Brad Stone, "Going All In for Online Poker", Newsweek, August 15, 2005, pp. 40-1

"...[P]oker is now the third most-watched televised sport on cable TV - behind only car racing and football...Every day, 1.8 million players - more than 70 percent from the United States - throw their chips into the virtual pots of the Internet...online-poker revenues have grown from $82.7 million in 2001 to $2.4 billion today...Last month at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, nearly two thirds of the 5,619 players qualified in online competitions...[T]here are 80,000 players on PartyPoker.com every night."

Johnnie L. Roberts, "Keepin' It On the Download", Newsweek, August 1, 2005, p. 42

"As of December, more than half of U.S. homes were wired with the high-speed pipeline to the Net. Online audiences are surging (5 million-strong for AOL's Live 8 concert coverage)."

Steven Levy, "Television Reloaded", Newsweek, May 30, 2005, p. 55

"...[H]ouseholds that receive about 60 channels usually watch only 15.  Households whose systems can receive 96 channels (around the national average) actually watch ... 15."

Brad Stone, "New Ways to Drive Home the Message", Newsweek, May 30, 2005, p. 56

"70 percent of DVR owners skip the ads. Meanwhile, the average wired consumer now spends more time fiddling with the Internet at work and home than watching TV."

Linda Stern, "Corporate Spim Is No LOL Matter", Newsweek, May 9, 2005, p. 63

"Spim...the instant-messaging version of spam...chimed in a remarkable 1.2 billion times last year."

Nadine Joseph and Brad Stone, "Diagnosis: Internet Phobia", Newsweek, April 25, 2005, p. 74

"...[F]ewer than 31 percent of seniors older than 65 have ventured online, compared with more than two thirds of the younger baby boomers, 50 to 64. Of seniors older than 65 whose annual household income is less than $20,000 a year...an even slighter 15 percent have gone online."

Brad Stone, "Hi-Tech's New Day", Newsweek, April 11, 2005, p. 62

"75 percent of Americans use the Internet and spend an average three hours a day online."

James Surowiecki, "Technology and Happiness", Technology Review, January 2005, pp. 72-6

"In the United States...gross domestic product per capita tripled from 1950 to 2000. Life expectancy soared...By most standards, then, you'd have to say that Americans are better off now than they were in the middle of the last century. Oddly, though if you ask Amercians how happy they are, you find that they're no happier than they were in 1946 (which is when formal surveys of happiness started). In fact, the percentage of people who say they're "very happy" has fallen slightly since the early 1970s - even though the income of people born in 1940 has increased, on average, 116 percent over the course of their working lives...Between 1960 and the late 1980s, Japan's economy was utterly transformed...yet by the late 1980s, the Japanese said they were no happier than they had been in 1960...Since the 1950s, reports of major depression have increased tenfold...People are more anxious, trust government and business less, and get divorced more often."
"Richard Easterlin...in 1974 showed that when it came to developed countries, there was no real correlation between a nation's income level and its citizens' happiness...though poverty was strongly correlated with misery, once a country was solidly middle-class, getting wealthier didn't seem to make its citizens any happier."
"...[P]eople adapt very quickly to good news. Take lottery winners. One famous study showed that although winners were very, very happy when they won, their euphoria quickly evaporated, and after a while their moods and sense of well=being were indistinguishable from what they had been before the victory. Psychologists even have a word for the phenomenon: 'hedonic adaptation.'"
"...[T]he workplace is central to people's sense of well-being and is more important to them than anything, including family. Studies show that nothing - not even divorce - makes people more unhappy than unemployment."

Steven Levy, "Sony Gets Personal", Newsweek, October 25, 2004, pp. 80-2

"[The PSP draws] thousands of game polygons with PS2 speed...[and has] built-in Wi-Fi...It will also play films and songs. It will display your photos and home movies. It could stream television shows from your home network. You could even use it as a voice-over-Internet phone...'Our target user was not only kids but adults, people who will use music video and other entertainment,' says [industrial designer Shinichi] Ogasawara...[The PSP uses] the same wide aspect ratio as a high-end HDTV unit...[and uses] Universal Media Disks (UMD), a brand-new CD/DVD-like disk not much bigger than a silver dollar but dense enough to hold a whole movie...the knoblike analog control on the PS2 is, on the PSP, a raised gutta-percha button that tilts in the direction you want to move...[Sony] expects tens of millions of customers...[Features include] powerful, energy-saving chips, a new kind of DVD format to hold software and movies, and a great, low-cost screen that would handle the intricate graphics of PS2-style games."

Steven Levy, "No Net? We'd Rather Go Without Food.", Newsweek, October 11, 2004, p. 14

"...[T]hree quarters of all Americans have access to the Internet, spending an average of twelve-and-a-half hours a week online...for those between 12 and 18, usage approaches 100 percent. Though e-mail is still the No. 1 activity, the study concludes that the Net has profoundly changed the way we spend money, keep in touch with our friends and get information (Internet users use the medium as their No. 1 source of news, despite worries about credibility)."

Robert J. Samuelson, "A Cell Phone? Never for Me.", Newsweek, August 23, 2004, p. 63

"Among those 60 to 69 [years old], cell phone ownership (60 percent) is almost as high as among 18- to 24-year-olds (66 percent), though lower than among 30- to 49-year-olds (76 percent), according to a recent study from the Pew Research Center.  Even among those 80 and older, ownership is 32 percent...In 2003 cell-phone conversations totaled 830 billion minutes, reckons CTIA [Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association].  That's about 75 times greater than in 1991 and almost 50 hours for every man, woman and child in America...A recent poll, sponsored by the Lemelson-M.I.T. program, asked which invention people hated most but couldn't live without. Cell phones won, chosen by 30 percent of respondents."

Malcolm Jones, "Waiting for the Movie", Newsweek, July 19, 2004, p. 58

"Using Census Bureau data, the NEA [National Endowment of the Arts] found that the number of Americans who say they've even opened a single book of fiction...has declined by 10 percent, from 56.9 percent in 1982 to 46.7 percent today...Two decades ago the number of new books published annually hoevered around 60,000, then climbed more than 100,000 in the early '90s. Last year saw a record 164,609 new titles."

Aaron Marcus, "Insights on Outsourcing", Interactions, July/August 2004, p. 13

"In fact, even though [India] has only 3.7 million personal computers, it has the largest number of software professionals outside of California in the world and exports software worth about $8 billion in 2003-4, much of it to the U.S."

Rich Ling, Ph.D., Newsweek, June 21, 2004, p. 15

"A recent survey I have done...shows that 100 percent of a nationally representative sample of 16- to 19-year-old Norwegians had a mobile telephone. The average teen sends about nine text messages per day...all of this has happened in the last decade."

Brian Braiker, "So Happy Together", Newsweek, May 10, 2004, p. 12

"Only 30 percent of cell owners send text messages - but that's double what the number was two years ago."

Steven Levy, "All Eyes on Google", Newsweek, March 29, 2004, p. 52

"...[A]nnual search revenues are just under $4 billion today (about a billion of that is Google's)."

Linda Stern, "Here Come the Kiosks", Newsweek, March 22, 2004, p. E4

"After a few years of so-so growth, worldwide kiosk sales hit $463.7 million last year, up more than 21 percent from 2002. The number of U.S. kiosks, now at 195,000, is expected to double in two years."

Gloriana St. Clair, "Killing discipline knowledge and its libraries", FOCUS, Winter 2004, p. 3

"Overall since 1986, the price of scholarly scientific, technical and medical (STM) journals has increased over 215 percent while the Consumer Price Index has increased only 62 percent. Economists have expected this marketplace to correct itself, but several factors contribute to the continuing dysfunction...Brian Hawkins now estimates that knowledge doubles every two to three years. Large STM publishers are currently targeting for takeover of several other fields...Through the processes of the promotion and tenure system, universities effectively outsource their decisions about which faculty to reward and retain to the different disciplines."

Brad Stone, "Cutting the (Phone) Cord", Newsweek, December 8, 2003, p. 103

"...4 percent of Americans say their wireless phone is their only phone, up from 3 percent last year. And that percentage was three times higher for adults under the age of 24."

Brad Stone, "Soaking in Spam", Newsweek, November 24, 2003, p. 66

"Spam is now approaching 60 percent of all e-mail, according to the research firm Gartner Group. Ferris Research says spam puts a $9 billion annual drag on productivity."

Jim Guest, "Web-Site Roulette", Consumer Reports, November 2003, p. 5

"In July, WebWatch published results of a study on consumers' understanding of - and their reactions to - how search engines work. WebWatch had found in an earlier study that 60 percent of Internet-savvy consumers didn't know that companies can, and do, pay to be listed ahead of their competitors in searches. The new study found that most respondents knew very little about how search engines compare rank, and list results. When told the facts, they felt, at best, misled."

Rana Foroohar, "Finding a Safe Bet," Newsweek, October 20, 2003, p. E24

"European carriers are counting on such whiz-bang data services [streaming football games, sending movie clips, downloading songs, snapping pictures] to rack up an extra $90.2 billion in revenue in the next six years...But analysts say they may be overestimating those figures by at least half...Last year the [gambling] service [introduced by the Hong Kong Jockey Club in 2001] generated an additional $5.2 million per year for the four mobile carriers that support it...[it] has cultivated a whole new group of gamblers - women - who are drawn to the anonymity of the mobile phone...Asian carriers have embraced their role as a delivery-and-payment service, leaving the hard work of content creation to others. The classic example is Japan's NTT DoCoMo, which makes it easy for outside content developers to use its system, and takes a 9 percent cut of whatever they earn...One of NTT DoCoMo's most successful data services was a Hello Kitty cartoon that users could sign up to have delivered to their phone, once a day, for about 70 cents a month. The first month, 700,000 users signed up."

Anna Kuchment, "Get a Move On", Newsweek, October 20, 2003, p. E28

"Cities from Berlin to Los Angeles are pinning their hopes on so-called advanced traveler-information systems...they rely on thousands of sensors embedded in the asphalt, attached to street sings and hidden in traffic lights that record data on traffic flows and density and deliver it, wirelessly, to computer servers. Computers then combined this information with police dispatches on accidents or emergencies and deliver it to users who can access it on PDAs, mobile phones and the Internet. In Japan, 10 percent of drivers rely on such systems, and that number is growing rapidly."

Sean Smith and Devin Gordon, "Hollywood Family Feud", Newsweek, October 20, 2003, p. 56

"But [Jack] Valenti [the head of the Motion Picture Association of America] and the seven [major] studios have been watching piracy increase, estimating worldwide annual losses of $3 billion."

Brad Stone, "Is That a Radio In Your Cereal?", Newsweek, September 29, 2003, p. E34

"...[T]he introduction of the bar code [was] more than 30 years ago...today bar codes save the food industry $17 billion per year, or 50 times the savings initially forecast...Recently the price of the chips has fallen, sending the cost of RFID [radio-frequency identification] tags close to 10 cents apiece...60 billion items move through Wal-Mart each year."

Daniel McGinn, "Small-Screen Dilemma", Newsweek, September 29, 2003, p. E37

"Roughly 40 percent of households have caller ID, up from 12.6 percent in 1998."

Johnnie L. Roberts, "Out of Tune," Newsweek, September 22, 2003, p. 44

"The advent of the CD in 1982 fueled global sales, exceeding $40 billion by the mid-1990s. But since then, U.S. revenue alone has shrunk by a third. And the rise of file sharing, kicked off by Napster in 19999, is largely to blame...Apple has still generated 10 million downloads at 99 cents a song...Technology is creating new markets for music as well. The music giants are banking on an exploding U.S. market for dialing up music on cell phones - in effect, you would use your phone as a portable player. It's already a multibillion-dollar business in Europe and Japan...Industry forecasters have projected that the business will soar in the United States to $790 million in 2008 from $94 million this year...Since this spring, fans have purchased 360,000 ringtones by Warner Music star Sean Paul at about $2 each.

"E-mail Spam: How to Stop it from Stalking You", Consumer Reports, August 2003, p. 12

"Between February and April alone, according to America Online (AOL), the maximum number of messages that spammers had lobbed toward the service's 35 million customers in a single day tripled, to 2.4 billion. A typical day's volume averages about 1.5 billion...The service averages 7 million complaints daily about spam that reaches customers...Roughly one-sixth of the customers the [largest cell phone carrier in Japan] surveyed said they receive one to five cell phone spams daily...Spammers can broadcast a million messages for as little as $500. If even a few recipients buy what's advertised, the campaign most likely pays...When the Federal Trade Commission recently examined spam forwarded by consumers, it found that nearly two-thirds contained false information. Last year, the FTC found that only about one-third of requests to be taken off spammers' lists were honored."

Scott Granneman, "RFID Chips are Here," SecurityFocus.com, June 26, 2003

"RFID tags are essentially microchips, the tinier the better. Some are only 1/3 of a millimeter across. These chips act as transponders (transmitters/responders), always listening for a radio signal sent by transceivers, or RFID readers. When a transponder receives a certain radio query, it responds by transmitting its unique ID code, perhaps a 128-bit number, back to the transceiver. Most RFID tags don't have batteries (How could they? They're 1/3 of a millimeter!). Instead, they are powered by the radio signal that wakes them up and requests an answer...RFID chips cost up to 50 cents, but prices are dropping. Once they get to 5 cents each, it will be cost-efficient to put RFID tags in almost anything that costs more than a dollar...Delta is testing RFID on some flights, tagging 40,000 customer bags in order to reduce baggage loss and make it easier to route bags if customers change their flight plans.  Three seaport operators - who account for 70% of the world's port operations - agreed to deploy RFID tags to track the 17,000 containers that arrive each day at US ports. Currently, less than 2% are inspected. RFID tags will be used to track the containers and the employees handling them.  The United States Department of Defense is moving into RFID in order to trace military supply shipments. During the first Gulf War, the DOD made mistakes in its supply allocation. To streamline operations, the U.S. military has placed RFID tags on 270,000 cargo containers and tracks those shipments throughout 40 countries.... Applied Digital Solutions has designed an RFID tag - called the VeriChip - for people. Only 11 mm long, it is designed to go under the skin, where it can be read from four feet away. They sell it as a great way to keep track of children, Alzheimer's patients in danger of wandering, and anyone else with a medical disability."

James Stevenson, "Cut-and-paste oops costly for TransAlta," Canadian Press, June 4, 2003

TransAlta Corp said yesterday a "clerical error" was a costly one for the power producer -- $24 million US to be exact. The Calgary-based company said a spreadsheet goof by an employee last April caused the company to pay higher than intended rates to ship power in New York. CEO Steve Snyder told a conference call yesterday a "cut-and-paste" foul-up in an Excel spreadsheet on a bid to New York's power grid operator led TransAlta to secure 15 times the capacity of power lines at 10 times the price. The costly human error couldn't be reversed by the grid operator and while TransAlta has since tried to recoup the mammoth losses, it was left with a $24-million US lesson.

"The Exterminator," Lycos.com, May 26, 2003

"Computer bugs have been around since malfunctions in a 1945 [Harvard] Mark II were blamed (facetiously) on a moth trapped in a relay. Nowadays the term refers to programming flaws--commands that don't accomplish the desired result because computers have a habit of following the letter rather than the spirit of the instructions handed to them. The cost to customers of these flaws is necessarily a nebulous figure, but for what it's worth a National Institute of Standards & Technology report puts it at $38 billion a year. Evaluating only the cost of intrusions by hackers, who exploit flaws in computer security, Gartner Group comes up with $5.4 billion a year..."Software quality is about removing or preventing defects. The sooner any defect is caught, the better--ideally, they are simply never coded," says Gates. Building clean code is getting more daunting, especially for Microsoft . The Windows operating system has 50 million lines of code (a line averages 60 characters) and grows 20% with every release. It's put together by 7,200 people, comes in 34 languages and has to support 190,000 devices--different models of digital cameras, printers, handhelds and so on."

Gregory D. Abowd, "Smart Homes or Homes that Smart?", Beyond the Desktop, March/April 2003

"Jupiter Research predicts that 28 million US households will have a home network by 2006...paralleling this increase in the number of interconnected data-centric devices is a corresponding increase in the complexity of the home audio/visual 'network.'"

Robert J. Samuelson, "Show Kids the Money?", Newsweek, February 10, 2003, p. 61

"In 2002 all 12- to 19-year olds spent $172 billion...an average of $92 a week for 16- to 17-year olds.  An estimated 47 percent of these teens have cell phones...A century ago many children - certainly those over 11 or 12 - had jobs.  On farms, many worked as much as adults...By 1890, 17 states imposed age limits on hiring; three were as low as 10 and none higher than 14...about 40 percent of 16- to 19-year olds are in the labor force...In 1920, 16 percent of 17-year- olds were high-school graduates; by 1960 that was 63 percent."

Janet Kornblum, "Spam Continues to Increase," Newsfactor.com, January 13, 2002

"The number of spam messages sent increased nearly 300 percent from 2001 to 2002 -- from 14,078,511 to 55,683,103, according to e-mail filtering company Brightmail. If you think you're getting more spam than ever, you're right. Spam has dramatically increased in the past year. And next year will be even worse. One new report says that by July, the volume of spam sent to business e-mail addresses will exceed the amount of regular e-mail."

N'Gai Croal, "He's Got Games", Newsweek, Dec. 29, 2003 / Jan. 5, 2004, p. 101

"Over the past 19 years...Electronic Arts has become the world's largest independent videogame publisher, with 4,400 employees worldwide generating some $2.5 billion in annual revenue...Madden NFL Football (30 million units sold), The Sims (28 million) and Harry Potter (20 million)..."

N'Gai Croal, "Sims Family Values," Newsweek, November 25, 2002, pp. 48-9

"Last year $6.35 billion worth of video- and computer games were sold at retail.  An additional $196 million came from subscription fees to online games, a number that is expected to grow to $1.4 billion over the next five years...for many people it's more fun to outwit, outplay and outlast a fellow human being than a computer....The Sims, which was released in 2000, is already the best-selling PC game ever...Electronic Arts has racked up worldwide sales of nearly 20 million for The Sims and its expansion packs...45 percent of the players are women, and more than a third are over 24...online games are succeeding not just as an outlet for competition but as a forum for social interaction...the most widely played online action game is the first-person shooter Counter-Strike...Every night, without fail, there are 100,000 or more people online playing Counter-Strike."

"Put Yourself Here," Newsweek, November 25, 2002, p. 60

"70 percent of American travelers are doing travel research online, and more than half of them book reservations on the Web, too, spending $22.6 billion in 2002."

Keith Naughton and Joan Raymond, "Click Here for a New Sedan! (Not Yet, Alas)," Newsweek, November 11, 2002, p. E12

"Those who actually buy a car online...account for a scant 4.1 percent of the U.S. auto market...Nearly two thirds of car buyers now begin shopping with the click of a mouse, up from just one quarter four years ago...The average Internet car shoppers visit seven sites and cruise the Web for two months before buying.  They tend to be younger, more affluent and more distrustful of dealers."

