Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street was definitely the most gloriously profane movie of the year (it’s in the record books!), and now it has another title.
According to data from Excipio, as obtained by Variety, the film was the most-pirated film this year, with just over 30 million downloads.
It just edged out Disney’s mega-hit Frozen for the top spot.
The top 10 is filled with big-budget blockbusters like The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Oscar-winner for Best Picture 12 Years a Slave snuck in at #10.
Here’s the top 20 most-pirated of 2014:
1. The Wolf of Wall Street: 30.035 million
2. Frozen: 29.919 million
3. RoboCop: 29.879 million
4. Gravity: 29.357 million
5. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: 27.627 million
6. Thor: The Dark World: 25.749 million
7. Captain America: The Winter Soldier: 25.628 million
8. The Legend of Hercules: 25.137 million
9. X-Men: Days of Future Past: 24.380 million
10. 12 Years a Slave: 23.653 million
11. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire: 23.543 million
12. American Hustle: 23.143 million
13. 300: Rise of an Empire: 23.096 million
14. Transformers: Age of Extinction: 21.65 million
15. Godzilla: 20.956 million
16. Noah: 20.334 million
17. Divergent: 20.312 million
18. Edge of Tomorrow: 20.299 million
19. Captain Phillips: 19.817 million
20. Lone Survivor: 19.130 million
Do note that the RoboCop figure is not entirely accurate, as it also includes downloads of the original 1987 film of the same name.
As far as TV shows go, no surprise in which took the most-pirated crown. According to Torrent Freak, Game of Thrones was, once again, the most-downloaded TV series of 2014.
Facebook encourages its developers to work on side projects throughout the year. Some of those projects end up being cool ideas that manage to be integrated into the Facebook platform proper. Others are just awesome ideas that must be seen to be believed. The social network dubs these projects “hacks” and is now sharing the best hacks of 2012.
Many of the hacks from 2012 actually made their way into Facebook proper as features that users have access to everyday. One such hack was a complete accident created by Facebook Engineer Pete Hunt. He was working on new photo viewer builds and accidentally created a full screen version. The Facebook team liked it enough to ship it to every user.
The other major hack that became part of Facebook proper was an Events calendar that kept track of all upcoming events. The calendar was created by Bob Baldwin and a few other members of the team and integrates posts, photos and videos. It shipped out to users in July.
Moving onto more of the extraordinary hacks, some Facebook team members painted a giant QR code that could be seen from space on the roof of one of the campus buildings. The code used to direct users to a job listing page for QR code painters, but now it goes to a page on how the code was created.
The last project that deserves specific mention involves an old friend – 3D printers. Benjie Holson, an engineer on the Timeline team, created a model of the world with spikes relative to how many people use Facebook in that area. The result is a neat 3D printed model that would look great on any modern artist’s portfolio.
Facebook will be holding a number of hackathons next year, and some of the projects will undoubtedly make their way into Facebook proper. It will be interesting to see Facebook and its hacking scene evolve through 2013.
In the strange world that we live in, people have come to like advertisements. Heck, we even look forward to them when it comes to the Super Bowl. That’s because advertisers are increasingly seeking to entertain as well as push a product. This strange phenomenon has resulted in us ranking ads through various means. YouTube joins in this year with the top 20 ads of the year as decided by page views.
Unsurprisingly, Super Bowl ads were popular this year like always, but they did not take the number one or two spot. The number one ad of the year goes to Nike Football which garnered more than 20 million views since its debut in May.
The second most viewed ad was for Pepsi Max. Debuting in May, it has gained more than 17 million views.
