Archive for December, 2011

It doesn’t get any more local than this, folks. Cory Booker, the popular major of Newark, New Jersey, has challenged his city to get fit and is using Facebook and Twitter to get them involved.

Booker isn’t new to Twitter, with over a million followers he has become one of the most popular mayors in the United States. During the winter, Booker takes to Twitter to field cries for help from citizens who had their cars snowed in. Booker may be best known for his city being the recipient of a $100M grant from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

In the “Let’s Move” challenge, Booker is asking everyone in Newark to sign up and share their fitness resolution for 2012. Along with sharing the resolution, the program will give out prizes and have social games.

By using social networks like Facebook and Twitter to get the word out, Booker hopes that Newark residents will be inspired by seeing other locals pledge to get fit in 2012, and get involved themselves. The first step is to enter your fitness resolution for the new year, and then blast it out to Facebook and Twitter.

When 2012 starts, the site will let you log your activities and share them with your neighbors. By leveraging social networking activities like checking in and leaderboards, this is a brilliant way to bring a community together to reach one goal. In this case, Booker would like to see his city become more physically active.

We’ve seen other mayors take to social networks to get people more involved in their city, like Tampa City mayor Bob Buckhorn, who left foursquare tips at popular spots.

Even if you don’t live in Newark, this is an inspiring story and great use of technology. I suspect that we’ll see more of this in 2012.

➤ Cory Booker Challenge

The Age’s passing is being marked by a period of extended bickering in comments sections across the Web over the meaning of “age,” “blogging” and “tech” in their respective contexts. In keeping with the style of argument that marked the heyday of the Age, none of these arguments have reached any conclusions, though many were declared “idiots.”

Such an extraordinary amount of turmoil and upheaval, it is believed, is unprecedented for this period in world history, which has otherwise been characterized by peace, stability, economic well-being, the eradication of hunger, and freedom from strife. Indeed, compared to the upbeat and forward-thinking spirit of the automobile industry, the sound strategy and sure-footedness of the financial industry, the bold and innovative stance of the media industry, the strength and resolve of our infrastructure, and the comity and brotherhood that has characterized the most productive period of legislative accomplishments at any time since the Dawn of Humankind, the passing of the Golden Age of Tech Blogging is a rare blot, a pimple on the face of progress. Things would have been so perfect this year, but alas.

Gone, gone are the names that once rolled off of Web readers’ tongues, the bylines that built an Age of magnificence, of greatness, of headlines so brilliant that they nearly crossed the threshold into truth. All the great editors of this-and-such, can’t you recall them as though they were here only yesterday? A list of several of those names was being recollected for this article, but woefully had already been forgotten by press time.

As a tribute to those great names, to the fallen ones who once relied solely upon themselves for expertise, illumination and biting wit, I have called upon the most conveniently available expert on the topic of the Golden Age to shed more light upon it.

Self: How do you do?

Me: Greetings, self. Self, tell us how the passing of this Golden Age compares to the passings of other ages?

Self: Well, as you’ll recall, there was the End of the Geocities Era in April 2009, during which the End of Blogging For All Time was predicted.

Me: Oh, yes. Terrible!

Self: Then two months earlier came the Death of Web 2.0, which was marked by a long period of public mourning.

Me: Yes, I remember many members of my family sought my help in reverting to Web 1.7.

Self: Then there was The Day the Web Died, on account of CBS’ purchase of CNET Networks in 2008.

Me: And of course, who can forget the Bubble?

Self: The what?

Me: The Bubble, you know, the one that burst in 2001.

Self: Oh yes, the End of the Internet as We Know It. As I recall, what brought that on was an over-investment in entities that had unsubstantiated business plans. They didn’t really know how they would earn revenue.

Me: And of course, that mistake could never be repeated again.

Self: Naturally. Of course, it’s too late now anyway, with the Golden Age having passed.

Me: Now, according to Wikipedia, there were prior technological eras during which people reportedly walked on the moon; and before that, there were – again, reportedly – major public infrastructure projects which resulted in the building of dams and the construction of lakes and waterways.

Self: Yes, but you’re forgetting that due to the absence of available bloggers during that prehistoric period, there’s considerable doubt over whether these events actually happened.

Me: But it was during the Golden Age that such doubts were elevated to their rightful place alongside the truth.

Self: Indeed. During the Age, one could produce a headline such as, “Man Never Walked On Moon.”

