A few months ago we integrated the carbon footprint calculator into barcoo for (selected) categories. And so our next step is as difficult as it is obvious: to feature the carbon footprint calculator for specific products. Some manufacturers believe it’s not worth spending so much money on collecting the data necessary to do that. They would rather put their money into directly into reducing CO2 emissions. But when they do that, there’s no way to measure how much “good” it’s actually done. At any rate, they believe that it has a positive impact. But we believe, for the medium term, that measuring CO2 emissions in an exact way is not so costly and will lay the foundations for controlled CO2 reduction.

In 2009 Frosta became the first food manufacturer in Germany to participate in the Product Carbon Footprint project. Since then, the company has assessed the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions expended as a result of its products. They traced the entire production chain for each of their frozen foods, factoring in raw material production, transportation, storage, processing, distribution, retail, and usage (the consumer’s shopping trip, preparation, washing). Based on the results for most of the products, they could determine that raw materials make up the highest portion of CO2 emissions (about 50%), while further processing and manufacturing logistics make up about 20% and the consumer is (on average) responsible for about 30%.

When you scan the Frosta products in question, you’ll be provided with information about its carbon footprint, from its supplier to its consumer, in grams. We encourage all other manufacturers to provide us with their CO2 information for individual products so we can integrate them into barcoo.

We are often asked to what proportion the various mobile operating systems are represented by our users. The last statistic is nearly one year old, so it’s now time for an update. Below is the evolution of the various mobile platforms at barcoo:

You will have noticed the striking Samsung bada dent in the middle of last year. This is due to the fact that we supported bada from the start, that the Samsung devices sold well and that their app store was pretty empty. Therefore users downloaded most of the few apps available to them in the store. This temporary high market share could not be kept indefinitely. With a current overall market share of 5%, but nonetheless increasing steadily, the bada platform should still remain of interest to some app developers.

Nokia Symbian is a tragedy (see analysis by Tomi Ahonen). From August 31st, barcoo will cease supporting Nokia Symbian. It was a very painful decision: we’ve invested again and again in this platform, but now it’s enough. It’s all over.

In the graph, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry are hardly to be seen. Here also, because of the continued lack of use, we have been compelled to discontinue support for these platforms. We are currently not planning any WP7 or webOS version either. Anyone interested in detailed statistics will find the historical data in Google Docs.

The evolution of the current market share, compared to the average for 2010:

No surprises. It should be quite clear where we’re heading. Or not? Nokia will be (most likely) purchased soon. A lot is possible then: Maybe MeeGo after all? Exciting.

We’ve just had another sensational couple of months: in July alone, 269,767 consumers installed barcoo! Check out the development of our installations in the last months: