Facts & Figures Library - Culture of Use

Cell phone companies are finding that they're sitting on a gold mine--in the form of the call records of their subscribers. Researchers in academia, and increasingly within the mobile industry, are working with large databases showing where and when calls and texts are made and received to reveal commuting habits, how far people travel for public events, and even significant social trends. With potential applications ranging from city planning to marketing, such studies could also provide a new source of revenue for the cell phone companies. "Because cell phones have become so ubiquitous, mining the data they generate can really revolutionize the study of human behavior," says Ramón Cáceres, a lead researcher at AT&T's research labs in Florham Park, NJ.

e-Trikala, the broadband service provider to Smart21 Trikala, Greece, has introduced new online and mobile services for city workers, citizens and tourists.  Xenagos is a touristic platform that includes data such as tourist information about museums, historical sites, churches, monasteries, archaeological sites, as well as restaurants, hotels, lodging, etc. located in the city as well as the Prefecture of Trikala. Trikala-tourism is a touristic portal, developed to provide useful information, suggestions, clues, weather forecast module, as well as city maps to every traveller staying or passing through Trikala city.

Even as work crews and scientists mobilized over a huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, high school students in this city were hard at work cleaning up another spill — in the virtual world.  Students like Christian Lopez jumped into an elaborate video game, called Spill, in which they assumed on-screen identities known as avatars to run cleanup efforts for the mayor of New City. The game, devised to help students sharpen their business acumen and skills, was rolled out in more than 750 schools across the country as part of a business contest in March and April.

In 2001, Cass R. Sunstein wrote an essay in The Boston Review called “The Daily We: Is the Internet really a blessing for democracy?” Sunstein, a professor at the University of Chicago who now serves in the Obama administration, raised the possibility that the Internet may be harming the public square.  The new media, he noted, allow you to personalize your newspapers so you only see the stories that already interest you. You can visit only those Web sites that confirm your prejudices. Instead of a public square, we could end up with a collection of information cocoons.  Yet new research complicates this picture.

Maltese businesses are getting more and more hooked on selling their products and services over the internet.  According to new statistics published by Eurostat, Maltese businesses in 2008 managed to register 11 per cent of their annual turnover through sales over the internet. Although the EU average is slightly higher, at 12 per cent, Maltese businesses are fast gaining ground in using the internet as a new gateway for various commercial transactions.

The average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation.  Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. And that does not count the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones.  And because so many of them are multitasking — say, surfing the Internet while listening to music — they pack on average nearly 11 hours of media content into that seven and a half hours.  “I feel like my days would be boring without it,” said Francisco Sepulveda, a 14-year-old Bronx eighth grader who uses his smart phone to surf the Web, watch videos, listen to music — and send or receive about 500 texts a day

The emergence of social media and social networking presents the possibility of transforming the way government agencies communicate and cooperate among themselves and with the public. While the potential benefits of social media use by government agencies are considerable, the number of issues connected with such use and the number of potential pitfalls are substantial as well. In response to growing interest in and concerns about social media in the public sector among government professionals, the Center for Technology in Government launched a project aimed at exploring some of the issues and benefits connected with social media tools.

Facebook, the popular networking site, has 350 million members worldwide who, collectively, spend 10 billion minutes there every day, checking in with friends, writing on people’s electronic walls, clicking through photos and generally keeping pace with the drift of their social world.  Make that 9.9 billion and change. Recently, Halley Lamberson, 17, and Monica Reed, 16, juniors at San Francisco University High School, made a pact to help each other resist the lure of the login. Their status might as well now read, “I can’t be bothered.”  The two are among the many teenagers, especially girls, who are recognizing the huge distraction Facebook presents — the hours it consumes every day, to say nothing of the toll it takes during finals and college applications, according to parents, teachers and the students themselves.

Tens of thousands of British patients do not have their radiologists in their own hospital, or in their city, even in his country. In the absence of specialists, the National Health Service has spent years reaching agreements with foreign clinics. Some are in Belgium, others are Swedish-one of which, Telemedicine Clinic is based in Barcelona, which send images over the Internet (MRIs, for example). There are analyzed and sent back to their colleagues across the Channel, reports to the diagnosis of the patient in a particular range of outsourced healthcare.