In the previous installment in this series, I looked at the browser share in North America. Across the water in Europe, the browser distribution metrics show the unique flavor that this continent brings to this fluid arena.

In Europe, MSIE7 and Firefox 3 are effectively tied for the lead as the most dominant browser, followed distantly by MSIE6. As in North America, MSIE8 has substantially increased it’s market share since its March 19 2009 release, but it has not caught up to Europe’s favorite son, Opera 9.6.

What is clear is that MSIE8’s gain is MSIE7’s loss. Comparing March 1-19 with April 1-19, the shift away from MSIE7 is almost equal to the shift to MSIE8, meaning that people that are upgrading to MSIE8 in Europe are doing so, in the most part, directly from MSIE7.

There is little or no change to the MSIE6 install base, indicating that this is an entrenched population, likely in large corporations or government agencies.

Like in North America, the big factor to watch is how quickly the MSIE6 population decreases. Europe already has an entrenched population of alternative browser users, mostly with Firefox 3. When Opera 10 and Firefox 3.1 are released, it is likely that these people will move directly to these browsers.

What remains to be seen is how the strong anti-Microsoft sentiment in Europe affects the adoption of MSIE8.

Steve Gillmor comments on TechCrunch today that Comcast’s caps on bandwidth may finally drive people from the land of torrents, and to the land of streaming. [here]

While I agree that the promise of streaming is long overdue, there is the one area that streaming still can’t fill: The mobile viewer. I don’t mean folks on mobile phones, although with the growth of 3G in the Americas (Europe and Asia laugh at us in the area), the mobile market will become more important.

No, I am referring to the mobile, laptop-using traveller, mainly the business traveller, although leisure travellers are starting to take their laptops with them more often. Streaming doesn’t work on the road, in a hotel with a crappy connection, in an airport, or somewhere were the 3G isn’t 3G enough.

While streaming will become more prevalent, it won’t unseat the culture of Torrents for a few years yet. It will happen. But affordable, reliable connectivity saturation across the Americas has to occur first. And, in some ways, Comcast and the other providers are the ones hampering this process.

The focus of the connectivity providers on their dinosaur cage-match with the FCC has left them ignorant of the asteroid screaming toward them. In order to create a streaming market that they can profit from, they have to open the pipes, lower the costs, and increase the options for the consumer of their Internet/bandwidth services. If the connectivity they provide to the consumers can’t support the desire for the streaming economy, the Torrent reality will not fade away.

My system has a daily job to collect and aggregate the IP Blocks distributed by the five registrars into a single database, and then provide high-level WHOIS information for this data. If you want to try this yourself, the interface here.

On an extremely irregular basis, I aggregate the statistics from this data, and present it to the masses for the examination. I might actually automate this data someday!

So, for August 2007 (as of August 21, 2007), here are the aggregated IP distribution statistics broken down by registrar and country.

Starting with the country data, I figured that a sane cutoff for values would be 1,000,000 IP addresses. The list here is mostly unchanged, except for the addition of the European Union (EU). The EU is a recent addition, as it was not listed in the Country Code lookup table I had been using, and had to be added manually on August 20, 2007.

COUNTRY
IPS


UNITED STATES
1394044928


JAPAN
156239616


CHINA
127511296


EUROPEAN UNION
120433884


UNITED KINGDOM
82641530


CANADA
73318912


GERMANY
69600688


FRANCE
65257760


KOREA, REPUBLIC OF
57733376


AUSTRALIA
32543744


ITALY
24079040


BRAZIL
21366272


SPAIN
20058528


MEXICO
19406848


NETHERLANDS
19265064


TAIWAN, PROVINCE OF CHINA
18736896


SWEDEN
16378336


RUSSIAN FEDERATION
15920408


INDIA
13495040


POLAND
12080076


SOUTH AFRICA
10817792


FINLAND
8577920


TURKEY
8287680


DENMARK
7872864


SWITZERLAND
7311136


HONG KONG
6909952


AUSTRIA
6634208


NORWAY
6611232


ROMANIA
5997696


BELGIUM
5419904


NEW ZEALAND
4971008


CZECH REPUBLIC
4791168


ARGENTINA
4749056


ISRAEL
4042176


CHILE
4041728


IRELAND
3851776


SINGAPORE
3821568


VIETNAM
3795712


THAILAND
3629568


VENEZUELA
3457536


PORTUGAL
3371840


HUNGARY
3312768


MALAYSIA
3133440


GREECE
2941440


COLOMBIA
2817280


UKRAINE
2446144


BULGARIA
2395648


PHILIPPINES
2328832


INDONESIA
2221056


EGYPT
2105088


LITHUANIA
1920384


SAUDI ARABIA
1572608


SLOVAKIA
1358080


IRAN, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF
1331712


COSTA RICA
1303296


UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
1230848


LATVIA
1161536


SLOVENIA
1060890


PERU
1023744

The next data is the IP addresses by registrar. Again, the order of this list is not surprising, except for the continued overwhelming dominance of ARIN.

REGISTRY
IPS


arin
1552509952


ripencc
497148492


apnic
406221568


lacnic
61819136


afrinic
16387328

I hope that this information is helpful and informative.

Technorati Tags: ARIN, RIPE, LACNIC, AFRINIC, APNIC, registrar, IP bloks, internet dominance, internet geography, statistics

I have set up measurements to monitor the main pages of some of the world’s largest mobile phone providers.

• US Providers
• Canadian Providers
• European Providers
• AsiaPac / South Asia Providers

Just something to do on a rainy Sunday.

Tags: GrabPERF, Web performance, GSM, CDMA, Web site, mobile, wireless, US, Asia, Europe

Many thanks to Otis Gospodnetic of Simpy for putting me in contact with Benjamin Reitzammer. Benjamin has graciously set up the GrabPERF measurement script on his server in Zurich.

Now that the Europeans have a growing presence on the GrabPERF Network, we need some locations in the US and Asia-Pacific.

Tags: GrabPERF, Simpy, Benjamin Reitzammer, measurement agent, Web performance, Zurich, Asia-Pacific, USA

Just read a story on the BBC site where the chief Latinist (new word to me) bemoans the death of Latin. [here]

Although I would be the first to admit that the teaching of Latin has little relevance in today’s world, I found my lack of Latin a serious hindrance when I was considering the study of Medieval English History in graduate school.

It was offered as a course in high-school, by correspondence only. I often dreamed that I attended one of those brutal old English boarding schools, if only to receive some semblance of a highly impractical liberal and classical education.

I share Father Reginald Foster’s despair over the loss of Latin to our culture. The foundations of who we are, our political and legal structures, are found in Latin (Roman and Medieval; and yes there is a difference), and in Classical Greek. And those items that the Catholic Church tried to hide or destroy, the cultures of the East, and Islam held on to.

Losing the base languages of our global cultures leaves us with poor translations, interpretations of what was said, filtered through the passage of time.

Ok Skype hounds, this is is. Skype, in a move to get us North Americans (sorry Mexico) to use more Skype, is offering us unlimited calling to Canadian and American numbers (landlines and mobile) for all of 2007 for the ridiculously low price of $14.95 (offer valid until January 31, 2007).

Get it! Like you need a reason to resist Skype?

Oh, and of course all Skype-to-Skype calls are still free.

So, the question begs to be asked: why? Well, it seems that us dense folks on the non-European side of the Atlantic and the non-Asian side of the Pacific haven’t been adopting Skype fast enough.

A variety of theories abound about this. The one I have is that the US phone companies have priced long-distance so low that there is no motivator driving people away from their POTS connections.

The competition between the Telcos and the Cablecos over your phone service has been another factor in keeping long-distance costs so low.

It will be interesting to see which of the long-distance companies responds with a North American unlimited plan for a ridiculously low rate.