Me: Ah-ah-ah! Don’t forget the question mark!

Self: Oh, yes, forsooth I shan’t. It was a common practice in this period, when there wasn’t enough time between now and lunch to seek an outside source, to simply run with the headline with a question mark at the end.

Me: Which was good, because then you’d get a lot of comments.

Self: Mostly from readers who would be insulted by, for instance, the gender-insensitivity of the headline.

Me: So you would replace that…

Self: …publish a whole new story, “People Never Walked On Moon,” question mark.

Me: Assuming for the sake of hypothesis that these technological events did happen; the moon landing, Hoover Dam…

Self: D-Day, the splitting of the atom.

Me: How do they relate by comparison to the technological events we attached question marks to during the Golden Age?

Self: Well, Buzz Aldrin couldn’t exactly tweet his good fortune from the Sea of Tranquility, now, could he? Nor could he play a round of “Angry Birds” while sitting at the foot of the lunar lander.

Me: Very good point. Boy, wouldn’t that have made all the difference!

Self: Perhaps it did. “Aldrin Aced ‘Ham-’em-High’ Level from Lunar Surface,” question mark.

Me: Now, we haven’t seen an official autopsy report yet, so do we know what the actual cause of passing was?

Self: For what?

Me: The Golden Age, the latest one.

Self: Oh, yes. Sorry, I lost my train of time there. Well, we do have some evidence. There was a report by Sarah Lacy earlier this week…

Me: Sarah Lacy! Yes, she was one of the names on my list! Do we know if she’s all right?

Self: She’s fine, she made it through.

Me: Thank heavens!

Self: Sarah mentioned how with the business model of blogs during the Golden Age, the more popular a blog became, the more distributed its ad inventory grew, and as a result, the less money each ad generated.

Me: That sounds like the business model used to equalize the revenue from farming, just after the Russian Revolution.

Self: True, socialism had been enjoying a brief reprise during the Golden Age.

Me: And that all ended with the surge of corporate interests.

Self: Money, as you know, is the root of all corruption. Now, it would appear the capitalists have come home to roost, and who knows what the fate of the Free and Open Web will be now that money has entered the picture.

Me: Who knows, question mark!

Self: Question mark, quite correct!

Me: Self, thank me for joining me for this exclusive, live coverage, and I look forward to seeing you for the next great passing.

Self: Thank you, me. I’m holding next April open.

Here at TNW we have been harping, and writing, on the importance of the holiday sales season for Windows Phone for some time, given that we view it as the chance for the mobile platform to turn around its fortunes and begin what could be a comeback; Windows Phone has been generally well received, but it has failed to capture the wallets of consumers, or their mindshare.

New data from comScore paints a somewhat bleak picture of Microsoft’s performance through November however, the month at which we had anticipated a rise in Windows Phone market share due to new handsets and market pushes coming online, not to mention the Mango update being fully launched. We got it wrong: Microsoft shed another 0.5% market share. That puts it, again according to comScore, at just above 5%.

As comebacks go, that’s a pretty poor effort.

However, it is important to keep in mind that as Windows Phone tries to expand its total market share, the pie itself is growing; the iPhone, for example, continues to set records. Therefore, Windows Phone could be experiencing expanding sales, but declining market share. As you can easily deduce, this puts any potential sales growth in a very small grotto, as any large expansion of sales would have ticked its market share figures in the right direction.

At best we can say that Windows Phone hasn’t run completely out of gas, at least through November, and at worst that the phone line might have set itself up for a second underperforming holiday sales cycle. Microsoft’s Windows Phone plans are known for the next year, and it’s more than probably that a full two years have been mapped; Windows Phone is in no danger of going away. The question is what Microsoft will try next to boost its sales. How many of those ideas does the company have left?

AngelPad, the startup incubator launched by seven ex-Googlers in August 2010, is taking a look back at how far it’s come in the months since and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. So far, AngelPad has helped 37 companies get off the ground, but it wasn’t until this year that things really got going: 29 of those 37 startups emerged from AngelPad’s incubator in 2011 alone.

Out of the 37 companies, 31 have received funding, totaling just over $25 million.

According to one of AngelPad’s founders, Thomas Korte, the average funding amount for its startups is around $750,000. Of course, he admits that averages don’t always give the most accurate picture since a few highs and lows can distort things. MoPub, for example, is on the high-end, having raised over $7 million. There were a couple of others with high numbers over a million, too, Korte says.

