Growth of our social media, real time, translation platform, Ortsbo.com has absolutely exploded – and we are continuing to outpace the first year growth of Facebook.
In the article Facebook: Facts & Figures 2010 published by digitalbuzzblog.com, by the end of its first year, 2004, Facebook had 1 Million users. By comparison, after 6 month of operations, in December 2010, Ortsbo already has over 2.1 Million active users on a monthly basis – and is currently tracking at over 1.1 Million per week, well on its way to Facebook€™s 2005 second year results of 5.5 Million active users. On a weekly basis we’re seeing almost 6 million minutes of user engagement.
Language and communication barriers continue to erode as Ortsbo users are spending up to 15 minutes per session chatting with friends, families and colleagues in over 50 languages translated in real time. Here’s a cool chart that provides a visual representation of the growth of Ortsbo versus Facebook in the first year:
Today, over 60 Million more people speak Chinese and Spanish than all English speakers globally, according to Internet World Stats.
Mashable.com reported on November 15, 2010 that €All signs point toward an increasingly multilingual future for the web. It€™s estimated that over a billion people will be using PCs in the so-called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries alone by 2015, and the opportunity is even greater when you factor more people accessing the web using mobile devices than computers in many emerging markets. It€™s time businesses of all sizes embraced the foreign language Internet.€
In the article, writer Christian Arno, founder of Lingo24, continues by stating, €In the last ten years, the use of Arabic online has increased by over 2500%, while Chinese and Spanish rose twelve and seven-fold respectively. And English? It didn€™t even triple.€ Arno goes on to say, €Today, 42% of all Internet users are in Asia, while almost a quarter are in Europe and just over 10% are in Latin America. These stats shouldn€™t sway businesses towards targeting one region over another, though €” Latin American countries account for over 200 million people on the web.€
Because of this, Ortsbo is continuing to expand its global reach, amplifying recently launched initiatives in South East Asia, India and South America while accelerating programs in North America, Europe and Asia as well. Stay tuned because even greater things are yet to come through 2011.