John Horn, "Point and Bet," Newsweek, October 28, 2002, p. 50

"In a typical month, surfers plunk down $640,000.  Because players make more bets per hour than they would at Caesar's Palace, they literally lose money to the house twice as fast...Every week about 2 million players ante up at more than 1,800 virtual casinos...$3.5 billion will be lost on Internet bets this year, about three times the revenue of porn sites."

Alan Schwarz, "Take Me Out to the Web Site!", Newsweek, October 14, 2002, pp. 38F-38H

"High-speed broadband connections, which Jupiter [a research organization] estimates are in 15.5 million homes now...afford viewers three-by-three inch screens...MLB [Major League Baseball] this season Webcast 10 pennant-race games live in their entirety, the first of which attracted 30,000 viewers in 64 countries...So far, radio has turned out to be MLB.com's big seller - 750,000 subscribers, compared with video's 27,000...Real[Networks] currently has 750,000 customers paying $9.95 a month for access..."

Brad Stone, "Is the Boss Watching?", Newsweek, September 30, 2002, p. 38L

"...workers spend an average of 8.3 hours a week - more than one entire workday - peeking at non-work-related sites.  One of every four employees reports 'feeling addicted to, or compulsive in' using the Internet.  The numbers suggest nearly twice the non-work-related usage as last year's survey, a trend that seems to be jolting the country's corporate elite.  More than half of the Fortune 500, as well as roughly 17,000 companies, now run EIM [employee Internet management] software, including Cisco, McDonalds and Pepsi."

Steven Levy, "Time for an Instant Fix," Newsweek, September 30, 2002, p. 38X

"AOL has about 150 million registered users...more than 2 billion instant messages (IMs) [are] sent daily...with about 12 million office users a month."

N'Gai Croal, "The War of the Super-Handhelds", Newsweek, September 29, 2003, p. E30

"Even as [Nintendo's] share of the U.S. console market fell from 90 percent to 15 percent over the past decade...Nintendo has sold 150 million units worldwide since their 1989 debut, leaving it sitting atop what research firm DFC Intelligence calculates is a $2.7 billion portable-gaming market."

Steven Levy, "Living in the Blog-osphere," Newsweek, August 26, 2002, p. 42

"...a new blogger [joins] the crowd every 40 seconds...Most estimates peg the current number at a half a million Weblogs."

Steven Levy, "Can 8.0 Save the Chat Room?", Newsweek, August 19, 2002, p. 45

"...with 34 million members the service [AOL] has a unique critical mass."  Microsoft has 7 million users.

Brad Stone and Jennifer Lin, "Spamming the World," Newsweek, August 19, 2002, p. 43

"Spam...accounts for 30 to 50 percent of all e-mail traffic on the Net...when [one bulk e-mailer] started spamming in 1999, she could send out 100,000 e-mails and get 25 responses.  Today, she has to send out a million messages to get the same response (a .0025 percent hit rate)."

Jerry Adler, "The EBay Way of Life," Newsweek, June 17, 2002, pp. 50-57

"Each day, about half a million items are sold on eBay...nearly 50 million people around the world [use eBay]."

"EBay users exchanged some $9.3 billion worth of goods in 18,000 categories [in nearly 170 million transactions last year]...Admittedly, this is only about 4 percent of Wal-Mart's $220 billion in sales last year - but Wal-Mart deploys a worldwide network of warehouses, more than 3,000 stores and 1.3 million workers.  EBay got by with no stores, fewer than 3,000 employees and without taking legal or physical possession of [anything]...revenues from listing fees and advertising last year amounted to $749 million."

11 million items are for sale at any given time.  EBay has 8.2 million unique visitors worldwide.  EBay receives 200,000 queries [not all are fraud-related] per month; 70 percent are answered within 24 hours.  One one-hundredth of 1 percent of all eBay listings result in a confirmed case of fraud...an estimated 900 fraudulent items on the site each day.

"Some psychologists think eBay's particular format lends itself to an obsessiveness that borders on the unhealthy."

"...as many as 200,000 [businesses]...exist entirely on eBay."

Steven Levy, "How to Play the eBay Game," Newsweek, June 17, 2002, p. 58

"First, there are no bargains on eBay.  By definition.  You 'win' the competition by paying more than other people are willing to spend.  You're not stumbling across some hidden gem in a yard sale; you're bumping elbows with millions of other scroungers, including people who know more than you do about the item for sale."

Louise Kehoe, "Drowning in a Deluge of Data," Financial Times, p. 8, June 12, 2002

"About 24 exabytes of unique information has been produced by the human race, according to a two-year-old study from the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley, while study leader Hal Varian has noted the possibility of an acceleration of data growth in a recent update."

Charles Hoedt, "Locals Look Good in Software," St. Petersburg Times (Russia) Online, June 11, 2002

"Russian software exports this year will almost double from last year, and total $300 million....India is expected to export $8 billion in software this year."

Peter J. Howe, "Broadband Talks to Address New Strategies," Boston Globe p. C1, June 10, 2002

"...approximately 70 percent of consumers [are] currently able to connect."

Steven Levy and Brad Stone, "The Wi-Fi Wave," Newsweek, June 10, 2002, p. 38

"Two million use it [Wi-Fi, or Wireless Fidelity] now."  There are currently 3,000 public hot spots.

Rick Kuhn, "Impact of inadequate software testing on US Economy," June 5, 2002 (summary of a RTI survey published by NIST )

"NIST engaged the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) to assess the cost to the U.S. economy of inadequate software testing infrastructure. Inadequate testing is defined as failure to identify and remove software bugs in real time. Over half of software bugs are currently not found until downstream in the development process leading to significant economic costs. RTI identified a set of quality attributes and used them to construct metrics for estimating the cost of an inadequate testing infrastructure. Two in depth case studies were conducted. In the manufacturing sector, transportation equipment industries were analyzed. Data were collected from software developers (CAD/CAM/CAE and product data management vendors) and from users (primarily automotive and aerospace companies). In the service sector, financial services were analyzed with data collected again from software developers (routers and switches, financial electronic data interchange, and clearinghouse) and from users (banks and credit unions). ...the annual cost to these two major industry groups from inadequate software infrastructure is estimated to be $5.85 billion. Similarities across industries with respect to software development and use and, in particular, software testing labor costs allowed a projection of the cost to the entire U.S. economy. Using the per-employee impacts for the two case studies, an extrapolation to other manufacturing and service industries yields an approximate estimate of $59.5 billion as the annual cost to the nation of inadequate software testing infrastructure."

AP News, June 5, 2002

"Fifty-four percent of U.S. schools rely on students to provide technical support for their computer systems, according to a report titled "Are We There Yet?" (http://www.nsbf.org/thereyet/index.htm), released yesterday by the National School Boards Foundation. In 43% of the 811 districts surveyed, students troubleshoot for hardware, software and other problems, and 39% of the districts, students are tasked with setting up equipment and wiring. Nearly as many districts also report that students perform technical maintenance."

N'Gai Croal, "Now, 01 Vérité," Newsweek, June 3, 2002, p. 43

"In 2001, consumers snapped up $9.4 billion worth of game software and hardware - up 43 percent from the previous year - led by Sony's world-beating PlayStation 2."

"Still Waiting for the Revolution: A Conversation with Alan Kay," Perspectives on Business Innovation No. 8, June 2002

"In an interview with Kate Kane, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center co-founder Alan Kay explains that the so-called revolution in the computer industry is actually a gradual, evolutionary process because of the nature of innovation."

Anne Ju, "In Search of the Green PC," Medill News Service, May 30, 2002

"The National Safety Council (NSC) estimates that 315 million computers will be trashed in 2004, up from 20 million in 1998, in addition to an estimated 130 million cell phones by 2005; only 11 percent of the 20 million computers thrown out in 1998 were recycled, according to an NSC study. These products contain dangerous chemicals and metals that can leak toxins into the environment when put into landfills."

"Conference Looks at Africa's IT," Agence France Presse, May 29, 2002

"The United Nations' Economic Commission for Africa says there is about one Internet user for every 250 people in Africa--4 million in total--most of whom are in South Africa. This compares with a worldwide average of one Internet user for every 35 people."

Emily Benedek, "Web Attack in the Workplace," Newsweek, May 13, 2002, p. 40J

"The Code Red virus alone infected more than 300,000 workplace computers in 14 hours and cost more than $2.6 billion worldwide.  InformationWeek Research estimates the cost of security-related downtime to U.S. businesses in the past 12 months at $273 billion.  Worldwide, the tally was $1.39 trillion.

"Mom-and-Pop.com," Newsweek, May 13, 2002, p. 40P

Percentage of small- and medium-size businesses that report using the Internet for:

• Researching markets, competition - 79%
• Advertising, promoting products - 51
• Long-distance collaboration - 44
• Providing after-sales services to clients - 32
• Communicating with government offices - 27
• Selling directly to other companies - 27
• Managing financial accounts - 26
• Selling directly to consumers - 26
• Managing orders and invoices - 23

Retail Web sites in 2000 and 2001 featuring:

                                           2000     2001 
Automated e-mail service:      81%      91%
Detailed product information: 50         88
Advanced searches:                59        73   

Percentage of Internet users who (most of the time) trust sites run by:

• Small businesses - 59%
• Charities and other nonprofit organizations - 46
• Financial companies - 45
• The federal government - 40
• Health-care companies - 34
• Web sites offering buying advice - 29
• Large corporations - 29
• Web sites selling products, services - 26

If they could have only one medium of entertainment, the following percentage of children [ages 8-17] would choose:

                                  Boys     Girls
Internet:                      38         28
Television:                   34        17
Telephone:                  12         31
Radio:                         12        17

Percentage of Web users who value a site based on its having:

• Easy navigation - 80%
• Trustworthy information - 80
• Identifiable sources of information - 68
• Frequent updates - 65
• A familiar owner - 32

Richard Florida, "The Rise of the Creative Class," Optimize p. 28, May 2002

"[Richard Florida, co-director of Carnegie Mellon University's Software Industry Center, estimates that] 38 million Americans--roughly 30 percent of the U.S. workforce--comprise a "Creative Class" that is growing in leaps and bounds."

"Economic Bust, Patent Boom," May 2002

"According to MIT's Technology Review (TR), a "patent or perish" mentality continued in high-tech sectors even during the recent economic downturn. TR's annual Patent Scorecard tracks the U.S. patenting activity of 150 top companies in eight high-tech sectors. The IT and telecommunications industries were particularly active. TR's Erika Jonietz reports that "Semiconductor companies saw an average increase of 21.4 percent in the number of patents issued from 2000 to 2001. Similarly, patenting grew 20.4 percent in the telecom industry, and in computing 11.6 percent." In addition, the semiconductor, telecommunication, and computing industries saw the highest numbers of new patent applications filed in 2000. For the ninth year in a row, IBM led the list of patentees, receiving 3,454 in 2001. It also earned more than $1.5 billion from licensing income."

David Lieberman, "Piracy Pillages Music Industry," USA Today p. 1B, April 8, 2002

"About 17% of all adults wired to the Internet at home, work or school say they've downloaded music...Some 43% say it should be legal, 46% say illegal, with 11% undecided.  People are also split — 48% in favor and 42% against — on whether record companies should use technology limiting buyers' copying of new CDs to a few copies...Music executives blame digital copying for most of a collapse in sales. Last year they sold 10.3% fewer albums and singles than in 2000. Meanwhile, seizures of counterfeit, pirate or bootleg labels soared nearly 504% in 2001 to 22.2 million, according to new data from the Recording Industry Association of America.  Sales this year are worse. Total units are down another 12% vs. the first three months of 2001."

"More Kids Say Internet Is the Medium They Can’t Live Without," StatisticalResearch.com, April 5, 2002 (thanks to Dick Halpern)

"Given a choice of six media, one-third (33%) of children aged 8 to 17 told KN/SRI that the Web would be the medium they would want to have if they couldn’t have any others. Television was picked by 26% of kids; telephone by 21%; and radio by 15%.  For the top three media, results were dramatically different among girls and boys. Twice as many boys (34% versus 17%) chose TV as their must-have medium, while telephone was more than twice as popular (31% versus 12%) among girls. The Internet placed first with 38% of boys and 28% of girls."

Robert J. Samuelson, "Debunking the Digital Divide," Newsweek, March 25, 2002, p. 37

"In 1997 only 37 percent of people in families with incomes from $15,000 to $24,999 used computers at home or at work.  By September 2001, that proportion was 47 percent.  Over the same period, usage among families with incomes exceeding $75,000 rose more modestly, from 81 percent to 88 percent.  Among all racial and ethnic groups, computer use is rising.  Here are the numbers for 2001 compared with similar rates for 1997: Asian-Americans, 71 percent (58 percent in 1997); whites, 70 percent (58 percent); blacks, 56 percent (44 percent); Hispanics, 49 percent (38 percent)."

"By 2000, public schools had roughly one computer for every four students.  Almost all schools were connected to the Internet, as were about three quarters of classrooms.  Some students get computer sills that they might miss.  Among 10- to 17-year old students from homes with less than $15,000 of income, about half use computers only at school, reports the Census Bureau."

Peter McGrath, "3G, Phone Home!" Newsweek, March 18, 2002, p. 38H

"Last year SMS [Short Message Service] was a savior for European wireless carriers.  It accounted for about 15 percent of total telecom revenues.  And it did so on 2G phones."

Lorraine Ali and David Gates, "Looking Grim at the Grammys," Newsweek, March 11, 2002, pp. 61-2

"Only 5 percent of major-label [music] releases make a profit...Last year blank CDs outsold prerecorded ones.  Two out of five music consumers own a CD burner.  About the same number say they downloaded rather than paid for most of the music they listened to last year...Over the past 10 years, [the music] business has become scarily monolithic.  Just five corporations now control more than 80 percent of the $14.3 billion-a-year industry...they own...often the print and broadcast media and the online services that publicize and disseminate them...If your 'local' top 40 radio station...isn't owned by Clear Channel (which has nearly 1,200 stations in the United States), it's probably owned by Viacom."

"Broadband Outpaces Dial-Up," TVTechnology.com, March 7, 2002

"...broadband surfers logged 1.19 billion hours, or 51 percent of the 2.3 billion hours spent online during January. Last year broadband users spent 727 million hours online in the same month, for 38 percent of the total. Total time spent online by broadband surfers increased by 64 percent over last year to 1.19 billion hours, while time using narrowband decreased three percent from 1.18 billion to 1.14 billion.  The unique audience accessing the Internet via high-speed connections also continues to rise. Almost 21.9 million surfers at-home accessed the Internet via broadband connection in January, an increase of 67 percent, representing 21 percent of the total online population at-home. The at-work broadband population jumped 42 percent to 25.5 million office workers, compared to 18 million the year prior, reaching 63 percent of the Internet office population."

Julia King, "Mainframe Skills, Pay at a Premium," Computerworld Vol. 36, No. 10, P. 1, March 4, 2002

"A recent Meta Group survey found 55 percent of employees skilled in mainframe technologies at more than 300 companies are over 50 years of age."

Rob Fixmer, "Broadband Homeland," eWeek Vol. 19, No. 9, P. 41, March 4, 2002

"A little over 10 percent of U.S. households had broadband connections as of Jan. 1, a penetration rate that makes the United States the seventh most wired country in the world."

"Productivity growth accelerated in 1995 because Wal-Mart's success forced competitors to improve their [IT] operations.... In 1987, Wal-Mart had just nine percent market share but was 40 percent more productive than its competitors. By the mid-1990s, its share had grown to 27 percent while its productivity advantage had widened to 48 percent. Competitors reacted by adopting many of Wal-Mart's innovations, including ...  economies of scale in warehouse logistics and purchasing, electronic data interchange and wireless bar code scanning ... Consider Wal-Mart's $4 billion-plus investment in its 'Retail Link' supply chain system. ... [This] expenditure has likely influenced at least $40 billion worth of supplier investment in systems and software. Of course, those supply chain innovations are also eventually emulated by competitors, further amplifying the multiplier effect."

Mark Martin, "Surcharge Suggested for Scrap Electronics," San Francisco Chronicle p. B1, February 27, 2002

"6,000 computers and televisions...become obsolete every day in California...Romero's bill, SB1619, also calls for a goal that 75 percent of all discarded computers be recycled by 2010. The figure at present is only about 15 percent."

John Markoff, "Technology's Toxic Trash Is Sent to Poor Nations," New York Times p. C1, February 25, 2002

"Electronic waste is being sent to third-world countries for recycling, where poor regulations threaten the environment and people's health Fifty percent to 80 percent of obsolete electronics from the United States is shipped to India, Pakistan, China, and other developing nations. The report concentrates on the Guiyu region of Guangdong, China, where electronic gear is recycled: The operation has polluted the groundwater while children are often employed as laborers."

Francesco Guerrera and Clive Cookson, "Seeking to Bridge the Science Gap," Financial Times p. 10, February 25, 2002

"EU as a whole [should] increase its R&D spending as a percentage of gross national product from 1.9 percent. The United States currently spends 2.6 percent of its gross national product on R&D."

Tim McDonald, "When Will AI Get Down to Business?", NewsFactor Network, February 25, 2002

"Gartner has reported that investment in AI for customer service systems could increase from US$100 million in 2001 to $1 billion in 2005...HNC Software in San Diego, California...claims its product improves [credit card] fraud detection rates by 30 percent to 70 percent and significantly lowers "false positives"...And the New York State Department of Social Services uses an AI technique called "expert rules" to help make unbiased and consistent decisions regarding clients referred to it for vocational rehabilitation. The department reported increased productivity as a result of the technology. Case assessment increased by 70,000 per year, and the dropout rate declined by more than 80 percent."

Dan Lee, "Tech Transformation: Once Dependent on Agriculture, Ireland Has Carved a High-Tech Niche," Siliconvalley.com, February 23, 2002

"Ireland's technology economy is maturing, despite the economic downturn plaguing the technology sector worldwide. The country attracted many leading technology companies, including Intel, Oracle, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard, to set up their European operations centers there because of the low-cost, English-speaking workforce. Ireland also boasted the lowest corporate tax rates in Europe. As a result, 60 percent of European packaged software and about one-third of European PCs hail from Ireland, and the unemployment rate has dropped to half of many European neighbors' rates."

Noam Levey, "Two California Bills Address Recycling of Electronic Discards," SiliconValley.com, February 21, 2002

"Statistics show that California households are stockpiling 6 million obsolete computers and televisions."

Saumya Roy, "Broadband: On the Fast Track?", Medill News Service, February 21, 2002

"...almost 80 percent of American homes have access to at least one form of broadband connection, while half of those have a choice of three or more providers. Still, the study found that only 11 percent of households were likely to sign up that year."