But the vast majority of the startups have raised somewhere in the $500K – $1 million range, and 10 AngelPad companies have raised over $1 million each in 2011. Also, among a handful of acquisition offers, only one took the bait: Hopscotch sold to Sosh. However, both companies were so young, it was really more of a teaming up on their parts.

Not all companies make it, though. AngelPad has seen three companies fail out of the 37 launched – something that Korte says was not due to lack of funding or traction. “In early stage startups, the number one reason for failure is the founder relationship, he explains, “all three failed because of a founder breakup.” He says the program now looks at the founders applying to see how long they’ve known each other, if they’ve worked together and what sort of issues they’ve overcome in the past.

There are few other insights the AngelPad team gained over the past year and half of operation. One is that founders need to have an extremely large vision. ”And not an artificially inflated vision, but truly a great vision of what you want to do,” says Korte. “That’s when a lot of investors, and people who want to work for you, and even advisors, get excited about your company.”

But a vision alone is not enough. You also have to have the first tangible steps. Korte says he often sees startups with the tangible steps and a smaller vision, or people with a huge vision, and no tangible steps as to how to achieve it. You have to have both those things together.

He also stressed that growing a company takes time. It seems an obvious point, but in today’s instant gratification age (and corresponding news cycle, ahem), what’s often not reported is how long it took for a company to achieve its success, funding, or whatever other metric is being touted. “We don’t see how much work or how much time has gone into it – we don’t see how many iterations it took, how many years it took, how long it’s being going on,” says Korte. And it’s a problem that’s affecting everyone. “Investors become impatient, founders become impatient, employees become impatient…but building great companies takes time.”

Finally, Korte says that AngelPad learned that even a small amount of money early on can have a big impact on how founders approach the product. It takes the pressure of raising money off founders’ shoulders, allowing them to focus not on impressing VC’s with what’s being built, but more on building the product itself. Of course, AngelPad knows this impact first-hand: this summer, two VC firms ponied up $50K each, providing each startup with an additional $100K - something that will continue in the new year.

As for what’s next for 2012? With any hope, it’s more of the same. The incubator plans to start interviewing companies in January for the session starting in March. Applications are closing on January 1st, so if you’re a startup thinking of applying, time is almost up. Get busy.

• ANGELPAD

AngelPad is a mentorship program founded by a team of ex-Googlers to help web-technology startups build better products, attract additional funding and ultimately grow more successful businesses.

AngelPad provides founders with funding, mentorship and the chance to work alongside other great founders in San Francisco.

Learn more

This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read the case study about how Intel Xeon processors and VMware helped virtualize 12 business critical database applications.

If you’re using WordPress, the options you are mostly likely to use are to run your own stack, use a shared hosting provider that offers WordPress or to go with WordPress.com. With the rise of PaaS offerings like OpenShift, though, why not run WordPress there?

As it stands, most PaaS providers are largely targeted at custom code rather than packages like WordPress. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get WordPress up and running, as Amit Shah demonstrated by moving his WordPress blog to OpenShift.

Actually, he was moving from Blogger to WordPress, which makes it even more interesting. Shah gives a detailed explanation of how he moved his blog to OpenShift, including the commands to grab PHP, MySQL, add domains and set up the directory for WordPress.

Why would you want to do this? Scalability is one thing. I’m running a WordPress instance on Linode right now, and I can add resources if I want but it requires manual intervention and stopping/restarting the VPS to make changes. Hosting on a PaaS should mean you can scale up/down dynamically with no downtime.

It also means that the PaaS provider will take care of all the security updates. That’s true, or should be, if you’re using shared hosting or WordPress.com. However, the trade-off for shared hosting means that you’re on a server with who knows how many other users. It also offers much less flexibility. WordPress.com offers plenty of scalability, but again has much less flexibility in terms of what you can do (like install custom plugins, etc.).

One of the trends I’m hoping to see in 2012 is for projects like WordPress to be easily deployed on PaaS services.

