Interesting Facts

According to a survey conducted by Tecmark, the average Brit checks his/her smartphone around 200 times a day. (The average smartphone user spends about 3 hours and 16 minutes every day on their phone, which amounts to about a full day a week. 4 in 10 of those surveyed admitted to feeling “lost” without their phone. I guess that is true, especially if they use a navigation app.)

In the world of romance one of the difficult things to do is pluck up the courage to ask someone out. No longer! So called "Hook up" apps are seemingly all the rage amongst young singletons. (One of the breed, Tinder, claims to be responsible for 150 marriages; it is a location-based dating app which highlights fellow singles in your area, sort of virtual speed dating. Now I know that sounds kind of sweet, but (there's always a but) there are 450,000,000 Tinder profiles worldwide, which means their "meaningful relationship rate" is pretty low. So how does this tie in to Valentine's Day and the Winter Olympics? Well, romance aside, a news story claims that Olympic athletes in Sochi are hooking up using Tinder. Now this could just be clever marketing by the owners of Tinder, but there's no doubt that the market is booming, Smeeters, Down, OkCupid, and Grindr, to name but a few, are all aimed at pairing us up in different combinations.)

According to a study by uSwitch.com, one in 10 children in the UK has a mobile phone by the time they are 5 years old. (What's worse is a study by the National Literacy Trust said that children as young as 7 are more likely to own a mobile phone than a book. We can only hope they have downloaded the Kindle app.)

In computing "app" is an abbreviation of application - a piece of software that runs on a computer, a mobile device or other platform (for example, an iPhone or Facebook.) App is really a generic term for any standalone bit of software. (Of course it's a pretty new word, so now people are fighting over it. Apple is suing Amazon in a bid to stop the online retail giant from using the name Appstore, which will offer downloadable applications for Google's Android operating system.. Apple, which makes iPhones and iPads, claims that the name is deliberately similar to its own App Store. "It will confuse and mislead customers," said Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet. I think I'm going to put a claim on the term "shoe store". I mean enough shoe salesmen target the forum, I think I have a very good case.)