So picture this: you're a Chinese smartphone user with, like almost every smartphone user in China, a limited data plan. You get 500 MB of data per month -- for example -- as part of your package and you're charged a per-MB rate for every bit of data you use beyond that. It's straightforward enough, but if your phone doesn't contain its own internet data usage tracker, it's pretty easy to go over your usage limit without even knowing it. That can be an expensive pain. And soon it should ...
Tag Archives: data
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![Japanese Users Ready for Branded Mixi Pages [SURVEY]](http://www.penn-olson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/mixi-branded-250x159.jpg)
Jan 12 2012
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Startup Grepsr Wants to Make Data Collection Easy
Grepsr is one of the more intriguing startups I’ve come across in a while. It is a data extraction and web crawling service which you can use if you need to automate data collection from places on the web. Initially I thought this was simply a data scraping tool, but upon closer inspection ‘service’ does seem to be a more apt description as there is some human involvement from the Grepsr team as well. I spoke to Amit Chowdhury, who explained that Grepsr is a just a two-man operation so ...
Jan 6 2012
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Chinese Net Security Expert: Don’t Trust Online Banking
A series of high-profile hacking incidents of late has tested Chinese net users' trust in the safety of the online services they use. Thus far, online banking and financial information seem to have been largely untouched. But one Chinese security analyst suggests that online banking may not be any safer than other online activities. Song Guoqin, the CEO of a major information security company in Guangdong, shocked reporters from the Guangzhou Daily when he told them that despite his security expertise -- or perhaps because of it -- he doesn't use ...
Dec 27 2011
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Our 5 Favorite Data Visualizations for Asia in 2011
We digested quite a bit of data over the past 12 months here on PO. While we’re far from pro statisticians, we did our best to present trusted data for our readers, in a manner that emphasized clarity above all else. We hope to learn more as our blog continues to grow, but as this year draws to a close, I thought I’d look back at some of the more fun/interesting data presentations we kicked out this year. So here they are in no particular order: 1. Asia’s Internet By the ...
Oct 6 2011
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Indian Smartphone Users Move Towards Data, Games and Content, Away From SMS
A new report by Nielsen India reveals that a seismic shift is happening in mobile usage in the country: Indian smartphone users are now spending more time browsing content (and using more data) than more conventional activities such as voice calls or SMS. It marks a big step into the arena of apps, mobile gaming, and content browsing in India. Of the average 2.5 hours per day that people in the nation spend tapping and prodding their smartphones, Nielsen found that... 72 percent of their time spent on activities ...
Sep 23 2011
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Institute for Information Design Japan Visualizes Radiation in Google Earth
I’ve talked a lot about the importance of data in the wake of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster. The radiation threat was and still is very difficult to measure, and in the absence of adequate information, people get scared. And that has very real effects - on the economy, on tourism, on peoples’ state of mind. Among those many volunteers who worked towards helping the public understand the radiation numbers back in March was The Institute for Information Design Japan. We received word from the Institute today that its radiation map is ...
Aug 25 2011
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Japan’s Mobile Carriers Play Chicken with Smartphone Data Plans
On multiple occasions this week, Japan's mobile carriers have publicly addressed a looming problem: networks are not prepared for the smartphone revolution (see here and here, subscription required). Smartphones still only comprise a small fraction of the mobile phones in Japan, but compared to so-called 'feature phones', smartphones use 10 to 20 times more data. By the year 2015 data traffic from smartphones is expected to increase 18-fold. Koji Tanaka, the president of Japan's second largest carrier, KDDI (33.5 million subscribers), has admitted that without change the KDDI network will become ...
Dec 27 2011
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Asia’s Internet By the Numbers
We had a little bit of free time this afternoon to dive into some figures about Asia’s internet that we’ve been meaning to crunch for a while. Internet World Stats updated its Asia figures a few weeks back, and so we jumped in to try to make some sense of it. {"dataSourceUrl":"//docs.google.com/spreadsheet/tq?key=0Ankqe-fbHOHIdGdYb25reEJNYzB3UlAzS3BWN2ZmUHc&transpose=0&headers=-1&range=A1%3AB36&gid=0&pub=1","options":{"title":"Pecentage of Asia's Internet Population","backgroundColor":"#FFFFFF","legend":"none","colors":,"is3D":false,"hasLabelsColumn":true,"hAxis":{"maxAlternation":1},"width":298,"height":230},"state":{},"chartType":"PieChart","chartName":"Chart 1"} As far as which Asian nation has the most internet users, there’s not much question that China beats everyone by miles, slowly coming up on half a billion. The Chinese are still far ...
Aug 8 2011
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Mapping Radiation: Yahoo Japan Publishes Data, Safecast.org Plugs Along
Yahoo Japan has made a start on publishing radiation measurements from 11 locations around Japan. The data is being gathered by a team from Keio University,* and can can be viewed by visiting radiation.yahoo.co.jp. The page includes an interactive map that shows the latest information, which updates at approximately five-minute intervals. There are reportedly plans to increase the number of locations in the future, but for now this is a promising step. Besides publishing the data in map form and in HTML tables (I've machine translated them here), Yahoo is also ...
Jul 27 2011
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Japan’s Android Users Prefer GREE and Mobage to Twitter and Facebook
Here’s an interesting study from Japan’s Nobot Inc., the parent company of Admaker, whose CEO we spoke to earlier this month. Nobot recently conducted a small survey into the experiences of the nation’s smartphone users, examining a number of different criteria. The survey found that among iPhone users, 54 percent said that Twitter was a social networking tool that they use frequently, in contrast with only 46 percent of Android users. A similar trend was observed on Facebook, as iPhone users tended to favor the social network more than their Android ...
Jul 20 2011
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Zaim: Manage and Share Your Personal Spending On Your iPhone
There are a number of personal accounting solutions available for your mobile phone. Japanese developer Takako Kansai has just released one of the more intriguing solutions, an iPhone application called Zaim. It allows you to input your various expenses into an assortment of categories, and eventually once you have enough data you can gain some insight into your spending habits by viewing Zaim’s graphic analysis. But Zaim features an interesting twist as well. It brings a social layer to personal accounting, allowing users to share certain data with friends. I briefly spoke ...
Jul 19 2011
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Japanese Users Ready for Branded Mixi Pages [SURVEY]
There were rumors that Mixi, Japan's largest online social network with a massive user base of over 23 million, was going to start branded pages this August. Currently, brands are not allowed to start and manage their own pages on Mixi which is similar to how Facebook treated fan pages before brand pages took off. I conducted a survey here in Japan asking what people would do if Mixi started branded pages. As the graph below shows, 73 percent of the respondents showed interest in joining these groups. This ratio ...
![Japan’s Social Giants: Trends in User Numbers [CHART]](http://www.penn-olson.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/IMG_5437-80x80.jpg)
Japan’s Social Giants: Trends in User Numbers [CHART]
Feb 8, 2012
Cazbak Partners With Giant E-commerce Sites, Gives Savings to Consumers in India
Feb 8, 2012
Perx’s ‘Chop Mob’ Helps Coffee Bean Increase 50% in Transaction
Feb 8, 2012
CyberAgent Ventures Invests in Vietnamese Music Service
Feb 7, 2012
DropMySite.com Backups Your Website, Email, and Database in the Cloud
Feb 8, 2012