It seems that Internet companies are particularly concerned about earning their spots at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year. Earlier this week, Facebook and Deloitte released a more specific (and self-serving) study about the social networking company’s revenue and jobs contributions to the European Union.

There will be three billion Internet users in 2016, or 45 percent of the world’s population, the BCG study estimated. By 2013, there will be more mobile broadband connections than fixed-line connections.

By 2016, China will have 800 million Internet users — as many as France, Germany, India, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. combined. At that time, its Internet economy will be about the same size as that of the U.S., BCG noted.

BCG highlighted the value of social media in a couple of emerging areas. More than 90 percent of Internet users in Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico engage in social media, a higher contingent than in many more-developed markets. Plus, small- and medium-sized businesses with significant Internet presences expect to grow 5 percent faster than those that do not.

(Photo courtesy of World Economic Forum)

If you’re in the big-deal camp, then you’ll like a new survey from Deloitte, which finds that a staggering one in five U.S. residents say they have either cut the cord or are thinking about doing it. The breakdown: Nine percent of survey respondents say they’ve recently cut the cord and are getting their shows from Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, etc. And another 11 percent say they might do it. (Click image to enlarge.)

To repeat: The Deloitte survey is asking people about cutting pay TV — Comcast, Verizon, Dish, etc. Not cutting back on certain channels like HBO (that would be cord-shaving) or simply never signing up in the first place (that would be the “cord-nevers” we’ve started to hear about).

How can that possibly square with the pay-TV industry’s reported results, which show that overall subscription levels remained basically flat last year? Even if you allow for a significant margin of error, things don’t add up: If the pay-TV business had lost a single percentage point of its customers in the last year, it would be a huge deal.

But Deloitte is reporting that approximately nine million people say they’ve recently stopped paying for TV. That’s the entire population of New York, plus another million or so, vanished. Can’t be.

I’ve asked Deloitte if they’ve got any insight on the gap, but haven’t heard back. But my hunch is that — for now, at least — cord-cutters are like vegans: They’re real, and they’re out there. They’re particularly notable in certain places like New York, the Bay Area and college towns. And they over-index at certain Web gathering places, like this one. But McDonald’s sales are still chugging along.

That creates an interesting opportunity that the Boston-based startup Apperian has been working on. Companies often have their own custom-made applications that they need to distribute to hundreds or thousands of employees, but they’d rather not do so via the iTunes App Store, where Apple has control and the power to approve all applications. No, instead companies need their own internal App store.

That’s exactly what Apperian has built. It’s called EASE–for Enterprise App Service Environment–and it gives enterprises the ability to create apps that can be distributed and managed and updated throughout a company.

After two years of operation, Apperian will announce today that it has landed a $9.5 million series A led by North Bridge Partners and joined by Bessemer Venture Partners and the Kleiner Perkins iFund, the $200 million fund focused on investments in the iPhone-iPad universe. Apperian is, I’m told, its first enterprise investment. Before this round, the company was funded by about $1.9 million in seed funding from CommonAngels and LaunchCapital. Michael Skok, a partner at North Bridge, and Bob Goodman, a founder partner at Bessemer, will be joining Apperian’s board.

One of its founders and its current Chief Strategy Officer is Chuck Goldman, who spent eight years as the Director of Field Engineering and Professional Services for Apple. His job was helping companies integrate Apple gear–first Macs but then later the iPhone–into their corporate infrastructure. (A 2008 BusinessWeek cover story I worked on focused on Apple’s somewhat reluctant embracing of its newfound popularity within corporations, which has only accelerated since then.)

I talked with Apperian CEO David Patrick yesterday. Initially, the plan was to build apps for corporate customers. “About halfway through we realized there was a huge interest among our customers in building apps internally for specific internal use, especially on the iPad.” That led to EASE, which is essentially a cloud-based platform that allows companies to build, deploy and manage iPad and iPhone applications. Customers can create their own branded app store-like environments.

And there are many customers: Procter and Gamble, Cisco Systems, NetApp, and Estée Lauder among them. All of them, Patrick told me, have built their own internal app stores that authenticate employees and serve up apps that are used for company-specific work without any need to host them in Apple’s public-facing app store. “You can literally push out an application to 5,000 users in a matter of seconds,” Patrick said.

Cisco builds its own internal sales force automation apps, Patrick told me. Cosmetics giant Estée Lauder uses the iPad at its retail counters to help suggest Clinique skin care products to customers. (Apperian also built this app.)

It’s a big turn of events from when the company first started, Patrick said. “We started working on EASE about 15 months ago, and we showed it to companies who asked why they’d ever want it,” he said. “They were providing email and calendar access and that was the extent of their commitment to the iPhone and the iPad. By summer, after the iPad first launched, our phone was ringing off the hook.” CIOs at big companies quickly got iPad religion when all their senior executives and board members walked in the door with iPads. “They could read all the documents on the screen, and it wasn’t long before they wanted their corporate apps, their business intelligence and SAP reports on the iPad too.”

Last night, I was the master of ceremonies, as I have been for several years, at the laudable annual Astia Awards Dinner, which celebrated venture capital firms that support women-led companies.

And VC Tim Draper really went above and beyond in showing–quite literally–his support for his female entrepreneurs.

The San Francisco-based nonprofit does work to accelerate funding and growth of early-stage women-led businesses in life sciences, high technology and clean technology, with chapters in Silicon Valley, London and New York.

The NVCA member firms honored at the show, which is sponsored by Deloitte and Fenwick & West, by Astia for making the most investments in companies with a woman CEO were Draper Fisher Jurvetson, InterWest Partners, Prolog Ventures and Redpoint Ventures.

In addition, Allan Will, founding managing director of Split Rock Partners, received the Deloitte Leadership in Mentoring Award for encouraging female CEOs in technology-based fields.

Other award winners this year included: Anu Acharya, founder and CEO of Ocimum Biosolutions, who got the Life Science Innovator Award; Diane Greene, founder of VMware, who was awarded the Technology Innovator Award; and Pam Marrone, founder and CEO of Marrone Organic Innovations, who received the Clean Tech Innovator Award.

But it was Draper who stole the show, held at the de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

He could not attend, but made his presence known by doing a video in which Draper sings very badly, but with incredible enthusiasm.

But before he starts crooning, Draper takes off an article of clothing for every woman-led company he funded.

Let’s just say, while he should be proud of his investments in women CEOs, it would have gotten very dicey if DFJ had done just one more.

But see for yourself–or, more correctly, see a lot of Tim Draper, in this video: