What I Learned Yesterday

From Henry Blodget's Business Insider, a review of various Internet industry metrics today:

In 1870, the average workweek was 60-70 hours long (included Saturdays)
Today, the average workweek is 40 hours
28 hours of saved worktime is now spent watching TV each week
There are 3 billion people online today, and just 4 billion to go
50% of TVs sold today are connected to the Internet
72% of the US population owns a smartphone today, vs 18% in Jan 2010
25% of all smartphones sold worldwide are sold in China
Global TV advertising revenues = $170 billion in 2014
Google's total revenues = $70 billion in 2014 (nearly half of entire TV market)
Time Warner's total revenues = $30 billion in 2014
Facebook's total revenues = $18 billion in 2014
YouTube reaches more 18-34 year olds than any single cable channel
Mobile devices now account for 33% of all ecommerce
US desktop PC search queries are now in a year-over-year decline
Among US teens, phone numbers are for texting, not talking.


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Kaname Takeya is a battery engineer with a firm called Power Japan Plus. He helped design the nickel metal hydride batteries that power every Prius. He also helped design the lithium batteries that power all Tesla cars. Today, he is working on Dual Carbon Cell batteries. These require only carbon to work and can last through as many as 3,000 charge cycles.

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From a presentation at the Charlotte SouthPark Rotary Club, Martin Grable of the Blood Center of the Carolinas talked briefly about the incredible decline in costs for sequencing the human genome. The cost to sequence one human genome has declined from $100 million 15 years ago to less than $1,000 today.

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A different era. After reading a great bio of the actor Gregory Peck in Friday's IBD, I searched for the Academy Award winners in 1962 (Peck won the Best Actor award that year for his role in "To Kill A Mockingbird". Here are the movies that were nominated for Best Picture:

Lawrence of Arabia
To Kill A Mockingbird
The Longest Day
The Music Man
Mutiny on the Bounty

The quality of those films speak for themselves. Hard to find a year in the last 10 that matched that quality.