Frank Hayes, "Girls Warm Up to IT," Computerworld Vol. 36, No. 8, P. 62, February 18, 2002

"Women currently account for only 25 percent of the IT workforce, while Colorado School of Mines' Tracy Camp notes that the number of female computer science undergraduates has fallen from 37 percent in 1999 to 20 percent in 2000. But IM may be for girls what computer games are for boys. A Girl Scouts survey of young women between 13 and 18 finds that IM is important, and is getting more of them on the Net. Two-thirds of the respondents report that they go online several times a day, seven days a week."

CNN, February 6, 2002

"As of September 2001, 143 million Americans, or about 54 percent of the population, were using the Internet, and new users were adopting the technology at a rate of more than two million per month. The report says 90 percent, or 47.4 million, of children between the ages of 5 and 17 now use computers at home and at school. Seventy-five percent of 14- to 17-year-olds and 65 percent of 10- to 13-year-olds use the Internet. Households with children younger than 18 are more likely to access the Internet than households with no children."

Michele Kessler, "Security-conscious groups ban Wi-Fi," USA Today, January 28, 2002

"Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California banned all wireless networks, including the most prevalent, Wi-Fi, from its grounds due to "security vulnerabilities," directors said in a newsletter. Other entities that handle sensitive data are implementing or considering similar bans. And airlines are coming under fire for using Wi-Fi in curbside baggage check-in systems.  The fear: Computer hackers can intercept data traveling through the air if Wi-Fi networks aren't properly safeguarded. Wi-Fi defenders say Wi-Fi is secure when properly installed. The problem: Only about 10% of users install even basic safeguards, security experts say."

Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2002

"Henrico County, Va. school officials are recalling all 11,000 laptop computers that it distributed to its high school students in order to retrofit them with security software that will prevent students from using the devices for accessing pornography or changing their grades -- abuses that reportedly have occurred since the machines were handed out last fall."

Jay Lyman, "Virus-Busters: Worms, Flaws More Than Doubled in 2001," NewsFactor Network, January 11, 2002

"In 2001, both computer security incidents and vulnerabilities more than doubled, according to the CERT Coordination Center. The research center reported 52,658 security incidents in 2001, compared to 21,756 in 2000. For 2002, CERT predicts security incidents will surpass 100,000. Similarly, CERT recorded 2,437 security vulnerabilities in 2001, compared to 1,090 in 2000. A greater number of PCs and a growing Internet are responsible for the higher numbers, says CERT Internet security analyst Chad Dougherty."

Mike Musgrove, "Tech-Support Seekers Turn to the Web," Washington Post, p. E1, December 28, 2001

"Microsoft says its tech support site received 200 million hits this year compared to just 4 million calls."

Janet Kornblum, "After 10 Years on the Web, Impact Keeps Unfolding," USA Today, p. 3D, December 27, 2001

"...American Web users totaled 113.7 million in October, accounting for 62 percent of the U.S. population."

"According to data from Northbrook, Ill., firm Teenage Research Unlimited, 37 percent of teens have cell phones; 78 percent go on-line at home. Ninety percent say the Net is "cool"; 84 percent say the same thing about partying."

Desa Philadelphia, "Can You Print it for Me?", Global Business Magazine Vol. 158, No. 27, P. B10, December 2001

"Between 1995 and 2000, paper use increased 12 percent while there were almost 5 percent more computers at workplaces. In their book, "The Myth of the Paperless Office," Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper found that paper consumption generally leaps 40 percent when an office first implements email."

Howard Millman, "Beyond Sight," InfoWorld Vol. 23, No. 32, P. 32, August 6, 2001

"...there are almost 11 million people on federal disability rolls, almost twice that of 10 years ago."

Robert Marquand, "China Tames Wild, Wild Web," Christian Science Monitor, p. 1, August 2, 2001

"About 8,000 Internet cafes have been shut down by the government in the past several months, either because they were not registered or because authorities failed to keep users from viewing objectionable sites. Through the continuous issuance of regulations, chat-room monitors, and the "The Great Firewall of China," which monitors overseas access and blocks certain Web sites, China has been able to restrict use of the Internet. At the same time, the amount of people using it has increased from 2 million in 1998 to 23 million today."

Paulo Rebelo, "Casting a Wider Net in Brazil," Wired News, July 30, 2001

"Only about 11.1 million out of over 160 million Brazilians are currently online, but both governmental and non-governmental organizations are planning to change that through initiatives. The Brazilian government will set up Internet terminals at post offices within every major city, an effort that Brazilian Planning Minister Martus Tavares says will cost $400 million."

Donna Howell, "Companies Quicker to Patch Up Security Weak Spots," Investor's Business Daily, p. A4, July 13, 2001

"Security holes emerge in even the most popular software programs on a frequent basis...20 or so vulnerabilities [are] exposed every week."

Brian Acohido, "Net Rivals Gird for Latest Battle," USA Today p. 3B, July 9, 2001

"3.5 million software developers... know Visual Basic...the Java language...has a base of 2.5 million developers."

Stephen Shankland, "Study: Web, E-mail Monitoring Spreads," CNet, July 8, 2001

"About 27 percent of employees around the world (100 million) constantly have their email and Internet activities monitored to employers; about $140 million worth of...[online surveillance] software is sold each year worldwide...As many as 14 million U.S. workers are continuously monitored, the study finds."

Dick Kelsey, "Most U.S. Workers Comfy with Technology - Study," Newsbites, July 5, 2001

"Most U.S. workers feel at ease with technology, according to a new Society of Financial Service Professionals survey of 1,130 members. Some 92 percent reported being comfortable with technology and equipment at the office. Using technology increases knowledge in the workplace, said 87 percent of participants, while 80 percent said technology develops job skills. However, many workers admitted to using technology for personal uses: only 37 percent said spending time at work looking for a job online is "highly unethical," and 41 percent said they have engaged in personal Internet surfing or online shopping at work. Similarly, a similar percentage reported using corporate email for personal reasons or playing games on the computer."

Scarlet Pruitt, "Gartner: No Rest for the Work E-Mail Addict," IDG News Service, July 2, 2001

"Over half of U.S. workers check their email six or more times each day, according to a new survey from Gartner, while 34 percent of workers said they check their email constantly. Moreover, 23 percent of workers read business-related email during the weekend, and 42 percent check email while they are on vacation. The Gartner survey reports that the average worker needs 49 minutes each day to check email. However, barely a quarter, 27 percent, of this email is truly important for business, Gartner reports, with 37 percent rated as "occupational spam," short and usually unnecessary messages between co-workers."

Kim Girard, "Borg is Back," Business 2.0 Vol. 6, No. 13, P. 77, June 26, 2001

"At present, women comprise only 9 percent of all computer engineers in the nation and 26 percent of all computer scientists."

Stephen Shankland and Joe Wilcox, "Why Microsoft is Wary of Open Source," CNet, June 18, 2001

"International Data (IDC) reports that Linux represented 27 percent of new server operating licenses for 2000, compared to Microsoft's 41 percent."

Roberta Holland, "Visual Basic.Net: Is it Too Complex?", eWeek Online, June 15, 2001

"Microsoft is introducing a revision to the Visual Basic programming language, which has some 3.3 million users, to take advantage of its .Net Web services model. However, developers that have seen the Visual Basic.Net beta versions complain about the fundamental differences in the new release, such as altered data types and keywords, saying the company has abandoned its original intent to make Visual Basic a simple programming language for Windows. Other programmers say developers will not have much trouble once they get used to the changes. Rival software companies such as Borland and Sun hope that frustrated developers will migrate to their languages instead. Borland's Delphi language has a user base of 1 million programmers."

David M. Ewalt, "Just How Many Linux Users are There?", InformationWeek Online, June 13, 2001

"Gartner, in a survey of 724 IT professionals, found that 8.6 percent of server shipments in the United States in the third quarter ran Linux. However, Linux advocates dispute that low number, and other research firms are backing them up. International Data (IDC) has estimated Linux's server market share at 27 percent, and AllNetResearch says it is 39 percent. "I suspect that an awful lot of servers--and home computers--get counted as Windows machines because that is how they were sold, even if they now run Linux," contends Robin Miller on the open source Web site Newsforge.com. In many cases, say advocates, Linux users download the software and install it only after purchasing a server."

Donna Howell, "Web Visits are DOA with DoS," Investor's Business Daily, page A6, June 13, 2001

"The report found that 4,000 DoS [denial of service] attacks had occurred in a period of one week in February. The Yankee Group says the costs associated with DoS attacks--security, lost sales, depreciated stock value--cost businesses over $1 billion. Part of the problem is the availability of sophisticated tools that let hackers perpetrate these crimes with ease. At Exodus Communications, which estimates it suffers from between 200 and 300 hacking attempts daily, officials are looking at new solutions, such as those developed by Asta Networks and Mazu Networks. Exodus chief security officer Bill Hancock estimates that there are 20 such companies trying to carve out a slice of the emerging market for DoS-fighting solutions."

Phil LoPiccolo, "The Next Big Thing," Computer Graphics World, Vol. 24, No. 6, P. 4, June 2001

"

William J. Broad, "Bell Labs: A Bit Abstract and Always Curious," New York Times, May 30, 2001, p. C4

"Bell Labs, a subsidiary of Lucent Technologies, remains a key player in the development of new technology despite the turmoil surrounding its parent company, experts say. Only IBM files more patents per day than Bell Labs, which has a daily average of four patent filings."

Diana Bass, "Slow Start Foreseen for Office XP Sales," Bloomberg, May 29, 2001

"Currently, Giga Information Group analyst Ken Smiley says, Office 97 runs on the majority of corporate systems, with 40 percent using Office 2000, and from 5 percent to 10 percent using Office 95."

"Your Boss Knows You're Reading This," Reuters, May 29, 2001

"A recent survey of more than 1,000 U.S. businesses showed that nearly 78 percent monitored employees' Web, email, voice mail, and other communications--more than twice as many businesses that said they did so than in a survey five years ago."

Lou Hirsh, "The Next Environmental Crisis: Techno-Trash," E-Commerce Times, May 29, 2001

"The Environmental Protection Agency says electronics now accounts for 220 million tons of U.S. waste, much of it containing poisonous metals...large companies such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard have set up recycling programs that people can use for a fee--usually about $30...Many groups are pointing to new legislation passed by the European Parliament that requires computer manufacturers to reclaim their products, equaling up to 13 pounds of equipment reclaimed per person, per year."

Gary H. Anthes, "Making IT Accessible," Computerworld Vol. 35, No. 22, P. 56, May 28, 2001

"The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the United States has 60 million disabled individuals, 70% of whom say they are underemployed or without employment at all because of that disability. Disabled individuals confront a particular challenge in IT-related positions, as computers and other hardware can often be difficult or even impossible to use...At the Department of Education, which has as many as 400 disabled employees, IT adaptations include ergonomic keyboards, voice-based Caller ID, and Braille embossers and translators, and Craig B. Luigart, the department's CIO, says the cost of such adaptations is low, often adding no more than 1% to the price. Microsoft's new Office XP program features a host of accessibility tools, including voice-recognition software and a tool that can describe for blind users how the formatting of their document actually appears."

Stephanie Wilkinson, "From the Dustbin, Cobol Rises," eWeek Vol. 18, No. 21, P. 58, May 28, 2001

"The IT industry is suffering an acute lack of programmers who know Cobol, the 40-year-old language in which much of the world's business data is written. Gartner Group reports that 200 billion lines of Cobol code existed as of last year, with an expected growth of 5 billion lines of code per year for the next four years. At the same time, Gartner reports, as of last year there were only 90,000 Cobol programmers in North America, and that number will fall as those programmers retire or pass away. As Gartner reports that Cobol houses 60% of the global code base and 85% of global business data, the decline in programmers could soon present a severe problem to firms in nearly every sector...However, Payson [the president of the Senior Staff Job Information Search] says his company's database has some 2,500 Cobol programmers, and he believes that as many as 10,000 retired but still employable Cobol programmers currently live in the United States."

John Schwartz, "Computer Vandals Clog Antivandalism Web Site," New York Times p. C5, May 24, 2001

"A new report from the University of California at San Diego reveals that there are 4,000 DDoS attacks around the world each week."

Peter Galli, "Linux Looks Good on Server," eWeek vol. 18, no. 20, p. 1, May 21, 2001

"Tests on IBM's DB2 7.2 Linux 2.4.3 database server demonstrate that it beats Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 running Windows 2000...In the desktop market, however, Linux companies are finding it a hard sell to investors because they have yet to come up with a breakthrough product and have captured no more than 2 percent of the market. Eazel recently closed its shop after it could not find further funding for its work on a Linux-based graphical user interface. Corel's Linux arm is also struggling, and the company is now in negotiations to sell the unit for only $1.5 million."

NewsScan Daily, May 21, 2001

"Software piracy grew in 2000 for the first time in more than five years, according to the Business Software Alliance, which estimates that 37% of all software programs used by businesses worldwide are illegal copies. The Asia-Pacific region -- where more than half of all software in use last year was stolen -- tops the list in terms of dollars (an estimated $4 billion) lost to piracy. Meanwhile, Eastern Europe has the highest piracy rate, with 63% of its software illegally copied in 2000. In the U.S., 24% of programs are pirated copies."

Mitch Wagner, "Handhelds Nudge PCs," InternetWeek no. 861, p. 1, May 14, 2001

"Sears...supplied 15,000 handheld computers from Symbol Technologies to stockroom staff and sales clerks...Compaq says sales of its color iPaq have reached 100,000 a month, compared to expectations of 7,000 units."

Charles Babcock, "Visual Basic on the Decline?", Interactive Week vol. 8, no. 19, p. 11, May 14, 2001

"...of programmers with multiple-language skill, the number who know Microsoft Visual Basic has fallen from 62 percent last March to 46 percent in March 2001...many programmers are already looking for other options. Java is one; another is Borland's Delphi environment, which Borland estimates has 1 million programmers already. Borland's new Delphi 6.0 release is targeted at programmers interested in the Web-based applications sector as it supports XML, SOAP, and other Web-based programming languages and protocols."

"Freshmen Women's Confidence with Computers is Half that of Men's," CRA Bulletin, May 7, 2001

"The annual freshman survey conducted by UCLAs Higher Education Research Institute showed increasing familiarity of entering students with computers. 78.5% of freshman entering college in 2000 were regularly using computers in the year prior to college entrance, compared to 68.4% in 1999 and 27.3% in 1985. There was not much gender difference in computer use reported by those entering college in 2000: 77.8% of women and 79.5% of men. There was, however, continuing gender difference in confidence levels: 23.3% of females rated their computer skills as "above average" or "within the top 10%" whereas 46.4% of males did so. This confidence gap between men and women is the largest in the history of the survey. 1.4% of females and 6.5% of males entering college in 2000 expected to major in computer science."

Elisa Hae-Jung Song, MD, and Jane E. Anderson, MD, "How violent video games may violate children's health," Commercial Alert, May 2001 (thanks to Dick Halpern)

"...video games have rapidly become the largest segment of the entertainment industry, taking in $6.3 to $8.8 billion in 1998, compared with $5.2 billion in Hollywood box office receipts. Video games, which now can be played at home on a computer or a television set, account for 30% of the toy market in America. With 181 million computer games sold in 1998, each home has, on average, two video games...

About 90% of United States households with children have rented or own a video or computer game, 49% of children have a video game player or computer on which to play the games in their own bedroom, and 46% of children would choose, in preference to any other form of media, to take a video game player or computer to a desert island...

According to a 1993 survey of 357 seventh- and eighth-grade students, boys spent more time playing video games than girls. While 60% of girls clocked an average of two hours a week playing video games, 90% of boys played for more than four hours a week. Boys and girls also differed in where they liked to play: 50% of boys spent time in arcades, compared with 20% of girls. Only 2% of preferred games had educational themes, while about half had violent themes. A 1996 survey of 1,000 fourth- to eighth-grade students confirmed that boys spent more hours each week than girls playing video games, with game playing decreasing as grade level increased. Children of all ages preferred games with violent content; boys preferred human violence, girls, fantasy violence. A study of 227 college students showed that 97% of students played games. Again, girls spent less time than boys in this activity. The survey also investigated respondents' earlier use of games: Students reported that the time they spent playing games gradually decreased from the junior high years (five and one half hours a week) to college (about two hours a week). Figures on earlier use of games may not be reliable, however, because they were based on long-term recall...In a 1999 study, most parents were not able to name their child's favorite game, or named an incorrect game. In 70% of these incorrect matches, the child described their favorite game as violent...On average, according to another study, parents recognized only nine of the 49 most popular video games...

In a study from British Columbia, only 22% of teens said that their parents had set rules for playing video games. This compares with 39% of teens who had rules for television viewing...Only 15% were subject to restrictions on the type of game they played...

...sales of games rated extremely violent...have jumped from 53% of all sales in 1985 to 82% in 1988. Analysis of a sample of the 33 Sega and Nintendo games that were most popular in 1995 showed that nearly 80% featured aggressiveness or violence; in 21% of the games, the aggression or violence was directed toward women. In nearly 50% of the games examined, violence or aggression was directed against other characters, and the violence generally was very graphic. Another survey found that violence was a theme in 40 of the 47 top-rated Nintendo video games."

"Today 145 million Americans play computer and video games. It's not just kids and boys: 69% of high-frequency players are over 18, and 49% are female."

"Survey: Denmark Most Wired; Men go for Cars, Porn," Reuters, March 26, 2001

"Denmark boasts a home Internet penetration rate of 54 percent, making the country the world's most Internet-enabled nation, followed by the United States at 50.9 percent, Singapore at 47.4 percent, Taiwan at 40 percent, and South Korea at 37.3 percent, according to a study of a dozen countries by NetValue. Home Internet rates in China and Spain are below 18 percent. The study determined that Yahoo.com and msn.com were popular Web sites in 10 of the 12 countries studied, which included the United Kingdom, France, Mexico, and Hong Kong. Nearly three in four citizens of Denmark use email, while 50 percent of South Korean Internet users play online games. In the United States, men account for 52 percent of the online population, while in Mexico the number is 66 percent. Web sites pertaining to cars, sports, and pornography are favorites among men in the dozen countries, while women prefer women-oriented Web sites and sites about fashion, beauty, or electronic greeting cards."

"Fifty-seven percent of women workers use a computer in their jobs, compared with only 44 percent of men. At home, 70 percent of women use a computer, compared with 72 percent of men. The home-use gap of the mid-1980s of about 20 percentage points has now closed."

Aaron Pressman, "Business Gets the Message," Industry Standard vol. 4, no. 8, p. 58, February 26, 2001

"Media Metrix reports that 53 million U.S. households sent an instant message in January, with another 11 million using the technology from work--no universal standard for instant messaging exists."

Nevin Cohen, "Russian Internet Landscape Still Bleak," eMarketer, February 21, 2001

"Russia's lack of telecommunications infrastructure and stark economic prospects threaten to limit Internet penetration in that country to the single digits until at least 2004, according to eMarketer predictions. Those estimates also tag the number of current Russian adult Internet users at only 2.9 million in a nation of roughly 122 million adults. ROMIR Consulting, Moscow, says 48 percent of users access the Web from work and only 36 percent communicate via the Internet...few [people] hold credit cards and ISP access can cost anywhere from $120 to $1,500 per month."

