According to Wikipedia, as of October 22, 2010, the world’s population—the population of humans on planet Earth— is currently estimated to be 6,876,600,000. Spelled out that number is six billion eight hundred seventy-six million six hundred thousand. That is one heckuva lot of people. Hard to wrap my head around it. This figure comes from the U.S. Census Bureau. According to the International Telecommunication Union’s October 19,2010 newsroom press release, the number of people online by end of 2010 is estimated at 2 billion. The number of internet users has doubled in the past 5 years. The number of people having access to the Internet at home has increased from 1.4 billion in 2009 to almost 1.6 billion in 2010. According to New Media Trend Watch, the number of people online around the world will grow more than 45% to 2.2 billion users over the next five years, according to a report by Forrester Research, Inc. with the global online population expected to reach 2.2 billion by 2013. Asia remains the biggest global internet growth market where 43% of the world’s online population will reside by 2013 with 17% of the global online population in China alone. Growth rates in the US, Western Europe and the major industrialised nations in Asia Pacific such as Australia, Japan and South Korea will slow to between 1% and 3%. 
