News, Figures

According to the survey conducted by Maximiles Surveys among 1,000 youngsters in Britain, young Britons are increasingly turning to the internet to look for help with personal problems instead of seeking advice from their parents or friends.

90% of youngsters aged under 25 responded for national free helpline Get Connected that they had used the Web targeting to seek for help in solving a personal problem.

As Microsoft started offering European users a choice in browser with a so-called ballot screen Opera Software has recorded a sharp increase in downloads of its popular Internet browser (10.5).

The company reports that over half of the European downloads of Opera’s latest browser come directly from that Choice Screen on an average basis.

Thus, the downloads have more than doubled from the normal figures. Earlier this month Opera boasted a triple increase in downloads.

According to the statistics reported by Getjar, the self-described "world's largest cross platform app store," with just under 850 million apps downloaded to date, the earnings of the mobile apps market will reach $17.5bn by 2012.

According to the new study, young boys who receive their first video game system don't progress as quickly in school as boys who don't have such gaming devices. That means, parents who worry about their kids addicted to video games might be right.

The study was published last week in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The average reading and writing scores of the young gamers don't go down, but they don't improve either as study found.

According to the report from an analytics company Flurry, Google’s sales of its Nexus One smartphone have significantly straggled the pace of Apple’s iPhone and Motorola’s Droid sales.

Google launched the Nexus One phone, which it developed with handset manufacturer HTC Corp of Taiwan, in January, marking the first time the search engineer had sold a hardware device directly to consumers.

According to a recent study by market research firm Crowd Science users of BlackBerries are going to leave their handsets for iPhone or Google Android devices when their contracts come to the end.

40% of BlackBerry users say they will change their mobile phones for iPhone with 32% willing to trade in their BlackBerry for a Google Nexus One.

Sounds surprisingly but owing to the global financial crisis employees became more loyal. Thus, crisis has made more than 40% employees feel totally committed to their employer, according to a global survey from Kelly Services conducted in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.

The annual Kelly Global Workforce Index polled about 134,000 people in 29 countries from October to January.

A new survey conducted for the BBC World Service revealed that 4 out of 5 adults think access to the Internet is a fundamental right. The survey polled 27,000 adults in 26 countries and showed 78% of users believed the Web gave them greater freedom and 9 in 10 said it was a good place to learn.

The poll further shows that users in the United States are above the average in believing the Internet is for greater freedom and they are also more confident than most in expressing their opinions online.

According to the latest study by Kansas communication-studies prof Jeffrey Hall and his colleagues men are most likely to tell lies when trying to find love online.

The study shows that women are more inclined to tell lies when talking about their weight. On the other hand, men are most likely to lie about how rich they are, what kind of relationship they want to have with you, their past romantic history, their age or their personal interests.

The study polled over 5,000 participants in an unnamed "national Internet matchmaking service".

Online gaming time has been increasing considerably as proves data from The NPD Group. Thus, the average amount of hours spent each week on online gaming has climbed by 10% since the last year, while an average of 20% of all games purchased were digitally downloaded up from 19% in 2009.

The average number of hours spent per week on online gaming has increased from 7.3% hours per week in 2009 to 8 hours per week in 2010. This means that, despite the decline in overall online game play, those who are playing, are spending more time playing than they did last year.

As American Bankruptcy Institute data showed, despite good signs of economic recovery consumer bankruptcy filings surged this month compared to a year earlier figures.

Thus the data reflected 14% surge on an year basis. As for the monthly changes, 9% increase from January is represented by 111,693 cases filed last month.

And that financial distress is driving more Americans to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which allows a court to discharge most unsecured consumer debt, including credit card bills.

According to a new report February showed positive but slow increase in US manufacturing. Meantime, consumer spending also grew at a modest pace. National factory activity was worse in February as compared with the previous month.

"The message is continuing progress for the economy, if not as fast as hoped," said Pierre Ellis, a senior economist at Decision Economics in New York.

A new report from GetResponse shows that many small and medium-sized business (SMB) marketers are increasingly staking on video email, social media and personalization.

The report reveals that more than 80% of the polled plan to use video emails in 2010. Meantime, over 90% of SMB marketers who use video emails report it delivers significant conversion rates.

According to the latest statistics provided by Opera the search engine market in the mobile sector is also dominated by Google as it is the case in the PC sector as Google has a significant lead over its rivals while its competitors hardly can be confronted to it.

Opera State of the Mobile Report shows that Google's search portal accounts "for more than 9% of all page views on the mobile Web." Meantime Yahoo only shares 4.3% of page views with Microsoft having miserable 0.03%.

According to a new survey conducted by comScore for the Newspaper Association of America many people consider newspaper websites as the most valuable sources of credible and trustworthy local information.

The survey polled 3,050 respondents 57% of whom rated local newspaper websites as the top online source for local information. That figure is even higher for upper income households (63%) and for the college educated (60%).