In 2008 the virtual game economy employs 400,000 people who earn an average of $145 per month, creating a global market worth about $500 mln, according to Professor Richard Heeks from the University of Manchester. 80% of virtual game workers are based in China.

PC gaming was a $10.7 bln industry during the year of 2007, with retail sales accounting for just 30% of total revenues. According to PC Gaming Alliance, growth was largely driven by online revenues from Asia, the world’s largest market, which is approaching half of total worldwide sales. Online PC gaming revenue led the way in 2007 with $4.8 bln, nearly double the worldwide retail sales numbers for PC games. Digital distribution sales approached $2 bln, while advertising revenues from websites, portals, and in-game ads accounted for $800 mln.

US sales of video game hardware and software soared 28% in July 2008, hitting $1.19 bln. According to NPD Group, Americans bought $446.9 mln worth of video game hardware during the month, a 17% jump from July 2007.

Expansion of the enterprise application software (EAS) market in the Czech Republic slowed to 4.5% year on year in 2007, down from 6.4% in 2006. The value of the market exceeded $117 mln in 2007. In 2008, IDC expects the market to regain momentum and expand by a further 10% to reach a value of $129 mln . In 2007, enterprise resource management (ERM) remained the largest functional area of the Czech enterprise application software market, accounting for 41.6% of EAS market value. Customer relationship management (CRM) increased in popularity, rising from fourth place in 2006 to second place last year to account for just under a fifth of the market. Operations and manufacturing modules were the third most in demand, with a 17% share. Supply chain management (SCM) represented 15% of the total market, while integrated business analytics (BA) accounted for 7.1%, according to IDC.

VMware is the clear market leader in providing virtualization technology with 82% of the sample using VMware. Despite high levels of Linux use, only 3% of the sample were using Xen as their virtualization platform. Microsoft was used by 13% of the sample base with various Unix technologies and mainframe accounting for 14%. 59% of implementations have fewer than four VMs or partitions per physical box. 23% of virtualization users report that their application vendors’ licensing is still not meeting their needs and 33% of large businesses report that it limits use of virtualization, according to IDC.

2007 was a year that saw continued steady growth in the relational database management systems (RDBMS) market, with signal improvements on the part of several of the top five vendors in this space. The RDBMS market is estimated to have grown by 12.6% from $16.7 bln in 2006 to $18.8 bln in 2007, according to IDC.

The pace of adoption of virtualized servers is incredibly rapid among organizations that are using virtualization, with 35% of servers purchased in 2007 being virtualized and 52% of those bought in 2008 expected to be so. 54% of those not using virtualization expect to do so in the next 18 months. Growth of virtualization as a strategy remains strong, rising from 46% of the base to 54%, according to IDC.

Location-based mobile social networking revenues will reach $3.3 bln by 2013, but successful business models may differ from what many observers expect, ABI Research says.

40% of US gamers are women, Entertainment Software Association says. 65% of American households play computer and video games. 38% of American homes have a video game console. The average game player is 35 years old. One out of four gamers are over age 50. Women age 18 or older represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (33%) than boys age 17 or younger (18%). 41% of Americans expect to purchase one or more games 2008. 94% of parents are present when games are purchased or rented. 88% of parents report always or sometimes monitoring the games their children play. 63% of parents believe games are a positive part of their children’s lives.

Malware has risen by 278% in the first half of 2008, thanks to the large number of websites comprised last month, according to ScanSafe. Trojans are the most commonly blocked malware, they increased from 4% of malware in January 2008 to 27% in June 2008.

The worldwide relational database management systems market saw a 12.6% growth spike in 2007 to $18.8 bln compared to $16.7 bln in 2006, according to IDC. Oracle took the top spot, capturing 44.3% of the market with revenue growth of 13.3%. IBM came in second with a 21% share, also logging a 13.3% revenue growth rate. It was followed by Microsoft, with 18.5% of the market and a 14% jump in revenue. iSybase and Teradata rounded out the top five, garnering market shares of 3.5% and 3.3%, respectively.

IDC forecasts that the small and medium-sized business (SMB) enterprise applications market will grow to $80.3 bln by the end of 2012, representing a 10.6% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the 2008-2012 period.

24% of European households have given up fixed landlines for mobile phones, up from 22% in 2006. The Czech Republic, Finland and Lithuania had the lowest number of landlines in use. 22% are now using their PCs for phone calls or video chatting via programs such as Skype. That is a rise of 5% from 2006. In Lithuania, 61% of the households were using Internet phone services.

