This idea struck me again as I was preparing for my talk with Tumblr founder David Karp at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference on Monday, which you can read about (and see a video clip of) here. I pulled together a lot of statistics about the size of the service, but it quickly became obvious that there wasn’t much point, since they would almost certainly be out of date by the time I hit the stage. Sure enough, Karp mentioned that Tumblr recently crossed the 20 billion pageview-per-month mark, up from the 16 billion that is mentioned on its website.

When you look at Tumblr’s size and growth, it’s easy to assume that you have somehow made a mistake and added too many zeroes: at the beginning of this year the network was at 15 billion pageviews, and a little more than a year ago it was at 10 billion. According to estimates from Quantcast, in the past year the site has almost doubled the number of monthly visitors it gets, from about 80 million to almost 140 million. There are more than 35 billion posts on the almost 80 million blogs that are hosted on the service, and it gets tens of millions of new posts every day from what Karp told me were its 160 million or so members.

When comScore looked at the amount of time that users spend on different sites earlier this year, Facebook was still far and away the leader, with about 400 minutes per month, but Tumblr and Pinterest were tied for second place, with about 90 minutes per month. Time spent may not be a great measure of actual engagement — since many users leave sites like Facebook or Tumblr open in a window for hours at a time — but those are still pretty compelling numbers. And there have been some indications that Facebook’s engagement levels are falling, or at least levelling off.

It’s not just the growth, it’s the level of engagement

Those are some of the number-based reasons for why Facebook should be interested in Tumblr. The other part of the argument is more anecdotal: It comes from watching how both of my teenaged daughters use the service, and the powerful hold it has over the way that they consume and share all kinds of content, especially visual content (including animated GIFs, etc.) — and the corresponding decline in the amount of time they spend on Facebook. For them, Facebook seems to have become something they feel they have to use rather than something they want to spend a lot of time on, much like email is for older users. When it comes to sharing info about their favorite TV shows or movies or likes and dislikes, they use Tumblr almost exclusively.

If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I would be more than a little worried about that phenomenon, just as the Facebook co-founder and CEO was apparently worried about the growth of Instagram, and the threat that it posed to Facebook’s dominance of the photo-sharing market and the mobile market — and the possibility that a competitor such as Twitter or Google or Apple might acquire it. As Om described it after Facebook announced the $1-billion purchase (which lost some of its value after Facebook went public and its share price fell):

“Facebook was scared shitless and knew that for first time in its life it arguably had a competitor that could not only eat its lunch, but also destroy its future prospects. Why? Because Facebook is essentially about photos, and Instagram had found and attacked Facebook’s achilles heel — mobile photo sharing.”

It’s true that Tumblr is not nearly as large a player in mobile as Instagram was, but it is clearly a huge and growing force when it comes to sharing and engaging with visual content of all kinds — in other words, it’s the kind of curatorial and creative market that lots of advertisers and brands are interested in appealing to. The sharing of that content is exactly what Facebook has tried to encourage with its “frictionless sharing” apps and features, but much of that has been awkwardly handled from a user point of view and it’s not clear what effect it has had on engagement.

The bottom line is that any service that is growing as rapidly as Tumblr, and sucking up a massive amount of the attention of younger users, is a potential threat to Facebook’s future growth. Theoretically, it could acquire Tumblr for something close to what it was willing to spend for Instagram — since Tumblr’s last financing round allegedly valued it at about $800 million — and then keep the network as a standalone entity, as it has with the photo-sharing service (which has continued to grow by orders of magnitude).

The only stumbling block is that David Karp and his backers may see the value of remaining independent and the potential for building something even larger than they have now.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Gabriele Coletti

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Growth has become such a mainstay of our existence that we take its continuation as a given. Growth brings many positive benefits, such as cars, television, air travel and iGadgets. Quality of life improves, health care improves and, aside from a proliferation of passwords to remember, life tends to become more convenient over time. Growth also brings with it a promise of the future, giving reason to invest in future development in anticipation of a return on the investment. Growth is then the basis for interest rates, loans and the finance industry.