Laura Carr, "Still a Man's World?", Industry Standard vol. 4, no. 1, p. 80, January 8, 2001

"The survey of almost 2,600 newsletter subscribers found that women in the Internet industry earn a median base salary of $60,500, compared with $80,000 for their male counterparts. Meanwhile, women receive a median bonus of $7,000, which is less than half of the $15,000 median bonus awarded to men. With this bonus disparity factored in, the gender wage gap is even more evident in median total cash compensation, which is $66,000 for women and $91,000 for men. The Standard's findings echo figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that suggest women who work full-time and are more than 25 years old earn 26 percent less than men. Still, women responding to The Standard survey worked 9.7 hours a day on average, while men worked 10.3 hours. In addition, slightly more than half of women worked at least one weekend per month, compared with 61 percent of men. These factors still do not account for the gender wage gap, which is even wider than the wage discrepancies noted along lines of race and age."

Phil Hochmuth, "Linux Against the Odds," Network World vol. 18, no. 1, p. 75, January 1, 2001

"In 1999 Linux beat Novell NetWare and all other versions of Unix in terms of shipments, claiming 24.6 percent of the server OS market. Only Microsoft's Windows NT surpassed Linux, with 38.1 percent of the market. IBM, Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and SAP all offer products and services that support Linux."

Ariane Sains, "Sweden's Digital Debate," Europe no. 402, p. 8, December 2000

"Sweden is sometimes considered one of the most wired nations, with computer and Internet penetration rates of 60 percent and mobile phone penetration rates of 70 percent...Union leaders fear that blue-collar workers without online access at work or home are being excluded from online training programs and cannot participate in online democracy. Banking is a problem; institutions are cutting costs by closing branch offices, particularly in rural areas, and are suggesting Internet services as a replacement...Just 8 percent of those between the ages of 65 and 74 say they have access to computers, according to government statistics, and what access they do have is frequently at public locations, which makes it hard to use the encrypted software that some services need."

"High-Tech Outlays Seen Rising 50 Percent by 2004," Reuters, November 21, 2000

"Spending on information and communication technology (ICT) worldwide climbed to more than $2.1 trillion in 1999, accounting for 6.6 percent of the world's gross domestic product (GDP), according to a World Information Technology and Services Alliance study released on Tuesday. By 2004, worldwide ICT spending is expected to grow another 50 percent, the study says. The United States continued to lead global ICT spending last year with $762 billion, which represented nearly 9 percent of the U.S. GDP. Japan came in second with $362 billion in ICT spending, followed by Germany with $139 billion."

Toni Kistner, "IT Strides Seen as Double-Edged Sword," Network World vol. 17, no. 46, p. 29, November 13, 2000

"Technological advances, contrary to popular belief, are actually increasing the number of workers on the road each day as the number of mobile workers grows far faster than the number of remote workers, according to a recent IT Forecaster report from International Data (IDC)...Mobile workers are increasing their ranks 3.5 times faster than remote workers, says IDC. Mobile and remote workers, as defined by the report, spend at least 20 percent of their working hours outside of the office, while remote workers must work from home at least four days a month. Mobile workers are outstripping remote workers because of advances such as longer-lasting notebook batteries and the proliferation of devices such as personal digital assistants, cell phones, and two-way pagers, observers say. In addition, the number of remote workers is growing more slowly than anticipated because of the slow deployment of broadband services, security concerns, reluctance among employers as well as workers, and the expense of remote infrastructure development. However, International Telework Association and Council President John Edwards objects to IDC's findings. Technology is not bringing more people onto the roads, but simply allows workers to make more productive use of their time while traveling, Edwards says. Furthermore, Edwards disagrees with the report's distinction between mobile and remote workers, arguing that mobile workers are a type of remote worker."

"Americans spent $424 million on educational CD-ROMS for their children last year."

"Contrary to popular belief, not all gamers are teenage boys. In fact, 13% are over 50, and 43% are women. Overall, more than half of all Americans play videogames."

"Solving the Paradox," Economist vol. 356, no. 8189, p. 11, September 23, 2000

"The United States has enjoyed a surge in labor productivity since the mid 1990s, about the time when computers reached a 50 percent penetration rate. From 1975 through 1995 the average yearly growth in labor productivity in the business sector was 1.4 percent, but the figure has since jumped to 2.9 percent. And for the second quarter of 2000 the figure is up 5.2 percent. The information technology producing industries have been the greatest beneficiaries of the new economy, having seen productivity climb an average of 24 percent a year in the 1990s...With labor productivity and per capita growth projected over the long-term at an annual 2.5 percent, the impact of IT would be as big as electricity. For IT to be bigger than electricity, cars, and telephones, productivity growth would have to reach 3 percent to 4 percent over the next decade."

Aravind Adiga, "High-Tech Productivity Boom Rolls On," Financial Times, September 1, 2000, p. 4

"The report found that the annual productivity growth rate for non-farm workers reached 3 percent in 1999, a significant increase from the 1.3 percent growth rate that existed from 1974 to 1995. The report cites technological advances such as computer-aided design programs as a main reason for the increases in productivity. Also, NAM [National Association of Manufacturers] reports that the annual compensation growth rate in 1999 was 3.6 percent, a 2.5 percent rise from the annual rate between 1974 and 1995. Salaries were up as well, with the average private-sector worker making $42,000, while the average manufacturing employee made $49,000. The report counters claims that international trade has hurt U.S. workers, finding that trade was responsible for creating 25 percent of new private-sector jobs in the 1990s."

Carrie Johnson, "High-Tech Salaries Keep Powering Ahead," Washington Post, p. E8, August 31, 2000

"[A] survey found that the average salary of Web workers has risen 8.5 percent from 1999 to $82,000 per year. The average salary for online executives has increased from $295,800 to $323,300. Moreover, the survey reports more companies are offering signing bonuses this year--nearly 70 percent, a 10-percent gain over last year--while 30 percent of the firms surveyed said they provided performance bonuses to current employees. Analysts with Buck Consultants believe the increases reflect the demand for new employees and the shortage of qualified workers and will continue to grow until that conflict is resolved."

John Yaukey, "Discarded Computers Loom as Environmental Problem," USA Today, August 29, 2000, p. 6B

"Computers contain toxic substances such as lead, cadmium, mercury, and chromium that seep into the groundwater when computers are thrown into landfills. Only 11 percent of the 20 million computers that outlived their usefulness last year were recycled. In five years, 350 million computers will have become obsolete and about 55 million are likely to reach landfills, says the National Safety Council...In addition, while 97 percent of computer parts can be recycled for use in other computers or as scrap metal, qualified recyclers deal primarily with companies and are not widely known among consumers...The high-tech industry is also taking some responsibility, with companies such as IBM working to design computers that can be recycled more easily."

Ken Popovich, "PC Sales Drift to Doldrums," eWeek Vol. 17, No. 34, P. 43, August 21, 2000

"Most information technology market observers foresee a slump for PC sales...Dell Computer is coping with the uncertain future of the computer industry by focusing on notebook PC sales, which now account for 30 percent of its revenue...Gateway's non-PC income has grown from little more than 10 percent of its total income to 40 percent, and its goal is 45 percent by the end of 2000."

Ted Plafker, "China Closes First Locally Based Dissident Web Site," Washington Post, August 9, 2000, p. A21

"The number of Internet users in China has almost doubled since last year to 16.9 million."

Sally Whittle, "Wild about Wireless?", Industry Standard vol. 3, no. 29, p. 124, August 7, 2000

"Forrester says only 6.1 million people in Europe use Web phones to access the Internet. And some companies such as Deutsche Telekom are feeling the pinch of consumers' lack of interest in Web phones. The company's cell phone division, T-Mobile, announced in July that less than 1 percent of its 13 million cellular customers purchased its new Web phone, which debuted commercially six months ago. Other wireless providers have admitted similar disappointing sales...French Web bank First-e has acquired only 100 users since it began offering service six months ago, but had originally anticipated attracting 100,000 mobile users."

Claudia Kalb and Karen Springen, "Is Your Cell Really Safe?" Newsweek, August 7, 2000, p. 63

"A whopping 100 million Americans now use mobile phones, and tens of thousands of new customers wire up every day."

"There will be as many as 1.6 billion cell phone users worldwide by 2005."

"...statistics provided by the Department of Education ... show that girls account for only 17 percent of computer science 'advanced placement' tests taken by high school youths. In colleges, women earn just 28 percent of computer science undergraduate degrees, a sizable drop from pre-Internet 1984, when they earned 37 percent."

Adam Thierer, "Is the 'Digital Divide' a Virtual Reality?", Consumer's Research, vol. 83, no. 7, p. 16, July 2000

"The current market for personal computers and Internet access should reveal that there is no digital divide. The continued decline in computer prices is evidence that some Americans will not be left behind. PC Data says the average cost of a new PC has fallen from $1,434 in 1997 to $916 last year...From a historical perspective, Internet access is on pace to reach more than 50 percent of American homes faster than television (18 years), radio (28 years), VCRs (12 years), electrical service (52 years), and telephones (70 years). The Internet, which has been available as a commercial service for less than 10 years, will be in more than 50 percent of American households by 2001, according to Forrester Research."

Lane Hartill, "E-Mail Attitudes: Talk to the Mouse," Christian Science Monitor, p. 12, June 19, 2000

"The survey, which polled over 1,000 employees, found that 80 percent of respondents believe email has essentially supplanted traditional mail, while 49 percent said email has replaced phone calls. In addition, 79 percent of respondents keep a separate email account for personal messages, citing concerns about monitoring by employers. Meanwhile, a separate study from Stanford University indicates that email is taking a toll on users' social lives, finding that Internet users tend to devote less time to social events and personal phone calls."

Ronna Abramson, "Digital Divide may Narrow by 2005," TheStandard.com, June 15, 2000

"The study finds that only 15 percent of American households with annual incomes under $15,000 currently have access to the Internet...As of last year, only 30 percent of African American households and 33 percent of Hispanic households had Internet access."

Spencer E. Ante, "Info Wars," Business Week No. 3684, p. EB107, June 5, 2000

"Last year, there were more than 8,200 cases involving patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property brought under federal law. Over the past five years, patent, copyright, and other intellectual property cases have occurred 10 times faster than other cases. As fears grew concerning the Web as a tool for stealing the work of innovators and artists, patents were lengthened to 20 years, and copyrights were lengthened to 70 years after an artist dies."

"The Microsoft-Free Office,"  ACM TechNews Volume 2, Issue 64, June 5, 2000

"Windows accounted for 94.6 percent of the OS market last year, according to International Data. In addition, even the software giant's rivals admit that running a business without Microsoft Office, which includes Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, is nearly impossible. Companies essentially have no alternatives when it comes to word processing and spreadsheets, with Office holding over 90 percent of the Windows market for desktop suites."

Elisa Batista, "Latinos Prefer Mainstream Portals," WIRED News, June 2, 2000 (thanks to Neil McAllister)

"A new study shows more than half of the 2,017 Hispanics surveyed, including those who mainly speak Spanish, preferred surfing on English sites, according to Cheskin Research, a market research firm in Redwood Shores, California. ... Projected in five years to be the largest ethnic minority group in the United States, Hispanics already have a purchasing power of over $425 billion per year. And despite the media spotlight constantly glaring on the "digital divide," Hispanics are snapping up computers and going online at a faster rate than any other group. Cheskin Research found that PC ownership increased at a rate of 68 percent since 1998 for Hispanics, compared to only 43 percent for the general population. Now 42 percent of the estimated 32.5 million Latinos in the United States own PCs at home."

"Value of E-Mail? About $9,000 Per Worker", ACM TechNews Volume 2, Number 61, May 26, 2000

"[A] report determined that email does improve employee productivity by an average of 326 hours annually. Using a complex formula to convert the hours to a dollar value, Ferris Research reported that companies gain approximately $9,000 net per employee annually, or about a 15 percent gain in productivity."

Information technology has directly contributed to the rise in productivity across all U.S. industries in recent years, economists say. Just a few years ago economists questioned the effects of technology on productivity. However, last month the Federal Reserve issued a report saying the use of technology and the production of IT goods since the mid 1990s has accounted for about $50 billion in productivity output every year, contributing about two-thirds of the $70 billion annual productivity gain over the same period. Eighty percent of companies that record worker productivity say productivity is at a record high, according to an InformationWeek Research survey. Most InformationWeek respondents credit not only technology, but also management policy with some of the productivity gains. Companies are realizing productivity gains by improving their business processes, for example, by eliminating the barriers between different business areas. Among the top technologies that contribute to productivity are collaborative software tools, newer PCs, increased network bandwidth, mobile computing devices, and wireless devices. In addition to worker output, IT is improving customer service, range of offerings, response time, product quality, and customization of products and services, says Eric Brynjolfsson, professor at the Center for eBusiness at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Many companies are counting on e-business to further increase productivity, and experts predict that the Internet will drive the next wave of productivity.

"The number of companies monitoring employee email has increased from 27 percent in 1999 to an estimated 38.2 percent in 2000 due to a combination of more advanced monitoring software and employers' concerns about the volume of network traffic, widespread employee use of corporate equipment for personal business, and the circulation of offensive or obscene email messages."

Cliff Edwards, "World PC Sales up in 1999," ABCNews.com, January 24, 2000

"Despite concerns about the Y2K bug, personal computer sales surged 22 percent worldwide last year, fed in part by the surging domestic market for Dell computers.  Data released today by two research firms shows that Dell Computer surpassed rival Compaq Computer in annual sales for the first time and IBM slipped in both worldwide and U.S. sales.  Dell, based in Round Rock, Texas, sold 7.02 million PCs for the year, grabbing a 16 percent share of the U.S. market, up from 12.7 percent in 1998, according to research firm Dataquest, a unit of Gartner Group.  Compaq, based in Houston, sold 6.86 million computers, giving it a 15.7 percent market share, Dataquest said. Compaq’s share a year earlier was 16.1 percent...Compaq continues to hold a commanding lead for global sales, with Compaq maintaining a 13 percent share of the international market to Dell’s 10 percent...Dell’s strategy of direct sales has reduced costs and proved to be more efficient than store sales. Dell provides made-to-order computers and is generating more than $30 million in sales a day...Market growth slowed by just 2 percentage points in the quarter because of Y2K...Among the biggest losers in 1999 in market share were IBM Corp., which both studies found had slipped to fifth place domestically and third worldwide as it pulled its Aptiva line out of traditional brick-and-mortar stores.  NEC Corp. also lost worldwide market share, slipping out of the top five worldwide computer sellers in the IDC study. It pulled the plug on the money-losing Packard Bell line that once was synonymous with home computers.  Direct seller Gateway, with its more than 200 Gateway Country stores, was in the No. 3 spot domestically. Its sales rose 32 percent to boost its percentage of the U.S. market to 9.1 percent, up from 8.4 percent in 1998.  Hewlett-Packard’s share rose to 8.7 percent from 7.5 percent to give it fourth place. Apple Computer finished sixth domestically and seventh worldwide amid strong sales of its curvy iMacs and iBook laptops."

"During the past seven years, computers, high-speed communication systems, and computer software have become more powerful and more useful to people at home and work. Nearly half of all American households now use the Internet, with more than 700 new households being connected every hour. More than half of U.S. classrooms are connected to the Internet today, compared to less than three percent in 1993. IT allows Americans to shop, do homework, and get health care advice online, and it has enabled businesses of all sizes to join the international economy. Since 1995, more than a third of all U.S. economic growth has resulted from IT enterprises. Today, more than 13 million Americans hold IT-related jobs, and the rate of growth is six times as fast as overall job growth."

Mary Deibel, "High-Tech Homing Devices Worry Privacy Advocates," Scripps Howard News Service, January 1, 2000

"Meantime, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children says that its Web site and computer imaging technology have played a large part in raising the recovery rate for children to 90 percent, up from 66 percent in 1989."

"In the United Kingdom, 63 percent of children have a TV set of their own.... Of British children ages 6 to 17, 72 percent have a room they do not have to share with a sibling; 68 percent have their own music installation, 34 percent have an electronic games controller hooked up to the TV, 21 percent have a video and 12 percent have a PC.... Only one child in 100 can be classed as a real `screen addict,' a child that spends a worrying 7 hours or more watching TV or playing computer games.... They do watch a lot of TV, on average for two and a half hours a day, but they prefer playing with their friends.... One in three children continues watching TV after [9pm when the programs containing violence or sex start]. Some 28 percent of this group is between 6 and 8 years old."

"Around the world, more than 2,700 photographs are taken every second.... Vacation pictures take up 80 percent."

"Virtually 100 percent of Finnish young people aged 14 to 21 have mobile phones. What's more, research shows that half of their use is for SMS calls, short messages of up to 160 characters that can be typed on the keypad.... The average Finnish teenager swaps about a hundred SMS messages monthly and the volume is growing."

"In the United States, 40 percent of all purchases are made by or influenced by children."

"Last year the videogame industry raked in $6.3 billion (between software and hardware), just shy of the record $6.9 billion movies earned at the box office.... One out of every six U.S. households owns a [Sony] PlayStation. In fact, Sony's game division contributed 40 percent of the parent company's overall profits last year, more than movies, TV, music, or consumer electronics.... As recently as 1993 Sega had 50 percent of the market... Today Sega's market share is less than 1 percent."

"This year, for the first time, videogames will outperform the domestic box office of movies. Some selected titles with estimated production costs and gross:

				Movie	Videogame
"GoldenEye"				"GoldenEye" (Nintendo)
   Development Cost	$60 million	   $4 million
   Domestic Gross	$106 million	   $230 million
"Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me"	"Legend of Zelda (Nintendo)
   Development Cost	$33 million	   $6 million
   Domestic Gross	$201 million	   $205 million
"Wild Wild West"			"Tomb Raider 1, 2, and 3" (Eidos)
   Development Cost	$160 million	   $6 million
   Domestic Gross	$111 million	   $192 million

"Mobile phones are rapidly becoming the preferred means of personal communication, creating the world's largest consumer electronics industry. In 1997 more than 100 million mobile phones were sold worldwide."

[There have been] "56 million PlayStation units sold worldwide vs. 8.9 million Saturn and 24 million N64."

"In 1990, company purchases of high-tech equipment (computers, communication gear, instruments) was 20 percent of all business investment, which includes everything from office buildings to industrial machinery... By 1998, it was 40 percent. And over the past decade, the computer industry (including software) has generated about 1 million new jobs...

In 1989, an estimated 21 million personal computers were sold worldwide, about 9 million of them in the US... In 1998, worldwide PC sales totaled almost 93 million and US sales about 36 million. In 1990, about 15 percent of US households owned a computer. Now, that's 50 percent...

Consumers account for only about 30 percent of PC sales... Businesses, government and schools represent the rest. `You've reached saturation,' says [Fred] Hickey. `In many businesses, there's a one-to-one ratio of computers to people.'