Posted in

Case Studies,Features,PaaS

and tagged with

openshift, PaaS, rhel, wordpress

• Comment
• Subscribe
• 
  Email This
• Print This
• 
  Tweet This
• 
  Share
  

If you’re using WordPress, the options you are mostly likely to use are to run your own stack, use a shared hosting provider that offers WordPress or to go with WordPress.com. With the rise of PaaS offerings like OpenShift, though, why not run WordPress there?

nn

As it stands, most PaaS providers are largely targeted at custom code rather than packages like WordPress. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get WordPress up and running, as Amit Shah demonstrated by moving his WordPress blog to OpenShift.

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

It appears that Facebook has stopped supporting Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 browser, according to our friends at The Sociable.

While this isn’t surprising since the browser is five years old, it is a bit of a hack for those who would rather not use Facebook’s Timeline feature to browse the site. It’s not perfect though, since along with dropping Timeline, IE7 also screws up the page a bit with extra white space:

Once you get past all of that though, it’s the same old Facebook that we’ve used for years:

Even if you’re not a PC user, you can spoof your browser’s user agent to emulate IE7 quite easily with Safari.

Just go to Preferences Advanced Show Develop Menu In Bar

Once you do that, just click Develop and User Agent like so:

You can even clean up that ugly white space by installing a script called F.B. Purity. That’s a lot of work to get around having to see a Timeline on Facebook, but if you’re geeky, have the time and want the challenge, go for it!

When Twitter debuted its native photo-sharing feature earlier this year, some people worried that it would harm the existing ecosystem of third-party photo-sharing apps. Sites such as Yfrog and Lockerz were built to let people share photos on Twitter well before the microblogging site decided to offer the capability itself. What would happen to those businesses now?

Turns out, those concerns were pretty well justified. New data out of Skylines, a Dutch real-time photo search startup that analyzes the Twitter feed, indicates that most third-party photo sharing services are seeing major shrinkage in terms of market share.

Skylines December 2011 Twitter photo analysis (click to enlarge)

Twitter now powers nearly half of all the photos shared on the micro-blogging site, according to Skylines’ analysis. And over the course of December alone, the company increased its market share by 18 percent, growing from 38 percent of all photos shared in early December to 45 percent in late December.

Meanwhile, the biggest loser of market share in December was Twitpic, which fell from 23 percent to 16 percent market share over the course of the month. That may be because Twitter’s brand new user interface, which began rolling out in early December, has its own service set as the default photo sharing app — a designation that formerly belonged to Twitpic.

But there is one third-party Twitter photo app that is growing right now: Instagram. The hip iPhone photo-sharing app now is responsible for 16 percent of the photos shared on Twitter, up from 13 percent in early December. And at the moment, Instagram’s growth is not showing any signs of slowing down. As Om Malik reported Thursday, Instagram saw a big “bump” in users over Christmas, after being named Apple’s iPhone app of the year and newly gifted iPhones were being activated.

It bears mention, though, that Instagram is not as closely tied to Twitter as these other services are — as of this past summer, only 11 percent of Instagram members were using Twitter. Instagram is built as a mobile social hub in itself, which is something that’s surely contributing to its current strength. It’s a good reminder that building an app with standalone independence in mind from day one is always a good thing to do.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Internet of things: creating tomorrow’s health care
• Themes for a connected world: GigaOM RoadMap review
• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future

Image: Image: Vivian Giang — Business Insider

Protests against Backpage.com in November

See Also:

Apple And Google + Top The 5 Best New Ads Of The Week

This Hilarious Commercial Beat Out VW’s ‘The Force’ For 2011′s Most Popular Ad In The UK

Mitt Romney Wants To Put Billboards On Sesame Street

Village Voice Media, which operates 13 alternative papers across the United States — including the flagship Village Voice in New York City — has an unusual source of revenue.

The company owns a classified network called Backpage.com. Classifieds, ranging from ads for appliances to escort services, generate 30-35 percent of VVM’s business, CEO Jim Larkin told the New York Times’ David Carr.

What makes Backpage.com unusual is its adult services, including escort and body-rub advertising, which represented $2.1 million in revenue in November alone, according to AimGroup.com. For a struggling newspaper business that gives away many of its products for free, that’s significant.

But the service is also onto its second controversy of late 2011. First, there was criticism over concerns of underage prostitution being facilitated by the site, which ended up with VVM snared in a weird quarrel with Ashton Kutcher. (VVM said only 14% of the site’s advertising is adult-related.)

Now, the site is being investigated in connection to the deaths of four women in Detroit last weekend. Three of them had escort profiles on Backpage.com.