The first Super Bowl ad to show up is from Volkswagen, coming in at number three, who steals the show again with another Star Wars themed ad:
Here’s the rest of the year’s top 20 ads starting at number four and continuing down in descending chronological order:
4: The Next Big Thing Is Already Here – Samsung – Over 16 million views
5: Matthew’s Day Out – Honda – Over 16 million views
6: The Dog Strikes Back – Volkswagen – Over 16 million views
7: GoPro HERO 3 – GoPro Camera – Over 12 million views
8: Halftime in America – Chrysler – Over 11 million views
9: Mercurial Vapor III – Nike Football – Over 10 million views
10: Vampire Party – Audi – Over 7 million views
11: 2012 – Chevy Silverado – Over 7 million views
12: Pocket Like It’s Hot – Hot Pockets – Over 6 million views
13: Blown Mind – Old Spice – Over 5 million views
14: Bounce – Old Spice – Over 5 million views
15: Make It With A Firemam – Sauza Tequila – Over 5 million views
16: it’s Reinvented – Toyota Camry – Over 4 million views
17: Hot Wheels World Record – Hot Wheels – Over 4 million views
18: House Arrest – FIAT 500 – Over 4 million views
19: Bed – Old Spice – Over 4 million views
20: Vending Machine – Old Spice – Over 3 million views
Google updated its Zeitgeist site today, showing the top search trends of the year in a variety of countries and across a variety of different categories. Google also put out some year-end lists for Google Shopping, looking at “some of the most searched-for items on Google Shopping.”
Granted, Google Shopping has only been in full swing in the U.S. since October, but it has been in transition since announced in May. Here are the lists Google is presenting:
Electronics
1. Roku 2 XD searches have reached an all time high in search popularity this season
2. Google Nexus 7 searches are up 21% since the device launched in June
3. Sony Nex 5R searches are up 76% since October
4. Kindle Fire HD searches are up 68% since mid-October
5. Samsung Galaxy SIII searches have risen by 44% in the past 12 months
Toys
1. Furby searches have risen 88% in the past 12 months
2. Skylanders: Giants searches have risen 90% since September
3. Nabi 2 searches are up 92% in the past 30 days
4. Vtech Innotab 2 searches have doubled since October
Home
1. Nespresso Pixie searches are up 36% in November as compared to October
2. KitchenAid Stand Mixer searches have been up in 2011 and 2012 over previous years by as much as 60%
3. Roomba 780 searches are up 87% since it’s launch in December 2011
4. Cake Pop Maker searches are up 70% since September
Women’s Apparel
1. Women’s Puffer Jackets searches are up 32% over November 2011
2. Fair Isle Knits searches are up 20% over last year and continue to rise in popularity
3. Searches for the color Oxblood have peaked in search popularity this season, over all holiday seasons since 2004
4. Ankle Boots searches are up 20% over last year
Men’s Apparel
1. Chelsea Boots searches have reached an all time high and are still rising
2. Toggle Coats searches are up 35% in searches over last year
3. Cable Knit Sweaters searches have reached an all time high
It’s that time of year again. Google has updated its Zeitgeist site for 2012, looking at the most popular search trends of the year. The company has been doing this for 12 years.
Google has added some bells and whistles to the site that weren’t available in previous years. There is an interactive map showing search spike locations and times, for example.
Google is also launching Zeitgeist Android and iOS apps. The Android app will be available today, the company says, but does not specify when the iOS version will be ready.
Google says it has seen 1.2 trillion searches in 146 languages.
Here, Google reviews the year in under three minutes (video produced by Whirled):
“Global superstar Whitney Houston topped many countries’ lists as well as three of our overall trending lists—her unexpected death surprising fans around the world,” says SVP & Google Fellow Amit Singhal. “From Korea, YouTube sensation PSY’s ‘Gangnam Style’ signature dance took the world by storm, landing him the #1 spot in many countries and making his song the second most trending query of 2012. (PSY’s video became the #1 most watched in YouTube history—stay tuned for YouTube’s Rewind for more.)”
“Then there was the superhuman,” he adds. “Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner’s epic free fall jump made him the #6 globally trending person of the year, while the 2012 Olympics and its various athletes made it into almost every country’s top trends. And NBA player Jeremy Lin also rose on the charts this year, making him the #1 trending athlete globally.”
He also notes that web users took “a serious interest” in threats to the open Internet like SOPA and ACTA, which both appeared on many countries’ lists.
1. Whitney Houston
2. Hurricane Sandy
3. Election 2012
4. Hunger Games
5. Jeremy Lin
6. Olympics 2012
7. Amanda Todd
8. Gangnam Style
9. Michael Clarke Duncan
10. KONY 2012
Top Trending People Searches In The U.S.
