The Serenoa Consortium Meeting took place in Gijon (Spain) past week.

The partners could then synchronize the current status of their work packages and tasks, present new results, plan the next steps for future work. The demonstrator could be better detailed and the contents of the deliverables due to M18 could be also discussed.

The next Serenoa Consortium meeting will take place in Sofia-Antipolis, in W3C venues, in March. The specific dates will be confirmed and informed soon.

Next Consortium Meeting for Serenoa will take place in Gijon at CTIC premises. The meeting will take place on January 18-19, 2012.

ComScore has published in the last December the report “Top 10 need-to-knows” about social networking activities, providing an overview about how social applications are used nowadays in different countries around the world. Below, you will find reported some information related to context-aware adaptation that were originally provided by the report.

Social networks can be defined as online platforms where users connect themselves, share information and build relationships with other online users. Social networks are popular among Internet users, being adopted by 82% of the online users. This popularity has been significantly changing  consumer behaviors, and also life in communities and societies.

Despite differences in government, infrastructure, Internet access, and cultural practices around the world, social networking grows in every country. As such its usage behavior reflects regional differences, for instance, concerning the time spent online, while Latin Americans spent an average of 7.6 hours per user in October 2011, Asians spent less than 3 hours. Concerning the gender, consistently across all regions, women spend more time than men. In North America and Europe, women spend 30% more time than men on social networking sites a month (approximately 2 hours).

• Facebook leads the social networking in the majority of the countries, but exceptions include Japan, Brazil, China, and Russia. Among the top five global networks, Twitter and Linkedin present the highest growth rates for audience size over the past year.
• Microblogging is also a popular social activity, Twitter for instance, is mainly  used to communicate events of worldwide and national significance, ranging from the political uprisings in the Middle East to natural disasters as the tsunami in Japan.
• Social networking penetrates mainly among young demographic groups (also called “digital natives”), however users older than 55 represent the fastest growing segment in social networking usage.

Mobile devices represent the future of social networking as they provide means for users to connect on-the-go, facilitating real-time interaction. However, the mobile audience for social networking is still a fraction of users who access them via a classic web interface trough a fixed-line Internet connection.

Across five leading European markets (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom), nearly a quarter (24%) of the total mobile population reported access their social networks on their mobile devices. UK shows the highest social networking penetration among mobile users with 35%. The growth in mobile social networking use can be attributed largely to the growth in popularity of smartphones, specially considering the apps that were developed aiming to provide a better user experience.

The original publication is based in a research with 2 Million people from 171 countries. It can be accessed online at http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/it_is_a_social_world_top_10_need-to-knows_about_social_networking

BlueStacks recently published an infographic illustrating the main characteristics of the typical user profile of Android. Although the results cannot be considered as scientific, they provide interesting insights to contextualize the average user of Android.

Concerning the triple User, Platform, Environment, typically applied to define context information, from this infographic, some of the main characteristics of an Android user can be highlighted:

• User: 37% reported to wear glasses; 62% reported to use Android to play, and 38% to work; 13% reported to have more than 50 applications on their phone, 33% have only free applications on their phone
• Platform: 9% reported to own an Android tablet, but not an Android phone
• Environment: 36% reported to be Americans, 28% Asians and 27% Europeans

The average monthly data usage of an Android user is 582 Mb. Furthermore, the graphic also reports more specific information about the users, such as clothing style, and biometric data.

The infographic, generated by BlueStacks, was originally published at: http://bluestacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/mr-android-big-new.jpg in December 2011. The data used were obtained as a courtesy of Nielsen research in collaboration with Facebook users that are fans of BlueStacks App Player for PC.

The program includes workshops, demos, panels, presentations, discussions and competitions.

The main topics involve:

• Social: social enterprises, best practices for a cross-platform social strategy, great social experiences;
• Mobile: innovative mobile applications, mobile advertising, best practices for developing apps on mobile and tablets;
• TV: content discovery and recommendations.

JESS3 and LiveSketching.com's Illustration of Day 1 at LeWeb 2011

Further information about the event can be accessed at: http://www.leweb.net/