Interesting comments as usual. The top google query list from Pakistan is both informative and entertaining. Of course these things are wide open to interpretation. One can argue that women in pakistan (those who use internet) tend to do more research online for their beauty needs, but probably women are still a minority overall when it comes to internet users in Pakistan. But this is beyond the scope of the current study which was on phone usage.

A very strong positive relationship was observed between the sms usage and the relative cost of a call to an sms. i.e. higher the relative cost of a call, higher the sms usage. The regression analysis indicated an R-square figure of 99.9% for the above relationship, which implies 99.9% of variability of SMS use is explained by (or due to) the relative cost of a call.

But the relationship between the sms usage and the actual cost of an sms was found to be very weak and the R-Square figure is close to 0%.

It’s widely known that SMS usage in the Philippines exceeds that of any other country, but I haven’t noticed a concise explanation of what’s going on. The fact that SMS started out as a free service is occasionally mentioned, but…

If Google’s Zeitgeist is considered an indicator, there are more female users of Internet in Pakistan than their male counterparts.

In April 2007, the top query for Pakistan on Google was ‘beauty tips’, a topic that certainly cannot be a typical contemporary Pakistani young lad. It has to be a girl/women to quest for this.

For May 2007, see it for yourself at: This month, the second most searched topic is ‘facial’, again something strongly to do with the fairer sex.

http://www.google.com/press/intl-zeitgeist.html#pk

Nothing beats real research and this is not one but trends have their importance too.

-T