1. Whitney Houston
2. Jeremy Lin
3. Amanda Todd
4. Michael Clark Duncan
5. Kate Middleton
6. One Direction
7. Morgan Freeman
8. Peyton Manning
9. Joe Paterno
10. Paul Ryan
Top Trending Events Of 2012
1. Hurricane Sandy
2. Presidential Election
3. Super Bowl
4. Olympics
5. UEFA Euro 2012
6. KONY Movement
7. SOPA Protest
8. Aurora Shooting
9. Trayvon Martin Case
10. Hurricane Isaac
Top Trending How-To Searches In The U.S.
1. How to love
2. How to rock
3. How to vote
4. How to install
5. How to hate
6. How to archer
7. How to wobble
8. How to calculate
9. How to root
10. How to tebow
Top Trending “What Is” Searches In The U.S.
1. What is SOPA
2. What is Scientology
3. What is KONY
4. What is Yolo
5. What is Instagram
6. What is Pinterest
7. What is Lent
8. What is Obamacare
9. What is iCloud
10. What is Planking
Top Image Searches In The U.S.
1. One Direction
2. Funny Pictures
3. Nicki Minaj
4. Justin Bieber
5. Love
6. Flowers
7. Selena Gomez
8. Heart
9. Money
10. iPhone 5
Top Searched Cities in Google Maps In the U.S>
1. San Francisco, CA
2. Chicago, IL
3. Denver, CO
4. Los Angeles, CA
5. New York, NY
6. Dallas, TX
7. Washington, DC
8. Houston, TX
9. Seattle, WA
10. Boston, MA
Top Searched Local Places In Google Maps
1. Hotel
2. Restaurant
3. Walmart
4. Apartment
5. Starbucks
6. Target
7. Parking
8. Bank
9. Camping
10. Home Depot
Top Searches For International Travel Destinations From U.S.
1. Toronto
2. Paris
3. San Juan
4. Cancun
5. Vancouver
6. Rome
7. Montreal
8. Tokyo
9. St Thomas Island
10. San Jose del Cabo
Top Trending Tech Gadgets In U.S.
1. iPad 3
2. iPad Mini
3. Samsung Galaxy S3
4. Kindle Fire
5. Nexus 7
6. Microsoft Surface
7. Galaxy Note 2
8. Samsung Galaxy S2
9. iPhone 5
10. Nokia Lumia 900
There are plenty more lists where those came from. You can browse numerous countries across numerous categories, including News, Pop Culture, Fashion, Lifestyle, Science, Tech & Gadgets, Sports, Humanities and Cities.
Want to take a trip through your top moments on Facebook this past year? Well, you’re in luck. Facebook has just unveiled their year-in-review materials, and one of them is a user-specific 2012 Timeline of top stories.
Just log in and go to facebook.com/yearinreview to see your own personalized year in review Timeline for 2012.
The first thing you’ll see is a rotating collage of important photos from the year. For me, Facebook did a pretty good job of capturing memorable moments from 2012. Right below that, Facebook will show you how many friends you’ve added and how many pages you’ve like in the last 12 months.
Under that, Facebook has selected your “20 biggest moments” to display.
According to Facebook, these “big moments” include “life events, posts you’ve highlighted, popular posts you’ve been tagged in, and popular posts you’ve shared.” So your year-in-review Timeline will be a lot better if you’re an active Timeline user – as in someone who manually highlights and removes stories to make it truly personalized. But I’m not really a Timeline tinkerer and Facebook did a great job of highlighting my top life events, photos, and popular updates from the year.
It’s a fun little walk down memory lane, considering you are active enough on Facebook for the Timeline to be populated with relevant and important stories. You can check yours out today.
It’s that time of the year again – cold weather, warm drinks and lukewarm receptions at family gatherings. But the end of year also means something else: it’s time for all of the year-in-review lists to emerge. Today, it’s Facebook’s turn.
Facebook has revealed the top ten trends in 11 categories: Memes, Sports, TV, Politics, Technology, Books, Public figures, Check-ins, Movies, Songs, and Events – basically anything and everything anyone would ever talk about on the social network. And according to the data, Instagram was the most-discussed tech trend of 2012.
The rest of the list, in order: Timeline; Pinterest; Draw Something; iPhone 5; Kindle Fire; SOPA; News Feed; Siri; SongPop.
