Research and Data

Hispanics trail other groups in Web usage, confidence

According to a new Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation-Harvard University poll, 72 percent of Hispanics say they use the Internet, lower than the percentages of whites and African Americans. Fully 57 percent of Hispanics say they don’t have enough knowledge about computers and technology to be competitive in the current job environment. That compares with 46 percent of whites and 45 percent of blacks who feel the same level of insecurity about their technological skills.

Read the full report here.

Shopping by Mobile Will Grow to $119 Billion in 2015

By 2015, it’s estimated that shoppers from around the world will spend about $119 billion on goods and services bought via their mobile phones, according to a study released in February 2010. In the United States alone, mobile shopping rose from $396 million in 2008 to $1.2 billion in 2009.

Read the full report here.

It’s a smart world

The real and the digital worlds are converging, bringing much greater efficiency and lots of new opportunities, says Ludwig Siegele. But is it what people want?

A Brattle Group study found that energy use can fall up to 27% when customers have access to real time prices and when prices vary according the grid’s load. This can lead to avoided cost in building expensive generating capacity that is needed to meet peak demand. The Brattle Group also finds that a 5% reduction in peak demand could save $66 billion in new generating capacity over the next 20 years. Brattle estimates that larger reductions in peak demand could save between $175 billion and $332 billion over 20 years.

Read the full article in The Economist here.

Policymakers are desperate to promote enterprise. A new index could help

A new study, called the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index, focuses on high-growth companies as it tries to measure the ambition of entrepreneurs as well as the prevalence of start-ups. The U.S. is ranked 3^rd (with Denmark number 1) out of 71 countries.

Read the full article in The Economist here.

National Education Technology Plan 2010

At the end of 2010, the U.S. Department of Education released its National Education Technology Plan. http://www.ed.gov/technology/netp-2010 The plan’s goal is to use technology to help raise the proportion of college graduates from where it now stands (around 41 percent) so that 60 percent of our population holds a two-year or four-year degree by 2020.

Foreign-Born Entrepreneurs: An Underestimated American Resource

Vivek Wadhwa finds that in a quarter of the U.S. science and technology companies founded from 1995 to 2005, the chief executive or lead technologist was foreign-born; that figure is 52% for Silicon Valley.

Read the full article here.

The Supply Side of Innovation

A December 2008 study released by the Harvard Business School found that immigrants comprise nearly half of all scientists and engineers in the United States who have a doctorate, and accounted for 67 percent of the increase in the U.S. science and engineering workforce between 1995 and 2006.

Read the full Harvard Business report here.

Distrust, Discontent, Anger and Partisan Rancor

A recent Pew Research Center survey shows that technology companies were overwhelmingly viewed as having a positive impact on the way things are going in the country. The tech sector’s approval rating dwarfed those of other institutions. The full survey can be viewed here.

The Digital Nation

The Commerce Department released a report today entitled, “Exploring the Digital Nation: Home Broadband Internet Adoption in the United States.” The report counts large increases in broadband use over the last decade; 63.5 percent in 2009 from 9.2 percent in 2001. The increased broadband penetration, however, splits along education and socio-economic divides, bespeaking the need for continued efforts to spread broadband to all communities.

You can find the full report here.

The Rise of Apps Culture

Pew reports that 35% of adults have apps on their phones and that an “apps culture” is emerging.  View the report here.