Percentage of schools wired to the Internet
			1995	1996	1997
All schools:		50%	65%	78%
Elementary:		46	61	75
Secondary:		65	77	89
City:			47	64	74
Rural:			48	60	79
Less than 6% minority:	52	65	84
50% or more minority:	40	56	63

Computers per household:
USA:       1 /   3
Singapore: 1 /   3
Taiwan:    1 /  20
China:     1 / 100

"The [difference] lies in the distinct language patterns of the societies. In Singapore, English is used as the official language.... Taiwanese customers, however, generally speak Chinese only. Inputting Chinese characters with devices designed for Western languages is difficult."

About 42% of adults overall say there is a personal computer in their home. 74% of these have a modem, 65% have Internet access. Homes with a PC by household income:

Under $10,000:      5%
$10,000 - $14,999: 20%
$15,000 - $24,999: 26%
$25,000 - $34,999: 40%
$35,000 - $49,999: 55%
$50,000 - $74,999: 57%
$75,000 and up:    75%

"Thanks in part to yesterday's inventions, new technologies are reaching a quarter of the U.S. population faster than ever."

Date	Invention	Years Till Mass Use
1873	Electricity	46
1876	Telephone	35
1886	Gas Automobile	55
1906	Radio		22
1926	Television	26
1953	Microwave Oven	30
1975	PC		16
1983	Mobile Phone	13
1991	The Web		7

The United States spent $530 billion on education in the 1995-96 school year, counting everything from elementary to graduate school... There are 3.1 million teachers in the US... Between 1979 and 1989, average teachers' salaries (after inflation) rose 20 percent.

In Massachusetts, applicants for new teaching jobs are being tested for basic competence in reading, writing, and a subject area. 59 percent failed.

36 percent of freshmen in New York's university system, 48 percent in Kentucky's and 39 percent in Georgia's, needed remedial courses.

(p. 192): "A financial services firm's activities might rely nearly 100 percent on information, whereas a restaurant's dependence might be 5-30 percent. Across the entire U.S. economy, 58 percent of the total workforce (including government) deals with office work. It is also estimated that 60 percent of the U.S. GNP deals intensively with information. Across the industrial nations of the world, the situation is not much different, with the ration closer to one half."

(p. 240): "In the United States, Germany and Japan, computer hardware and software and the information processing that goes on within organizations make up roughly 10 percent of the GNP. In Bangladesh, the share is well below 0.1 percent--100 times smaller."

Poll about "Where do you get most of your news about current events?"

61%	Television
24%	Newspapers
 8%	Radio
 2%	Internet or other online services
 1%	Magazines

"In 1993, 60 percent of Americans over 18 'regularly' watched TV networks' nightly news programs; by 1998 this was 38 percent... In 1995, 4 percent of adults went online to get news once a week; now that's 20 percent... Between 1970 and 1997 the share of adults who read a daily paper slipped from 78 to 59 percent... In March, the online magazine Slate began charging $19.95 a year for what it had been giving away; estimated readership fell from more than 200,000 to less than 30,000."

"The average American child spends 900 hours a year in school--and 1,500 hours a year watching television."

"A 1997 poll of Internet business use by the American Management Association showed that respondents averaged 3.1 hours per week on total Internet use from the office--and 4.1 hours of business Internet use from home. When the Society for Human Resource Management surveyed human-resource professionals about Internet use last year, fewer than 1 percent said their company's productivity had decreased greatly. More than 45 percent said productivity had gone up."

"1996 Revenues from Consumer Books, in Millions:

$1220	Random House (incl. Knopf, Pantheon)
$ 911	Simon & Schuster (incl. Scribner)
$ 692	Pearson (Viking, Penguin, Putnam)
$ 670	Bertelsmann (Bantam, Doubleday, Dell)
$ 520	HarperCollins
$ 304	Time Warner (Warner, Little, Brown)
$ 264	Holtzbrinck (St. Martin's, FSG, Holt)
$ 158	Hearst (Wm. Morrow, Avon)

Total = $7.3 billion

"A Newsweek poll shows familiarity and optimism.... Overall, teens are upbeat about technology's impact on their lives..."

• 89% of teens use computers at least several times a week. Teens from lower-income homes use computers as often as kids from wealthier families, but get their access at school more than home. This suggests that wiring schools is an effective way to close the gap between the haves and have-nots. Teens from families earning less than $25,000 a year were twice as likely to say they never use a computer at home.
• 61% surf the net. Boys edge out girls in on-line experience (66 to 56 percent) and wealthier kids are more likely to have surfed.... Only 14 percent of those who've been online admitted to having seen or done something they `wouldn't want their parents to know about.'
• 92% think computers will improve their educational opportunities; almost as many think technology will create better jobs in the future and help us live longer, healthier lives. Optimism was more buoyant among frequent computer users.
• 28% believe that technology isn't helping--or, worse, actually harms--the environment...
• 71% want to talk to, rather than type into, their computers. Speech recognition was the No. 1 high-tech product that teens would like to see developed....
• 98% credit technology for making a positive difference in their lives. Boys were slightly more likely than girls to say technology makes their lives much better (57 to 46 percent)....

The southern city of Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, stands as the glittering tiara of the new India. Indians themselves own only 1.8 million installed personal computers--about a third the number in New York City."

"By a reasonable measure, information-related efforts now encompass well over half of the GNP, and the percentage seems to be rising. We all seem far busier on average than 30 or 40 years ago at the heyday of mass production, and getting busier still. While tools like personal computers seem to enhance 'personal productivity' tremendously, overall productivity as measured by conventional economics has grown more slowly in recent decades than it did years ago. Further, if this gigantic information-related effort is supposed to improve life, that improvement does not show up in conventional measures of the standard of living, which have been flat, at best, for most of the populace for more than two decades now."

"190,000 high-tech jobs are now vacant. The Department of Commerce reckons the nation will need a million more information-technology workers by the year 2005 than will be available. All this at a time when fewer students are graduating with college degrees in computer science and electrical engineering--24,200 in 1994, compared to 42,000 in 1986....

A typical programmer earns between $70,000 and $90,000 a year, with annual pay hikes trending toward 20 percent.... Signing bonuses ranging from $10,000 to $20,000 are not unusual."

"In the past decade ... the number of jobs requiring computer skills has increased from 25 percent of all jobs in 1983 to 47 percent in 1993. By 2000, ... 60 percent of the nation's jobs will demand these skills -- and pay an average of 10 to 15 percent more than jobs involving no computer work."

"A 1992 study of the 47 top-rated Nintendo games found that only seven did not have violence as their major theme, the covers of these games portray a total of 115 male and 9 female characters, and 13 of the 47 games contain scenarios with women kidnapped or having to be rescued.... The majority of designers are male...."

"The numbers of computers in schools is increasing rapidly... The number of computers is increasing at an annual rate of between 300,000 and 400,000 machines.... Between the 1983-1984 school year and the 1993-1994 school year, the ratio of students to computers improved from 125:1 to 14:1."

"As Intel's own Web site puts it, `Gartner Group has estimated an annual Total Cost of Ownership of $13,187 per year per Windows PC.' Total Cost of Ownership includes the cost of training, upgrading, and troubleshooting."

"More than 99 percent of this country's employers are small businesses, and they employ nearly 60 percent of the private sector workforce. Small businesses generate 54 percent of U.S. sales and 40 percent of the Gross Domestic Product, and they account for 42 percent of private sector business net worth."

"53 percent of small businesses plan to be selling on the Internet within five years."

"93 percent of small businesses believe that the most important use of a PC is to save time."

"In 1995, ... the average cost for graphic design services was $53.10 an hour."

"Already, one out of 10 small businesses advertises on the Internet, and the number is expected to triple before the end of this year. This is because Web advertising works: over two-thirds of Web advertisers studied by Forrester Research last fall said their advertising has been successful."

"Most Fortune 1000 companies are already networked (nearly 85 percent) and smaller organizations everywhere are starting to adopt networking as well (30 percent overall, up from 5 percent at the beginning of this decade)."

"PRETEENS LEAD KIDS' PC USE
Seventy-two percent of 8- to 12-year-olds reported spending time on a PC during the last 30 days, as opposed to 55% of 6- to7-year-olds and 67% of teenagers, according to the 1996 Roper Youth Report. And while preteen computer use is roughly equal for boys and girls, girls were more likely to use computers at school, while boys tended to use them at home. (Investor's Business Daily 18 Mar 97)"

"The number of U.S. homes with one or more personal computers increased by 16% [in 1995] to about 38 million households, up from 33 million in 1994 and 25 million in 1993.... Lower-income houses purchasing computers now represents 20% of all homes with personal computers."

"U.S. firms spend more than $250 billion annually acquiring software." Vijay Gurbaxani, "The New World of Information Technology Outsourcing", Communications of the ACM, vol. 39, no. 7, Jul, 1996, p. 45

The U.S. market for outsourcing major components of information technology now exceeds $10 billion annually and is growing at a rate of 16% a year.

One billion people will speak English by the year 2000 as a first, second or "foreign language," reports the British Council. English is the official or joint official language of more than 75 countries. Algeria recently dumped French in favor of English as the second language in schools. More than two-thirds of the world's scientists read English, the council adds, three-quarters of the world's mail is written in the language and 80 percent of the world's information stored on computers is in English.

As of July, 1996, 12.5 million US households were on-line, and 18.8 million households have CD-ROMS.

"... 125% annual growth in CD ROM sales, from 91.8 million units in 1994 to 206 million in 1995. CD ROM's 13% penetration into U.S. households outstripped online's 9% penetration in 1995."

The Software Publishers Association's fifth annual survey said the number of households with computers increased to 33.9 million from 32.6 million, while the percentage of homes with PCs remained at 34 percent. The survey of 630 random households found that 79 percent had machines compatible with computers made by International Business Machines Corp., while 16 percent had Apple Computer Inc. machines, the same as last year. Seventy percent of PC households reported owning a modem, of which 46 percent subscribed to an on-line service. Of all PCs purchased in 1995, 83 percent were equipped with CD-ROM drives, compared with 55 percent in 1994, the survey said.

"The U.S. home personal computer market is the largest in the world, holding a 55% share of the $24 billion-a-year global market for home PCs.... 37% of U.S. households have one or more PCs, including systems provided by employers or schools, compared with 28% in Germany; 24% in Britain; 15% in France; and less than 10% in Japan.... U.S. Consumers spend about 13 hours a week using home PCs; 80% of that time is work-related."

				    SW
		    Phone    MIPS   Profes-   Hardware	  IT 
	  Popula-   lines    per    sionals   production  spending
	   tion	    per 1000 1000   per 1000  1993	  as % of
Country	 (millions) people   people people    (US $mil.)  GDP
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Denmark	    5.1	    577	     343    7.52      166         1.5
Finland	    5.0	    542	     339    6.94      670	  1.1
Hong Kong   5.8	    448      159    NA	     2306	  1.5
Ireland	    3.5	    295      285    6.71     3729	  NA
Israel	    4.9	    343      171    7.54      464	  NA
New Zealand 3.4	    439      302    7.21       38	  2.7
Norway	    4.3	    515      357    7.40      335	  1.5
Singapore   2.8	    365      241    4.1     10933	  2.2
Sweden	    8.6	    690      307    7.51      832	  1.3
U.S.	    252.5   552      673    7.93    49380	  2.8
Japan	    124.0   461      199    7.88    50939	  1.6

Increase since 1978 in information technology capital investment per white collar worker: 10,000 percent.

Accompanying increase since 1978 in white collar productivity: 0 percent.

Trip Hawkins, chairman and chief executive of 3DO Co. (THDO), an interactive multimedia concern in Redwood City, Ca., said that last year the estimated 30 million [PC] households spent an average of about $25 on computer games. In contrast average expenditures on other forms of entertainment: video games, prerecorded music and movie video rentals, ranged from $150 to $200 per household per year, he says. ''The spending pattern indicates that U.S. households are primarily buying PCs for what they are - PCs- and not entertainment vehicles,'' he says.

"...the real cost of a computer is a user's time.... Hardware now costs nothing and software costs a lot. But the cost that's increased is that users are now the system managers, and that's costing a minimum of $50 billion a year to the 50 or 100 million computer users in lost time."

Some 12.8 million family households -- 38% of all families [in the US] with children under 18 -- now own a desktop PC.... Over eight in 10 families planning a PC purchase in the next year cite `children's educational use' as the reason for the purchase. Among PC owners, parents in nearly all (90 percent) ... households report their children actively using the PC -- usually at the expense of watching TV... Children use PCs an average of 5.5 hours per week and usage peeks in the early teen years."

For more information on this study, call The American Learning Household Survey, contact Data Simmons, FIND/SVP, (800)965-4636, dsimmons@findsvp.com.

Percent of Households with Telephones, Computers, and Modems

"In the world there are some 89,000 movie picture screens; there are 790 million TV households, there are 50 million paid subscribers, there are 315 million homes with videocassette recorders, who last year rented or bought 7.3 billion pre-recorded videocassettes. And last year alone, there were over 2,000 films that were produced, not to mention the many thousands of television shows."

"Black households have the lowest rate of computer ownership of American ethnic groups."

Source: 1994 figures, U.S. Dept. of Commerce:

39.0%  Asian or Pac. Islander
28.6%  White
20.7%  Amer. Indian, Aleut, Eskimo
13.1%  Hispanic
11.1%  Black

"An estimated 80 percent of all salaried workers will work at video display terminals by the year 2000."

What consumers spent in 1993:

• $13.2 billion Home movie videos
• $10.0 billion Recorded Music
• $ 5.2 billion Movies
• $ 5.0 billion Videogames
• $ 2.0 billion Computer Software

Top videogames can produce first-week sales that rival what giant movie hits take in when they open.

Videogame sales			Movie Openings
First week sales in millions	Biggest sales to date in millions
Mortal Kombat II    $50.00	The Lion King  		    $40.87
Donkey Kong Country $34.98	Interview with the Vampire  $36.39
				The Flintstones		    $29.69

• In the US, over 2,000 new specialty magazines debut each year.
• Worldwide, there are over 1900 computer specialty publications.
• Video games are now an $8 billion industry....larger than the movie box office.
• It took radio 11 years to penetrate 50% of US homes, and new media may take just as long, but last year, CD-ROM software was already a $500 million business.
• On-line services are a $9.6 billion business growing at 100% CGR.
• Americans own 149 million e-mail addresses, cellular phones and pagers.
• Americans left 12 trillion voice mail messages for each other last year.
• Another 10 million game machines were sold last year.
• 60% of our PC's are now attached to networks, an increase of 500% in 5 years.

• 1 in 3 USA households contains a PC (31%)
• about 23 million adults use a home computer everyday
• 28% of children use computer at home for educational purposes
• 46% of teens have a home computer
• 1 in 10 households has a modem-equipped computer
• 6% of households use their computer to go on-line

1985:	13.6%
1986:	16.6%
1987:	19.4%
1988:	22.4%
1989:	24.0%
1990:	25.4%
1991:	26.6%
1992:	29.6%
1993:	32.7%
-- Percent of households with televisions:	98%
-- Percent of households with VCRs:  		80%

• 70 million personal computers in US.
• "U.S. Department of Labor figures show that Repetitive Stress Injury now accounts for 60% of all job-related illnesses. Estimates of the annual cost to business reach $20 billion." (p. 90)
• "Computer use [is] projected to reach 75% of all workers by the year 2000"

• U.S. Financial Institutions transfer more than $1 trillion every day via computer.
• The Federal Reserve System handles more than 24,000 wire transfers every day.

"80% of all the computers used in the advertising and design and prepress and printing are Macs. 64% of Web sites were created on Macs. Apple has almost $2.5 billion worth of revenues from education. And that market is growing at 23% a year."

"This year, the installed base of Windows doubled to more than 60 million."

Nearly 150 million personal computers are working now, 9 out of 10 of them running Intel microprocessors.

• 20% of all Unix users are developers (writing code) (p.28)
• There are 25,000 to 30,000 applications for Windows (p.29)
• 50 million or so copies of Windows have been sold. (p.79)

DOS and Windows account for 75% of software on the market

• Disk drive density is improving at 60% per year, and you can now get 9 gigabyte drives.
• Processor speed is increasing by a factor of 2 every 18 months
• The Sony PlayStation today handles 320,000 shaded polygons/sec.
• By the year 2000, TV sets will have processors faster than today's fastest graphics workstations.

"Ericsson employs around 130,000 people, of which about one-fifth are involved in software development.... Furthermore, about 1,000 software development projects per year are started within Ericsson."

"The average budget to produce a game on Sega's Genesis on the '90s was about $200,000. For today's PlayStation and Nintendo 64, it's around $2 million. Many designers expect development costs for a PlayStation 2 game to jump to at least $4 million."

"Hello, may I speak to the code-cruncher of the house?" They may not use those words, but this summer, pollsters will be randomly dialing 10,000 homes as part of an unusual survey commissioned by Microsoft Corp. to aid its marketing efforts.

The calls instead will start out this way: "Hi, do you or someone in your household develop software using a macro language like Excel, a database or a programming language?" Says Jon Roskill, Microsoft's manager for the study: "If they go 'Huh?' we say, 'Thank you very much' and we go on." Two years ago, a similar study found 300 people, or 3%, said they had written software, but 70% of them did so for personal use. Extrapolated to the U.S. population, that left an estimated 2.4 million professional developers, prime targets for Microsoft's big programming-tools business.

Some estimates report that only slightly more than 30% of the code developed in application software development ever gets used as intended by end-users. The reason for this statistic may be a result of developers not understanding what their users need."

Japanese researchers found that 37% of software faults would have been avoided "by appropriate scheduling and placing no stress on the developers." Another 34% of those faults were attributed by the researchers to "human nature" rather than to technical difficulties. Adding these percentages together, the researchers conclude "71% of all faults are the responsibility of the project manager, the quality assurance manager, and the senior management" (in the sense that these faults arise from human-factors considerations).

"Employment growth in the software segment alone, which averaged 9.6% between 1987 and 1994, jumped 11.7% last year, and is expected to grow even faster this year.... Job growth in the U.S. economy as a whole this year is expected to amount to only 1.6%."

"In his book, The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer, Edward Yourdon claims it can take one to two years for the typical software engineer to become familiar and comfortable with a methodology [such as object-oriented programming]. ... our experience has been more like four to eight months."

David A. Kaplan, "Nothing by Net," Newsweek, Dec. 25, 1995, pp. 32-36

"The [original Mosaic] amounted to just 9,000 lines of code--compared, say, with Windows 95's 8 million."

"IS departments [are] flocking to Visual Basic, making it the most popular language tool since Cobol (see chart)."

Language	Installed Base
Cobol		2.5 million
Visual Basic	2   million
C++		1.2 million
Smalltalk	120,000

Number of new PhDs in Computer Science, from about 140 PhD-granting departments.

