With the supersonic Felix Baumgartner and Facebook the world’s 3^rd largest country, the digital age is seeing a spate of record- breaking.

Felix Baumgartner breaks the sound barrier

Red Bull Stratos was above all an amazing human and technological challenge: jumping out of a balloon from 39,000 metres in the air, at a maximum speed of 1,340 km/h (833.9mph) during the jump, reaching the speed of sound in 40 seconds, and reaching the ground in just 9 minutes and 40 seconds.

Felix Baumgartner, who has since announced his retirement, beat 3 world records (going faster than the speed of sound, highest freefall, highest balloon flight) on Sunday 14 October.

But Red Bull Stratos, which involved 5 years’ preparation and cost $50 billion, also broke other records thanks to digital media, with massive coverage on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the media in general:

• 8 million livestreams during the jump.
• 2,000 tweets/second during the jump and 249,000 followers on the Twitter account.
• 758 000 “likes” on Facebook.

And €1 billion worth of earned media (viral communication), according to estimations by Havas.

Facebook: the world’s third largest country

If it were a country and its 1.01 billion active users were inhabitants, Facebook would be the third largest in the world at the end of September 2012.

Topping the actual population stakes are, according to PopulationData.net: China with 1.341 billion, followed by India (1.210 billion) and the US (314 million).

Smartphones top the billion mark

This landmark was reached in Q3 this year: according to a report by Strategy Analytics, the number of smartphones in circulation at the end of September 2012 was 1.038 billion. – meaning one in 7 people on earth use a smartphone.

According to Strategy Analytics, given that it took 16 years to reach this 1^st billion (the Nokia Communicator came out in 1996), the next billion smartphones should be activated around 2015. (Sources pcmag.com)

24 billion smart objects in 2020

9 billion communicating objects were counted by France’s National Research Institute (INRIA) the end of 2011, and some 24 billion are predicted by 2020.

INRIA attributes this to the increasingly powerful and miniature digital devices resulting from falling production costs, the expansion of global Internet and telecom networks and big data, all of which will open up potentially huge possibilities for digital communication.