Because growth has been with us for “countless” generations — meaning that everyone we ever met or our grandparents ever met has experienced it — growth is central to our narrative of who we are and what we do. We therefore have a difficult time imagining a different trajectory.

This post provides a striking example of the impossibility of continued growth at current rates — even within familiar timescales. For a matter of convenience, we lower the energy growth rate from 2.9 percent to 2.3 percent per year so that we see a factor of ten increase every 100 years. We start the clock today, with a global rate of energy use of 12 terawatts (meaning that the average world citizen has a 2,000 W share of the total pie). We will begin with semi-practical assessments and then in stages let our imaginations run wild — even then finding that we hit limits sooner than we might think. I will admit from the start that the assumptions underlying this analysis are deeply flawed. But that becomes the whole point, in the end.

A race to the galaxy

I have always been impressed by the fact that as much solar energy reaches Earth in one hour as we consume in a year. What hope such a statement brings! But let’s not get carried away — yet.

Only 70 percent of the incident sunlight enters the Earth’s energy budget. The rest immediately bounces off clouds and atmosphere and land without being absorbed. Also, being land creatures, we might consider confining our solar panels to land, occupying 28 percent of the total globe. Finally, we note that solar photovoltaics and solar thermal plants tend to operate around 15 percent efficiency. Let’s assume 20 percent for this calculation. The net effect is about 7,000 TW, about 600 times our current use. Lots of headroom, yes?

When would we run into this limit at a 2.3 percent growth rate? Recall that we expand by a factor of ten every hundred years, so in 200 years, we operate at 100 times the current level, and we reach 7,000 TW in 275 years. Two hundred and seventy-five years may seem long on a single human timescale, but it really is not that long for a civilization. And think about the world we have just created: Every square meter of land is covered in photovoltaic panels! Where do we grow food?

Now let’s start relaxing constraints. Surely in 275 years we will be smart enough to exceed 20 percent efficiency for such an important global resource. Let’s laugh in the face of thermodynamic limits and talk of 100 percent efficiency (yes, we have started the fantasy portion of this journey). This buys us a factor of five, or 70 years.

But who needs the oceans? Let’s plaster them with 100 percent efficient solar panels as well. Another 55 years. In 400 years, we hit the solar wall at the Earth’s surface. This is significant, because biomass, wind and hydroelectric generation derive from the sun’s radiation, and fossil fuels represent the Earth’s battery charged by solar energy over millions of years. Only nuclear, geothermal and tidal processes do not come from sunlight — the latter two of which are inconsequential for this analysis, at a few terawatts apiece.

But the chief limitation in the preceding analysis is Earth’s surface area — pleasant as it is. We only gain 16 years by collecting the extra 30 percent of energy immediately bouncing away, so the great expense of placing an Earth-encircling photovoltaic array in space is surely not worth the effort. But why confine ourselves to the Earth, once in space?

Let’s think big: Surround the sun with solar panels. And while we’re at it, let’s again make them 100 percent efficient. Never mind the fact that a 4-mm-thick structure surrounding the sun at the distance of Earth’s orbit would require one Earth’s worth of materials — and specialized materials at that. Doing so allows us to continue 2.3 percent annual energy growth for 1,350 years from the present time.

At this point you may realize that our sun is not the only star in the galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy hosts about 100 billion stars. Lots of energy just spewing into space, there for the taking. Recall that each factor of ten takes us 100 years down the road. One hundred billion is eleven factors of ten, so 1,100 additional years. Thus in about 2,500 years from now, we would be using a large galaxy’s worth of energy. We know in some detail what humans were doing 2,500 years ago. I think I can safely say that I know what we won’t be doing 2,500 years hence.

Why single out solar?