Year	#PhDs	% of depts. 
		reporting
93-94	1005	92
92-93	 969	94
91-92	1113	98
90-91	1073	98
89-90	 907	98

1994 graduates by rank of the department:

Dept		PhD	Ave per
		Prodn	Dept
CS rank 1-12	203	16.9
CS rank 13-24	124	10.3
CS rank 25-36	114	 9.5
CS rank < 36	492	 5.4
CE		 72	 7.2

All CS and CE  1005	 7.3

• Computer and information sciences:
  • 1982: 251
  • 1992: 772
• Mathematics
  • 1982: 721
  • 1992: 1082
• Engineering
  • 1982: 2621
  • 1992: 5488

1.9 million U.S. computer professionals

"Data Points", Newsweek, June 27, 2005, p. E2

"53% of computers sold in May 2005 were laptops, the first time that laptops have surpassed desktops in market share."

Rana Foroohar and B.J. Lee, "Masters of the Digital Age", Newsweek, October 18, 2004, pp. E10-4

"Samsung...[has] become the world's most profitable consumer-electronics company. Samsung leads the global market for color TVs, VCRs, liquid-crystal displays and digital memory devices. It's second to Nokia in cell phones, and catching up to Sony in DVD players...This year will likely be the first in which digital electronics - from high-definition TVs to smart phones - will outsell analog precursors...[Samsung] produces the largest variety [of cell phones]: 100 new models a year, versus Nokia's two dozen...[Samsung] is on pace to hit a record $12 billion profit this year, which would make it the second most profitable technology company after Microsoft...Today, nearly a quarter of Samsung's 88,000 employees are researchers...In 2002, Samsung introduced 30,000 new products - up from 18,000 two years before - with the same number of parts (67,000). The cost savings are huge."

N'Gai Croal, "Fall of the Video King", Newsweek, October 18, 2004, pp. E30-1

"Japanese publishers...share of the U.S. market has plunged to 29 percent in 2004, from 49 percent in 1998...The U.S. firm Electronic Arts now has nine of the top 20 best-selling games...gaming has become an $18-billion-a-year global business."

"Microsoft: ... But with 11 percent market share, it's the largest player in the packaged-software industry, which sells $175 billion globally each year."

"Already there's an estimated $30 million software market for children 3 and younger. It's only a small slice of the $500 million youth-software market. But the demand for baby titles--particularly for kids 1 ½ to 3-- is growing faster than any other software segment."

• cost of a custom remote-controlled security system: $50,000. 
• cost of satellite, high-speed DSL and standard phone access in every room: $20,000
• master lighting-control system commanding indoor and exterior lights for different moods: $40,000 - $65,000

"Between 1990 and 1999, here's what happened:

• the share of U.S. households with personal computers rose from 22 to 53 percent;
• annual U.S. shipments of personal computers increased from 9 million to 43 million;
• households with Internet access went from 0 to 38 percent;
• total global Web sites grew from 313,000 to 56 million;
• sales by U.S. software firms went from $63 billion to $141 billion."

"At 25 million units sold, one in four U.S. households now has a PlayStation. And what started out as child's play now attracts all ages -- 59 percent of console players are over 18."

"Sales [in the first quarter of 1999] grew at a healthy 19 percent annual rate. Worldwide, well over 100 million PCs will be sold this year. That means the world now buys almost as many PCs as color TVs."

"The Palm Pilot was released in 1996.... [Now there have been] 3 million units sold."

"3Com's Palm Pilot easily continued to dominate the field in 1998, garnering almost 80 percent of the market, in the face of a full assault from Microsoft and its fleet of palm-size devices...." Windows CE devices [account for] 15 percent of the market this year.

		   Myst		 Windows 95	`Jurassic Park'
Date Released:     Nov. 1993	 Aug. 1995	June 1993
Revenue:	   $143 million	 $544 million	$357 million
Earnings/Cost:	   191/1	 1.81/1		6/1
Months in top 10:  55		 22		4

"Sales off hand-held computers are expected to grow from 3 million units in 1997 to 13 million units by 2001... That kind of market potential is driving developers to build applications not only for personal use but also for business. Much of the development work is taking place on 3Com's Palm Computing platform, with over 1,000 applications and games so far."

"Independent software vendors today produce some 15,000 different shrink-wrapped software products for stand-alone computers."

• "Michael Dell 32, Mail order magician, His 16% stake in Dell Computer is worth more than $4 billion."
• "Jerry Yang 28, David Filo 31, Yahoo! indeed. Their stakes in the Internet firm are worth $191 million each."
• "Scott McNealy 42, With his Sun Microsystems going supernova, his stock's worth $324 millions."
• "Bill Gates 41, The Croesus of our age. With $38 billion, he's three times as rich as John D. Rockefeller was."

"Approximately 1.4 million handheld computers were shipped in the first half of 1997, compared to 1.6 million shipped in [all of] 1996 .... 3Com's Pilot accounted for 66 percent of sales while Windows CE-based computers represented 20 percent of sales."

DEC ships 300,000 Alpha chips a year, while Intel ships 65 million microprocessors.

Operating Systems	1996 Market Share
Microsoft (Windows and DOS)	87%
Apple	5.6%
Other	7.2%

Web Browsers	1996 Market Share
Microsoft Explorer	29.5%
Netscape	54.6%
Other	15.8%

Business Performance, 1996, in Billions
Company	Revenues	Market Value
General Motors	$158.0	$50.7
IBM	$75.9	$98.6
Hewlett Packard	$38.4	$67.6
Microsoft	$8.7	$164.5

The Software Publishers Association reported sales of $359.8 million for home education software in North America in the first half of 1996, while entertainment titles amounted to only $298.4 million. So home PCs are not just game machines."

"As more banks offer customers touch-tone phone and online computer payment of monthly bills and fax machines become the norm for paper correspondence, the amount of first-class mail continues to shrink dramatically--1996 volume was down 1.4% from 1995, which was 0.2% below that of the year before."

"The ten leading companies in software revenue last year were (in descending order): IBM, Microsoft, Hitachi, Computer Associates, Oracle, Fujitsu, SAP, Bull HN Information Systems, Digital Equipment Corporation, and Novell. And of the top thirty companies, 37% are in California, 13% in Massachusetts, 10% in Pennsylvania, 7% in New York, and 33% in other states, provinces, and countries."

"The 400 million credit records maintained by the three largest credit agencies, the 700 million annual drug prescription records, the 100 million computerized medical records, the 600 million personal records estimated to be owned by the 200 largest superbureaus, and the 5 billion records maintained (and often sold) by the federal government, as well as the billions of records maintained and stored by state and local governments, all have market value, demonstrated every day in the market."

"The information technology industry, which was nonexistent 50 years ago, has grown to be over 10% of the GNP and is responsible for over 5% of the total employment in the country."

"Sales of portables now account for roughly a quarter of the consumer computer market (up from 15 percent in 1990)."

"Personal-computer shipments in the U.S. will rise by a greater-than-expected 22% this year, as Compaq Computer Corp. maintains a slight lead over rivals Packard Bell Electronics Inc. and Apple Computer Inc. as the nation's largest PC maker."

"According to the preliminary estimates by International Data Corp., a market research firm based in Framingham, Mass., this year's projected volume of 22.9 million PC shipments represents an acceleration from the 20% growth rate in 1994."

                     PC Market Share
  Based on estimated U.S. PC shipments, in thousands of units
                                          MARKET
 COMPANY            1995        1994       SHARE
 Compaq            2,669       2,198       11.7%
 Packard Bell      2,656       2,125       11.6
 Apple             2,636       2,150       11.5
 IBM               1,885       1,640        8.2
 Gateway 2000      1,175         960        5.1
 Dell              1,145         788        5.0
 Hewlett-Packard   1,023         445        4.5
 
 Source: International Data Corp.  

12 million copies of Microsoft Office have been distributed worldwide as of Dec, 1995.

Windows units licensed to new users:
1993	15 million
1994	30 million
1995	40 million

"More than 2,000 new CD-ROM titles are expected to be on the market by the end of the year. About 60 will succeed. ... On average, producing a CD-ROM costs about $500,000."

"... 16 million personal computers will be sold in the United States in 1995 and a further 34 million units worldwide. Workstation sales will add a million units more. To put this in perspective, PCs' and automobiles' yearly unit sales are now in the same ball park. By the end of 1994, the installed base of PCs exceeded 80 million units in the United States and 200 million worldwide (0.3 and 0.035 unit per person respectively). Intel Corp. chairman Andy Grove predicts that by the end of this decade, PC sales will surpass 100 million units worldwide--more than sales of cars or TVs."

• Microsoft gets 50% of its revenue from products released in the last 12 months.
• Microsoft releases 50 new products a year.
• Microsoft upgrades products every 18 to 24 months to maintain the revenue stream.
• In an upgrade, 2/3 of the bits are new code, including 1/4 of the underlying software.
• Microsoft is now the largest producer of encyclopedias in the world
• Microsoft's product mix is now:
  • 49% Desktop applications
  • 26% Operating systems
  • 5% Developer tools
  • 11% Consumer games and information products, and this is the fastest growing sector

		1992
		Revenue		Market	Revenue		Market
Segment		$ (millions)	Share(%)  $(millions)	Share(%)
Supercomputer	  2,062.10	  1.8	  2,198.30	  1.8
Mainframe	 23,376.40	 20.6	 21,151.10	 17.5
Midrange 	 21,809.80 	 19.2	 21,000.50	 17.4
Workstation	  9,327.90	  8.2	 10,127.50	  8.4
PCs		 57,045.20	 50.2	 66,265.00	 54.9
Total		113,621.40	100.0	120,742.40	100.0

	1992	1991	  1990		Change	Market
Company	Rev.	Rev.	  Revenue	91-92	Share (%)
IBM	8,190.0	9,100.0	  10,623.0	-10.0%	29.1%
Fujitsu	4,431.3	4,446.1	   2,843.1	 -0.3%	15.7%
Hitachi	4,043.5	3,501.9	   3,414.2	 15.5%	14.4%
NEC	3,079.0	3,063.5	   2,593.6	  0.5%	10.9%
Unisys	1,966.0	  850.0	   1,016.0	131.3%	 7.0%
Amdahl	1,489.6	  987.2	   1,360.0	 50.9%	 5.3%
Nihon	1,029.3	  965.4	     951.0	  6.6%	 3.7%
Siemens	  962.2	  964.4	   1,018.5	 -0.2%	 3.4%
Gr.Bull	  857.3	  830.2	     825.4	  3.3%	 3.0%
Cray	  550.5	  582.0	     590.2	 -5.4%	 2.0%

	 1992		1991	1990	91-92	Market
Company	 Revenue	Revenue Revenue	Change	Share (%)
IBM	 7,654.5	8,505.0	9,644.0	-10.0%	17.2%
Apple	 5,412.0	4,900.0	3,845.8	 10.4%	12.2%
Compaq	 4,100.0	3,271.4	3,598.0	 25.3% 	 9.2%
NEC	 3,986.8	4,135.8	3,211.1	 -3.6%	 9.0%
Fujitsu	 2,618.5	2,319.7	1,419.6	 12.9%	 5.9%
Toshiba	 1,949.4	2,093.5	1,953.7	 -6.9%	 4.4%
Dell	 1,812.5	  667.4	  n/a	171.6%	 4.1%
Olivetti 1,348.7	1,586.1	1,791.7	-15.0%	 3.0%
AST	 1,140.5	  800.7	  n/a	 42.4%	 2.6%
Gateway	 1,107.1	  627.0	  n/a	 76.6%	 2.5%

	1992	1992	1993	1993
	Revenue	Market	Revenue	Market
Company	$mil	Share 	$mil	Share(%)
IBM	 7,448	 13.1%	 9,015	 13.6
Apple	 6,048	 10.6%	 7,267	 11.0
Compaq	 3,478 	  6.1%	 6,603	 10.0
NEC	 2,824	  5.0%	 3,795	  5.7
Dell	 1,769	  3.1%	 2,532	  3.8
Others	35,478	 62.1%	37,053	 55.9
Total	57,045	100.0%	66,265	100.0

	1992	1991	1990	91-92	Market
Company	Revenue	Revenue	Revenue	Change	Share (%)
Sun	2,394.0	2,455.3	1,934.0	 -2.5%	17.4%
IBM	1,890.0	1,400.0	1,000.0	 35.0%	13.7%
HP	1,530.0	1,055.0	  920.0	 45.0%	11.1%
Fujitsu	1,510.7	1,353.2	  865.3	 11.6%	11.0%
Digital	1,120.0	1,250.0	1,250.0	-10.4%	 8.1%
Matsush	1,112.4	1,013.8	  848.1	  9.7%	 8.1%
SGI	  730.0	  550.0	  414.6  32.7%	 5.3%
Unisys	  650.4	  100.0	  n/a	550.4%	 4.7%
Intergr	  615.5	  616.0	  344.7	 -0.1%	 4.5%
Siemens   384.9	  211.0	  n/a	 82.4%	 2.8%

	1992	1992	1993	  1993
	Revenue	Market	Revenue	  Market
Company	$mil	Share%	$mil	  Share(%)
Sun	2,991.3	 32.1	 3,220.6  31.8
HP	1,753.7	 18.8	 2,289.6  22.6
IBM	1,516.7	 16.3	 1,470.3  14.5
Digital	  982.4	 10.5	   970.8   9.6
SGI	  675.1	 7.2	   936.3   9.2
Others	1,408.7	 15.1	 1,240.0  12.3
Total	9,327.9	100.0	10,127.5 100.0

	1992		1991		1990	91-92	Market
Company	Revenue		Revenue		Revenue	Change	Share (%)
IBM	11,365.9	10,524.0	9,952.0	  8.0%	31.9%
Fujitsu	 3,524.9	 2,513.0	1,607.0	 40.3%	 9.9%
Micrsft	 2,960.2	 2,045.9	1,323.0	 44.7%	 8.3%
NEC	 1,840.3	 1,761.5	1,358.5	  4.5%	 5.2%
Comp As	 1,770.8	 1,437.8	1,310.7	 23.2%	 5.0%
Siemens	 1,058.4	   964.4	  925.9	  9.7%	 3.0%
Novell	   988.6	   632.6	  n/a	 56.3%	 2.8%
Hitachi	   982.5	   959.1	  798.1	  2.4%	 2.8%
Lotus	   810.1	   828.9	  642.2	 -2.3%	 2.3%
Digital	   800.0	   796.0	  810.0	  0.5%	 2.2%
Oracle	   782.0	 1,085.0	1,002.0	-27.9%	 2.2%

	1992	 1991		91-92	Market
Company	Revenue	 Revenue	Change	Share (%)
IBM	7,948.6	10,278.0	-22.7%	12.6%
HP	4,590.0	 4,370.0	  5.0%	 7.3%
Canon	3,892.8	 3,139.0	 24.0%	 6.2%
Hitachi	3,401.0	 3,092.9	 10.0%	 5.4%
Fujitsu	3,122.0	 2,996.3	  4.2%	 4.9%
Seagate	3,079.4	 2,668.7	 15.4%	 4.9%
Digital	3,000.0	 2,900.0	  3.4%	 4.8%
Xerox	2,708.0	 1,200.0	125.7%	 4.3%
AT&T	2,283.2	 2,100.0	  8.7%	 3.6%
Conner	2,240.0	 1,590.0	 40.9%	 3.6%

	1992	1991	1990	91-92	Market
Company	Revenue	Revenue	Revenue	Change	Share (%) 
AT&T	3,315.0	1,790.0	1,465.0	85.2%	19.5%
N. Tele	2,300.0	1,460.0	1,220.0	57.5%	13.5%
IBM	2,200.0	2,000.0	2,950.0	10.0%	12.9%
NTT	1,871.7	1,495.4	1,230.3	25.2%	11.0%
Matsush	1,262.3	1,267.2	1,060.1	-0.4%	 7.4%
Ricoh	  956.1	  892.2	  837.4	 7.2%	 5.6%
Motorol	  745	  n/a	  n/a	 n/a	 4.4%
Racal	  690.7	  679.0	  625.2	 1.7%	 4.1%
Mitsubi	  647.3	  550.9	  492.0	17.5%	 3.8%
HP	  630	  450	  n/a	40.0%	 3.7%

	1992	1991	1990	91-92	Market
Company	Revenue	Revenue	Revenue	Change	Share (%) 
IBM	6,410.0	2,018.0	1,500.0	217.6%	13.3%
EDS	4,272.6	3,666.1	2,870.0	 16.5%	 8.9%
CSC	2,474.4	1,944.7	1,679.3	 27.2%	 5.1%
Anderso	2,445.0	2,083.0	1,670.2	 17.4%	 5.1%
ADP	2,075.0	1,810.0	1,736.0	 14.6%	 4.3%
Fujitsu	1,913.5	1,546.5	  988.9	 23.7%	 4.0%
Cap Gem	1,892.5	1,462.1	1,465.9	 29.4%	 3.9%
TRW	1,800.0	1,839.0	1,739.0	 -2.1%	 3.7%
Digital	1,570.3	1,570.3	1,162.3	  0.0%	 3.3%
Unisys	1,336.0	  600.0	  n/a	122.7%	 2.8%
NTT	1,247.8	  996.9	  883.7	 25.2%	 2.6%

Number of units
	   sales	installed base
1993:	   65,000	   65,000
1994:	  150,000	  215,000
1995:	  330,000	  545,000
1996:	  750,000	1,300,000
1997:	1,400,000	2,400,000
1998:	2,300,000	4,400,000

Jonathan Alter, "Monkey See, Monkey Do", Newsweek, August 15, 2005, p. 27

"One of the reasons we have fewer science majors is the pernicious right-wing notion that conventional biology is vaguely atheistic...Bush's policy of politicizing science - retreating from the field of facts and evidence on everything from evolution to global warming to the number of cell lines available to justify his 2001 stem-cell compromise - will eventually wreak havoc with his legacy."

In tracking Microsoft Word use by 16 people (Version 6 for the Mac), of the 642 commands available, just 20 commands accounted for 90% of use. The average person used only 57 commands in six months, and all of the users together used only 152 commands in 18 months.

In 1978, there were approximately 170 programming languages in use in the United States. By 1993, approximately 1000 languages had been implemented since the beginning of the computer field, with an estimated 700 of them being dead. Major languages in 1993: Ada, APT, C, C++, Cobol, Common Lisp, Fortran, Pascal, Prolog, Smalltalk. Cult languages: APL, Forth, Mumps. Other languages: GPSS, ICON, Macsyma, Mathmatica, PL/1, Simula, SIMSCRIPT. Numerous application-oriented languages: ATLAS (test), KAREL (robotics), OPS5 (expert systems), PILOT (CAI), Strudl (civil eng.), VHDL (hardware design).

"Today, the economic benefits of all these [computer] innovations account for 10 percent of the world's industrial economies, nearly $2 trillion a year worldwide. Not a bad return--100,000 percent--on the $1 billion (in today's dollars) that ARPA spent on computer research during its early years to fund "half" of these innovations!"

