A new study claims that most of you are using your phones more for texting than for talking.  Texting is quite popular with the teenage crowd, but this data suggests that popularity crosses generational boundaries.

And I don’t completely understand it.  It takes far longer for me to type/text something than it would take me to say it.

However, the person you’re trying to communicate isn’t always able to talk on the phone.  Nor are you.  If you’re at your child’s school play, for instance, it’s far more discrete to text your buddy that “man this is boring” than it would be to actually speak those words–especially if you’re sitting near the lead actor’s parents!

Anyway, from the article:

For the second quarter of 2008, U.S. mobile subscribers sent and received on average 357 text messages per month, compared with making and receiving 204 phone calls a month, according to Nielsen. The new statistic is a clear indication that Americans have jumped onto the SMS text bandwagon.

This is just part of the reason you should be paying attention to mobile phones.  People love the instantaneous nature of using their phone, and more and more businesses are beginning to make mobile versions of their websites so the on-the-go consumer can connect with them more easily.  The iPhone has made mobile browsing mainstream, and the recent announcement of the so-called Google Phone is simply more evidence of the merging of mobile devices and the PC.

Text-speak may be difficult to understand sometimes, but it’s a language that isn’t going away anytime soon… not by a long shot.

Google continues to provide useful and clever new services.  The latest is the voting information they’re slowly rolling into their Google Maps product.

Users who visit http://maps.google.com/vote will be prompted to enter their address.  Google then tells you where to register, how long you have left to register, and where the local polling places are.  They’ll even direct you to the appropriate government website for more information.

This is really handy.  It’s still being populated with data, so not all cities have all their information yet, but they should soon.

While there are plenty of non-voters who choose not to vote for various personal reasons, there have to be many who simply didn’t know where to vote or even how to register.  Granted, government agencies have been making this information available for a long, long time… but having it accessible through Google just makes it that much easier (and less embarrassing) to find out what you need to know.

Google, the current king of the Internet and all-around innovator, has announced a new technology called Audio Indexing–actually it’s called GAudi, which sounds more like a car than a web service.

Either way, it’s one of the slickest things I’ve heard of in months.

GAudi will catalog every word uttered in a YouTube video and add it to a searchable archive.  Translation:  you will soon be able to search videos by keywords used within the video.

For now, the product is still in Beta (limited testing mode), and will only be indexing YouTube videos related to the current political races.  So you can search for a soundbite you read about in a news article–maybe something Obama or McCain said–and then use GAudi to search for video of the speech on YouTube.

That’s pretty mind-blowing to me.  Sure, there have been speech-transcription services for years that allow you to dictate text to your computer… but they are far from perfect, and had never been applied to video like this.  As video’s importance on the web increases, technology like GAudi makes finding the right video a heck of a lot easier–and if you’ve ever tried to search for a particular video on YouTube without knowing its title… you know how frustratingly hard it can be.

Imagine a future where your company creates and uploads videos to YouTube–maybe instructional, maybe humorous, maybe just advertisements–and you’ve used some good keyword selection in writing the spoken script for that video.  People who just surf around YouTube for videos related to their favorite topic will then have a much easier time finding your content than they currently do.

So now everyone in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry will be adding video content writing to their roster of services, as companies begin to learn how the spoken audio of their movies can help them reach new customers.

Very exciting stuff.  Stay tuned for more developments.  And you can check out GAudi and search for things the candidates have said here.

IMDB.com–the Internet movie database–is the number one online source for movie information.  Everything from casting information to quotes and trivia can be found on the site.

Owned by Amazon.com, IMDB has just this week begun streaming free movie and television content for users.  It’s yet another in a long line of recent sites offering free streaming content such as Hulu (the best, in my opinion).

There are over 6,000 titles, so the odds are good that you’ll be able to find something you like.  And in a neat little coup, the site will be airing several season premieres of various tv shows before they air on television… pretty neat.