Some readers may be bothered by the foregoing focus on solar/stellar energy. If we’re dreaming big, let’s forget the wimpy solar energy constraints and adopt fusion. The abundance of deuterium in ordinary water would allow us to have a seemingly inexhaustible source of energy right here on Earth. We won’t go into a detailed analysis of this path, because we don’t have to. The merciless growth illustrated above means that in 1,400 years from now, any source of energy we harness would have to outshine the sun.

Let me restate that important point. No matter what the technology, a sustained 2.3 percent energy growth rate would require us to produce as much energy as the entire sun within 1,400 years. A word of warning: That power plant is going to run a little warm. Thermodynamics require that if we generated sun-comparable power on Earth, the surface of the Earth — being smaller than that of the sun — would have to be hotter than the surface of the sun!

Thermodynamic limits

We can explore more exactly the thermodynamic limits to the problem. Earth absorbs abundant energy from the sun — far in excess of our current societal enterprise. The Earth gets rid of its energy by radiating into space, mostly at infrared wavelengths. No other paths are available for heat disposal. The absorption and emission are in near-perfect balance, in fact. If they were not, Earth would slowly heat up or cool down. Indeed, we have diminished the ability of infrared radiation to escape, leading to global warming. Even so, we are still in balance to within less than the 1 percent level. Because radiated power scales as the fourth power of temperature (when expressed in absolute terms, like Kelvin), we can compute the equilibrium temperature of Earth’s surface given additional loading from societal enterprise.

The result is shown above. From before, we know that if we confine ourselves to the Earth’s surface, we exhaust solar potential in 400 years. In order to continue energy growth beyond this time, we would need to abandon renewables — virtually all of which derive from the sun — for nuclear fission and fusion. But the thermodynamic analysis says we’re toasted anyway.

Stop the madness!

The purpose of this exploration is to point out the absurdity that results from the assumption that we can continue growing our use of energy — even if doing so more modestly than the past 350 years have seen. This analysis is an easy target for criticism, given the tunnel vision of its premise. I would enjoy shredding it myself. Chiefly, continued energy growth will likely be unnecessary if the human population stabilizes. At least the 2.9 percent energy growth rate we have experienced should ease off as the world saturates with people. But let’s not overlook the key point: Continued growth in energy use becomes physically impossible within conceivable time frames. The foregoing analysis offers a cute way to demonstrate this point. I have found it to be a compelling argument that snaps people into appreciating the genuine limits to indefinite growth.

Once we appreciate that physical growth must one day cease (or reverse), we can come to realize that all economic growth must similarly end. This last point may be hard to swallow, given our ability to innovate, improve efficiency, etc. But this topic will be put off for another post.

Acknowledgments

I thank Kim Griest for comments and for seeding the idea that in 2,500 years, we use up the Milky Way galaxy, and I thank Brian Pierini for useful comments.

This post originally appeared on Tom Murphy’s blog, Do the Math: Using physics and estimation to assess energy, growth, options.

Tom Murphy is an associate professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego. An amateur astronomer in high school, physics major at Georgia Tech, and Ph.D. student in physics at Caltech, Murphy has spent decades reveling in the study of astrophysics. He currently leads a project to test general relativity by bouncing laser pulses off the reflectors left on the moon by the Apollo astronauts, achieving one-millimeter-range precision. Murphy’s keen interest in energy topics began with his teaching a course on energy and the environment for nonscience majors at UCSD. Motivated by the unprecedented challenges we face, he has applied his instrumentation skills to exploring alternative energy and associated measurement schemes. Following his natural instincts to educate, Murphy is eager to get people thinking about the quantitatively convincing case that our pursuit of an ever-bigger scale of life faces gigantic challenges and carries significant risks.

Photos courtesy of NASA Goddard’s Flickr stream

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Why You Need a Dream Team

Before you can build it, you have to believe that you need a dream team. As a small business owner, it’s easy to become complacent in our roles and just accept that we wear all the hats, but that’s probably a mistake if:

1. We hope to build thriving and sustainable businesses that don’t require our physical presence to keep them afloat,
2. We hope to eventually sell our businesses, retire, or at least have one or both options available to us, and
3. We want lives and some semblance of balance outside our businesses.

