iPhone sales surprise… Blogging hits the mainstream… Australia on the radar…

• iPhone sales surprise
• Blogging hits the mainstream
• Australia on the radar

iPhone sale surprise

The hype surrounding the iPhone looks to have some substance. iTWire reports that the iPhone outsold all competitors in the US at iSuppli, to be the number one smartphone seller in July. Almost 2% of all phones sold in the US were iPhones, iSuppli says, more than nearest smartphone competitor BlackBerry.

iSuppli says that although it doesn’t have the historical data to compare, the iPhone appears to have achieved the fastest initial penetration and sales of any phone ever, especially for a brand new player facing such entrenched competition.

And Apple is aggressively positioning the iPhone for more growth; yesterday it slashed its price by $US200, making the larger eight-gigabyte iPhone worth $US399.

Blogging hits the mainstream

Blogging has entered the US mainstream, with 8% of Americans – that’s more than 24 million people – currently maintaining their own blog, according a recent Synovate/MarketingDaily study reported by Marketing Charts.

And if that sounds like more blogs than could possibly be digested by a media-hungry population, think again. The study of 1000 US adults also found that four in 10 Americans have visited a blog, and eight in 10 now knowing what a blog is.

Like other forms of media, people tend to go back to the same blogs they have come to know and trust, with 46% of US blog readers saying they visit the same blogs regularly. The majority of blog readers view them less than once a month, while 28% visit them monthly and 15% daily.

Interestingly, more women than men are bloggers, with 20% of American women who have visited blogs having their own compared to 14% of men.

People go to blogs for opinion 65% of the time, compared to 39% for news and 38% for entertainment.

And before you decide that these figures are a sign of the decline of traditional media, think again. Only 13% of blog readers say they spend less time with other forms of media since they’ve started following blogs.

Australia on the radar

Australia is likely to be hit by a global slowdown in the pace of foreign direct investment, a study of international capital flow has found.

Australia’s business environment is rated ninth in an assessment of the world’s 82 largest economies conducted by the Economist magazine’s economic intelligence unit and Columbia University’s program on international investment and reported in the Australian Financial Review today.