Traffic has always been at the forefront of supporting social and good-hearted causes. From rendering free technical solutions to helping raise funds for charities, we have always endeavoured to increase the social impact of our organization both locally and internationally. 

Recently, as part of our CSR agenda for 2012, our Managing Director, Johnny Huntington, signed-up to run the Dubai Marathon, to raise money for Hope and Homes for Children, a charity that helps children and families in dire need. 

Hope and Homes for Children is an international charity with a mission to give hope to the poorest children in the world. The charity helps orphaned, abandoned or vulnerable children in Eastern Europe and Africa to fulfil their potential by moving them out of institutions into family based care. It also provides vital support to families that are threatened by breakdown due to poverty, disease or conflict and works to prevent child abandonment. 

"It’s a cause close to my heart" exclaimed Johnny, “Hope and Homes for Children is an international organization that helps children grow in safe and productive environments. One Hundred per cent of the proceeds of the run will go directly to supporting their work.”

Traffic raised £663 (AED 3,800) for the charity event, which took place on Friday, January 27, 2012.

Google might be the kingpin of the search engine world but over the last twelve months, searches powered by Microsoft Bing have increased at an impressive rate. In fact, just a few weeks ago Microsoft Bing over took Yahoo! to become the second most popular search engine of the world.

 
According to study published by comScore.com, more than 18.2 billion searches were conducted in the United States during December 2011.  Google catered to 12 billion of those searches, followed by Microsoft Bing with 2.7 billion and Yahoo! with 2.6 billion searches. The study found that during December 2011, Bing raised its market share by 0.1 per cent, while Yahoo! experienced a real drop of 0.6 per cent – 0.5 per cent of Yahoo’s lost market share went to Google.

It is interesting to note that in December of 2010 Bing only accounted for 12 per cent of the U.S. search market. Today the number stands at 15.1 per cent. A growth of 24.7 per cent may seem like a triumph, but when one compares Bing’s 15.1 per cent market share with Google’s 69.5 per cent, the leap doesn’t seem that enormous. Nonetheless Bing is on the right path; let’s see what the year 2012 has in store for this underdog of search engines.

Facebook completely dominated social networking in 2011 - a trend reflected in social networking in the United Arab Emirates.

According to StatCounter’s 2011 statistics, Facbook with 87.88 percent of the market share dominated social media in the United Arab Emirates in 2011. Youtube help the second spot with 4.11 per cent, followed by StumbleUpon and Twitter at 3.5 per cent and 3.3 percent respectively.

The poor showing for supposedly star performers like Twitter and Google+ (included in the Others category) is not surprising. Most users in the Middle East are still playing “catch-up” to micro blogs and Facebook killers. Nonetheless Twitter is gaining momentum, even if it’s at the expense of StumbleUpon, which lost 3.6 per cent of its market share in the last quarter of 2011. 

Apart from its success on social networking, Facebook is also usurping the traditional strongholds of search giants like Google, Yahoo and Bing. People are spending more time on Facebook than on Google, or than on Yahoo and Bing combined. In fact 2011 became the first year when a social network thrash search engines in this particular category – a big bust for search engines.

The web is changing and uses across the world are changing with it. Let’s see how the old-web does against the now-web in 2012.