The bottom line is that we are not islands, and we don’t have to build our businesses by ourselves. With the right plan, a little patience, and some persistence, it’s possible to build a dream team, and possibly achieve more than you ever imagined for your business.

Who’s On Your Dream Team?

You’ve established that you need a dream team, but now who do you need on it? Each business will be slightly different in its needs, and every business owner will have his or her own preferences about who to include, but here are a few suggestions for who might make up your company’s dream team.

Your Marketing and Advertising Team

No matter what your business, one of your primary goals should be meeting new people in your target market and finding prospects who might become customers or clients, but as with many other responsibilities of a small business owner, it’s easy to get behind with marketing and lead generation, which makes this the perfect area to look for dream team members. Some of the possible roles and responsibilities to cover might include:

• Networking (in-person and online),
• Direct marketing (sales letters, email marketing, sales calls, etc.),
• Web marketing (managing your website, PPC advertising, search engine optimization, etc.),
• Event management (managing speaking engagements and events),
• Publicity and promotion (managing guest posts, media opportunities, etc.),
• Social media (managing Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), and
• Advertising (radio, television, magazine, Facebook, sponsorships, etc.).

Also, don’t forget that with lead generation comes leads, metrics, and a database to manage, so it might be helpful to have someone overseeing the admin side of your marketing and advertising efforts.

Your Operational Team

You’re in the business of selling some type of product or service, and while you might be the primary person delivering those goods or services, you should always be thinking of ways to leverage your efforts. This might include team members who oversee:

• Product and service development and/or delivery,
• Customer service and current customer accounts,
• Your editorial calendar and content generation efforts,
• Your financial picture, budget, and taxes,
• Your schedule and personal/in-house organization, and
• Human resources, training and education.

How to Build Your Dream Team

Once you know who you want on your dream team, the next and probably longest step is actually building it, and this is where you’ll need a big dose of patience, creativity and persistence. One approach I’ve been implementing more recently is the use of interns. Rather than trying to locate highly-targeted virtual assistants (which, for me, wasn’t proving to be a successful method), I’ve been able to find ambitious, creative college students who are studying to go into the different lines of work that fall under my business.

Not only does this approach help me find motivated, talented and specialized support for my business, it also helps me find prospective permanent hires who are being both trained and screened as we go.

Building a dream team for your small business is possible, if you know the goals you’re trying to achieve and then find creative ways to fill the gaps and find support. While I can say that building a team hasn’t been the easiest part of running my business, it’s certainly opened my mind to new possibilities for growth and improvement.

Looking for some tips on how to recruit your dream team? Check out this recent post from Huddle’s Andy McLoughlin on using the web to find a team of peers.

Who would be on your dream team, and what methods are you using for building it?

Photo by Flickr user woodleywonderworks, licensed under CC 2.0

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Issued by OpenTrust, a software security provider that was tasked with creating a secure network for the devices, the report doesn’t reveal which pharmaceutical company is bringing in the Apple hardware. It does note that the new customer has a large international presence, spanning more than 100 countries, and claiming more than 100,000 employees worldwide. That’s right around Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline territory, in case you were wondering.

Apple touted its presence within top companies last Wednesday, when Jobs noted during the conference call that the iPhone is being piloted or deployed by 80 percent of Fortune 100 companies, while the iPad has presence at 66 percent.

The OpenTrust announcement reveals some interesting usage information about how iOS devices are operating in corporate IT, too. The company’s focus seems to have been on enabling secure remote access for distributed employees dialing in from abroad. If remote workforces are pushing the enterprise drive toward iOS adoption, then that’s promising news for Apple, as the number of employees who commute virtually is on the rise.