There is a noticeable boom in tv and film content being made available online for free.  And it’s a trend that shows no sign of stopping.  As we have discussed before… advertisers just want the eyeballs… they don’t really care if they’re coming from TV or the Internet.

The real winner here is the consumer, who now has tons of options on when and where to watch their favorite shows and movies.  Check out the IMDB free content here.

Kids love video games.

That may be a shock to some of you, but it shouldn’t be.  Ever since I was a teenager–when the first Nintendo came out–the younger generations have embraced video gaming more and more.

And even though it’s fairly common knowledge that such games are popular with kids… you might be surprised at the findings of a new study.

Specifically, it seems that 97% of kids play video games.  That’s, well, a huge number.  I don’t think I would have guessed it was that large.

The gender breakdown is as follows:  99% of boys play video games, and 94% of girls (again, a shockingly high number).

Some more interesting facts from the article:

• They play often. When surveyed, half of the respondents said they had played a video game the previous day.
• Their games of choice are as diverse as their tastes in music or TV. Eighty percent of respondents play five or more different game genres, with racing, puzzles, sports and action the most common. Favorites were “Guitar Hero,” “Halo 3,” “Madden NFL,” solitaire and “Dance Dance Revolution.”
• Young people are routinely able to get their hands on games that are rated “M” (for mature) or “AO” (adults only). Three-quarters of parents who were surveyed said they “always” or “sometimes” check the ratings on their kids’ games. And yet, half of boys who were questioned listed a game with an “M” or “AO” rating as one of their favorites, compared with 14 percent of girls.

There’s also some pretty fascinating insight into video game violence, with the survey’s author noting that some of the more violent games (such as Halo) are also some of the most cooperative and strategy-based.  He suggests parents pay just as much attention to how their kids play a particular game as they do to what the specific game is being played.

This shouldn’t be news at this point, but a new study from CareerBuilder.com suggests that one in five bosses previews applicants by checking out their online profiles on sites like MySpace and Facebook.  And one in three of those finds something on the profile that leads them to immediately dismiss that candidate.

So, if you have some borderline scandalous photos of you and your frat buddies partying on your Facebook page?  Delete them.  If you have your best bikini shot as your main profile pick on MySpace?  Change it.

This is all common sense stuff, but you’d be surprised how many people choose to put information and pictures on social network profiles that employers would find inappropriate.

And there’s no legality issue here.  If you put it on your MySpace page, and that page isn’t set to “private”… then it’s public.  Anyone can see it.  And if your MySpace blog articles are all about how many office supplies you were able to swipe at your last job, don’t be surprised if you struggle to get interviews.

It’s also worth noting that millions of people who created social network profiles during their college years have done little or no updating of that profile since then.  So the embarrassing content that might cost you a job may not even represent who you are today.

From the article:

“Hiring managers are using the Internet to get a more well-rounded view of job candidates in terms of their skills, accomplishments and overall fit within the company,” said CareerBuilder.com spokeswoman Rosemary Haefner in a statement.

“As a result, more job seekers are taking action to make their social networking profiles employer-friendly. Sixteen percent of workers who have social networking pages said they modified the content on their profile to convey a more professional image to potential employers.”

So be yourself, sure.  That’s what those sites are for.  But know that your profiles are public, and that means your future employers are more and more likely to be reading your profile.  If you’ve been wondering why you never got a call back for a second interview at that great company you applied to… it might just be the fault of your Facebook page.

Apparently checking your email every five minutes, while good for the ego, is not good for your productivity.  It can take an average of 64 seconds for an individual to get back on task after checking their email–not counting the actual time to read and respond to the message–and folks that check it regularly waste up to 8.5 hours a week.

Yikes.

Email is supposed to be a tool that boosts efficiency, and indeed it does.  However, for many email users, the nagging feeling that there’s a message you’ve missed causes frequent visits to the inbox.

