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Timeline: The March to a Billion Users [Chart]

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8 years ago

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Timeline: The March to a Billion Users [Chart]

The March to a Billion Users

How long did it take for each app to hit the 1B mark?

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

With approximately 3.3 billion people now using the internet, how hard can it possibly be to reach one billion of them each month?

It turns out that it’s quite a challenge.

Apple, the largest company by market capitalization, doesn’t have a single product with that kind of penetration.

WeChat, which is the most popular mobile messaging app in China, couldn’t reach one billion active users even if it was used by every single person with a smartphone in China. That’s why the app “only” has 650 million active users right now.

Meanwhile, names such as Reddit, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram all boast hundreds of millions of users. However, none of these are able to yet have the global market penetration to reach the coveted billion mark.

The Big Three

So far, the only companies in possession of apps or programs with more than one billion active users are Google, Facebook, and Microsoft.

Amazingly, Google alone has seven of them: Search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Android, Chrome, and Play. The last of these to reach the one billion mark was Gmail, as per Alphabet’s announcement earlier this month during an earnings call.

Google also has the app that reached one billion users the quickest: Android did it in only 5.8 years.

Facebook also has three apps that can make the billion user claim. Facebook itself has the largest audience out of all of these apps, with 1.59 billion monthly active users. WhatsApp, which Facebook bought for $22 billion in October 2014, has also recently announced on its blog that it also surpassed the one billion user mark. This now fulfills a promise that Mark Zuckerberg made to Facebook shareholders at the deal’s outset.

Lastly, there’s Microsoft’s Windows and Office products, which are the only paid products that could crack the list. They took the longest to get there: 25.8 years and 21.7 years respectively.

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Technology

Visualizing AI Patents by Country

See which countries have been granted the most AI patents each year, from 2012 to 2022.

Published

24 hours ago

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April 24, 2024

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Visualizing AI Patents by Country

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

This infographic shows the number of AI-related patents granted each year from 2010 to 2022 (latest data available). These figures come from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), accessed via Stanford University’s 2024 AI Index Report.

From this data, we can see that China first overtook the U.S. in 2013. Since then, the country has seen enormous growth in the number of AI patents granted each year.

YearChinaEU and UKU.S.RoWGlobal Total
20103071379845711,999
20115161299805812,206
20129261129506602,648
20131,035919706272,723
20141,278971,0786673,120
20151,7211101,1355393,505
20161,6211281,2987143,761
20172,4281441,4891,0755,136
20184,7411551,6741,5748,144
20199,5303223,2112,72015,783
202013,0714065,4414,45523,373
202121,9076238,2197,51938,268
202235,3151,17312,07713,69962,264

In 2022, China was granted more patents than every other country combined.

While this suggests that the country is very active in researching the field of artificial intelligence, it doesn’t necessarily mean that China is the farthest in terms of capability.

Key Facts About AI Patents

According to CSET, AI patents relate to mathematical relationships and algorithms, which are considered abstract ideas under patent law. They can also have different meaning, depending on where they are filed.

In the U.S., AI patenting is concentrated amongst large companies including IBM, Microsoft, and Google. On the other hand, AI patenting in China is more distributed across government organizations, universities, and tech firms (e.g. Tencent).

In terms of focus area, China’s patents are typically related to computer vision, a field of AI that enables computers and systems to interpret visual data and inputs. Meanwhile America’s efforts are more evenly distributed across research fields.

Learn More About AI From Visual Capitalist

If you want to see more data visualizations on artificial intelligence, check out this graphic that shows which job departments will be impacted by AI the most.

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