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Small business owners who find creative ways to manage their current work while continuing to expand their businesses win out in the end; those who can’t eventually hit a plateau and are usually left feeling trapped by their businesses, and figuring out how to be more resourceful and innovative might be the only way to work through it.

Steering a 70-Ton Train

The first thing you generally have to accept when you find yourself at this point in your business is that it’s going to be hard to maintain complete control. Up to this point, it’s been only you, working at your own pace and your own way, so you’ve likely had a lot of control over your business and its growth. In fact, it’s likely that you’ve experienced many lulls throughout the life of your business. During those times, you had a lot more free time to plan, to market and promote your business, as well as organize your workload to suit your style and preferences.

As your business grows, however, things begin to change. It’s a quiet roar in the distance warning you that something is coming, and then all of a sudden, the 70-ton train is moving. All that marketing and promotion and hard work has started paying off, and you now have the momentum of that big lead generation train behind you. The only problem is that you haven’t built the tracks, and now it’s hard to steer.

You’ll have to get used to keeping things moving in the general direction you want them to go, without having absolute control over every detail. As you find help, you’re going to have to accept different working styles, get used to training and teaching others on your support team, and even adjust to the demands of your new role as manager (or engineer).

Learning to Take Baby Steps

Another thing you might want to prepare for is working in small increments to get things on track. Not everything is going to work immediately or as expected, so it’s going to take a lot more patience and persistence to see your business through the growing pains.

You may have to “try on” several solutions before finding the fit that’s just right for your situation and business, but you have to trust that a solution exists or risk relegating yourself to that plateau forever. Keep searching until you find the right match.

Also, prepare to make adjustments. As you put the support structure in place for your business, it’s unlikely that it will work seamlessly right out of the gate. You’ll need to modify the plan and your support team as you go, so set out to make gradual and steady changes over time so that you’re left with a strong and sturdy foundation to support you.

Being Resourceful and Innovative

The last part of the puzzle is adding support when you’re lacking the time and money necessary to build it. How do you hire help and train someone, for example, when you (a) don’t have the money to pay him or her and (b) don’t have the time to devote to training and figuring out what to delegate?

First (and again), you’ll need to be prepared to take baby steps, but second, you’ll have to figure out ways to be more resourceful and creative when finding support for your business. Some solutions might include:

• Bartering with other business owners who might be in a similar position,
• Starting an internship program or working with local college students, or
• Bootstrapping to incrementally build a budget for a virtual assistant.

Think about everything you have to offer, and find ways to make those resources work to your advantage. Chances are, something you have at your disposal is exactly what someone else needs, and that kind of exchange can get you on your way without taking much in the way of time and money.

Seeing a business through stages of growth and change can be challenging, especially for small and solo business owners who are strapped for resources, but with a little creativity, there might just be a way to push through the plateau and take your business to the next level.

How have you used creativity and resourcefulness to grow your business when limited on time and money?

Photo by Flickr user Chris Denbow, licensed under CC 2.0

There comes a time in your business where you experience growth or change. You think you have everything running along smoothly, and then the real work begins when everything is turned upside down. You want to take advantage of new opportunities, but in order to do that, you have to adjust your systems, support and tools to accommodate that growth and expansion.

Old Pain: Incomplete and Outdated Systems

You know you need to do it. You hear it all the time, “You have to put systems in place to support your business and streamline your work so that you’re more productive, and so that you can outsource and delegate lower level tasks.” It makes sense in your mind, but it just doesn’t seem to be a top priority in the early stages of your business. Instead, you concentrate your efforts on figuring out how to navigate the often confusing path of the small business owner, while spending the rest of your time trying to find new customers and clients.

Before you know it, though, your business starts to take off, and then the pressure really starts setting in. You’re still figuring your way around, you’re trying to maintain your current lead generation efforts, but now you have the added workload to boot. There’s just no time left to worry about creating systems now, except that the further things go, the more desperate you become, and you start feeling like you’re digging your way out of quicksand.

Old Pain: Little or No Support

Most small businesses have to keep things very lean during the beginning, but it doesn’t take long to get used to managing things solo, leaving you strapped for time and thinking you’re the only one who can get the job done.

Then, of course, because you never had time to create systems around your business, everything is a jumbled mess. How will you ever figure out what best to delegate? Even if you wanted to outsource some of your work, where would you start? Without clearly delineated roles, hiring help would seem like a waste of time and money. You’d only end up doing the work yourself or not having anything for the new assistant to do.

The only problem is, there’s only so much you can do on your own, and at some point, you’ll come to the end of the line of your availability, which will mean the end of the line for your company’s growth as well.

Old Pain: Few Tools in Place

There are so many tools available to make the life of a business owner easier, but in the beginning, several things can get in the way of you taking advantage of them. Money is tight, and with such a small workload, it just seems to make more sense to do it yourself, rather than paying for something that you’ll barely use.

As your business grows, you start thinking you might want to get a few tools in place to cut down on your administrative time, but by then, you think that you’ll get things done faster if you just just keep doing them as you’ve always done. By the time you realize you really need them, you’re worried that implementing new tools could cause you to lose valuable information or time, should there be glitches in setting them up.

They don’t call them growing pains for nothing, but as hard as it is to interfere with the delicate arrangement of your business in order to put new systems, support, and tools in place, it’s important to have the faith and, as organizational and productivity guru Julie Morgenstern would say: let go so that you can grab hold. By letting go of things temporarily, you’ll be able to get a better handle on them for the future so that your business can handle the growth that’s coming your way.

What “old pains” are holding back your growth potential, and how are you overcoming them?

Photo by Flickr user doug88888, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

There’s a lot of information to digest, so I’ve condensed the juiciest morsels into what I hope is a more accessible short-form. Here goes!

All seven board members were re-elected; there was an advisory vote on executive compensation and Apple’s public accounting firm was chosen (it’s Ernst & Young, by the way.) Votes also were cast on two shareholder proposals. The first called for a published “sustainability report” detailing the company’s environmental policies and its contingency planning in the face of climate change. The second proposal was for the creation of a second board of directors, tasked with overseeing Apple’s environmental policies and business strategy in the face of climate change. The board felt they were already doing a fine job in both these areas, and recommended voting against the new proposals. Votes were counted and, unsurprisingly, neither proposal was successful.

Green

According to Macworld, Jobs claimed that Apple is the first company to work directly with suppliers on issues ranging from environmental impact to worker protection and education. Macworld’s Dan Frakes writes;

Taking a jab at other companies, as well as organizations such as Greenpeace, [Jobs] noted that “other companies just make promises” and attend conferences and events to “schmooze with [environmental groups], but the work ain’t getting done,” whereas Apple is actually taking steps to improve the company’s real-world green credentials and treatment of workers.

Jobs also noted that the smaller packaging used across Apple’s product line has reduced the number of annual cargo flights “by the hundreds”;

“It’s the right thing to do from an environmental point of view; it’s the right thing to do from a business point of view.”

Money

In its first quarter 2010 investor conference call, Apple announced it had $39.8 billion in the bank at the end of December 2009. The question now is, what on earth should it do with it? Spend it? Save it for the next recession? Perhaps pay dividends to shareholders — something BusinessWeek says the company has not done since 1995? Jobs said;

We know if we need to acquire something – a piece of the puzzle to make something big and bold – we can write a check for it and not borrow a lot of money and put our whole company at risk. The cash in the bank gives us tremendous security and flexibility.

You never know what opportunities are going to be around the next corner. We are a large enough business now that, in order to really move the needle, we have to be thinking pretty bold – pretty large.

New Role

On the matter of Apple’s new role as a ‘mobile devices’ company (first announced by Jobs in January and reiterated by Tim Cook in last month’s earnings call) Jobs said;

This is not something that we’re ordaining from the top. This is something our customers are saying with their dollars, if you just look at the products that we’re selling. They’re telling us what they think is important and we’re reflecting that.

