TikTok Most Downloaded; $2.5 Million NFTs Stolen; Hawaiian Will Offer Free In-Flight Starlink; Internet Reaches 63% of Humans

The winnah is….TikTok. The app was the #1 most downloaded app in the 1st quarter of this year. According to techcrunch.com, Sensor Tower has released its ‘Store Intelligence Data Digest’ report showing TikTok hitting 175 million downloads the first 3 months of 2022. TikTok has now passed 10 million downloads, over the past 9 quarters. For comparison, YouTube has passed 10 million downloads over the last 8 quarters. No app has had more downloads than TikTok since 2018, when WhatsApp racked up 250 million world downloads. 

A hacker has snagged $2.5 million worth of Board Ape Yacht Club NFT’s. Cnet.com reports that the thief got into the NFT brand’s Instagram account and put up a link to a phony air drop, which would give existing Bored Ape holders a free allotment of land in the upcoming Otherside metaverse. But the link included in the post was a phising scam. People who opened it and connected their crypto wallet had their Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs stolen. OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace, has put a “suspicious activity” label on the stolen goods, but no one can actually stop the NFTs from being sold. The hacker has already offloaded several on LooksRare, another NFT marketplace. It sucks for the owners, but you have to kind of laugh at the thought of a virtual pawn shop or virtual fence taking stolen virtual property!

You may be one of the folks who can’t stand to not be either working or online surfing while flying. With most airlines charging fees to connect, I have chosen to do without. Now, zdnet.com says Hawaiian Airlines will offer free in-flight connectivity using Starlink. Starlink is a division of SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space company. Hawaiian says installation in the aircraft will start next year. They say the service will be ‘seamless,’ and will not have registration or payment pages to access. 

According to DataReportal’s new Digital 2022 April Global Aftershot report (in conjunction with We Are Social and Hootsuite), there are now more than 5 billion people on earth using the internet. That is 63% of all humanity online! Smartphones account for about 4 out of 5 of the mobile handsets in use now. As for social media, 4.65 billion is the user tally, which is 58.7% of the world population. If you leave out 13 years old and under (which is the age most social nets have for a lower limit), roughly 3/4 of the population uses social media. THAT is some kind of reach!