India is the World's 3rd Largest Internet User

Hindustan Times  says that India is now the 3rd largest Internet user-base in the world, as claimed by the Google India's Head of Products Vinay Goel. The 1st 1 in the list is China with 300 million users, then U.S. at 207 million. India comes in 3rd at with 100 million people entangled in the digital web. 

What is more important to note is that 40 percent of those 100 million are accessing the net through their cell phones. Vinay's estimate is that by two years, the number of mobile Internet users will surpass those using PCs. That's a big contrast from 2007 - only three years ago, when the nation had just two million users. He stated that there's a major scope for improvement for the mobile Internet market, as the 40 million mobile Internet users comprise of only 8 percent of the total number of people using cell phones in general. Finally, Goel said that Indian internet users search for songs the most.
  
For detailed statistics, we'd recommend you to check out this Wikipedia page about Global Internet Usage. It just shows the massive population of the country; as these 100 million people constitute just 8.5 percent of the entire nation's population! This news is in a way ironic too - it is the end of 2010 and all of us are yet to use 3G Internet even as we see the world slowly progressing to 4G. Also, Internet costs in India are comparatively expensive to the Western regions and the cap on the cheaper data-plans is fairly low. 

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World Smallest Stop Motion Animation

I love this little (literally) stop-motion animation. Not only did “Dot” break the Guinness World Record for Smallest stop-motion animation character in a film, it was shot using life-saving technology.

First about the film, which you can watch below. It features Dot, a girl who just 9 millimeters tall. She wakes up in a world that seems to be unraveling. Fleeing an encroaching wave of loose threads, Dot runs across coins, pins, nuts and bolts and jumps on a bumblebee to fly away. Finally she saves herself by knitting the threads into a sleeping bag.

Now about the life-saving technology. The animation was filed using a Nokia N8 smart phone equipped with a CellScope, a diagnostic-quality microscope that was invented by Daniel Fletcher at the University of California, Berkeley. The CellScope allows a doctor working anywhere there is a phone service to capture and transmit images of blood samples anywhere in the world. The technology could help diagnose disease in developing countries where medical doctors and labs are few and far between.

Another bit of technology was used that, although not life-saving, is an interesting application. It’s 3-D printing. It was used to create various molds of Dot posed in different positions. Normally such an animation would rely on clay manipulated manually to adjust the character’s body positions. But Dot was too small for this and so her body positions were adjusted using molds of her in various positions.

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