But specifically, what does this mean about the future of Apple’s desktop Macs, the iMac and Mac Pro? “We love desktop computers,” El Jobso assured the shareholders, “And plan to continue making them.” So, that’s alright then.

Asia

When asked about Apple’s efforts to increase international sales, Jobs turned to (VP of Retail) Ron Johnson, who announced that Apple is looking to open 24 more stores in China to join the existing store in Beijing. This is to be expected, given how important (and lucrative) China is to Apple. DigitalDaily’s John Paczkowski writes, “Mac sales in China increased nearly 100 percent year over year in the first financial quarter of 2010… while iPhone sales [are] ramping up.”

Apple's Beijing Store

Beyond the Mac, Paczkowski quotes Tim Cook on Apple’s overall revenue in that market;

“…if you look at greater China last quarter, which is China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, our revenues tripled year-over-year… We have a tremendous focus on it.”

I guess it’s only right China should get a little Apple-love… after all, they make most of Apple’s gear in the first place!

Stability

Finally, there was a moment of fun, Jobs-style; a shareholder wanted to know of Jobs, “What keeps you up at night?”

“Shareholder meetings,” Jobs immediately shot back, before getting very serious and adding, thoughtfully;

“Apple requires stability in the world. People aren’t going to worry about which laptop to buy if they can’t afford dinner, can’t afford to send their kids to school, can’t afford textbooks. There are things much bigger than us that are out of our control. So we try to just do the best we can.”

Bravo, Steve. And bravo, Apple.

IDC found that Mac sales in the U.S. had climbed by 31 percent compared to last year, but that despite that strong growth, sales hadn’t kept up with increases in the industry at large. Cheap Windows machines helped create a banner year for the PC side of things. Gartner came up with slightly less impressive numbers for Apple during the quarter, with a growth rate of 23 percent.

That’s quite a difference, and represents a 40,000 machine gap between the figures found by the two companies. It’s a large enough gap to affect whether Apple falls under or above the average gain among all companies listed in the rankings. By comparison, PC makers HP and Toshiba had incredibly strong years, growing sales by 45 percent and 71 percent respectively.

In a quote from Computerworld, Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa explains what Apple’s doing wrong to miss out on the promising industry numbers, and its a tune we’ve all heard before:

The U.S. market last quarter continued to be very price driven. If a company is not in the low-priced market, it’s absolutely difficult for it to increase market share. And Apple did not do as well as others in share because of its prices.

Netbooks and cheap laptops are flying off the shelves, in other words. That being the case, the growth numbers might not mean as much to Apple as they might otherwise. If companies like Toshiba and HP are making their gains on the backs of underpowered machines of questionable build quality, and ones that might also have lower profit margins than Apple’s line, then it might not be growth that Cupertino is interested in. I maintain that we’ve yet to see the fallout of selling so many cheap machines so quickly. Wait a couple years till they start showing significant failure rates, then we’ll see how long-term growth is affected.

The general recovery of the PC industry is good news for Apple, though, even if it didn’t reap as many of the direct benefits as some of its rivals. The bottom line is that people are once again willing to spend money on consumer electronics, and computing devices specifically. The climate is a much better one in which to introduce a tablet than it has been in recent memory.

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Not to be outdone, Apple is busy breaking records too. At the Web 2.0 Summit this week, Morgan Stanley’s Managing Director Mary Meeker revealed that the iPhone/iPod touch is the fastest growing consumer electronics platform in history. And she had some charts to prove it. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld picked through her 60+ page presentation to focus on three iPhone-relevant slides.

Catchy title, no? But impressive. The iPhone/iPod touch has seen far steeper user adoption than that of other popular consumer electronics platforms, including other iPods.

