Taking a cue from Raven’s recent post announcing the 10,000 iPhone app milestone, I decided to update some charts from earlier posts on the U.S. iTunes app store. First, the weekly growth in the number of apps was slower in November: the number of apps grew less than 10% on a weekly basis for all of November. During the last week of November, there were close to 9,800 unique apps, 22% of which wer

If you care what I think, you know that Twitter is just about the best way to learn what I’m paying attention to. I pass along tidbits of O’Reilly news, interesting reading from mailing lists and blogs I follow, and of course, tidbits from the twitterers I’m following. These are all the things I could never find time to put on my blog, but that I spray via email like a firehose at editors, confere

Like a lot of people, I was feeling a bit of post-partum letdown after the election. Those of us who were really engaged, following the polls, making calls to undecided voters, arguing out the merits of the candidates, experienced a bit of a vacuum after the election. Doonesbury summed it up pretty well: “I’ve been on a constant news drip all year and I can’t shut it off.” But of course, the idea

Yesterday I gave a talk to the Privacy Forum in Auckland, New Zealand, titled Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud. The talk was intended as a scene setter for a discussion with the audience, about 70 lawyers, technologists, consultants, and public policy wonks. They responded well to the challenge, and we talked about the nature of privacy, how expectations change over time, trust

Big Data is a major theme on the O’Reilly Radar, so we’re delighted to welcome guest blogger Joe Hellerstein, a Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley whose research focuses on databases and distributed systems. Joe has written a whitepaper with more detail on this topic. There is a debate brewing among data systems cognoscenti as to the best way to do data analysis at this scale. The old gu

I met recently with Vic Gundotra, formerly Microsoft’s head of platform evangelism, and now VP of Engineering at Google, responsible for all their mobile efforts outside of Android. We were talking about Google’s mobile strategy and the insanely cool new voice-activated Google search in the Google Mobile Application for iPhone. But what I really want to share is Vic’s story about why he left Micro

The third calendar quarter of 2008 (Apple F4Q08) was a record for iPhone sales. 6.9 million iPhones were sold from July through September, more than the 6.1 million iPhones sold in prior quarters combined. Steve Jobs mentioned during Apple’s most recent quarterly earnings call (transcript) that the company had even beat out Research in Motion (RIM), which sold 6.1 million BlackBerry devices during

With the recent launch of the Android app market, I thought it would be a good time to give a quick update on the iTunes app store. For now, there are only a handful of apps in the Android market. Developers will be able to start uploading their apps this coming Monday. In the meantime, the rival iTunes app store keeps growing: there are now well over 5,000 apps. To put the growth in number of app

The Linux Foundation has released a report estimating the Linux kernel to be worth $1.4 billion, and the Fedora 9 distribution to be worth just over $10 billion. The report is an update of a 2002 report estimating the worth of Red Hat Linux 7.1 (Fedora is the community edition of Red Hat Linux, renamed in 2003). The report doesn’t attempt to estimate the worth of the total Linux ecosystem, as some