Is the iPhone more data efficient than its Android rivals? Sprint CEO Dan Hesse says it is.

During an earnings call Wednesday, Hesse claimed iPhones use about half the network resources required by Android handsets, a feature that weighed heavily in the carrier’s decision to add Apple’s device to its portfolio.

“There is a misperception that our launch of the iPhone will increase the load on Sprint’s 3G network and require us to spend more 3G capital,” Hesse said. “The reverse is true. iPhone users are expected to use significantly less 3G than the typical user of a dual-mode 3G, 4G device. Even adjusting for more total new customers being added to the network, we believe they will put less load on our 3G network than they would have if we did not carry the iPhone.”

In other words, Sprint believes the iPhone is so data efficient that it will help the company continue to offer unlimited data plans for its smartphones — even following the debut of iCloud, whose services are presumably on the data-heavy side. Evidently, Apple’s strict network efficiency requirements, which prohibit apps from pinging networks as often as those on other operating systems, and the iPhone’s ability to quickly offload data onto Wi-Fi goes a long way toward reducing network congestion.

So the iPhone will likely be a big boon for Sprint, though one that’s not without risks. The carrier says the device’s benefits won’t exceed its costs until 2015. And in the meantime it may need $7 billion in new financing to cover up-front and network costs related to it.

The Internet’s favorite top-level domain is close to hitting a huge milestone. The .com domain is now on the brink of reaching 100 million registered domain names. It’s a real triumph for what is already by far the world’s largest top-level domain – it accounts for around 45% of all domain names.

It’s not quite there yet, though. There are currently 98 million registered .com domain names, so there are still two million to go. Judging by the chart here below from Registrar Stats, we will reach the 100-million milestone within a few months, sometime around the end of this year.

The .com domain is one of the original top-level domains on the Internet, having been around since 1985 and the start of the Domain Name System that we all depend upon so much.

To give you an idea of how the .com domain has grown since its inception, we’ve put together this chart for you:

The number for December 2010 is an estimate based on the Registrar Stats chart and an old domain name industry brief from Verisign. The others come from BV.com.

Quite amazing, isn’t it? Especially when you compare today’s numbers with the modest beginnings in the 1980s and early 1990s, before the World Wide Web (you may have heard of it) made everyone flock to the Internet.

P.S. If you wonder about the jagged section in the chart from Registrar Stats, here is the explanation.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

The following is an excerpt of an entry in our Facebook Marketing Bible. The full version contains a detailed walk-through of how to measure the lifespan of your posts through Insights, and how to optimize for gaining new fans or link clicks. 

Facebook’s new Page Insights and some third-party tools can help you determine the lifespan of your Facebook Page updates. When your updates stop receiving Likes and comments, it may be time to post a new update to make sure you’re consistently engaging your fans. Here we’ll walk-through how to find your optimal Facebook Page publishing frequency.

PageLever ran a limited study of 20 posts from five Facebook Pages with over 1 million fans. It found that that average lifespan of a Page post in the news feed was 22 hours and 51 minutes. The median lifespan was 19 hours and 30 minutes. These figures were based on when posts ceased to receive Likes and comments. Posts continued to receive impressions for a slightly longer period of time, but the bulk of feedback occurs within the first 20 hours of a post’s lifespan.

Third-party tools such as PageLever and EdgeRank Checker can track the activity on a post by the hour so you can easily get an accurate, personalized assessment of the life-span of your Page posts.

If you don’t want to use or pay for a third-party tool, assessing the lifespan of your posts is more difficult as Facebook does not report Likes, comments, or clicks by hour, just by the day and per post. However, there is a manual way to gather this data.

To do so, visit your Page and click the Insights tab in the left-sidebar navigation menu. At the bottom of the main Insights tab in the Page Posts section…

Instructions for tracking the lifespan of your posts through Insights and optimizing for news fans or link clicks can be found in the full version of this article. This is available in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook.

FRONTLINE - Doctor Hotspot (full report) #healthcare #mapping #data

Excellent set of infographics on Indian politics and current affairs.

Infographics heaven

The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand. You don't have to be a data expert to navigate between different views, make your own comparisons, and share your findings.

Instead, the most important things I've learned are less formal, but have proven extremely useful when working/playing with data

"That then is the dilemma the natural sciences find themselves in in my opinion, a dilemma that the social sciences have faced for centuries. In fact one can argue that the dilemma has been caused by the social sciences finally intersecting with the natural science as their integrated whole has become more and more complex and is now tackling extremely convoluted territory like the brain, the climate, the universe, human behavior, the economy, evolution and the mechanisms of drug action and disease. With this kind of complexity, scientists have been resigned to pick between two quite unsastisfactory choices; either no explanation at all, or an "explanation" based on models, internal logical consistency, "aesthetics" and elegance (case in point- string theory) and ingenious sounding armchair explanations"

This prompted me to check my usage, which you can do in the Settings app by tapping General > Usage, and then scrolling down to the Cellular Network Data section and adding the two numbers there.

Join in the dialogue among all of the stakeholders – businesses, individuals, government agencies, non-profit groups, academics, teachers and students – to look more thoroughly at how advanced technologies affect our daily lives.

What happened with the Internet in 2009?

How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many more. Prepare for information overload, but in a good way.

Examine Netflix rental patterns, neighborhood by neighborhood, in a dozen cities

we have pulled together a set of 28 tools for creating graphs, Gantt charts, diagrammers, calendars/schedulers, gauges, mapping, pivot tables, OLAP cubes, and sparklines, in Flash, Flex, Ajax or Silverlight.

Societal trends reshaping the American electorate

Usain Bolt’s wonderful run in the Olympic 200-meter sprint reminds us that the normal distribution — the familiar bell curve beloved by economists and statisticians — can be wildly inappropriate when analyzing extremely selected samples

Olympic Medals won by million population

The Statbot is dedicated to bringing out interesting and fun stats about web communities and popular folks.

A fantastically cool list. And to think I struggle with tinkering around with my blog's CSS.