IDC says that the number of on-line bank accounts in Western Europe will increase by about 50% between now and 2007, when there will be 150 million on-line banking customers.

Some 11.5 mil PDAs shipped last year, Gartner said - 5.3% fewer than in 2002. HP’s shipments grew 40.3% to 2.28 mil units, yielding a market share of 19.9%, up from 13.4% in 2002. PalmOne’s 2003 share was 36.4%, down from 42.5% the previous year. Dell - number five in the chart - experienced the highest growth: 656.5%, as unit shipments grew from 77,000 to 582,500, propelling its market share from 0.6% in 2002 to 5.1% last year.

Research in Motion experienced three-figure growth: 121.4%, taking its market share from 2.3% to 5.3%. RIM was placed fourth in the chart behind Sony, at number three. The Japanese giant grew shipments by a modest 5.5%. It took 12.2% of the market.

Piracy also remains a major problem in Russia. Five years ago, 95% of foreign software was pirated, now only 79% is pirated.

Shipments of hard drives reached 254.3 mln units in 2003, a rise of 16% from the previous year, according to data released Wednesday by market researcher iSuppli. The growth was attributed in part to the adoption of smaller drives in consumer electronics gadgets, blade servers, ultra-slim notebooks and tablet PCs.

Preliminary figures from research house IDC Corp show that PC sales picked up in Q3 and surged in the last quarter of last year. Singapore saw 133,460 PCs - including desktops, notebooks and x86 servers - shipped in Q4 last year, up a resounding 11.7% over Q4 2002 and up almost 14% over Q3 2003, according to IDC. As for this year, IDC estimates desktop PC shipments to rise 2.4% - and notebook PCs to go up 4.1% - in Singapore over 2003. PC shipments in Q4 last year were slightly better than in the previous quarter in Singapore. In Q3 2003, PC shipments rose 11% quarter-on-quarter and 16% year-on-year.

In 2003, white-box PCs accounted for 28% of desktops, 14-15% of notebooks and 22.6% of servers sold in the U.S., IDC said. The server figures are preliminary. Non-branded PC makers, who control more than a quarter of the desktop market, are in position to take advantage of an improving economy to boost their share of notebooks and servers sold in the U.S.

The Seattle-based company announced that it set a single-day record with more than 2.1 million products ordered around the world. That amounts to 24 items ordered per second. Amazon said that more than 1 million customer orders were shipped out on its peak business day this holiday season and that more than 99% of the orders were shipped in time to meet holiday deadlines worldwide. The largest number of shoppers on the company’s Web site in a single hour was during Dec. 15, when the estimated number of visitors at Amazon.com during the peak 60-minute period topped 630,000, according to the company.

The worldwide router market will grow 6% over the next five years, while optical transport and mobility infrastructure won’t see significant growth until 2005, according to Dell’Oro Group. In a set of five-year forecasts, Dell’Oro said the router market will grow from $6.3 billion in 2003 to $8.6 billion in 2008. The second half of 2003 was the “turning point” for the market, which had experienced declining sales for several years, Dell’Oro states.

Nielsen//NetRatings finds that during the week ending 11 January, Netflix was the biggest US retail goods and services advertiser online with over 740 million online ad impressions. Amazon followed relatively far behind with over 311 million impressions, while Classmates.com rounded out third place with over 237 million impressions.

Yankee Group claimed that 43% of small and medium businesses it surveyed are kept awake at night because they fear depending too heavily on Microsoft. And 72% of the people surveyed said they were looking for other vendors presumably so they can have a good night?s kip.

Server shipments increased from 1.28 mln in the fourth quarter of 2002 to 1.59 mln in the fourth quarter of 2003. For the entire year, server shipments grew 20%, Gartner said. The server market has been gloomy since the end of the Internet mania in 2000. Although unit shipments never stopped growing, revenue from those sales shrank as fierce competition unleashed deep discounts. A bruised technology industry is starting to take heart with rosier projections, though. Measured by units shipped, Hewlett-Packard remained the leader with 462,000 for the quarter. Dell was No. 2 with 319,000, IBM was No. 3 at 274,000 and Sun Microsystems was No. 4 with 84,000.

The latest statistics from CWJobs’ Quarterly IT Skills Index found that permanent IT vacancies rose by an average of 4% between October and December 2003, while IT contract jobs increased by just 1%.

Taiwan’s major manufacturers of optical disc drives, including Lite-On IT, Quanta Storage and BenQ, anticipate high growth in slim DVD burner sales in H2 2004. Taiwanese makers, currently lagging behind Japanese and South Korean competitors such as Matsushita-Kotobuki Electronics (MKE), Toshiba, NEC, Teac, Ricoh and Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS), began production of slim DVD burners for notebooks last quarter and are each delivering the product in small volumes of 5,000-10,000 a month.

The steady rise in TFT LCD prices is coming to a halt. Although 15-inch panels are still in short supply and prices have officially risen, TFT LCD makers are selling panels for February shipment to first-tier LCD monitor makers at the same prices as in January, according to sources. Samsung Electronics, AU Optronics (AUO) and Chi Mei Optoelectronics (CMO) had told LCD monitor makers that their prices for TFT LCD panels shipped in February would rise US$3-5, sources added. ITFacts wrote about price hike last November.

The FCC said the number of non-broadcast channels - such as HBO, CNN and ESPN - has grown from slightly more than 100 in 1994 to more than 330 in 2003. The FCC report found that cable, which had a near-monopoly 10 years ago on delivering programming to households willing to pay for it, now has 75% of the market. Satellite services have 22%. Other competitors, such as telephone companies or electric utilities, have the rest of the market. About 70.5 million households subscribe to cable; 23.7 million get satellite service. Even with the increased competition, cable rates have continued to rise faster than inflation. Congress deregulated the cable industry in 1996; over the next seven years rates increased by 53%, while inflation rose 19%.

The IDC Israel research company predicts that Israeli international telephone operators? revenue will plunge 14.8% in 2004. A study by IDC Israel research director Gideon Lopez indicates that the international carriers had $226.9 million in revenue from calls in 2003, down 4.6% from 2002. Lopez states that the decline this year will be steeper, amounting to a $194 million drop, following the opening of the international calls market to competition.

The study found that overseas call minutes from Israel totaled 1.06 billion in 2003, 8.5% less than in 2002. IDC Israel predicts that the number of overseas calls will rise 1.2% in 2004, despite the expected fall in revenue, indicating that lower prices and the entry of new companies, which will take market shares away from the existing companies, will be the cause of the revenue loss.

Health care costs were mentioned by 19% in the poll, up from 11% a year ago and 5% two years ago. Unemployment was mentioned by 14%, up slightly from 9% a year ago.

While 76% of respondents said credit card fraud is either a moderate or major concern, only 69% of respondents felt the same way about online credit card fraud. The results are from a survey of 943 American credit card holders fielded last week who were asked their opinions about credit card security, both online and offline, as well as about their experiences with credit card fraud. Credit card fraud is still a major concern to 4 in 10 Americans - both online and offline. 42% of respondents expressed serious worries about credit card security, and consider fraud a major concern. Nearly the same number of Americans (41%) consider online credit card fraudulence a major concern and 38% of respondents said they are less likely to make an Internet purchase because of those anxieties.

The apprehension seems to be justified: 12% of respondents to the Ipsos-Insight survey said they have been the victims of credit card fraud. The number of people who reported knowing someone who had been a victim of fraud as a result of a stolen credit card concurs with the recent estimate from the Federal Trade Commission that 27.3 million Americans have been the victims of identity theft in the last five years.