“Email is by far the most relied upon channel for business communications, and today’s news will help ensure the vitality of email for many years to come,” said Matt Blumberg, chairman and CEO of Return Path. “Return Path pioneered email deliverability five years ago, just as Habeas pioneered the third-party whitelist. Now we can combine our complementary approaches to ensure trusted email delivery regardless of fraud, spam and virus challenges. Together, this accelerates our mission to keep the email ecosystem healthy and vibrant by enabling legitimate senders to get their messages to their consumers while enabling receivers to make better, faster and more accurate spam filtering decisions.”

According to a May 2008 study by research firm Ipsos, more than 67% of consumers prefer email over other online vehicles and 65% believe this will continue to be the case in five years.

Return Path will expand its presence in Silicon Valley by keeping Habeas’ Mountain View office, as well as most of its staff. Return Path is headquartered in New York City and has offices in Superior, Colorado, Paris, London, and Berlin.

The figures showed that about 20% of users the world over had been on a social networking site in the past month, however 55% was the number for Korea while 24% was the stats for the U.S.

The social juggernaut in South Korea is Cyworld, which has 18 million members. That’s about 30% of the entire population of the country.

Brian Cruikshank, executive vice president and managing director of Ipsos’ Technology & Communications practice claims that the numbers are particularly noteworthy “when one considers the various ways for users to interact with others using these sites, such as online chat, text messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, and so on.”

Ipsos also found that online video use is increasing worldwide as well, but mostly in developed markets. Cruikshank continued, “Where homes are saturated with televisions and DVD players, video content is a predominant part of consumers’ daily lives. The PC will begin to really assert itself as a ‘second screen’ within the household.”

The report showed that the global figure of video stream views was 34% in the past month up from 31%. Yet, while video grows, online music is deteriorating. According to the results of the study the percentage of downloaded music files, and online radio streams utilized accounted for 1% less than last year at 43%(files) and 51%(streams).

Surveys were conducted in November and December of 2006 in urban areas of Brazil, Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, China, India, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Korea and the U.S.