on Facebook.
• Remarkably, Facebook users install 20 million apps every day.
• Almost half of 18-34 year-old users check Facebook when they wake up, with more than a quarter of users doing so before they even leave the bed.

YouTube

• More than 3 billion videos are viewed daily on YouTube.
• Eight years of content are uploaded on YouTube daily, with more than 48 hours of video uploaded every minute.
• The video content uploaded onto YouTube in just one month exceeds the content created by the three major US networks in 60 years.
• Almost three-fourths of YouTube traffic comes from outside of the United States.
• By 2014, 90 percent of Internet traffic will be video.

Consumer Products

Ten million iPads were purchased in 2010.

Seven million Kindle (relaunch) were purchased in 2010.

Eight million Kinect for Xbox 360 were purchased in 2010.

Business Social Networking

In 2009, only 42 percent of major companies used wikis, blogs or social networking to communicate with customers, suppliers and partners.

Now, 77 percent of such companies employ these tools.

Connectivity

There were 4.6 billion cell phones in use as of 2010.

As many as 48 million consumers have mobile phones but no electricity.

Sixty billion instant messages are sent every day, and 40 percent are business-related.

Skype boasted 29 million simultaneous online users in early 2011.

These eye-popping statistics were provided by Ken Trombetta, Cisco Area Vice-President.

There is little doubt that we are on moving forward on the information superhighway. The journey so far has been fascinating, and surely the highway will take us to future destinations that we cannot even imagine presently.

Eric Sinrod is a partner in the San Francisco office of Duane Morris LLP (http://www.duanemorris.com) where he focuses on litigation matters of various types, including information technology and intellectual property disputes. His Web site is http://www.sinrodlaw.com and he can be reached at ejsinrod@duanemorris.com. To receive a weekly email link to Mr. Sinrod's columns, please send an email to him with Subscribe in the Subject line. This column is prepared and published for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice. The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author's law firm or its individual partners.