China has 250 million cellular subscribers, and is expected to allocate 3G licenses by early next year at the latest.

More than 52% of married surfers made an online purchase during the last six months, as compared to only 47% of single surfers over the same time. Top items purchased by married surfers were related to home life, such as garden supplies and educational software. For single surfers, online purchases concentrated on entertainment and financial services. What’s more, the report indicated that top destinations among single and married surfers revealed lifestyle variations that generally are true in the offline world. For single surfers, seven of the top ten online destinations were related to dating, including Marth.com, which attracted nearly 84% of those surveyed. For married surfers, six of the top ten online destinations were family-oriented, including Familyfun.com, which attracted nearly 85%.

Nielsen//NetRatings estimates that 9.4 million women in the United States accessed online pornography sites in the month of September

Just a week after Amazon.com introduced a tool that lets people search the entire text of many books it sells, the online retailer reported a boost in sales as a result of the feature. The Seattle-based company said Thursday that its “Search Inside the Book” feature, which launched Oct. 23, lifted sales for searchable books by 9%, compared with titles not part of the in-text database.

By the Q4 of 2004, 85% of enterprises will have enterprise-level spam filtering in place.

Vendors shipped a total of 1.37 million units in the quarter, the Stamford, Connecticut, market research firm said. Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) led the way with 408,290 units shipped worldwide, a 21% increase over its total shipments in last year’s third quarter. Dell Inc. shipped 276,350 units worldwide in the third quarter, up 28% from last year. IBM Corp. came in third place with 220,083 units, up 36% over last year’s third-quarter total. Sun Microsystems Inc. continued to lose ground, shipping 59,692 units in the quarter, down 2.9% from last year’s third quarter.

IBM Global Services, Accenture, and Lockheed Martin held the top
three spots in both the worldwide and U.S. system integration services markets. IBM Global Services, Accenture, and EDS gained the top three spots in the
custom app dev services market in both the worldwide and U.S. The pure-play Indian firms,
namely Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, were among the top 10 companies
in both the worldwide and U.S. markets. Wipro Technologies held a spot on the
top 10 list for the U.S.

77% of broadband customers are satisfied with their Internet service provider. Over one-half say they are satisfied with the customer service personnel and nearly 50% say the same about the quality of their broadband transmission. Comparatively, only 37% tell Yankee they are satisfied with the speed of their high-speed Internet connection and the value of their broadband service for the money, respectively.

Illegitimate email messaging over the Internet is currently greater than 90% according to Solid Oak Software, Inc. There are numerous recent reports that have indicated that spam accounts for 50-60% of all email traffic.

A recent study authored by Quris shows nearly half of consumers surveyed reported that they have stopped doing business with companies altogether as a result of poor email practices. Similarly the study finds that over 57% of consumers have made purchases as a result of email, based upon survey responses from 1,684 email users in the United States.

Israel’s information technology services market totaled $1.214 billion in 2002, 9.3% less than the $1.34 billion in 2001, states a new IDC Israel report. IDC cites the following factors for the drop: smaller enterprise IT budgets, especially by small and medium-sized private companies; the drop in GDP; less investment in Israel; the ongoing state of war; and competition between IT services companies that led to lower sweeping lower prices in the sector. IDC states that 2002 was the third consecutive year in which Israel’s IT services market shrank. IDC predicts that the market will expand by a modest 2.7% over the next five years to $1.386 billion in 2007. IDC revised its forecast from late 2002, which predicted only a 2.7% drop in Israel’s IT services market in 2002, compared with a year earlier. IDC attributed the difference the worse than expected recession in 2002.

Expenditure on Information Technology (IT) in the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council is expected to grow by 10.2% in 2004 to reach $4.2 billion, market research firm IDC reported. IT expenditure in Saudi Arabia will increase from $1.88 billion in 2003 to just over $2 billion in 2004 - a 6% growth. IT expenditure in UAE will increase from $1.04 billion in 2003 to $1.15 billion in 2004 - a 10.6% growth. IT expenditure will grow by 7.6% in Oman and 12.9% in Qatar.

The British online population has grown quickly since the mid-1990s, from 3.4 million
adults in 1996, 5.4 million in 1997, 9.4 million in 1998, 17.7 million in 1999, to 18.5 million in
2000, 19 million in 2001 and 22 million in 2002. In 2001 alone, the home computer penetration rate increased by 11%. 45% of British households were connected to the Internet in 2002, increasing from 38% in 2001. 47% of British adults use the Internet regularly (defined as
having used the Internet within the month prior to the survey).

The research sponsored by AMD Corp. reports the following data:

• Income has been the most important factor determining Internet
  access. For example, more than 60 percent of
  Americans with a household income of $35,000 or higher were online in 2000, whereas
  only 42 percent of those with a household income of less than $15,000 were online. In 2002, the share of American Internet users with a household income of less than
  $30,000 (18%) continued to be lower than its share in the general American
  population (28%). Moreover, those with a high school education or less made up
  merely five percent of the American online population but one quarter of non-users.

• The gender divide has been decreasing in the U.S. While just 34% of
  American women were using the Internet by the end of 1998, 44% of them had
  become Internet users by August 2000. In 2002, 73% of American men
  and 69% of American women were Internet users.

• Younger Americans have the highest level of Internet
  access and use. More than 80% of Americans aged between 12 and 35 were using the
  Internet. On the other hand, 34% of Americans over 65 were online in 2002.

• The racial/ethnic digital divide is pronounced in the U.S. While 63% of
  Asian-Americans and 55% of white Americans were online in 2000, only 30%
  of blacks and 28% of Hispanic-Americans were online. In 2003,
  the percentages of African-American and Hispanic-American Internet users (8% and 9% respectively).

Research firm Gartner predicts sales of smartphones worldwide to increase 140% to 20.7 million units next year as demand for PDAs flattens. According to Gartner, the Palm operating system will hang on to a slim lead in the PDA market next year amid a battle royal over smartphone sales between the alternative platforms, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm and Linux.

Wise Solutions today solidified its position as the leading provider of application installation and management solutions by securing partnerships with eight of the nine leading software distribution and management providers, Gartner claims.

Today, nearly half of all securities transactions are still paper-based and 40% of securities institutions manually enter data at least twice for the same transaction. In fact, more than half of these institutions still rely on manual methods such as facsimile, telephone or email to complete transactions, according to a recent report by Gartner G2.

The amount of new information stored on various media such as hard drives has doubled in the past three years, to five exabytes of new information produced in 2002, according to a study released Tuesday by the University of California, Berkeley. That’s exabytes, as in one byte with 18 zeros behind it, six zeros more than a terabyte. The amount of information put into storage in 2002, five exabytes, was equal to the contents of a half a million new libraries, each containing a digitized version of the print collection of the entire U.S. Library of Congress, according to the study by professors Peter Lyman and Hal Varian of the UC Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems. The professors estimated that between two and three exabytes of information was generated in 1999. Most of that data — 92% of it — was stored on magnetic media, primarily hard drives, the study estimates.