Nokia and some "swiss army knife" applications for phones

More and more functionality is moving into mobile phones. You make calls, SMS and browse the web. Phones are also your MP3 player and your camera. Not to forget your address book and your calendar. You name it...

I just noticed another functionality from Nokia Betalabs. Phones as your magnifying glass. Perhaps an obvious application, but I haven't heard of it before. Simple and potentially useful. When the cameras gets better and better, as well as the screens, this is yet another addition to the swiss-army-knife set of functionality. Have a look at the video:



When I browsed through the Nokia Accessability site I also noticed the text-to-speech (TTS) application. Neat.

The obvious (?) combination of these two applications would be to have the phone reading out text you view through the phone's camera. Just add a bit of OCR. Shouldn't take long before this application appears, or is it already available somewhere?

Two million Facebook users in Sweden - here's the demographics

Sweden now has over two million Facebook users. That's a lot.

(Update December 2009 - now more than three million users, read more here)

It took Sweden around 16 months to go from one million users to two million users. This means that the overall penetration of Facebook currently is 22% in Sweden.
As you can see from the chart below the growth rate started to increase in August last year, and doesn't seem to decline yet.

Just a week before Sweden broke the one million mark that I looked into the demographics of the Swedish Facebook users. So - let's have another look at the demographics and see what have changed.

Age of Swedish facebook users
This is the age distribution from Facebook:

If you combine this with the population in Sweden for each age group you get a similiar curve indicating the relative number of users within each age span:

You can notice a very high penetration (over 80%) among the population between 19 and 24.

From the chart below you can see that the media age is around 25 years, you find the first 25% of the users below 20 years of age and 75% of the users below 32 years of age:


Gender of Swedish Facebook users
When we look at the gender distribution we see that there is more women than men on Facebook in Sweden:

The female users are in majority across all age groups:


Also, when you compare the similiar graph from 2007 you notice that the "undefined" gender group has gone down. I believe Facebook no longer allow the users not to state gender?

And while we are comparing with the numbers from 2007, let's have a look at the penetration per age group side by side:

You can note that the population age 35 and over still has room for growth, but percentage wise has grown more than the 20-24 age group since 2007.

That's enough of graphs for now. Let's wait for the 3 millionth user in Sweden for some more graphs...

As a last note - when Facebook hit one million users in Sweden I noted that Facebook was the second most visited site in Sweden according to Alexa. Now, when the number of Swedish users has doubled the same Alexa lookup only put Facebook as number 5:

Twixdagen and some Twitter videos

It seems like the microblogging site Twitter has started to get some momentum in Sweden. Still not a mainstream usage, it will be interesting how far microblogging will spread in Sweden.

Twixdagen
In Sweden most political parties, and quite a few individual politicians, have started to use Twitter. No doubt they are influenced by Barrack Obama's Twitter account.

In the overall mashup tradition a site, Twixdagen.se, has created a feed of all Tweets from Swedish parties and politicians. I find this rather neat and interesting, as it definately increases the visibility and transparancy of the daily work inside politics (disclaimer - I haven't valued the quality and information value of the resulting strean ;-).

Twitter videos
Also recently, two videos with Evan Williams has surfaced.

The first video is from TED. Evan tells the story behind Twitter. I kind of like the statement "I learned to kind of follow hunches, even though you can't necessarily justify them or know where they're gonna go". Also, what takes place after Evans talk is a great example of the backchannel concept.


The second video is from the television show Charlie Rose. (The Twitter part starts a approx. 33 min 40 sec.)

So, what are you waiting for? If you are not on Twitter, join today. You'll find me at twitter.com/johan.