However, Gizmodo’s Dan Nosowitz very wisely points out:

Comparing one gadget to another in a different category is messy and inconclusive. iPhone adoption is different than, say, Wii adoption for lots of reasons: The iPhone is a phone, a gadget which pretty much everybody has and needs, and it combined the capabilities of a phone with that of an established hit, the iPod. In contrast, the Wii is a videogame system, a category with a totally different demographic, requiring different kinds of software and accessories. They’re just not the same (and I only mentioned a couple reasons), and comparing unit shipments doesn’t necessarily prove anything.

A slightly busier one, this illustrates how, in the two year period following its launch, the iPhone/iPod touch’s mobile internet user base has enjoyed a faster, higher adoption rate (57 million) than NTT Docomo’s mobile internet platform imode (25 million) and even desktop Internet legend AOL (7 million).

Of course, it’s important to remember that Apple benefits (at least a little) from the changing times. Both AOL and imode enjoyed their super-growth in the mid to late 1990′s — the Internet’s Stone Age. While the iPhone platform is undoubtedly sophisticated, it takes advantage of extraordinary advances in hardware and software engineering that, a decade ago, were merely the stuff of geek dreams. Also, let’s not forget that — relative to the Internet’s ubiquity and sophistication today — the mobile and desktop Internet of the 90′s was far more expensive, harder to use and much less rewarding of an experience. Still, these are impressive numbers nonetheless. It’s just helpful to put them into perspective.

If you want a chart that demonstrates just exactly why AT&T’s network is trembling at the knees beneath the strain of millions of data-hungry iPhones, look no further. Schonfeld added two arrows to pinpoint the June 2007 and July 2008 launches of, respectively, the iPhone and iPhone 3G. If you’re an iPhone owner and you don’t spend more time using the thing for email and web browsing than, y’know, actually talking to people, you’re in the minority. iPhone owners love their unlimited data.

You can bet your bottom dollar Steve’s next keynote presentation will extrapolate some of this data (of course, his charts will contain no numbers but look way more sexy).

View or download the entire presentation from Scribd, and tell me in the comments how no one uses the word “Pwns” any more.

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People seem to be fond of the iPhone 3GS’s new video recording capabilities. So much so that YouTube mobile uploads have grown by 400 percent since the device’s launch, according to some sources. I’m proud to say that I contributed to that dramatic rise with my own initial hands-on video using my phone. It was the first time I’ve uploaded anything to YouTube, and in fact, I signed up specifically for the purpose. And I doubt I was the only one.

That’s 400 percent in only six days, in case you were wondering. It’s by far the most significant single-product effect the company’s seen since its inception, though YouTube upload growth in general, as NewTeeVee reports, is trending upwards due to the growing ubiquity of video-capable smartphones and streamlined uploading processes.

Apple certainly had ease of use in mind when it designed the 3GS’s video-sharing features. Once you’ve entered your YouTube credentials, publishing content to your profile is only a couple of taps away.

This is great news for YouTube, but what about the average end user, i.e., us? A brief perusal of the video offerings available on YouTube retrieved by searching for the keyword “3GS” did indeed return many results, but the vast majority of these were “test shots” and “first video” type demos. This Disney fireworks show was fairly impressive, but very little led me to believe that the massive spike in volume was accompanied by any influx of creative or original content.

Is it fair to expect iPhone users to bring something to the table that their Curve and Pearl-toting counterparts haven’t in the realm of mobile video? I think so, for two reasons. First, we’re Apple people! How can we live up to our demographic expectations if we aren’t more creative than our BlackBerry and WinMo equivalents?

Second, we have editing capabilities, right there on the phone. We don’t even have to touch a computer to be able to put together at least a decent short clip. Admittedly, we can’t splice or add effects to video yet, but with developer access to the 3GS’s video recording functions available, it won’t be long before we get a more fully-featured editing program from a third-party source. I’m basically drooling thinking about the possibilities such an app would open up. Improvised 3GS-shot reality series? A definite possibility.

If you’ve already tried something out of the ordinary using your 3GS, or if you’ve found some interesting clips on YouTube, share them below so we can all get inspired.

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