More than 6 million students attend the 2,819 four-year institutions full-time, and 2.6 million more attend part time. One in four freshmen does not return as a sophomore. Half who matriculate do not graduate even in five years. Still, colleges are churning out more graduates than the job market really requires....

The average student does 29 hours of schoolwork a week, down from 60 hours in the early 1960s....

In the Cal State system, which has 344,000 students, almost half the freshmen need remedial work in math or English or both.

Last year, Californians passed Proposition 209, barring the use of race and ethnicity as determinants of college admissions... At Berkeley, blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans, who were 23.1 percent of 1997 admissions, are 10.4 percent of 1998 admissions. At UCLA the decline was from 19.8 percent to 12.7 percent."

"There are 154 Computer Science and Engineering departments in the U.S. that grant Ph.D. degrees and several times that number that grant BS degrees."

"Department of Defense support of research at universities ... supports over 75 percent of all electrical engineering research on our campuses, and it accounts for approximately 50 of research in other critical fields such as mechanical engineering, computer science, materials science and engineering."

In 1993-1994, the following estimates of the percentages of university funding obtained from DOD were released by the government:

• 50% Math and Computer Science
• 42% Engineering Sciences
• 53% Electrical Engineering

Nearly fifty percent of current graduate student support in computer science comes from DoD Funding.

John D. Sparks and Guilbert Gates, "The Power Game", Newsweek, December 22, 2003, p. E17.

"The Arab World" Newsweek, October 15, 2001, p. 37.

"Up to 37 percent of all physicians now have some kind of Web presence, however rudimentary. And 25 percent of Net-connected doctors use e-mail to communicate with patients."

"34% of internal business emails are unsolicited messages. 24% of employees spend more than one hour managing their e-mail. Only 27% of e-mail requires worker's immediate attention."

"Consider some indicators of the Internet economy:

• In 2000, online retail sales (dominated by computers, software, books, clothes) totaled $25.8 billion, says the Commerce Department. This was 0.8 percent of total retail sales of $3.232 trillion.
• Internet advertising has stagnated. In the third quarter of 2000, it was $1.99 billion, down from $2.1 billion in the second quarter... Estimated at $8 billion to $9 billion for the year, it would be less than 4 percent of all advertising.
• Though rising rapidly, online airline bookings represent only about 9 percent of all reservations....
• Online stock accounts have increased dramatically.... The New York Stock Exchange estimates that online accounts rose from 4 million in 1997 to 18 million in 2000, while traditional accounts declined from 61 million to 60 million."

"Domestic online-retail sales neared $12 billion in 2000, up as much as 66 percent from 1999."

"Jared Spool reports that in usability testing conducted at User Interface Engineering, users only achieve their self-selected goals 42% of the time. A particularly worrying aspect of this figure is that it has not changed significantly since they started collecting data in 1996. The situation is even worse in UIE's studies of web purchasing, with only 35% of sales succeeding. UIE have found and classified over 250 obstacles to success in this area."

"Web Increasingly World Wide," InternetNews, January 29, 2001

"A new WebSideStory survey indicates that 54.95 percent of Web users are not Americans, with 5.6 percent in Germany, 5 percent in Canada, 4.6 percent in South Korea, and 4.3 percent in Japan."

"More boys than girls use the Net, and the disparity is likely to continue:

What teens do online. Girls use it more for homework and chat; boys focus on entertainment:

Teen Trivia:

• Teens average only about 42% as much time online as grownups.
• But 77% of teens use the Net, compared with only 27% of adults.
• Teens make up 12% of Net users, but only 6% of the population.
• 81% of preteens say their parents know where they go online.

Girls send out twice as many messages per day as boys, the numbers both groups receive are similar: Preteen (age 8-12) email messages per day: Sent: girls 1.4, boys 0.7. Receive: Girls 4.0, boys 3.6.

Racial groups using the Internet, in Percent:

1998: Blacks 23%, whites 26%. 2000: Blacks 42%, whites 50%.

"By the end of this year, only 8 percent of mobile phones in the United States will have Internet access; of those, just 2 percent will be subscribed to the Internet."

"Studies show that 94 percent of high-school seniors have Internet access."

"A single web site called mail.com filled 28 terabytes of storage in 45 days earlier this year--equal to the total monthly traffic on the internet four years ago."

• Among kids 6 to 11, Internet use is split evenly between boys and girls.
• 95% of schools had Internet access and 63% of public-school classrooms were wired.

"There are about 8.1 million Web domain names registered."

"About 90 million Net users have registered to use AOL's version of IM."

"44% of all domestic mail sent in 1998 was junk, or 87 million pieces. Last year Americans bought $230 billion worth of goods and services as a result of marketing phone calls."

"AT&T WorldNet says it rejects 10 million to 12 million e-mails a day because the addresses don't match real users'--a sure sign that spammers are at work. AOL estimates that 30 percent of the e-mail it delivers to its 22 million users is unsolicited bulk messages."

• There are 56 countries on the Net, and 259 million users.
• Americans account for 59 percent of the world's electronic mailboxes, 43 percent of Internet users and 54 percent of on-line buyers.
• Percent of adults who have bought online: US: 31%; Sweden: 21%, Switzerland: 19%; Canada: 18%; Australia: 14%; Germany: 14%; Japan: 13%.
• Number of users: US: 110,825,000; Japan: 18,156,000; Britain: 13,975,000.
• Leading e-tailer among home users in March, ranked by the number of buyers: Amazon.com: 1,101,000 buyers, percent of audience reached= 21.9%.
• "67 percent of Americans 18 to 24 live in households that use the Internet to gather key information"
• "59 percent of young American adults say they get more useful information from the Internet than from newspapers."

The number of Internet users worldwide will shoot up from 300 million today to one billion by 2005, according to a $1 million study spanning 34 countries carried out by the Angus Reid Group, which operates out of Toronto. The study finds that U.S. and Canadian citizens lead the world in Internet usage, but European and Japanese users are the most likely to use Web-enabled wireless devices. As many as 150 million people are poised to connect to the Internet this year, the survey finds. However, worldwide growth patterns of Internet usage suggest that only a few countries will experience a real boom in Internet use. Ownership of home computers and interest in the Internet is lowest among Eastern and Southern Europeans, the study finds. "Wireless Web access on cell phones and palmtops and public access to the Web in cafes and kiosks must play a greater role" in bridging the digital divide, Angus Reid says. Per-minute phone charges are driving the use of wireless devices in Europe and Asia. Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, and Australia approach the U.S. and Canada in terms of being Internet-savvy. A greater percentage of Northern Europeans than Southern Europeans use the Internet. About 59 percent of Americans have Internet access, followed by 56 percent of Canadians, and 53 percent of Swedes. Germany has 18 million Internet users--good for third place in Europe--followed by 14 million in the United Kingdom.

"Retail e-commerce is puny. In 1999 it amounted to less than 0.5 percent of U.S. consumer spending. Ditto for advertising. In 1999 Internet ads amounted to $1.8 billion out of total U.S. advertising of $215 billion."

"90 percent of the nation's workers admit to surfing recreational sites during office hours. And 84 percent of workers say they send personal e-mail from work.... Nearly one third of American worker's time on the Net is spent cheating the boss out of real work, double last year's rate of on-the-job recreational surfing... More than half of American workers cybershop on company time.... On EIN five online game players logs on from work... [This all costs] corporate America more than $1 billion a year in wasted computer resources."

"More than two thirds of U.S. companies engage in electronic surveillance of their employees... The biggest growth is in cybersnooping, with 27 percent of companies reviewing e-mail, up from 15 percent two years ago, and 21 percent going over computer files, up from 13 percent."

"The UN's 1999 Human Development Report revealed that 88 percent of the world's Internet users are in the wealthy, developed nations.... 62 percent of U.S. children in the 8-to-15-year-old age group are now going online."

"Worldwide there are almost 200 million people on the Internet. In the United States alone, 80 million... A third of wired Americans now do at least some of their shopping on the Net... By 2003 more than 500 million people will be surfing the Web.... Americans with Net access spend an average of 8.8 hours a week online. News sites are the most popular; then travel, weather, music and technology.... Half of all adults now have access to the Internet either at home or at work... By the end of last year, more than 36 million Americans were getting news at least once a week from the Internet.... 46% of Americans send or receive e-mail every day. In addition, as many as 476 million instant messages are sent daily by AOL's 43 million registered users.... Worldwide, 225 million people can send and receive e-mail.... "Adult" sites were a $1 billion industry in 1998.... More than half the requests on search engines are "adult-oriented" .... 25 percent of teens in a recent survey ... said they had visited X-rated sites.... 51 percent of American classrooms had Internet connections last year."

Number of daily office communications by:
Telephone:	52
E-mail:		36
Voice Mail:	23
Postal Mail:	18
Interoffice:	18
Fax:		14
Pager:		8
Cell Phone:	4

"The Web now contains some 1.2 billion pages and roughly doubles in size each year ... [which works out to] about 38 pages per second.... Everyone agrees that search engines are necessary, but one study has shown that seven of 10 Internet users are dissatisfied with them.... `All the Web' [is] currently the largest index at 200 million pages.... Yahoo employs some 150 editors and Web surfers to create what it calls a `directory,' which categorizes a total of 1.2 million links to Web pages.... Less than 6 percent of surfers manage to use Boolean search terms, which are the `and' and `or,' and plus and minus signs that correspond to the way a computer filters data."

"AOL says its system conveys 760 million messages a day; the U.S. Postal Service averages only half that many letters."

There are an estimated 800 million pages on the Web:

"Norwegian company Fast Search & Transfer ASA took the wraps off of "The World's Biggest Search Engine," which scans 200 million URLs, or a quarter of the Web's estimated 800 million pages."

"China already has more than a million Internet users, and Japan has crossed the 10 million user mark... There are now an estimated 500,000 Internet users in India."

Although computers are becoming increasingly prevalent, Internet users are divided by race and income level, according to a recent Commerce Department study. Rather than reflecting society as a whole, the Internet is largely used by whites with incomes of $75,000 and above. Households with annual incomes of $75,000 and above are more than 20 times more likely to have Internet access than homes at the lowest income levels. Meanwhile, households that identify themselves as black and Hispanic are just 40 percent as likely as white households to have Internet access. Though all households are gaining Internet access at a growing rate, the divide between white households and black and Hispanic households has increased more than 6 percent since last year. Among families earning between $15,000 and $35,000 annually, more than a third of white families owned computers, while just one in five black families did.

This year, 10 percent of North American households are expected to make online purchases, twice the number who shopped in 1997."

"More than 9.8 million children are using the Internet, a number projected to triple in the next four years... In a recent poll by CNN and USA Today, 28 percent of teens said they could live without their TV, but only 23 percent said they could get by without a computer."

The Internet is growing so fast that traffic is doubling every 100 days... An estimated 62 million Americans now use the Internet... The Commerce Department said 10 million people across the United States and Canada made purchases on the WWW by the end of 1997... On-line bookings in the travel industry alone ... was $1 billion last year.

• Radio existed for 38 years before it had 50 million listeners.
• Television took 13 years to get 50 million viewers.
• The Web reached 50 million U.S. users in just 4 years

• There are 1.85 million adults in the Pittsburgh metropolitan region
• About 700,000 adults own a home computer
• About 500,000 adults use computers to access online services or the Internet
• Pittsburgh Internet users spend a median of 2 hours and 58 minutes a week on line
• 31% of all males and 24% of all females in the Pittsburgh region use Internet or on-line services.
• By age group:
  • 18-24: 56%
  • 25-34: 39%
  • 35-54: 33%
  • 55 or older: 7%
• Where they access from:
  • 50% at home
  • 39% at work
  • 31% elsewhere

"According to a study by the Commerce Department, Internet traffic is doubling every hundred days, more than 100 million people are now online, and electronic commerce should hit the $300 billion mark by the year 2002. The report points out that the Internet took a mere four years to reach 50 million people, while the same feat took radio and television 30 and 13 years, respectively....

America Online recently surpassed the 12 million member mark..."

"Berners-Lee ... hoped the ratio of active to passive would be higher. It irks him that most Website-editing software is so cumbersome... You chisel your text in granite and then upload the slab, after which changes are difficult. "The Web," he complains, "is this thing you read," but if you want to write, "you have to go through this procedure." ... To see how different things might have been, you have to watch him gleefully wield his original browswer--a browser and editor."

Jeff Lawhorn of Software Design Associates said that ½ to 3/4 of all spam email has forged reply addresses, estimating that the spam volume is now up to 1 billion messages a year.

NIELSEN PEGS INTERNET USERS AT 58 MILLION.
A new survey by Nielsen Media Research in cooperation with CommerceNet, based on interviews with more than 9,000 people, indicates that some 58 million adults in the U.S. and Canada are now online. This is the largest number estimate so far of adult Internet usage, and indicates a 15% increase over the 51 million estimated by Nielsen six months ago. Several other market research firms, using older data, have put the number at 35 million to 45 million adult users in the U.S. alone. In addition to overall user numbers, the Nielsen survey indicates that the number of people who've bought something over the Internet has increased 50% in the past six months, to nearly 10 million. More than half the respondents said they'd been online within 24 hours of the interview, and about 20% to 25% of Web users said they go online every day.

• "9.4 million American kids currently online."
• "Nearly one third of all wired Americans accessed adult content in May".
• Usenet is a collection of 40,000 bulletin boards
• On American Online there are more than 14,000 chat rooms active on any given night.
• "And if pornography, pedophiles and pitchmen aren't bad enough, says MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, there's another threat to kids: misinformation.... The Net is packed with lies, inaccuracies and hoaxes."

More than 90% of the content of the WWW is in English, and a similarly high proportion is Euro-American related content.

"French Internet users are estimated at less than ½ million subscribers, compared to nearly 1 million in both the UK and Germany. This trend will be accentuated by another scheduled tariff change in October, 1997 [in France]."

"Some of the Internet's top demographers have banded together to form a clearinghouse for Net stats. Hoping to create a one-stop shop for accurate and consistent data, the new Survey Working Group will coordinate existing statistics about the Net and its users, and will make those numbers available on the Web." Click Here

Two recent findings by SWG members: men outnumber women 3 to 2 on the Internet, (not 9 to 1, as previously thought), and the number of computers hooked to the global network has doubled each year since 1988."

The number of personal computers connected to the Internet will rise 71 percent this year to 82 million, driven by demand by businesses to stay in touch with their customers, a report by a market researcher said Wednesday.

The rush to connect to the global computer network also will generate $12.2 billion in software and service sales this year, up 60 percent from last year, the report from Dataquest said.

Until now, most of the Internet's growth has come from consumers plugging in through online services. Now, companies are tweaking their internal corporate computer networks so that they can communicate through the Internet with the networks of their customers.

By 2001, 268 million computers will be connected to the Internet, generating $32.2 billion in revenue for the software and computer services industries, Dataquest said.

"College students are some of the most wired people in the country... 94 percent of students have access to the web, and 56 percent had looked for a job online."

The number of online households worldwide will rise from 23.4 million in 1996 to 66.6 million in 2000, according to WORLD ONLINE MARKETS, a new market study by Jupiter Communications. Increased PC penetration, Telco deregulation, indigenous content development, and deployment of integrated services digital network (ISDN) in Europe's and Asia's most advanced online markets will be among the key factors driving this growth. This substantial growth in Europe and Asia/Pacific Rim will make the Internet a more truly global phenomenon. Jupiter says the U.S. will continue to lead in online households with 36 million in the year 2000, but its share of the total world market will drop from 62.8 percent in 1996 to 54.1 percent in 2000.

"The Net supported an estimated $200 million in commerce last year. Five years from now, that is going to look like pocket change."

"...nine out of ten Americans have yet to log on."

"If you look at the numbers they're quoting, with the Web doubling every 53 days, that's biological growth, like a red tide or population of lemmings," says Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired.

"...There's a raging controversy over exactly how many people regularly use the Net. A recent Nielsen survey pegged the number at an impressive 24 million North Americans."

The number of sites using the Internet for product transactions will increase from 14% of the survey base in 1995 to 34% in 1996 and 44% in the next three to five years.... The number of users who have access to the Internet within companies is growing at a rate of 10% every six months. 58% of surveyed users will have Internet access within the next three to five years."

"For the last five years, the number of machines on the network has been rising between five and 10 times faster than the number of transistors on a chip. With 1,300 miles of fiber-optic lines being laid every day in the U.S., bandwidth is sure to rise even faster than the number of networked computers."

"The Netscape browser for the WWW increased its market share from 0.1% to 64% during the four-month period from August to December 1994 (and the previous market leader, Mosaic, dropped from 73% to 21% in the same period), and the usage of the Lycos search server increased at an annualized rate of 130 million percent during the fall of 1994.

There are 32 million people on the Internet and this number has increased by 80% during the last year, with 1 million new hosts added during the first six months of 1994.

Traffic on the Internet has increased from 7.6 terabytes per month to 12.5 terabytes per month over the past year.

• p.22: Internet connects 2 million computers and 20 million users
• 7 million people participate in newsgroups.
• 40,000 messages are posted each day.
• The typical Usenet user subscribes to 10 groups.
• 2,000 newsgroups are distributed globally.
• p. 28: 300 active MUDs with 20,000 participants worldwide

Total U.S. retail sales were $1.5 trillion in 1993. Of that, $53 billion was catalog sales, $2.5 billion TV shopping, and $200 million on-line shopping on the Internet, CompuServe and other services. Forrester Research predicts that on-line shopping will grow to $4.8 billion by 1998.

• 20 million Internet users
• 4 million prodigy users
• 0.5 million Lotus Notes users
• 10,000 WW Web hosts

• The LambdaMOO MUD -- Multi-user dungeon (or domain), Object-Oriented, has about 8,500 members.
• There are usually about 200 people connected to LambdaMOO at any time.
• Some spend up to 20 hours at a time connected.
• (You can connect to LambdaMOO by telnet to lambda.parc.xerox.com 8888, connect as Guest)
• There are about 500 other MUDs on the Internet.

"It often takes 6-12 months to become highly productive with a GUI framework like MFC or MacApp.... Typically, hands-on mentoring and training courses are required."

The lack of attention to good software design is costing corporations $80 billion dollars a year, according to the Standish Group. Research by Professor Thomas K. Landauer suggests that the quality of software may be depressing national growth by 3-4%. And, if we care, it is making millions of people miserable.

The Gartner Group has characterized the state of software development as chaos. 25% of software development efforts fail outright. Another 60% produce a sub-standard product. In what other industry would we tolerate such inefficiency? Imagine if 25% of all bridges fell down or 25% of airplanes crashed.

"Studies have shown that usability is the characteristic most often identified with quality in a survey of 500 business computer users. In addition, surveys of I/S organizations emphasize usability when making their software purchase decisions. Usability is equal to reliability and performance as the most often identified characteristics that affect end-user satisfaction. And, if that isn't enough, usability accounts for 56% of the write-in comments across all major product characteristics evaluated in satisfaction surveys.... Usability is the most important factor in the Japanese software market, even more so than in the U.S."