The Christian Science Monitor’s Mark Guarino spoke to Chicago attorney Joe Obenberger, who specializes in adult entertainment law. He writes:

What protects online sites like Backpage.com is that “for there to be a crime involving speech, there must be a close proximity between the speech and the criminal activity,” Obenberger says. Advertising for prostitution does not qualify under this standard, he says.

If the site appears to be endangering users, though, it could be at greater liability. One opinion holds that closing down Backpage.com would just force adult advertising elsewhere, as happened when the shuttering of Craiglist’s adult ads sent many of them to Backpage.

The bigger issue for VVM is its intimate connection to what’s becoming a lightning rod for accusations of abuse and impropriety.

Okay, last workday of the year. It’s nostalgia time. Let’s take a quick glance in the rearview mirror at the year in Tech, before we speed forward again in 2012. There were defining moments, epic battles, new product introductions, and major corporate screw-ups. Mobile and social drove many of the changes in tech, and we’ve certainly gone through our own major transition here at TechCrunch (but I’ll save that for another post). Below is our list of the events in tech that made 2011 memorable.

1. End Of An Era: Steve Jobs Passes Away
The defining moment of 2011 which transcended tech was the passing of Steve Jobs. It shook the world not because it was unexpected, but because Jobs was at the height of his creative arc and his work was far from finished. He had pulled the tech industry into the post-PC era with the iPhone and iPad leading the charge, and the rest of the industry following. But Jobs always liked to surprise people with “one more thing,” and he set up Apple to keep creating those things far into the future. It is telling that his last public appearance was in front of the Cupertino City Council outlining his plans for a futuristic new Apple headquarters. (Other tech luminaries no longer with us include Dennis Ritchie, Bob Galvin, and Ken Olsen).

2. Google Goes Social
After many previous half-hearted attempts to take on Facebook, Google finally got serious about social in 2011 with the launch of Google+. Larry Page, who took over as CEO this year from Eric Schmidt, put it front and center by weaving it into Google’s other products and pushing it to an estimated 65 million people. With its Circles and Hangouts, G+ is forging its own distinct identity. The more that social threatens search as the way people find things in the Web, the more important G+ will become to Google.

3. The Kindle Lights A Fire
Amazon entered the tablet race this year with the Kindle Fire, a media tablet based on Android that serves as a window into all the digital media Amazon is trying to sell us—books, movies, music, apps. The $200 Kindle Fire is the best-selling Android tablet out there. Amazon sold more than 4 million total Kindles over the holidays (including the E-Ink versions). Amazon just wants to get as many Kindle Fires into people’s hands as possible so that it can deliver digital books, movies, and apps right into our hands.

4. The Year Of The Pivot
The one thing startup founders learn very quickly is that failure is okay as long as they learn from it. With the cost to create a product lower than ever before, lean startups can afford to try again. This is known as the “pivot,” an over-used term which became a survival strategy for some, even fat startups (see, Color). The two most successful pivots which come to mind are Turntable.fm (formerly Sticky Bits) and Fab.com (which went from gay social network to design-oriented e-commerce site).

5. Netflix Screws Up
This was a tough year for Netflix. Its stock went from $300 to $70 as it tried to speed its transition from a DVD rentals business to streaming online video. Along the way, it introduced price hikes to some of its customers and tried to split off its DVD-by-mail business before backing off and apologizing to customers. (Although, the price hikes remained). Viewers are spending more time watching Netflix movies streamed over the Internet, but the company still has a lot of work to do to repair its once-shiny brand image.

6. Tech IPOs Come Back (Sort Of)
After several years of almost no activity, 2011 was a big year for tech IPOs. We had LinkedIn, Pandora, Groupon, Yandex, and Zynga. And don’t forget about Chinese Internet IPOs like Tudou and Renren. Most of these didn’t perform that well for public investors after initial pops, and even some private investors got burned (Zynga priced below its last private round). Now all eyes are on Facebook, which is planning to IPO in 2012.

7. The Private Billion-Dollar Club Gets Bigger
One reason tech IPOs aren’t performing so well is that much of growth in value is now captured before the IPO by private investors. Tech companies are pushing off going public further and further into the future, and raising huge rounds of funding from the same types of growth investors—DST, T-Rowe Price, Fidelity—who a dozen years ago would have waited for an IPO. As a result, many private tech companies are raising money at $1 billion valuations. We saw this trend take off in 2011 with Airbnb, Dropbox, Gilt Groupe, Square, and Spotify. And it’s not limited just to the U.S.