Technorati Tags: Skype, SkypeOut, unlimited+calling, voip, Telcos, Cablecos, long+distance, competition

For history fiends, enthusiasts of lost treasures, and lovers of a good mystery, the discovery of the Archimedes Palimpsest has been one of those stories that must be followed.

The texts contained in the Palimpsest were lost to humanity for hundreds of years as a result of a common Medieval European tradition — the re-use of parchment. To quote the site:

“The word Palimpsest comes from the Greek Palimpsestos, meaning “scraped again”. Medieval manuscripts were made of parchment, especially prepared and scraped animal skin. Unlike paper, parchment is sufficiently durable that you can take a knife to it, and scrape off the text, and over write it with a new text. In this case, [the text of Archimedes'] five books were taken apart, the text was scraped off the leaves, which were then stacked in a pile, ready for reuse.”

Using a new x-ray scanning technology, the original Greek text is exposed to the Western world for the first time since 1229.

This holds more than a passing interest to me, as one of the most influential history courses I took during my undergrad tenure was taught by a paleographer and historian at the University of Victoria, Michèle Mulchahey (she is now part of the faculty at the University of St., Andrews in my ancestral homeland, Scotland). I still often wish I had continued my Medieval European history studies, but my lack of latin prevented me from go much further than I did.

Glad to see a truly old classic resurrected.

Technorati Tags: Archimedes, Palimpsest, paleography, Michèle Mulchahey

On my trip to Europe earlier this month, I picked up a Razr V3 that had been abandoned by one of my colleagues in the UK. Sitting in a drawer, it looked so lonely and abandoned.

It probably wishes it had stayed there.

Since I got it, I have been exploring all of the sites and boards that discuss the various hacks that people have performed on this magnificent piece of technology. Short of some of the advanced procedures (still trying to figure out how to convert the bluetooth into a directed energy weapon), this is not the same phone I received two weeks ago.

I have flashed the firmware (twice), switched on the Autoupdate feature for the Time/Date, and removed all of the Vodafone specific branding that came with the device.

I now understand how you can become heavily involved in phone modding. This device, which is a simple V3 that you see everywhere, is more powerful than my first 386. I can cruise the Web using Opera Mini, check directions using Google Mini-Maps, and use it as a modem if I am ever stuck for a connection somewhere.

I also have the Motorola Phone Tools software installed, so I can control my phone over USB.

A lot of what I have learned and done over the last three days is definitely in a “grey zone” as far as Motorola is concerned. However, given the number of people doing this, Motorola should open up their tools and let people know how to make the mods they want.

In fact, I would love to see Motorola should run a contest to see who can build the coolest Flash pack for the V3 that can be used by anyone. That would build intense customer interest and would make the V3 even more of a geek toy than it is now.

It is the single coolest gadget I have ever owned. It even outranks the Treo and the Zen Micro.

For those of you out there into the risk of turning your slek and sexy phone into a brick, I suggest Motox or MotoModders as places to start.

Long live MotoModding.

Technorati Tags: Razr V3, V3, Moto, MotoModding, Motorola, hacks, flash, modding

When I got to the London office, I started talking about how I had an addiction to sexy GSM phones, and showed off my collection. I then noted that the Motorola Razr seems to be a pretty hot commodity these days in London. My colleagues laughed, and one of them pulled his old Razr out of a drawer, effectively saying that it was so last year.

Since the Razr was unlocked, I asked if he was doing anything with it. So, I am now the proud owner of a first-series black Razr, a London office cast-off.

Seems that all of Europe wants a Sony-Ericsson W-series or the Nokia N-series. Razrs are so old school.

When I arrived in Germany with my Treo 600 now relegated to backup position by the Rzr, one of my German colleagues was bemoaning the fact that any PDA phone was horrendously expensive. I then offered him up the Treo 600, which I had adopted from its previous owner. After a hard reset, he spent the rest of the day fiddling with it, and grinning maniacally.

Sometimes technology just finds its way to the right place.

Technorati Tags: Razr, Treo 600, European phones, GSM