Sunday, November 30, 2008

Great Australian Firewall

In an attempt to combat child pornography the Australian Government is proposing a mandatory filter of all internet traffic! There can be no doubt that sexual slavery needs to be attacked but this proposal is ridiculous. At first I thought this might have been made up but unfortunately it's very real.

For further reading:

Can Labor Implement Clean Feed
Filtering Pilot and ACMA Blacklist
Great Firewall of Australia

WIPA.org.au
GetUp.Org
NoCleanFeed.com
IIA.net

Sunday, November 23, 2008

Text Msgs are surpassing Voice

Nielsen Research bears out what many people think - that text messaging is soon going to supplant voice as the primary means of communication.

During the second quarter of 2008, a typical U.S. mobile subscriber placed or received 204 phone calls each month. In comparison, the average mobile customer sent or received 357 text messages per month — a 450% increase over the number of text messages circulated monthly during the same period in 2006.
In U.S., SMS Text Messaging Tops Mobile Phone Calling

At this point text has not supplanted voice as one can't make a one-to-one comparison between text messages and voice phone calls. Still, one needn't be a statistical genius to see that if the rate of growth continues at the present rate that the data transmitted by text will shortly vastly surpass voice.

The Nielsen data shows that phone calls have leveled off at approximately 200/month with texts up to 350/month. Soon text/email msgs will be the primary means of communication and voice messages will become a vestige of the past. Yeah!! No more "call me msgs."

It must be pointed out that the Nielsen data pertains only to cell phone users and not to landlines. Is there still a use for landline phones? Maybe for some, maybe rotary phones are still useful for emergencies, but for day to day use land lines are going the way of answering machines, VCRs, and cassette decks.

What does this mean for you - the business customer? Stop putting out alpha-mnemonics based on the rotary/push-button phone. Soon no one is going to be able to use it - let alone remember that a 2 is ABC and that a 3 is DEF, etc...