From Techweb - Sales of handheld devices have fallen for the 10th consecutive quarter, as the market continues its shift to advanced cellular phones with many of the same capabilities, a research firm said. The number of handheld devices shipped in the second quarter ended June 30 dropped 26.3 percent from the same period a year ago.

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It's no suprise to me at all to see this change - almost everywhere I go I see either a Palm Treo or a Blackberry in someone's hands.  This has some pretty interesting implications for corporations who have invested in deploying applications out to the PDA's over the past few years.  TechWeb reports:

The number of handheld devices shipped in the second quarter ended June 30 dropped 26.3 percent from the same period a year ago to 1.4 million units, International Data Corp. said. For the first half of the year, vendors shipped 2.9 million units, down 21.4 percent from the 3.7 million devices shipped in the first half of 2005.

All of the top-five vendors reported double-digit drops in shipments. Palm remained the leader with a 34.6 percent market share, followed by Hewlett-Packard, 20.6 percent; Dell, 9.7 percent; Mio, 6 percent; and Acer, 10.8 percent.

From Forbes - The world's biggest companies, combined, they show a 10% gain in sales, 32% in profits, 10% in assets and 17% in market capitalization over last year. This year's list has 173 new companies - Here they are sorted and listed in several ways.

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Also view list sorted by:

 Rank | Name | Country | Industry
Sales | Profits | Assets | Market Value

From Forbes - Chinese Internet users spend nearly two billion hours online each week, while the U.S. audience logs on for 129 million hours per week.  China has an estimated 200 million active internet users vs the US's 154 million, and China users are increasing by 18% per year.

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The article also notes that:

Even if we assume that China is still behind the U.S. in terms of users, China definitely wins in another critical area. One of the most valued metrics of Internet usage (especially for advertisers) is time spent online. Chinese users average 15.9 hours per week, while Yahoo! , the most popular Internet site in the U.S., can only get its users to stick around for less than one hour per week (216.5 minutes per month according to ComScore Media Metrix). That's 1.765 billion hours per week online in China, compared with 129 million hours per week online in the U.S.

Also - with regards to mobile internet use via cellular phone, the article says:

There are 400 million cell phone users in China, with over 6.1 million mobile users connecting online.** As cell phones increasingly become the connection of choice, you can expect China, which is a generation ahead of the U.S. in mobile technology, to lead the world in mobile Internet-access growth. And everything will hit hyperdrive over the next two years, as the country ramps up to host the summer Olympics, which are being held in Beijing in 2008.

From CNNMoney.com - Here are five great resources that offer advice and contacts for women entrepreneurs. 

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Also - here are some shortcuts to the organizations:

• www.c200.org
• www.makemineamillion.org
• www.springboardenterprises.org
• www.womenpresidentsorg.com
• www.wtc-sf.org

According to Netcraft's most recent web server survey, the amount of hostnames on the Internet has doubled within the past three years. At the end of March, Netcraft said it identified a total of 80,655,992 websites!

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