"... One third of all [software] projects fail.... Top 5 Causes of Failure: Lack of user input, Lack of executive support, Incomplete requirements and specifications, Changing requirements, Technologically inept."

In a survey of 647 college instructors teaching systems analysis and design, "human factors considerations" and "prototyping" were ranked 5th and 6th in course emphasis.

"In a recent survey of CACM readers, over 44% (equivalent to over 35,000 ACM members) of the respondents said that they use HCI issues in their work."

Usability specialists find 130% more problems (more than twice as many) as regular developers.

According to the survey of Netnews readers, comp.human-factors has 92,000 readers. This is an estimate of the number of people who has the group marked as active in their .newsrc files or equivalent.

• All interface development technology for 1993 was $133 million (p. 19) which is a 64% increase over 1992.
• Total X Interface Development Technology Market, 1993 $1.2 billion (seems to include X terminals) (p. 19)
• Of the $133 million worldwide market for IDT technology, $63.6 (48%) is North America, $53.3 (40%) is Europe, and $16.1 (12%) is the rest of the world. (p. 19)

Approximately 1.5 million computer users, on 200 different hardware and operating system combinations, benefit from a Motif user interface ... and we estimate that over 70 percent of the leading corporations of the world are delivering software solutions using the Motif interface, and nearly 100 percent are using them.

Larry Copeland, "States to drivers: Hang up, look out", USA Today, June 2, 2005, p. 1A

"The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that distracted driving is a factor in 25% of all traffic accidents reported to police...NHTSA says 8% of drivers are using cell-phones at any moment during daylight."

Robert J. Samuelson, "A Cell Phone? Never for Me.", Newsweek, August 23, 2004, p. 63

"[T]he Harvard Center for Risk Analysis blamed cell phones for 6 percent of auto accidents each year, involving 2,600 deaths (but admitted that estimates are difficult)."

Anitha Reddy, "New Rule on Injury Reporting Rejected," Washington Post, page E1, June 30, 2001

"The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that repetitive-motion injuries--conditions such as carpal-tunnel syndrome--comprised roughly 33 percent of the 1.7 million workplace injuries reported to OSHA in 1999."

10 Million workers visit an eye doctor yearly due to computer related vision problems.
7.9 million workers are now classified as telecommuters.
Liberty Mutual spends 50 Million a year on wrist injury claims.
When keyboard use increases from 1- 4hrs. your probability of acquiring CTS goes from 45- 92%.

"In fact nearly all surveys [NIOSH, CAL/OSHA, AMA ] of computer workers show that vision related problems are the most frequently reported health concern by VDT operators [3 out of 4]. Eye care professionals in a recent survey reported 63% of the symptoms reported by VDT operators were due to vision disorders and 37% were found to be related to the visual environment."

"U.S. Department of Labor figures show that Repetitive Stress Injury now accounts for 60% of all job-related illnesses. Estimates of the annual cost to business reach $20 billion." (p. 90)

Paul Festa, "Net Fraud Complaints Triple in 2002," CNet News.com, April 10, 2003

"The FBI's Net fraud unit says it referred 48,000 complaints to law enforcement last year, with both the number of fraud cases and the dollar loss associated with them more than tripling."

Jonathan Alter, "America's Real Identity Crisis," December 9, 2002, p. 51

"According to the Justice Department, 500,000 to 700,000 Americans a year have their identities stolen.  When thieves succeed in extracting money, the average loss is $18,000...The average amount of time needed to straighten out the situation: a year and a half...identity theft...[accounts] for an astounding 42 percent of all reports of fraud."

Erik Sherman, "Fighting Web Fraud," June 10, 2002, pp. 32B-32D

"...the rate of online credit-card fraud is three to four times higher than fraud overall...In the entire telecom industry, the current estimate is that $15 [billion] to $20 billion of fraud happens on an annual basis...AT&T's software blocks 'at least' 100 frauds for every one it lets through...Ninety-six percent of the estimates we [eAutoclaims Inc.] review are changed, and the average percent or reduction is anywhere from 11 to 13 percent."

"Cyberspace Invaders," Consumer Reports, June 2002, pp. 16-20

"90 percent of large corporations and government agencies detected a computer security attack...[Out of] 8,000 subscribers to ConsumerReports.org...58 percent said they had found at least one virus on their home computer in the past two years.  And 10 percent said the virus had caused some kind of damage....only 7 percent of those using antivirus software suffered computer damage in an invasion.  By contrast, 30 percent of those without antivirus software had their computer damaged...Only about 60 percent [of 10 million Americans with a high-speed Internet connection use a firewall], if the...subscribers are typical of the overall online population.  That would leave about 4 million computers vulnerable."

Other results of the survey:
58% found at least one virus on their computer in the past two years.
17% of those who discovered a virus on their computer suffered some damage to programs or data.
32% of those who experienced virus damage lost important files permanently.  Nearly as many spent at least two weeks fixing the damage.
75% of those surveyed had gotten an e-mail-virus warning that turned out to be a hoax.
62% of those infected caught it via e-mail; 13 percent, via web downloads.

"...over the years...perhaps 40,000 [viruses have been] confirmed...Two of the most destructive - Melissa and Love Letter - caused millions of dollars in damage...Our survey found that Windows users encounter viruses nearly three times more often than do Macintosh users (62 percent vs. 23 percent).  Eleven percent of Windows users reported damage; only 2 percent of Mac users did."

Don Clark, "Computer Viruses Still Proliferating; E-Mail Risk Rising," Wall Street Journal p. B5, March 4, 2002

"Computer virus attacks are growing at a steady rate; TruSecure unit ICSA Labs polled 300 North American companies and found that they suffered 1.2 million virus attacks during the 20-month period that ended Aug. 31. Monthly virus infections rose 13 percent, averaging at 103 infections per 1,000 computers the respondents operate, compared to 91 infections a month in a 2000 survey. The percentage increase between 1999 and 2000 was about the same."

"Computer Programmer Sentenced in NJ Sabotage Case," Reuters, February 26, 2002

"A disgruntled computer programmer was sentenced to more than three years in prison and ordered to pay $2 million for setting off a cyber "time bomb" in his former company's system...The damages resulted in more than $10 million in lost sales and future contracts."

Simon Bowers, "Firms Fear Computer Enemy Within," London Guardian p. 20, February 25, 2002

"According to a survey of 100 U.K.-based businesses with yearly revenues exceeding 50 million British pounds sterling, more than half of the companies polled said that fraud and industrial espionage committed by an employee presented more of a threat than outside hackers or email viruses. Last year, the San Francisco-based Computer Security Institute estimated that insider breaches cost businesses an average of $2.7 million per incident, as compared to $57,000 per outside hack."

Jay Lyman, "In Search of the World's Costliest Computer Virus," NewsFactor Network, February 21, 2002

"He put last year's Code Red at the top of the list, costing $2.62 billion, while SirCam and Nimda cost $1.15 billion and $635 million, respectively. Computer Economics says the Love Bug virus retains the top spot all time, costing organizations $8.75 billion."

"Microsoft won't say how much money it loses to piracy. But with 11 percent market share, it's the largest player in the packaged-software industry, which sells $175 billion globally each year. The industry loses, by conservative estimates, 36 percent of its business to piracy."

"Software Piracy Up Last Year, Reversing Trend, Report Says," Associated Press, May 21, 2001

"An annual study on illegally copied software by the advocacy group Business Software Alliance found an increase in piracy after a five-year lull. The worst offenders were Eastern Europe, where 63 percent of all software was bootlegged, and the Asia-Pacific area, where software firms faced losses of $4 billion last year. Overall global losses due to illegally copied software were $11.75 billion, slightly lower than last year because of cheaper software prices and increased demand."

Laura Lorek, Interactive Week, February 25, 2001

"On-line credit-card fraud is currently estimated at $24 million per day. Prosecution is of course complicated by multiple jurisdictions."

"Figures from an annual joint study of the Computer Security Institute and the FBI suggest that 42 percent of the 643 respondents had total financial losses of $265 million [from people breaking into companies' networks] (ranging from the loss of revenue when servers were down to the expense of fixing sabotaged systems). That's close to $1 million each.... Critics say the CSI-FBI study is inaccurate."

"Implementing thorough computer security in a Fortune 500 company, including experienced personnel and specialized software and hardware, can run $15 million to $20 million, according to some estimates. Companies in the $100 million to $500 million range would likely spend more than $2 million. Small companies that outsource most security needs should expect to spend between $100,000 and $200,000."

"'The average outside hack costs a company about $56,000, and the average inside job costs a company about $2.7 million,' says Richard Isaacs, senior vice president of the LUBRINCO Group."

"...an astounding 75 percent of the transactions caught in the neural network [that looks for credit card charges that seem questionable] turn out to be legit.... Visa--which record U.S. transactions worth $760 billion in the last four quarters--has seen its fraud rate drop from 15 cents to six cents per $100."

Tim McDonald, "Study: Achilles Heel Leaves Net Vulnerable," E-Commerce Times, August 7, 2000

"[A] study found that the Internet operates as a network of nodes, almost all of which are end users. However, not all of these nodes have an equal value in the network, and there is very little to protect hackers from targeting the most connected nodes. A loss of 4 percent of these nodes would effectively disable the entire Internet, the study found...Corporations in the U.S. spent $266 million last year to repair the damage done by hackers, more than twice what they spent in the previous three years. Private-sector hacking crimes increased from 3,700 to 8,300 between 1998 and 1999."

"The Pentagon alone estimates its computer networks are hacked about 250,000 times a year.... But at least 500 are considered serious attempts at breaking into classified systems.... In recent years officials have also secretly observed attempts by foreign countries to penetrate U.S. government computers.... At least 13 countries have "information warfare" programs directed against the United States. "Its the Chinese, the French, Israelis, attacking American targets and doing it quite successfully," says one NSA official.... U.S. officials acknowledge that they catch about 10 percent of those who probe or penetrate government computers."

In China, according to the Business Software Alliance, as much as 96% of all business software is pirated. The article cites BSA's observation that only Vietnam has a worse piracy rate: 98%.

A report released earlier this week by the Software Publishers Association and the Business Software Alliance shows the industry lost $11.4 billion to pirates who produce illegal copies of software. ... Some areas have shown improvement -- Europe, which had a piracy rate of 90% five years ago, is now down to 50% -- still, that's almost twice as high as the U.S., which is 27%.

"Computer fraud is growing at a rate of 500 percent a year.... The Internet makes you visible worldwide, and it makes you easier to find... Fraud makes up 44 percent of computer crime... An American Bar Association survey of 1,000 companies in 1996 showed that 48 percent had experienced computer fraud in the last five years, with respondents each reporting losses of $2 million to $10 million... Computer crime in the UK amounted to 250 million pounds (US$417.7 million) in 1996, according to the Association of British Insurers, but they estimate this is only 20 percent of actual losses."

"By some reckoning, as many as one in every 14 laptop computers sold in the United States was stolen last year." ...

"208,000 laptops were stolen in 1995, up 39% from the year before."

"Roughly $2 billion worth of software was stolen over the Internet last year, a growing portion of the total $7.4 billion the Software Publishers Association reckons was lost to piracy in 1993."

"The association has identified 1,600 bulletin boards carrying bootleg software."

The cost to phone companies of stolen and posted telephone credit card numbers has been estimated at $50 million.

• The accounting firm of Ernst & Young estimates that computer crime may cost as much as $5 billion per year, while a California non-profit research firm called SEARCH says that some estimates for loss from computer crime run as high as $40 billion per year.
• No more than 10 percent of computer crime gets reported.
• Crime is paying. Of all computer crime cases reports, fewer than 2 percent result in convictions. And fewer than a dozen computer criminals nationwide have ever served time in this country.
• Around 80% of computer crime is committed by insiders.
• The 20% that is not is done by "hackers and phreakers" and they manage to steal $30 million by some estimates; $1 billion by others.
• Hackers had 700,000 intrusions in 1991, most caused no harm.
• 12% of hacker attacks do cause damage.
• Telephone companies lose as much as $4 million per year. The average fraud comes to about $90,000 per victim.

"Size of the Prize", Technology Review, January 2005, p. 41

"The searchable Internet (in [italics]) contains only a fraction as much information as the various other forms of digital media:

Adam Piore, "So Predictably Unpredictable," Newsweek, September 16, 2002, p. 34BB

1899: "U.S. Patent Office Commissioner Charles Duell proposes closing down the office because 'everything that can be invented has been invented.'"

1943: "IBM chairman Thomas Watson Sr. estimates the global market for computers at 'about five or six.'"

"[A] study measured the "residual vote": the number of ballots that did not end up having a vote for president counted, either because of undervote, overvote, or some other problem such as a stray mark. The residual vote is an estimate of a voting system's accuracy, probably the best such measure we will ever have on past elections. The average residual votes found were as follows:

machine type	residual vote (%)	margin of error	year of introduction
mechanical lever voting machine	1.6	0.10	1892
hand-counted paper ballot	2.0	0.14	1856
optically-scanned paper ballot	2.3	0.19	1980s
Vote-O-Matic-type punch card	2.9	0.09	1964
electronic "DRE" voting machine	3.0	0.17	1970s
DataVote-type punch card	3.2	0.33	1968

"In the U.S., companies and government agencies spent between $150 billion and $225 billion on Y2K. By contrast, Russia, which also seems to have passed through Y2K unharmed, spent up to 100 times less than the U.S. on Y2K fixes, says the Gartner Group's Lou Marcoccio. The British government spent less than a tenth as much as the U.S. government."

(p. 106): "A bank's cost to process a simple transaction like a withdrawal or a check the old way from teller to back office is $1.40; for an ATM transaction it is $0.45, and for an electronic bank-to-bank exchange, $0.08."

(p. 199): "Americans write some 70 billion checks a year and carry out a comparable number of credit card transactions."

"In 1996, 90 percent of U.S. households could be reached by cable, with 65 percent of them having active cable service. The average reach across Europe in the same year was 27 percent, with nearly full coverage in Belgium, Holland, and Bavaria, and none at all in Greece. In Asia and Africa cable TV has barely begun."

Cost per line of code corrected for the year 2000 bug:

1996: $1.10
1997: $2.00
1998: $3.10
1999: $4.10
2000: $6.70

By 2002, over 100,000 antennas will relay the calls of 90 million cellular-phone users. Today there are about 40,000 antennas for 30 million cell-phone users.

"In a period of 25 years that has been the period of greatest change in history, the institution that has been effectively left behind in terms of systemic and radical change is the public education system in our country.... More than 80 percent of American eighth graders cannot calculate fractions, decimals and percentages with consistent accuracy. Forty percent of fourth graders cannot tell northeast from southwest on a map--even with the aid of a compass."

America has 15,000 school districts that spend $330 billion a year.

"To make a state-of-the-art adventure requires millions of dollars, dozens of computer whizzes and lots of work."

"The American PC game market is a $1.2 billion business. Five years ago a talented programmer and an artist could make a hit. Today a state-of-the-art game is a multimillion-dollar collaborative product."

For "The Last Express" game:

• The art department created and processed 40,000 frames of animation.
• In three months more than 5,000 bugs were logged and fixed.
• It took 4 years, 50 people.

"While 80 percent of [game] console users were satisfied by the overall gaming performance of their machines, only 67 percent of PC users were satisfied with theirs."

"The most popular console games are fighting, shooting and sports -- "twitch" games. PCs tend to excel at strategy, role-playing and war games as well as realistic simulators, puzzles and board games.

"Any sufficiently popular PC game has fans making modifications and putting them on the Internet for other fans. A game like Quake comes with tools specifically for making Quake plug-ins. On a console system, it would have been impossible for Quake fans to create variants. Hackability is the heart and soul of Quake, and any console version will lose that."

There are 1.5 million books in print, compared to 150,000 music records.

The most recent game from Sierra, Phantasmagoria involved almost 200 people and cost $4 million.

Labor costs for Year-2000 projects have risen 30% since last year, when they averaged $60 an hour, and they're still climbing, says an analyst at the Gartner Group. The revised labor cost works out to about $1.50 per line of code, up from $1.10, causing Gartner to up its widely cited estimate of $300 billion to $600 billion for all corporate Year 2000 projects. A study released by Morgan Stanley & Co. last week suggests that companies could save some money by replacing some code with packaged software and discarding some of the 35 million lines of code that are typical for a large company's computer system. Meanwhile, a study of 24 federal agencies by Federal Sources Inc. estimates that it will cost about $5.6 billion for the federal government to rewrite all of its code to be Year-2000-compliant. That's about 2 ½ times higher than an estimate submitted to Congress in February by the Office of Management and Budget.

Businesses worldwide are expected to have to fork over the staggering sum of $600 billion to deal with the `year 2000 problem.' A single large firm will have to spend $40 million to solve this problem.

Other Sources of Numbers and Information

Other Sources of Numbers and Information

• Other pages about the Internet:
  • CyberAtlas, The Nielsen I/PRO Web Index
  • Cyber Dialogue: a "leader in providing full scale Internet Database Marketing Solutions, the key to executing e-commerce."
  • About the Matrix and the Internet (FAQ, maps, graphs, sources)
  • GVU's survey of Internet usage, which received over 23,000 responses.
  • The Internet Number FAQ by John S. Quarterman contains many numbers about the Internet.
  • The Internet Index contains an selected set of statistics about the Internet, and related electronic services.
  • The Internet Index
  • About the Matrix and the Internet (FAQ, maps, graphs, sources)
  • Internet statistics from Audio Graphics, Inc.
• Leading sites that have a lot of information that is searchable include:
  • www.statistics.com
  • idg.com
  • computerworld.com
  • infoworld.com
  • pcworld.com
• "Media Metrix", the PC Meter Company
• National Press Club site with many pointers.
• The International Data Corporation is a leading provider of market information, industry analysis, and strategic and tactical guidance, and many of the numbers above probably come (indirectly) from their studies.
• Economic Statistics Briefing Room (ESBR). The purpose of this service is to provide easy access to current Federal economic indicators. It provides links to information produced by a number of Federal agencies. All of the information included in the Economic Statistics Briefing Room is maintained and updated by the statistical units of those agencies. (Output, Income, Employment, Unemployment, and Earnings, Production and Business Activity, Prices, Money, Credit, and Securities Markets, Transportation, International Statistics).
• Social Statistics Briefing Room (SSBR). The purpose of this service is to provide easy access to current Federal social statistics. It provides links to information produced by a number of Federal agencies. All of the information included in the Social Statistics Briefing Room is maintained and updated by the statistical units of those agencies. (Crime Statistics, Demographic Statistics, Education Statistics, Health Statistics)

Editing help from Ryan Myers.

Page Design by Jennifer Snow Wolff

Thanks for contributions from Marvin Sirbu, Brian Ellis and the community.