In terms of events, the 2012 Election was the top trend. That was followed by the Superbowl, Whitney’s Houston’s death, Superstorm Sandy, and the London Olympics.
Continuing the interest in the election, Barack Obama was your top public figure of the year in terms of mentions. Fittingly, Mitt Romney was number two. Those two were obviously the tops in the Politics category, beating out other election-related terms like “voted” and “four more years.”
Here are some mini infographics for the top media trends, provided by Facebook:
Like tons of other internet properties, Facebook is joining to party and slowly releasing its year-end data. Earlier this month, we learned that the number one Facebook game of 2012 was SongPop. Today, Facebook has released the top 2012 trends for Australian users.
The Facebook data looked at the top ten mention, the top then check-in locations, and the top ten songs. One Direction led the mentions for 2012, while Bon Iver’s Skinny Love led the top songs category. One of those is respectable and the other is terrible. I’ll let you figure out which is which.
As the month of December rolls along, you can expect more and more of these types of lists to pop up. It’s that time of the year for the year-in-review wrap-ups, and today it’s Yahoo that’s giving us some insight on top searches in 2012.
The top three Yahoo searches in 2012 come from three different realms: politics, tech, and pop culture. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Yahoo users were most interested in the Elections, the iPhone 5, and Kim Kardashian (in that order). Yahoo says that in the 12 years that they’ve been doing the year-in-search list, this is only the third time that a “news” event has claimed the number one search volume slot. The other two were recent events, Michael Jackson’s death in 2009 and the BP oil spill in 2010.
Here’s the complete top ten list of 2012 Yahoo searches:
Elections
iPhone 5
Kim Kardashian
Kate Upton
Kate Middleton
Whitney Houston
Olympics
Political Polls
Lindsay Lohan
Jennifer Lopez
Bing recently unveiled their 2012 search stats and there’s quite a bit of similarity among the two lists. Over on Bing, Kim Kardashian was the most-searched person of the year, beating out Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus. In the news stories category, the iPhone 5 took the crown beating out the 2012 Elections and the 2012 Olympics.
When you just look at gadget searches, it’s Apple all the way. In that category the iPhone 5 finished ahead of “iPad 3” and the “iPad mini.” The rest of the top ten gadget searches were the Samsung Galaxy S3, Kindle Fire, iPhone 4, Nook, iPod Touch, Samsung Galaxy Tab, and Samsung Galaxy Note.
Brace yourselves: the year-end lists are coming. As 2012 comes to close, it’s vital that we all take a step back and review all of the inane crap we seek out on search engines. First up, it’s Bing with a nice comprehensive 2012 search overview.
Congratulations, Kim Kardashian. You’re the most-searched person of the year.
According to Bing, she beat out Justin Bieber, who held the title for 2011. The Biebs holds strong this year, coming in at #2. The rest of the top ten is as follows, in order: Miley Cyrus, Rihanna, Lindsay Lohan, Katy Perry, Selena Gomez, Jennifer Aniston, Nicki Minaj, and Taylor Swift. You may notice a few glaring omissions from that lists – notably Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, who happened to be running for the nation’s highest office this year. In our celeb-crazed culture, the President and his challenger only managed to break the top 50, coming in at 46th and 43rd, respectively.
As far as the most-searched news stories of the year, the iPhone 5 takes it down. The rest of the top ten looks like this: 2012 Elections, 2012 Olympics, Hurricane Sandy, Honey Boo Boo, Gangnam Style Dance, KONY 2012, Academy Awards, Kindle Fire HD, and Facebook IPO.
And when you look at social networks and apps, Facebook was the most popular search followed closely by Twitter. MySpace, which is soon launching a big redesign, came in third. Three of the top five app searches involved streaming music (Pandora, I Heart Radio, and Spotify).
When it comes to culture, there are no big surprises. PSY’s “Gangnam Style” was the most-searched song of 2012, followed by Carly Rae Jespen’s “Call Me Maybe” and Justin Bieber’s “Boyfriend.” The Avengers was the most-searched movie, followed by The Dark Knight Rises and Titanic.
Bing has a pretty substantial breakdown across many categories, including fashion, holiday icons, celeb couples, and more. You can check out their full report here.
