Txting In The New Year 12/31/2008 12:12 PM
What will you be doing when the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s? Drinking Champagne? Throwing Confetti? Perhaps you will be among the increasing trend of people texting friends, family and loved ones with greetings for the new year. If you are not amongst us in practice chances are you are amongst us in the crowd. New Year’s is one of the highest text messaging days of the year. Sprint anticipates a 100 percent lift in text messages over the New Year’s holiday, and the lift is not just from the under 30 crowd. New studies have shown that 20 percent of adults ages 50-64 use text messaging which is up from 13 percent 2 years ago. Among this 20 percent 76 percent say they primarily use text messaging to reach their children. Therefore, don’t be surprised to receive a text from Mom this New Year’s.
New Year’s is the perfect social holiday to review how pervasive text messaging has become in our culture. I challenge you to conduct your own survey or just analyze the crowd you are in during the holiday. See who is reaching for their cellphone to send a text message. Given all of the recent studies about the extensive use of text messaging usage, you may not be surprised by how many people are text messaging….but you may be surprised by who is texting.
Txt to Go Green 12/10/2008 02:20 PM
How many scraps of paper do you generate in one day? Between writing down phone numbers, putting meeting reminder post-it notes on your computer, jotting down grocery lists… it all adds up. In a trashcan. Then in a landfill.
Paper — in all its many shapes and sizes — amounts to almost half of what we end up sending to landfills. However, if Americans recycled just one-tenth of their paper, it would save 25 million trees a year.
What if there was a way to cut down on actual paper? Forget the recycling part (OK, not really!). What if we didn’t even jot notes down at all? What if we tapped them into our cell phones instead?
SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application in the world with 2.4 billion active users. The obvious next step is to cut out paper and focus on technology to help the environment.
Since 2007, I began each year with the same resolution – to be paper free. Hopefully this year I can make it happen with some of the following tips:
Not only will it organize my life but I’m doing my part to help.