Author Archive
State of the Mobile Web – July 2010
Every Month Opera releases the State of the Mobile Web report based on the surfing habits of Opera Mini users worldwide.
In July 2010 Opera Mini had over 62.3 million users who viewed 29.6 billion pages and generated over 445 million MB of data traffic for Operators worldwide. Thats after the data was compressed by upto 90% else Opera Mini users would have viewed over 4.1 petabytes of data in July.
Also this report focuses on the Southeast Asian Region providing information about the top websites and handsets used in Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Brunei, Singapore, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar besides the Top 10 countries using Opera Mini worldwide.
An interesting thing to note is that Google and Facebook compete for the top spot in several Southeast Asian countries. In Thailand and Laos, Google is #1, followed by hi5 and then Facebook. In Vietnam, where My Opera is very popular, Facebook is not in the top 10 list at all.
Last month Opera also conducted a survey of Opera Mini users to find out more about the users.
Some of the findings are as under
* They estimate that the global ratio of male to female mobile Web users to be 77% (male) to 23% (female). Although it has to be noted that the number of female users is increasing at a faster rate.
* Across the board, 18-27 is still the biggest age group of Opera Mini users.
* In the survey users were also asked Do you have online friends youve never met in real life? And in general yes responses to this question were high which indicates that mobile Internet users tend toward having online friends they have not met in person.
You can check the details and read the full report here.
Messaging Packs Or pay per use?
Do you use send a lot of messages on your mobile?
Then its best that you contact your mobile service provides and activate an add on to get free messages. Trust me, even if you don’t finish the messages in the pack, as long as you choose the pack wisely it should save you money.
Let of explain with the example of my service provider Aircel.
They have message packs for 9 and 38 rupees which give you 99 and 450 messages respectively.
The normal charges for sending a message is 1 rupee. So in this case even if you send messages equal to the value of the add on you are better of getting an add on than paying for each message.
So go ahead and call your mobile service provider and find ways to cut your messaging costs.
Shrek Forever and After
I saw the movie Shrek Forever After. A very entertaining movie. I’ve liked the previous versions and this was just amazing.
The story is about how Shrek seems to be bored of his mundane life after marriage and misses the carefree life he lived before as an Ogre, when everyone was afraid of him and he could do anything that pleased him. He is tricked by Rumpelstiltskin into making a wish in exchange for a day from his life, and then Rumplestiltskin transports him to a magical world where Rumplestiltskin takes over the kingdom of Far Far Away and Shrek is never born, so his life never happened. Now Shrek has to win Fiona’s love again to break the contract and get his life back.
I especially loved the songs through the movie which includes One Love, Hello, For Once in my Life, among others. An awesome movie to watch on a day off.
Let me know if you like it. 
Freebies
The moon belongs to everyone
The best things in life they’re free
Seriously, if you know where to look you can get a lot of free stuff. There are several companies that have adopted the practice of offering free samples or trial packs or starter kits of their latest products which can be used to get to know the product. Yes it may not be the full product but if you’re just looking to have some fun them a demo version of a game with about 4-5 levels doesn’t sound bad, does it. Some PC magazines give cd’s with free or demo software which is pretty good. I managed to get Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 Arena and several other games from such free cd’s.
Also I’ve often noticed that when purchasing something online you have the option of entering an offer code. If you use google to your advantage here, you’ll most probably find a code that’ll give you a decent discount. I’ve used discount codes when purchasing domain names and hosting so I’m speaking from my own personal experience. I’ve also downloaded games free based on a promotional offer. Often these offers are for a limited period only, so you need to be lucky to take advantage of them.
So if you’ve lucky and you’ve discovered some amazing freebies, don’t forget to share it with others here.
Thelonious
Thelonious
You’ve probably already heard that word. I’m not sure what it truly means but its the code name for version 3.0 of WordPress.
If you’ve visited any social site, you would’ve noticed that all the bloggers are posting about this major update. You can read the release post to know more about this release here.
Upgrading is a simple process, just back up your database and files, I’ve got the WordPress Database Backup plugin that takes care of that for me, and then you simply click on the update WordPress link on the Dashboard. The whole process takes less than a few minutes, so don’t worry and go ahead and Upgrade to Thelonious.
Happy Blogging