I saw this post on Duct Tape Marketing and it got me thinking, maybe its time to try Mac.

I’m hearing way to many good things about the Mac to ignore it anymore. I’m at a stage were I’m thinking of buying a new Laptop for home that I can use for doing a bit of work (Web application Development). I’ve never used a Mac properly at all. When I was younger the reason I wouldn’t buy a Mac was because I couldn’t use some of the more popular software that was only available on windows.

I think I’d like a Mac once I got used to it, my question really is will windows Vista be good enough to keep me using it instead? What to do, what to do …

UseAMap.com is a simple Google maps mashup service that has just been launched. Its pretty straight forward, you create a short name for a location and add directions to a place which is then marked on a map, e.g. http://useamap.com/jeebers. You can then email from the site a link to your new map for others to view.

Vincent, who also works in Jeebers and on 1time with me, created this service. Without being biased, I have to say I really like services like this for its simplicity and usefulness, similar to http://futureme.org

Very interesting statistics were published on the World Internet Usage Statistics and Population. From this table it shows that only 15%! of the world uses the internet which is surprisingly low. When you consider Asia alone has over 50% of world’s population it starts to make more sense given their low adoption rate. This combined with Africa which has an expected low adoption rate of less than 3% really lowers the world average.

Taken from Read/Write Web -Worldwide Internet Penetration is just 15%

From a business perspective I can see a lot of business plans referencing to the strong growth in Asia and companies expanding their services and language versions to accommodate these countries. There appears to be an opportunity to focus on this market with a long term view to grab the huge population yet to embrace the internet the way we have in the west. Surely the likes of China and India will eventually have internet adoption closer to 50% of the population. Japan for example has a very good internet adoption to match the US and some countries in Europe.

I didn’t spot any exact figures for Ireland but maybe someone can point me to another resource so we can compare and contrast with the rest of the world. From a personal point of view I wonder how closely those percentage adoption rates correlate with business internet adoption rates in those countries.