With celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey helping fuel Twitter mania, the micro-blogging Web site is soaring to stardom around the world, Hitwise said.
Twitter’s growth in Australia “has been nothing short of phenomenal,” rocketing 1,067 percent since the start of this year, reported Alan Long, research director at the Internet intelligence gathering firm.
The number of visitors to Twitter has more than tripled in New Zealand since the beginning of the year, and the Web site shot up 239 ranks in Singapore to score a place among the 50 most popular online destinations in the country.
“In other markets, Twitter has a growth pattern similar to the US and UK, highlighting that Twitter is a truly global phenomenon,” Long said in Hitwise findings released on Friday.
As of early this week, Twitter’s share of online visits in the US and the UK had increased by 570 percent and 621 percent respectively since the start of the year.
“It is interesting to note that large jumps in share of visits have been sparked by a variety of events and news items at different times over the past three months,” Long wrote. “But Ashton Kutcher and Oprah seem to have had an impact in all countries in mid-April.”
US talk show megastar Winfrey made her debut on the micro-blogging service a week ago and attracted more than 125,000 followers in just 24 hours. She now has more than 560,000 followers.
Kutcher, star of the TVseries That ’70s Show and husband of actress Demi Moore, beat TV news network CNN on April 17 in a race to see who could become the first Twitter user to attract 1 million followers.
Oprah is the latest celebrity to begin using Twitter, which allows users to pepper their followers with messages of a maximum 140 characters.
Other well-known users include UK actor and playwright Stephen Fry, NBA star Shaquille O’Neal, Australian actor Hugh Jackman, and seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained