Thirty years ago, if you wanted to make a phone call you looked for a phone box. Text messaging was unheard of, and the idea that a tiny, hand-held device could have more computing power than the Apollo 11 rocket that went to the moon was unthinkable.
Today, we have devices that will hold terabytes of data, fibre optics and a world wide web that connects us all instantly. And if that isn’t enough to blow your mind, here are a dozen more astonishing (and true) facts about mobile phones and the people who use them – you and me…
1. There are three times more smartphones being activated every minute around the world than there are babies being born. So even if you haven’t got kids, you’ve probably got a smartphone
2. Out of the current seven billion people on the planet, 4.8 billion have a mobile phone while only 4.2 billion own a toothbrush. So we’re more likely to be looking up dental hygiene on the internet than we are practicing it at home.
3. There are more Mobile Internet users in China than there are people in the USA. At the end of the first three months of 2012 there were 450 million mobile web users in China. That means China has more mobile internet users than the total population of the world’s third largest country.
4. By 2015, there will be one mobile device for every person on earth. That doesn’t mean that everyone will have a mobile device – they are still a remote dream to many of the inhabitants of the world’s poorest countries, but the number of mobile devices will be the same as the number of people on the planet.
5. In 2009, American mobile phone users sent approximately 4.1 billion text messages every day. That’s 17 messages per day for every single person in the country – usually reminders to pick up some milk on the way home!
6. Text messaging can save lives too. While working in the Congo in 2008, surgeon David Nott was forced to carry out an urgent operation on a wounded patient. The astonishing part of this story is that he received step-by-step instructions on how to carry out the operation from a colleague who communicated with him through text messaging. The patient made a full recovery. This was an early demonstration of just how vital text messaging can be in life-threatening situations – and how important it is to ignore predictive text corrections sometimes!
7. According to a study carried out by the University of Queensland, text messaging can be as addictive as smoking, although not nearly as bad for your health.
8. Texting can help politicians to connect with their voters. In 2004, Tony Blair became the first prime minister to use text messages to answer questions directly put to him from members of the public. But politicians, despite their attempts to look ‘with it’ by using text messaging, don’t always get it right. Recently it was revealled that David Cameron signed his text messages to former newspaper editor Rebekah Brooks with the acronym LOL (laugh out loud), mistakenly thinking it meant ‘Lots of Love’!
9. Mobile phone users check their phones around 150 times a day, perhaps confirming our point #7 that they can be addictive. Based on The Nielsen Company tracking figures, women are the biggest text addicts, sending 716 texts a month compared to men’s 555 texts a month.
10. Mobile search has grown by 500% in two years, and is predicted to continue growing at a very rapid rate, making it one of the most important marketing tools of the future.
It is hard to ignore the tremendous growth of mobile marketing during the last years. If you’re not thinking of the mobile phone as a possibility to grow your business, you should start now.
Let us know what are your thoughts about the growth of mobile marketing or maybe you know some other good facts to share with us!
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