IDC predicts that the year 2008 will close with total spending on hardware, software, and services in Brazil at $23 bln, nearly equal to the $24 bln expected in the Spanish market. Northeast region of Brazil is the fastest growing region for IT investment in Brazil even though it is not among the top 3 regions in the country. IT investments by companies in this region are accelerating at an impressive rate and at a higher growth rate than any other region. The Northeast accounts for 11% of total IT spending in Brazil now, or $2.5 bln. All IT spending in Brazil this year, 33% will be in the hands of corporations with more than 500 employees. At the same time, small companies, which have been investing steadily in technology over the past several years, will account for 13% of total IT investment in the country.

IDC expects worldwide revenue from open source software to grow at a 23% CAGR to reach $4.83 bln by 2012. Worldwide revenue from standalone OSS in 2007 was $1.73 bln.

US sales of video game hardware and software were $1.12 bln in May 2008, up 37% from May 2007. “Grand Theft Audio 4″ the best-selling title for the month, NPD said. In 2008 US video games industry has generated $6.6 bln in sales, topping total 2007 annual revenue.

Girls tend to assign less responsibility to computers in terms of writing quality than boys-70% of girls say writing on a computer makes no difference in the quality of their writing, compared with 57% of boys, according to Pew Internet Project. In terms of the impact of computers on the amount of writing teens do, demographic differences center on age and parental education. Younger teens are more likely to feel that computers make them write less (18% of 12-14 year olds feel this way, compared with just 7% of older teens), while older teens are generally more likely to feel that computers have no impact on how much they write (47% believe this, versus 39% of younger teens). Parental education is also correlated with attitudes toward computers and writing. Among children of college-educated parents, 47% believe that they write more outside of school thanks to computers, compared with 34% of teens whose parents have no college experience.

One-third of people ages 6 to 44 have played online casual games, according to NPD Group. Globally, casual games on PCs, game systems and handhelds, played online and off, generate about $2.25 bln annually, according to the Casual Games Association.

According to Radicati, Microsoft Exchange will run about 210 mln corporate e-mail accounts in 2008, growing to 319 mln mailboxes in 2012.

Americans spent $1.23 bln on video games, hardware and accessories in April 2008, up 47% from April 2007. Total hardware sales grew 26% to $426.2 mln, with the Wii selling 714,200 units, followed by the handheld Nintendo DS at 414,800. Software sales surged to $654.7 mln from $389.4 mln in April 2007. Grand Theft Auto IV was April’s best-selling game. In the US, GTA IV sold about 2.9 mln units in April 2008 for the Xbox 360 and the PS3. Of this, nearly 1.9 mln copies went to the Xbox, NPD says.

The market for open-source databases is expected to grow 35% to $270 mln in 2008 from $200 mln in 2007. The market remains a tiny niche of the total database market, which Gartner expects to reach $21.6 bln in 2008.

The enterprise content management software market in Europe, the Middle East and Africa is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12.6% between 2007 and 2012, reaching in 2012 a 55% increase over 2008. The highest growth is expected from the second half of 2008 through 2010, Gartner says.

The total network disk storage market (NAS Combined with Open SAN) posted 15.8% YTY growth in Q4 2007 to more than $3.9 bln. EMC continues to maintain its leadership in the total network storage market with 27.8% revenue share, followed by IBM and HP with 15.4% and 12.5% revenue share, respectively, according to IDC.

The full year 2007 results resembled those in the fourth quarter: EMC held the top market position with 25.8% revenue share, followed by Symantec and IBM with 17.7% and 13.9% revenue share, respectively. NetApp and HP rounded out the top 5 with 8.1% and 4.8% revenue share, respectively.

The worldwide storage software market experienced its 17th consecutive quarter of YTY growth in the Q4 2007 with revenues of $2.9 bln, an 11.2% increase over Q4 2006, according to IDC. For the full year 2007, storage software revenues totaled $10.9 bln, growing 10.4% year over year. The archiving market grew 18.6% year over year, driven by e-discovery, regulatory compliance, and overall storage optimization needs. Data protection and recovery had strong year-over-year growth of 11.5%. This growth was perpetuated by four out of the top six vendors experiencing double-digit growth over Q4 2006.