So while that message you’re waiting on might be critical to a project you’re working on, checking the inbox for that message 50 times in one morning is seriously undermining your ability to get work done.

The article also states that people spend, on average, over 2 hours a day in their Inbox.

So use your email liberally, just don’t let it use you.  Hey, send this article as a link to all your friends and you might just be wasting 64 seconds of their day.

I have been awaiting the release of Google’s first web browser, called Chrome, since news of its pending release exploded everywhere yesterday.  Seems they accidentally sent the announcement of Chrome a bit early, and some bloggers ran with the story.

Since then, I’ve been checking the supposed download page regularly, and until a few moments ago, it was a dead link.

Now, however, the Beta download of Google Chrome is available–in fact, I’m writing this post via Chrome.  For some of the uninitiated… a “beta test” is an early version that is likely to be buggy and unstable–we’re not recommending you download it just yet.  Here, in random order, are my initial thoughts and first impressions:

• Upon install, Chrome tries to import settings from your current default browser (Firefox for me), and I experienced an error with that which crashed Chrome.  Oops.  When I restarted it, however, the settings had been imported just fine.  This is nice because all my browser-stored passwords were already remembered.  Sweet.
• Google is claiming that Chrome is faster and more secure.  At this point, however, it’s not visibly any faster than Firefox.  In fact, it seems to take a fraction of a second longer to load a page than Firefox 3 (which is pretty darn fast to begin with).
• I love the trimmed down nature of Chrome.  It’s really no-frills in terms of UI, and the lack of bloat, combined with the tabs being on top of the window instead of below the address bar means you see more of the page than ever before.  I’m a big Netvibes user, and have several feeds on several tabs… and Chrome allows me to see and scan even more of my favorite content than Firefox or IE.  Right off the bat, this is a great feature and will probably keep me using Chrome a lot more.
• My coworker also downloaded Chrome, and he got a strange, glitchy look to his windows… with a mirrored sliver of the on-page content showing up in duplicate on the right next to the scroll bar.  It also wouldn’t let him scroll.  Hey… it’s a Beta release.  I’m sure they’ll find and promptly fix stuff like this… and I’m not sure what my friend might have running on his machine that may have contributed to it.
• I like the idea of the “incognito” window.  There’s plenty of concern online these days with privacy, especially where Google is concerned.  And while it may seem odd to simply trust Google when they say that “incognito” browsing never stores anything anywhere… the project is open-source.  That will allow for some checks and balances regarding how well the shielded browsing function works.
• I also love the feature where a crash only closes the current tab instead of the whole browser.  I was able to browse to a site I know crashes browsers (a site we’re currently developing) and the crash did, indeed, close only the open tab and not the entire browser.  That is a fantastic addition that cannot be overstated if you’re a power-browser.

All in all, the first few minutes of testing it out have been a postiive experience for me.  I am unashamed of the fact that I use and love tons of Google products beyond search (docs, gears, calendars, gmail, and more), so maybe you can label me a homer.  But better competition in the browser market is nothing but good for the consumer.

For Firefox, however, it’s probably a very bad day.  Google has long been a top financial supporter of Firefox (through an arrangement with the Google Toolbar).  I don’t think Firefox is destined to die or anything–they have a rabid fan base.  But they’re definitely going to need to seek dollars from new sources if Chrome gains any foothold on the market.

And this is a clear step from Google to infringe on Microsoft’s territory.  Should be interesting to see how it impacts that rivalry as well.

Stay tuned.  I’ll be playing with it more in the coming days and will be sure to update you on my findings.

UPDATE: So upon further testing… there are a lot of reports that the Chrome browser is a memory hog, slowing down your machine’s performance.  It browses the web fast enough… but I personally have seen it clog up my PC resources and slow down all programs.  I’m sure this is not the same for everyone, and I’m guessing it’ll be fixed as testing continues.  But for now, it’s reason enough to keep me from using it regularly.