More and more US households use broadband internet, but cut their TV subscriptions and switch to free broadcasts only. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that TV is over, but it certainly indicates that consumers use different channels to get their TV series shots.

In a few years, we might look at the last holiday season and mark it as the breakthrough point for tablets and ebooks: In the US, tablet and ebook ownership each nearly doubled from mid-December to early January from 10% to 19%. The share of Americans who own at least one of these devices is now at almost a third. From kinda-niche to full-on mainstream in 3 weeks.

While TV consumption is on the rise, increasingly people don't watch TV exclusively anymore. (As if they ever did.) 40% of tablet and smartphones owners use their devices while watching TV. That's almost half - broadcasters better take that into account when planning their programming.

A comprehensive, massive overview of mobile stats for 2011.

Impressive stats: Over Christmas alone, 6.8million Android phones and iPhones were activated. Android was ahead just a little with some 3.7m alone. To put this in context: That's up 353% from the usual daily activations.

Remember Google+? After Google's social networking site started with a bang, it has become somewhat quiet around the new kid on the block. Partly, that was because Google had restricted users numbers to grow slowly while they tweaked the code. By now it's open, boasts some 85 million users and it turns out the service is growing fast. Very fast, indeed - at a rate of 625.000 new users per day, projected to hit 100 million in late February and 400 million by the end of 2012.

UK-based agency We Are Social compiled a solid overview of Japan's social & mobile usage statistics.

some useful links for Facebook background (data, media, engineering, safety etc):

Tracking Influence and Measuring Success in Twitter

Die OpenNet Initiative hat die Internetzensur des letzten Jahres als Überblick aufbereitet.

free open-source online survey tool