8. Google Buys Motorola, Microsoft Buys Skype, And Other Big Deals
2011 wasn’t just a big year for IPOs, it was also a big year for MA. While the biggest tech deal of the year, ATT’s proposed $39 billion merger with T-Mobile, was squashed by the government on antitrust grounds, some of the biggest tech deals of the last decade did go through. Google bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, Microsoft called in Skype for $8.5 billion, and eBay acquired GSICommerce for $2.4 billion. Other notable large deals included HP-Autonomy ($10.2 billion), RightNow-Oracle $1.5 billion), PopCap-Electronic Arts ($1.3 billion), ITA Software-Google ($700 million), Anobit Technologies-Apple ($450 million), Admeld-Google ($400 million), Efficient Frontier-Adobe ($400 million), Radian6-Salesforce ($326 million), Huffington Post-AOL ($315 million), and Kobo-Rakuten ($315 million).

9. The Patent Wars Get Ugly
The patent system is broken. Patents are increasingly used to block innovation in courtrooms rather than create innovations in the marketplace, and we saw this problem reach epic proportions in 2011. Patent trolls continued to extort tech companies large and small. But the patent wars spilled over to the major industry players themselves as everyone pointed their patent arsenals at Android. In July, Google failed to win a bid for more than 6,000 of Nortel’s patents, which went to an anti-Google consortium for $4.5 billion. Google responded by buying patent-rich Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. Microsoft started demanding patent licensing fees from Android handset manufacturers, which led to a very public tussle with Google which never seemed to end. And Apple did its part by continuing to sue Android manufacturers, including HTC and Samsung, for patent infringement. It’s a mess.

10. Android And Apple Win The Mobile Internet
All of this fighting is for a very high stakes game—the future of computing, which is mobile. Apple and Android emerged as the two superpowers of the mobile Internet (with 76 percent combined mobile OS share in the U.S.). RIM is in shambles. Windows Phone is still nowhere to be seen (except in TechCrunch writer Robin’s pocket). So far, tablets are all iPad, but the Kindle Fire is coming out punching to become a serious contender.

Image via Shutterstock/ivosar

• GOOGLE
• APPLE
• NETFLIX

Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information….

Learn more

Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007.

Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod (offered with…

Learn more

With more than 23.3 million members in the United States and Canada, Netflix, Inc. is the world’s leading Internet subscription service for enjoying movies and TV shows. For $7.99 a month, Netflix members in the U.S. can instantly watch unlimited movies and TV episodes streaming right to their TVs and computers and can receive unlimited DVDs delivered quickly to their homes. In Canada, streaming unlimited movies and TV shows from Netflix is available for $7.99 a month. There are…

Learn more

Microsoft put out a rah-rah blog post today, touting its various victories with Internet Explorer for the year, mostly discussing Internet Explorer 9′s performance on Windows 7. That platform has been the company’s focus for some time now, with nearly every post that Microsoft publishes using its statistics to demonstrate what it deems to be success.

To get the numbers out-of-the-way, Microsoft predicts that Internet Explorer 9 will land, by year-end, at the 25.6% mark on Windows 7 globally. That puts it well within striking distance to overtake Internet Explorer 8 as the top browser on Windows 7. Chrome as a whole, for example, controls less market share than both IE8 and IE9 do individually. That’s not to say that Chrome isn’t better, my views there are known, but on its home turf, Microsoft is holding own.

As usual, Internet Explorer 9′s numbers are stronger in the United States than abroad. The browser controls over 30% of Windows 7 market share in the US, essentially tied with Internet Explorer 8, and is set to overtake it in days.

That’s all well and good, but the numbers highlight a very critical fact: Firefox isn’t doing well on Windows 7, the second most popular OS version in the world (losing to Windows XP). We’ll use one of Microsoft’s charts to make the point:

While Internet Explorer 9 and the Chrome family are performing strongly, Firefox went from flat to falling; for a franchise that used to be the high watermark of ‘not Microsoft’ that’s a quite a turn of fortunes. Of course, Firefox just signed a deal with Google to keep its head above water, but its performance in this market category is weak.

If the trends keep up, it could be an Internet Explorer 10 and Chrome world by the time Windows 8 comes out.