The free-to-play online game service Gameforge now has 300 million registered users.

Wooga CEO Jens Begeman has revealed the percentage revenue split of his company's social game income, with the unexpected revelation that his audience is far more interested in saving time than buying customisation and decoration.

Another month rolls round, bringing with it another bunch of browser market share statistics. July was the first full month during which Firefox 5 was available, so it was the first indication of how well Mozilla's new Rapid Release schedule would play in the market.

How fast is your broadband? M-Lab, a partnership between the New America Foundation and Google meant to measure Internet connections, has given Google two years worth of actual broadband connection data, as measured by users. That's more than 300TB of data, which Google has imported into its Public Data Explorer for easy viewing and analysis. The results are remarkable.

Measuring Internet access has been tricky for years. Sascha Meinrath of the New America Foundation told Ars back in 2009, when M-Lab got underway, that detailed network data about speeds, latency, jitter, and more used to be in the public domain until the government-run NSFnet was privatized in the earlier 1990s. Today, though, it's hard to know what speeds ISPs are actually offering (knowing what speeds they advertise, by contrast, is simple).

Mohan Srivastava, a geological statistician living in Toronto, was working in his office in June 2003, waiting for some files to download onto his computer, when he discovered a couple of old lottery tickets buried under some paper on his desk. The tickets were cheap scratchers—a gag gift from his squash partner—and Srivastava found himself wondering if any of them were winners. He fished a coin out of a drawer and began scratching off the latex coating. “The first was a loser, and I felt pretty smug,” Srivastava says. “I thought, ‘This is exactly why I never play these dumb games.’”

Every month Opera conducts the definitive analysis of the key trends affecting the mobile Web worldwide. We publish these findings as the State of the Mobile Web. Each report provides the most frequently visited sites, key data metrics from Opera Mini and a snapshot of a specific trend chosen by the analysis team that month.

According to a new report from Women’s Wear Daily, digital magazine sales are on the decline. A closer look at the data, however, reveals that sales are not nearly as bad as they appear.

The report, which cites numbers released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, points out that magazine sales on the iPhone and iPad are down across the board.

Microsoft has now released downloads and sales data for Windows Phone 7 Apps. The marketplace now counts 4868 apps. Among the most downloaded apps in the marketplace my 4 apps is ranked like this

Sigurd has 4 applications in Marketplace, with various levels of success, and it is his most recent app which has seen the most attention, garnering more than 50,000 downloads in 23 days, and reaching a Marketplace rank of 8, with an average of 2274 downloads per day.
The other apps have not fared as well, but what is interesting is the rapid drop-off when going from position 8 with 2300 downloads per day, to position 49 with only 330 downloads per day.

How much is a shared link on Facebook worth? For online ticketing service Eventbrite, each time someone shares a link to an event with their Facebook friends it results in $2.52 worth of ticket sales. In contrast, a Twitter share is only worth $0.43, and a LinkedIn share is worth $0.90. Sharing an event through Eventbrite’s email sharing tool is worth $2.34, almost as much as Facebook. On average, across all social channels, each share is worth an average of $1.78 for Eventbrite.

If you're anything like me, you usually think of your pics in terms of content: Here's me smiling. Here's me looking tough. Here's me in Hawaii with that wacky turtle. And so on. Today, however, we'll analyze photography from a numerical angle—we'll discuss flash, focus, and aperture instead. We feel like people don't really think about these things when they choose a profile photo, and yet, as we shall see, their misuse can seriously mess you up.

This Escapist’s publisher, Alexander Macris, strikes a note that is all too familiar to many veteran gamers. He’s feeling left behind as a gamer, and explains the simple economics of why this is the case. Why they aren’t makin’ ‘em like they used to anymore. While I’m not sure his numbers are entirely accurate, they do paint a pretty sobering picture of why games have adapted the way they have…

Dies ist die leicht überarbeitete schriftliche Fassung eines Vortrags, den ich am 5. Juni zum Abschluss der 3. Berliner Mediensucht-Konferenz gehalten habe. Der vollständige Titel meines Vortrags hieß: “Immer und überall online – ein verheißungsvolles Leben mit Facebook, Foursquare und Co?” Ich werde den Vortrag wegen seiner Länge in drei Teilen auf diesem Blog veröffentlichen. Hier geht’s los mit Teil 1: Warum das Internet kein Zukunfts- sondern ein Gegenwartsthema ist – und für manche Nutzer das Thema Nummer 1 überhaupt.

This post will share the first of what we expect to be a dozen or more papers on virtual world behaviors. As the first, it's the broadest, but I suspect will be of interest and use to the wider virtual world community. You can find the full text of this first paper here, at the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, with no access restrictions.